B-to-B TechMarketing Blog moves to B2B Marketing Solutions - and FREE report

This will be my final post in this location as I have a brand new WordPress site that is connected to my company, B2B Marketing Solutions, located here. It is much easier to sign-up and keep abreast of my ramblings by signing up to my RSS feed which you'll find on my Blog. That way you can receive the content in whatever is the easiest way for you to consume it.

I'm also providing a link to a free eConsultancy report on Internet Marketing Strategy. Go and check it out for information on five key current trends: customer centricity, channel diversification, data, social media and content strategy.

I have set up B2B Marketing Solutions to provide UK and overseas companies who need marketing strategy and execution, particularly around demand generation and pipeline management, but who can not yet justify investment in staff, with flexible access to marketing knowledge and skills.

We plan neither to be Consultants, nor an agency, but maybe a little of both, as needed, to support business generation aligned to the needs of Sales and Sales targets. If you want to know more, then check out the new site and get in touch.

I will continue to Blog on matters that affect the lives of B2B technology marketers from my new location, so check it out here.

What is holding back the B2B market from adopting MAPs?

A recent article in DemandGen report suggests that Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) vendors may suffer a dip in their revenues from a market valued at $325m in a recent analyst report in 2011 because the 50% growth this represents over 2010 has again been driven by the high-tech industry. As Raab states: "The market itself has to expand rapidly if those vendors are to grow quickly.”


What, we should ask, does this say about other B2B industries? Does this just reflect the willingness of the technology industry to quickly embrace new technology in general? Or have other B2B industries yet to be convinced of the merits of marketing technology? Maybe they are confused by the speed with which things have been moving - is automation about email and landing pages, SEO management, social networking, measurement or gibing Marketing something to plug into Salesforce.com? Or all of the above? Raab's report should help with dispelling some of the claims and identifying where some of the major platforms perform best.


I got my hands dirty with marketing automation, with a US software company as long as 5 years ago when they implemented Eloqua. That's a long time for other industries to stand on the sidelines. One reason more risk-averse industries may not yet have implemented the type of change programme needed to implement marketing automation must be that they are unconvinced by the ROI data. If automation was an 'open-and-shut-case' then surely everyone would be doing it!


Have the vendors oversold the benefits of their solution and under-played the cost, training and process changes required to get results? It can be a little difficult to know, since often there is no benchmark data available with which to compare improvements. In my experience, buying a system is often the beginning of Marketing to study its navel, not the end. Maybe MAP implementation will follow the CRM model where stories of failures are legion.


I'd be interested in hearing your opinions and examples of successful adoption of marketing automation outside high-tech industries.

'You can't manage what you don't measure' - but Marketing will try anyway..

I recently came across the findings of a survey conducted by Patricia Seybold Group and the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) into data-driven marketing. It may not come as a surprise to find that many Marketing department's fail to subscribe to the mantra attributed to Deming: if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. Marketing is famously associated with assertions that suggest the opposite of measurement, such as that of Lord Lever that 'half of my advertising budget is wasted; I just don't know which half'. This needs to change.

Marketing Leadership Needed to Drive Change 
But, despite the much greater availability of reliable data, due to marketing activity being increasingly conducted in the digital world, it seems that data-driven decision-making is not widespread. There is maybe a clue as to why this is the case in the findings quoted on the Patricia Seybold Group website:

'The survey further shed light on the factors that enable a company to become data savvy. First among these is leadership, with clear objectives and success measures. Data governance and technology plans and investments closely follow leadership. We also found that clearly documented, formal procedures and a dedicated analytics group are critical to success.'


Process, technology, governance and dedicated analytics are not concepts naturally associated with Marketing. To change expectations about how Marketing contributes to business performance and the revenue cycle,  Marketing requires leadership and vision from the CMO, as mentioned above. Unfortunately, what I see too often is companies embracing technology solutions as 'the answer' without asking any of the right questions.


Data Needed to Support Marketing-driven Pipeline


Marketo say in their Blog interview with Patricia Seybold:


' the combination of changes in buyer behavior and the technology capabilities available today make much more actionable data available to marketers. For instance, customers don’t call in salespeople until much later, so marketers use data to read buying behavior signals on the web in order to present the right offer at the right time as they move prospects through the buying cycle, much like a salesperson used to do in face-to-face engagement. Similarly, now that marketers are responsible for nurturing prospects through a larger slice of the buying cycle, they need to apply the same rigor to their pipeline reporting that sales has historically provided.'


But, in reality, how much of this is really happening outside the largest companies worldwide (led by the US)? I have often struggled to convince senior management to implement the changes required across the sales and marketing process to drive the data that fuels the key metrics needed to link Marketing programs with revenue. This seems to be reinforced by the study findings (see below) from Patricia Seybold Group, with whom I'll leave the last word. There is a long way to go before most marketing departments will have a Marketing Operations team; and measurable outcomes, supported by analytics, will be the norm.


'Most disturbing, only a handful of non-marketing senior executives rely on marketing data to make decisions, as shown in Illustration 2. As you might expect, business-unit and sales executives used marketing data the most to make decisions. Mostly, though, marketing data reports are reviewed with no action taken (my italics).'

Process and Objectives - then programs and tactics!

When I engage with a new client or lead a new marketing team, I'm often struck by how the drive to 'get things done' in Marketing, often with little budget and with immense time pressure - usually from Sales who are chasing quarterly numbers - takes over from thinking about planned outcomes. Everyone is busy. But do we stop long enough to determine if we are busy doing the right things?

Many marketing managers seem isolated from the sharp end of closing business and delivering revenue, with metrics, where they exist, still focused on opens, clicks and downloads rather than closed opportunities driven by Marketing activity. In a complex, long sales cycle, this is even more the case. So how does activity get associated with key business KPIs?

For those companies embracing marketing automation that by necessity drives a focus on process, data and measurement of outcomes, the automation project may for the first time encourage an explicit look at Marketing as more than a set of disparate activities. However a recent report suggests this is not always successful. 'Walk before you can run' was the key message of a recent DemandGen Report article on best practice for automation new adopters.

“Many companies rush to make an automation purchase before taking the time to define their internal requirements, such as what will they need from the automation solution,” said Carlos Hidalgo, President,  The Annuitas Group. “It is best to approach the purchase of automation in a cross-functional manner that includes groups beyond marketing including sales, operations, customer service and finance as these decisions will have an impact on each of these functional areas.”

This multi-functional, but marketing-led, approach to implementing what is effectively 'ERP for Marketing' introduces a fundamental change to the way marketing is practised in most B-to-B organisations. It produces a focus on outcomes rather than on activity. It requires Marketing to integrate at a process level with other functions and departments and demonstrate the link between what Marketing is doing and its impact on business performance. This is important stuff and it won't happen overnight.

I have yet to see many UK case studies of successful implementation and shows attended by many Marketing Managers continue to promote individual tactics, such as SEO and viral. Is this likely to change now that business is harder to come by and every dollar is being scrutinised?