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?

5 Ways to Kill Off Your B2B Marketing Automation Project

Recent experience has reminded me that, as we in B2B seek to implement enterprise-class tools to support our marketing efforts in demand generation and sales support, it is easy to forget some basic principles that can quickly set our initiative back - or even kill it off altogether: Here are 5 key things to consider if you want to  be successful:

1. If you're not clear about the project objective or success metrics, you won't know what progress you're making. If your SVP Marketing or CMO has decided to buy X vendor's software for Marketing, because sales has already got Salesforce.com and he heard that it integrates well - or they're offering a reduced license cost for 12 months - you're already on to a loser.
2. If you don't know the differences between your go-to-market processes in France versus the USA, don't be surprised when you get resistance to adoption. With enterprise software there is no such thing as one size fits all. 'Best practice' doesn't mean do it this way or not at all. Differences exist in local culture, process, market maturity, people skills and understanding of direct marketing techniques that need to be reflected in the project - by getting people involved early on and documenting what needs to happen. This document will make it much easier to brief vendors or other professional services people who will be needed to actually configure and set up the marketing automation platform.
3. Underestimate the impact on marketing managers' day-to-day jobs at your peril. Marketing automation changes the emphasis in Marketing from activity - programme execution - to results. And it requires familiarity with complex technology, with support from specialists in IT. This isn't what most Marketing people signed up for: we are specialists in creative communications and organising events or product launches, not setting up emails, planning landing page offers and tracking open rates. We don't want to deal with technical people day to day. You may find that automation leads to a rethinking of the skills and experience required in marketing and a period of unrest and change.
4. If the marketing project is driven by marketing in isolation from the rest of the business - particularly Sales and Customer Service/ Support ('Oh, we can worry about integration later.') - it will take much longer and cost much more to fix it later. Marketing can only be treated separately from the rest of the business when what it does has no impact on the business - this is the old world we are trying to fix, so try not to make this mistake again. A marketing automation project requires us to look in detail at areas that we have hitherto safely ignored: process, metrics, data, ROI, integration with other functional areas on which we are mutually dependent. In other words, don't make the mistake of thinking you can just use it for sending out emails and tracking activity on the website and worry about how to get qualified leads into the sales team SFA later. You will find customer data is out of synch in the two systems, campaign tracking is impossible and you are unable to show any evidence of ROI to the CFO.
5. Ignore the Change Management process; offer minimal training and do not invite comment from marketing users during roll-out. Implementing systems for marketing is just like implementing any other system - it is an exercise in change management. Everyone needs to be on side - from executive management, to the ultimate end user. Unless all parties understand what they are trying to achieve, why and how it will affect the status quo, the project will run over budget, take longer than anticipated and go way outside the scope - assuming any of these things were defined up front.

Marketing automation projects are not primarily about the technology. If your CMO is seduced with all the bells and whistles or stunning dashboards, remind him/ her of these 5 key points of failure - which are by no means exhaustive - and get him to take a step back and consider the basics.

Automating Demand Generation: will we follow the SFA model?

A History of Failure
As someone who has work in the computer software industry for 15 years, I am painfully aware of the history of failure in implementing new technology. Some of this has to be laid at the feet of the industry itself, which could be accused of over-hyping the benefits (i.e. features) of the software and down-playing key success factors; such as:

• clarification and documentation of business processes, 
• data modeling, 
• reporting, 
• user training, 
• project management, and 
• culture change

These are just a few issues that, in my opinion, outweigh the breadth of functionality on offer - much of which may never be used.

If technology is intended to 'provide the answer' to a business problem rather than merely automate processes, then it is being chosen for the wrong reasons: this is the lesson of MRP, ERP, SCM, ECM and CRM. It is a lesson that technology marketers would do well to learn now that the software industry has caught up with them.

SFA/CRM: a guide on how not to do it?
One article quotes multiple sources that suggest the failure rate of CRM implementations - defined in multiple ways, one of which is failure to meet initial expectations - ranged from 18 - 70% between 2001 and 2009. Why? According to ZDNet the 3 big reasons are: not having a business strategy; not paying sufficient attention to user needs and benefits (does it make their life easier/ better?); and using ambiguous measures of project completion and success.

This last one is particularly prevalent in the implementation of software: its implementation can change so many things that were not previously measured that no one can clearly articulate (until after the project, which is a bit late) what success will look like. The before/ after metrics don't exist.

So back to Marketing Automation - arguably part of Customer Relationship Management, but most people are referring to Sales Force Automation (SFA) when they refer to CRM. In the Technology industry, Marketing will often be driven by sales automation initiatives into looking at what they should be doing. This may be as the result of trying to use the SFA system for lead management, because this is where Sales wants leads to be. Or it may come about as an evolution of existing fragmented marketing initiatives in web analytics, Blogging, SEO or PPC.

These tactical initiatives are never a good place to start in considering a strategic approach to automating demand generation, because they are, by definition, tactical tools to do a particular job. This is a bit like comparing the implementation of a personal user license of Quicken with implementing enterprise SAP. They are different levels of complexity.

Start with the Process and KPIs
This is where it can get tricky for Marketing. We're not good historically at joined up thinking about demand generation - or any other part of Marketing for that matter. Thinking through process, sales/ marketing alignment, how we are (or should be) measured is difficult stuff. Far easier to be persuaded by a vendor's smoke-and-mirrors demo that it will be easy to create emails and landing pages and that this is enough to get you started. It isn't.

Marketing has to take the initiative in documenting what it does and how it does it, as well as how value is created in the process. We need to focus on the core inquiry-to-lead cycle, because Sales can relate to that, and not try to boil the ocean. However, we need to understand what the whole journey to marketing automation is likely to look like and set expectations with management and our colleagues accordingly. Because this is a journey, not a one-off project and success factors need to be determined for each stage of the journey. I like to focus initially on customer and prospect data management, lead scoring and routing and simple outbound emails and forms. This drives a focus on the hand over to Sales and on lead generation which can show immediate returns.

Vendors have got much better now at hand-holding customers through initial scoping and process definition because they understand that without it they will have a lot of unhappy customers. I am particularly impressed with the strides that Eloqua has made in this regard over the last 5 years. They have an engagement model that focuses on experience-based best practice - we all have a lot to learn from others.

Early Days
I forget sometimes that the penetration of technology in marketing is, while experiencing rapid growth, still fairly low. We need to educate ourselves as a function on the value it can bring to the organisations we work for. Sirius Decisions and the Marketing Leadership Council are thought leaders in this area, while there is also a lot of other very good advice around.

Will we learn from past mistakes or, in the words of George Santayana are we destined to repeat the mistakes of the past? Only we can decide.

Content is King in B2B Demand Generation

Personalised, Relevant Content
Things have moved on considerably in the last 10 years and creating 'stickiness' on your site is about delivering content relevant to the visitor and personalised to his/ her needs. Its form - interactive/static; flash video; Pdf; web text and graphics; - needs to be pertinent to the delivery of the content and not just 'whizzy' for its own sake.

In B2B demand generation is embracing the concept of marketers as publishers and the need to put content at the heart of your customer engagement strategy, because relevant content is now tied into the nurturing process that marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Genius support. Companies such as Avitage are at the forefront of recognising the need,and providing support for, a content publishing strategy. Ardath Albee writes extensively about this in her Blog and I'd recommend both sites for background on the subject.

By combining unique visitor data, which tracks pages visited, with great content and savvy form design, you can now create a triggered program of interaction with visitors, which increases click-through rates and hence engagement. Marketing Sherpa provide an example here. There are also some great tips  on MarketingProfs (need to be a member).

Key to Complex Sales
As marketing inevitably moves more and more on-line, and both passive and dynamic digital channels drive people to your site(s), the range of skills required of marketing executives must keep up. Good content is integral to the complex B2B sales cycle and drives the capture-nurture-convert-close loop which marketing must effectively support to drive revenue and align with Sales.

B2B Marketing Automation Continues its Inexorable Rise

Yesterday, DemandGen reported that Marketo has signed up 700 customers in two years, grew 315% in 2010 and has now set its focus on enterprise customers, as well as its traditional SME base, with its first $1m win. This would seem to put it on a collision course with Eloqua, who has increasingly been focused on the small-to-medium size companies as it has ramped up its European operations.

This announcement follows closely on the heels of last week’s story that Eloqua is preparing for IPO, having ‘held briefings with various financial analysts and public investors about the future of the business’ and hopes to secure a $400m - $500m evaluation.

Both of these stories confirm analysts’ expectations – and my Blog predictions for this year – that marketing automation amongst B2B companies has come of age and is going to experience significant growth and consolidation, as evidenced by acquisition of Unica and Aprimo last year.

Inbound Enters the Fray

Meanwhile, in support of some contentions made in my last couple of Blogs on ‘funnel management’, Hubspot , with its “Get Found, Convert, Analyze” mantra is getting greater recognition and bringing metrics to SEO and social networking activities that tie them into the Eloqua/ Salesforce worlds, which are still primarily about outbound nurturing and engagement. This is where the future lies I believe.

Last year, I was using Hubspot for web tracking and enhancement, social networking tracking and optimising keywords. However, I was still using Blogware from Compendium for enterprise blogging, because of its expertise in publishing effectively to Search sites, Linked-In etc; and Vocus for press distribution, social networking; with Eloqua and Salesforce at the back-end. ‘Overkill’ do I hear you cry?

This ‘best-of-breed’ approach acknowledges the need for good publishing platforms for different channels (web, social media, email offers etc) combined with a ‘quantify it’ approach to managing each stage of the buying cycle, through tracking and reporting. I see the current platforms (and don’t even get me started on the free tools available for Twitter publishing/ tracking etc.) continuing to embrace a broader set of channels for tracking purposes - but we are still some way off a single solution for publishing, tracking, analysing and reporting on all digital and off-line channels throughout the whole buying cycle. Maybe we will never get there.

I’d really like to hear who you are using for what, so let me know who your favourites are and why.

Next time, I’ll look at the content challenge that this poses for all of us as marketers become publishers, as well as analysts and accountants.

7 Steps to Effective Pipeline Management - Part 2

Sales Pipeline

This week I’ll continue my look, started with last week's Blog, on Marketing’s contribution to sales pipeline and how the customer’s buying cycle must drive how Marketing interacts with them and helps Sales to identify and develop sales opportunities.

The simple buying cycle I set out last week is as follows:

1. Understand Buyer behaviour
2. Be found
3. Convert interest to action
4. Create a community of interest
5. Nurture leads to create sales opportunities
6. Support the sales process
7. Retain and develop customers

I talked about the first three stages last week. These are about understanding and segmenting potential buyers; creating communications that enable your company to be found; and capturing interest so that it can be nurtured and developed into a sales opportunity.

Communities of Interest

I think of business communities as a self-selecting community with a set of business challenges and/or responsibility for operational or strategic assets which leads them to seek further information with which to educate and influence their purchasing decisions. They may be involved in a purchasing cycle, but typically community behaviour is more likely prior to formal acquisition processes and particularly post-sale.

Today generalised social communities such as Facebook and LinkedIn exist, within which communities of interest (‘Groups’) can be created. In B2B high-tech circles, media groups, such as TechTarget, continue to promote subject-specific communities. But the challenge facing Marketing is to use this community paradigm to nurture its own database of opted-in contacts. With the right content and a good understanding - based both on behavioural tracking and the information volunteered by respondents - of information needs, we can push out relevant information, or make it available on a personalised landing page URL and track response.

Nurture Leads

What is a lead?

This may seem like a strange question, but I can guarantee that what Marketing calls a lead and what Sales expect from a lead are two different things. This handover point from Marketing to Sales is always a bone of contention, often exacerbated by Marketing having to hit lead targets that bear no relationship to sales outcomes. If Marketing is the owner of prospect ‘touches’ until such time as the prospect (or more accurately to this point, the ‘suspect’) is ready to consider alternatives and shortlist, then how to identify this point is a priority and can only be achieved when Marketing and Sales sit down together.

In a complex sale, the nurturing process can be measured in months, so it requires a comprehensive nurturing strategy from Marketing using multiple communications channels and highly focused content. Twitter, Blogs, news stories, white papers, newsletters, video and interactive media are likely to be key content/ channels along with email, events and seminars. Contact-level database tracking and lead scoring will be essential to manage the nurturing process.

Support the Sales Process

Sales will pick up and continue the dialogue with prospects that Marketing has started. Particularly at the initial sales engagement, whether by telephone and email or in person, the messages must be consistent and deliver on the brand promise carefully developed over weeks and months. All sales support material must facilitate this process and be developed in close cooperation with Sales.

Later in the sales engagement, Marketing should be working closely with Sales to understand how it can support pipeline velocity: opportunities can get qualified out, slowed down or lost. Marketing has an armoury of weapons to help with opportunities that get stuck at various points in the sales process, such as ‘short listed’ or ‘proof of concept’. By automating the end-to-end pipeline process, Marketing should have a real-time dashboard that provides data on what is going on and provide input to Sales and Marketing discussions about what is being done. This is not just a Sales management responsibility. Rejected leads, opportunities qualified out and lost deals should be recycled and inform the marketing strategy.

Retain and Develop Customers

Realising customer value, building customer loyalty, and thereby expanding deployment of products and services in B2B environments is a key strategy for high-tech suppliers. In fact, in such a highly innovative industry, with the resulting short product lifecycles, this ‘land and expand’ strategy is critical to reduce the on-going costs of customer acquisition. Often profits are lower on the initial sale with an expectation of growing this business.

Marketing needs to understand how this strategy will be deployed and how interaction with customers is different from that used with prospects. It requires a more joined-up approach since the customer’s day-to-day experiences will now be handled by Operations (or Support and Services). How do today’s customer interactions help identify opportunities for expansion and how does Marketing leverage these?

Internal seminars, Intranets, executive events, case studies, networking and internal success stories can all be used in post-sales situations, but the focus once more has to be on engaging with Sales and Support to incorporate Marketing communications into the overall customer engagement strategy.

In Conclusion

Marketing can often get hung up on short term tactics and short term targets which are not aligned to actual pipeline performance. By understanding the customer journey throughout his buying cycle, tactics can be better targeted at particular stages in the journey to meet specific quantifiable ends.

7 Steps to Effective Pipeline Management - Part 1

The primary driver of B2B Marketing in high-tech markets is to feed the sales pipeline and generate a quantifiable contribution to revenue targets.

Marketing is primarily thought of in the context of demand generation - particularly driving sales leads - but this is just part of the equation. In my experience there are 7 key steps to align marketing activity with the sales pipeline. Each of these must be supported by KPIs that ultimately generate an acceptable ROI.

1. Understand Buyer behaviour
2. Be found
3. Convert interest to action
4. Create a community of interest
5. Nurture leads to create sales opportunities
6. Support the sales process
7. Retain and develop customers

Understanding Buyer Behaviour

One of the best books I've read on the B2B buyers' journey and the need to understand how buyer behaviour should drive sales and marketing strategy is 'The Leaky Funnel' by Hugh Macfarlane. In this book, Hugh reminds us that Sales and Marketing have a shared role to play in supporting a buyer through his (or her) journey from 'blissfully unaware' they have a problem to searching for a solution, selecting from alternatives and so on. Only by understanding this journey for your products and services in your market can you hope to determine buying signals and to shape your sales and marketing tactics accordingly.

In many high-tech environments - led by technophiles or Sales - one could be forgiven for thinking that all Marketing needs to do is tell people the product is available (and is of course the best on the market) for them to beat a path to your door (the 'better mousetrap syndrome). Why should they care? It's Marketing's job to communicate this.

Getting Found

Buyers will be searching for information for many reasons, depending on where they are in their buying cycle: they may be trying to confirm that they have a problem - perhaps they have reached a point of pain recognition, which is forcing them to dig into what the problem might be that is causing it. They need to be educated - and companies that can show 'thought leadership': relating to their business pain, identifying its causes and talking about potential alternative solutions are well positioned to begin a dialogue which may lead to an opportunity.

However, this is a different reason for seeking information - and requires a different response - to those who know they are looking for a particular type of solution and are researching suppliers. Marketers must use appropriate media channels and content to address these different needs. SEO/ PPC, Blogging, social networking, web communities and traditional through-the-line media channels and events must be deployed to provide buyers with multiple means of finding you. Content is King!

Converting Interest

Your website or landing page is key to converting interest into action and creating top-of-funnel enquiries. To engage with a potential buyer, you need to know who he is and this requires him to 'raise his hand' by registering his details on your site. I could fill many pages on the debate about whether a form should be required for downloading content, what fields it should contain and how long it should be, but there are many other sources for this. Suffice to say this requires a lot of testing, but typically the bar should be set low to encourage completion. In B2B environments, the buying cycle can be long, allowing for additional information capture throughout the process.

However, a dialogue can not begin until the buying party declares an interest; and the power lies with the buyer - often buyers want to remain anonymous until they have conducted their own research. This supports the need to promote thought leadership through multiple channels and the rise of social networking only serves to support word-of-mouth sources and delay the point at which a buyer will declare his hand. High pressure sales tactics are not well received amongst knowledgeable buyers. I have seen a marked decline in the value of trade shows during the early stages of B2B buying, for example, as there are many more effective channels for buyers to research vendors.

In my next Blog, I will look at the remaining stages: how to sustain a dialogue, develop the sales opportunity and build on-going customer relationships.

Focus on Marketing Metrics: should we be doing more?

I was inspired by a great Blog from Mashable to look at some of the current thinking on Marketing measurement. Prashant Suryakumar, who wrote this article makes the point that:

'There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign. Crowd behavior is dynamic and context-specific, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a “one size fits all” solution.'

He goes on to make the point that there is a lot of data points that can be captured in social media, but not all of them are relevant and that metrics need to be divided into those that identify influencers in your community, those that help businesses understand engagement and the conversations that are being had (reputation) and finally those that show how social media is impacting the business holistically. As he says: 'Measuring the impact of increased chatter for your brand might not always translate to more revenue for the business. Measuring cause and effect between buzz, branding and sales might show different dynamics for different product groups.' For me, this is the crux of the issue - how does social media activity impact the bottom line? Understanding this better will be the challenge for 2011. For an indication that certain social networking tools, specifically Blogs, can drive identifiable inbound leads, check out this Blog from Tiecas, which quotes Hubspot data - and which chimes with my own experience.

Funnel Management and ROI

However, while social networking measurement may be the subject de jour we should not forget that measuring any returns from Marketing is still a minority sport. According to a report quoted on DemandGen that I tweeted a couple of weeks ago (@j_ceri), the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) 'found that 64.9% of BtoB marketers cannot track ROI, while 58% do not qualify inquiries prior to lead distribution.

When respondents were asked if they track marketing ROI, only 14.6% said they do it within the SFA/CRM system.'

Marketing still has a long way to go to transition to a more accountable function that can demonstrate its impact on the business in financial terms. The focus on marketing metrics, process, data and analytics has to increase in 2011 - if only to enable a successful introduction of marketing automation (for more details on the current state of play check out this report).

There is now no end of content from vendors on why marketing measurement makes sense, how to do it, how to automate it and so on. Technology marketers should check out the content from Bulldog, Hubspot and Eloqua in particular.

Let's get in the driving seat of identifying the revenue we drive in 2011 before the CFO forces change on us. You may be surprised at the good news contained in the data and how it can be used to defend against Sales' claims of 'not enough leads'!

What Did MySpace do Wrong.... if Anything?

Time Magazine reported yesterday that MySpace is expecting to be sold off imminently by News Corp, but in the meantime was expecting to reduce its workforce by 50% by the end of the month! That is a significant turnaround for the business, which had conceded that Facebook was Top Dog in social networking last November.

Dominating the Category

On the back of my last Blog which looked at the strides both Facebook and Twitter made this year, this news made me think once again about the short window of opportunity new technology start-ups have to establish market dominance of a major market segment. As a company that launched in 2003 and was sold in July 2005 for US$580 million, MySpace represents a spectacular rise and fall over the two years of 2009 and 2010 as Facebook became the go to site for networking and maybe the seeds of this change were captured in the changing user demographics of each site as Facebook opened its doors beyond its college community roots.

The 'Internet factor' obviously played a huge part in this dramatic rise and fall due to the speed with which technology has developed in our connected world - Twitter has come from nowhere to be worth a reported $3.7bn - but can it make money, or is it destined for a MySpace swan dive? And what role does Marketing play in building brand and repeatable revenue streams in these businesses?

Tracking Buyer Behaviour in a Connected World

Of course, B2B businesses are less likely to rise and fall in quite the same dramatic fashion, as enterprises are relatively slow to adopt new technology due to the need to manage the risk of change and clearly demonstrate ROI. But the development of business communities - on Linked-In and Facebook, or more loosely connected on Twitter - present a challenge to all marketers to understand all the influences, formal and informal, or buyer behaviour.

Knowing how to embrace tools to help influence the influencers - and turn it into cold hard cash - could be just about the most important weapon in a marketer's armoury in the coming years.

Thoughts on 2010 for B2B Technology Marketing

It's that time of year: time to reflect on what became of 2010 and look forward (hopefully) to 2011.

For the B2B marketer, particularly in technology markets, 2010 seemed to be significant for three things:

1. the coming of age of the marketing automation platform
2. the rise and rise of social networking
3. the broad usage of terms reflecting a focus on marketing outcomes rather than activity

Marketing Automation

With the acquisition of Unica by IBM, followed by the recently announced acquisition of Aprimo by Teradata, a period of consolidation has started in the marketing automation market, reflecting a growing maturity and use of these tools in day-to-day marketing campaigns. Adding Unica to the analytics and reporting capabilities of Cognos and Coremetrics, IBM is seeking to provide integrated sales and marketing platforms which focus on metrics and data to provide real-time customer intelligence in the pursuit of revenue growth. Eloqua launched Version 10 of its leading platform for B-to-B marketing automation, completely redesigning the interface and workflow usability and opening the door for traditional Marketing campaign managers to catch up with their digital campaign cousins.

Social Networking

2010 may be seen as the year of social media. Twitter has released figures showing that 50 million tweets are sent a day across its network (compared with an average of 5,000 just 3 years ago). Facebook meanwhile boasts half a billion users of which half on average are logged on per day. My search on LinkedIn came up with over 670,000 English-language groups - there is definitely an appetite for sharing information. It remains to be seen how effective these media are in influencing B-to-B sales. Even more difficult will be assigning ROI to social media channels, when they become just one of many customer touchpoints.

Marketing ROI

Marketing performance management (MPM), Marketing operations, Revenue performance management (RPM) - these and many other terms have more frequently entered the marketing lexicon in 2010. The one thing they have in common is a focus on identifying the financial returns from expenditure on marketing. This recognition of the need to justify Marketing's contribution to the enterprise based on it showing a healthy return on investment is an idea that seems to have come of age in 2010. My good friend Jim Lenskold wrote the book on this back in 2003 so it is good to see companies embracing marketing metrics, underpinned by contact databases and automated marketing platforms, to show that each dollar invested can show a $4, $5 - or whatever - return. 'Can' is key here of course because this isn't easy - you have to measure the right things, often over a long period of time and processes and data need to be carefully monitored to ensure that the information needed to support the metrics is gathered consistently. As we know, even getting Sales to complete a few fields in the CRM system is difficult, so full visibility of marketing returns may be impossible. But the journey is beginning and 2010 showed that it is becoming the responsibility of more people, often in senior positions, to take the first steps.

2011: more of the same?

I won't run the risk of making any predictions for 2011. While I believe the 2010 trends, above, will continue and be reflected in the skillsets required of marketing professionals, the fact that technology is playing a greater part in marketing execution also makes it more unpredictable. The mobile channel, location-based marketing and other factors may also leave a more significant mark in the forthcoming year.

Whatever happens, have a good one!

Is B2B Marketing Changing Fast Enough?

'Despite the rapid, decade-long growth of Google and other digital forms of advertising, traditional channels still commanded 66% of b2b marketing budgets this year, according to the “2011 B2B Marketing Outlook” study.'

I was struck by this headline in BtoB magazine. What does this say about the state of Marketing? Either we are kidding ourselves about the impact of the Web, Email, Search marketing and social networking on our businesses or we are simply not putting our money where our mouths are! How can it be that in B2B, where budgets are comparatively small and market segments easier to target directly, we are not spending more on digital marketing? Do we think it's a passing fad?

Trade Shows Rule, Ok!
This article goes on to say that the top three areas of expenditure are 'trade shows and events (28%), magazines/trade publications (13%) and direct mail (9%). Apart from direct mail - which frequently could be replaced by email and eNewsletters - this off-line expenditure is in areas in which it is often hard to show any ROI. In my experience, Sales love events because it gives them an excuse to meet people (often people they already know). But ask what happened to the leads and things go very quiet! I'm not saying there isn't a place for target seminars and events - but 28% of budget...?

Decisions Must Be Data-Driven
80% of B2B marketers are using some form of digital marketing (what are the other 20% doing then..?) which is a relief, and it is even mentioned that through-the-line (digital plus off-line) campaigns are working, but, reading between the lines, this article suggests to me that many B2B marketers are still running campaigns from within their comfort zones and adding digital activity at the margins ('Yes, we're doing SEO'). How many marketers are looking at integrated, channel-neutral campaigns aligned to the sales pipeline and targeted at key stages of the buying cycle? How many are making decisions based on data, not just what they've always done or what Sales have asked for?

Not enough I would wager.

Marketing Leadership in Changing Times

Marketing is experiencing unprecedented change. From Social networking to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Performance Management (MPM). How it responds to the challenges of the digital age on the one hand and the calls from the C-Suite for accountability on the other, may be a defining moment in its quest to be regarded seriously as an investment and not just a cost of sale.

Is it time for Marketing to subject itself to the kind of scrutiny that other functional disciplines have faced for decades and begin to recognise its need to show a legitimate ROI?

Marketing ROI Not Just Tactics

If Marketing is the 'voice of the customer' then it must show that it can truly align marketing tactics to the strategic imperatives of turning customer demand into profit. In high-tech, marketing continually competes for attention with R&D - who make the products - and Sales - who sell them. R&D know that they need to 'package' 'price' and 'promote' their products (marketing tactics). Sales like trade shows, sales aids and the web site - the 'shop windows' of their trade.

But these are just the costs of 'doing business' - no one is really clear, in my experience, what the true ROI of Marketing is: how to measure it; how much to spend; whether PPC is 'better' than Twitter etc. The smoke-and-mirrors of marketing will remain that way unless Marketing itself shines some light (excuse the mixed metaphors) on what we do.

Marketing Metrics Drive Accountability

When the annual budget round comes along, Marketing needs to have a case to present to the CFO that demonstrates why the budget should not be cut; or, indeed, why it should be increased, for example, from 6% to 8% of revenue.

Metrics need to be established for demand generation tht are tracked through to sales revenue using marketing automation/CRM systems such as Eloqua and Salesforce,com. Metrics for intangibles, such as brand awareness and brand value are harder to establish, but again need to be agreed and reported against. These metrics should be part of the CMO's dashboard.

Is Marketing ready to stand up and be counted? The digital age presents the opportunity - we need to seize it.

Social Networking: what does it offer to the B2B marketing professional?

Like many marketing professionals, I have spent the last 18 months or so trying to get to grips with the value that Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on bring to a business focused on selling products and services to other businesses.

Of course, we all know that social media is 'a good thing'. Why else would everyone be putting up pages on Facebook, tweeting and retweeting messages and ensuring that they are posting content to the right groups on LinkedIn? Why indeed? It couldn't just be because everyone else is doing it, could it? Nor because it is new, trendy and exciting. We HAVE to do it to build 'communities' of interest, to let people know we have just issued a press release or posted a new Blog. Don't we? It's the future of digital communications: email is dead and that's official (Facebook say so)!

But amidst all the hype, what value are business marketers getting from it?

Granted, social media helps you 'get found' on the Internet: being found in a world of noise is pretty important and stage one of the buying cycle. But what then? How about conversion of that interest into leads? And nurturing those leads until qualified for Sales? How does that work without outbound marketing - using traditional techniques like email, telemarketing, webinars and so on?

In other words, what part does social media play in closing business? Is it just for raising awareness in new market segments and then for keeping customers informed so that you can sell more to them, at lower cost? Or does it signal a fundamental change in marketing strategy?

Strategically, B2B marketers need to know how social media integrates with the rest of the marketing mix and what the appropriate business metrics are for judging its contribution to ROI. Not just followers, clicks and web hits, but its contribution to the overall sales funnel.

My experience is that once the overall social strategy is developed, execution, as with most of marketing, means doing a lot of detailed, inter-dependent tasks well and consistently with clear targets and a real-time dashboard that tracks inbound and outbound activity throughout the buying cycle.

I'd be interested in your experiences.

Performance Measurement in B-to-B Marketing

Marketing in technology markets has become increasingly focused on measurable outcomes. As Marketing execution becomes more and more digital, Marketers are benchmarking email opens, clicks, conversions to leads and so on. But these are merely Marketing metrics - the rubber hits the road where Marketing hands over to Sales and we begin to monetise (to use a modish word) our investment in Marketing.

Credible Measurement
In short, Marketing needs to prove the Return On Investment (ROI) - sooner rather than later. The closer Marketing metrics are to the money end of the business, the better for the credibility of Marketing. And these are metrics that are primarily influenced by Sales: e.g. lead to opportunity conversion ratios; rate of opportunity leakage from marketing-driven leads; average value of orders derived from marketing leads and so on.

For complex sales cycles, these metrics also help Marketing to determine what tactics work most effectively to nurture sales opportunities and help move them through the pipeline. Events and ROI calculators may be appropriate tactics later in the sales cycle to overcome objections and help drive prospect engagement.

Process First, Automation Second

Marketing automation platforms, such as Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, Silverpop et al, all offer some form of workflow-like automation of marketing processes to make lead scoring, routing and nurturing much easier in the digital world (off-line activity still presents a challenge). But these systems will only provide business value if you have:

• a clearly defined marketing strategy
• clearly defined and understood marketing processes
• a clean and segmented contact database
• Well-trained staff who understand the process and how to set up and execute digital campaigns, and, above all
• clear financial and marketing metrics and targets

Metrics must be appropriate to their user and their role: Digital Marketers need real-time dashboards for email opens, web hits etc. Marketing Directors want standardised reports for volume of leads generated, percentage of leads converted to opportunities, cost per lead/ opportunity. Ultimately, measurement of overall marketing performance is defined by contribution to revenue and profit, so Marketing must be able to account for its total contribution from generating demand through to closed business. These are measurements that the CFO and COO understand.

Marketing Comes of Age

Marketing's contribution to revenue can no longer be the 'magic' that happens somewhere between the Web hit and the Sales team; ROI has to be more directly linked to specific activity. We need to understand marketing operations in detail and be able to explain to the C-suite the value of its contribution. Telling them we generated 1,000 leads this month and that this is more than the same time last year, is just not good enough any more. If Marketing is not an investment, it is simply a cost - and the pressure on costs is always downward.

'You can't manage what you don't measure', the old management adage, must finally be applied to marketing.

Content generation for lead nurturing in a 1-to-1 world

In this networked world it remains a challenge to take potential buyers through a truly personalized interactive experience with your company.

The Holy Grail of business to business marketing is to deliver a one-to-one customer experience at one-to-many prices. In other words, while our budgets and headcount are being cut this is supposed to be more than offset by the power of new technology to do things faster and cheaper.

Here's how the story goes: with social networking creating awareness and bringing visitors to your Web site 'for free', combined with the power of profiling, PURLs and analytics served up by vendors like Eloqua we can capture, profile, score and nurture buyers like never before using automated workflows. All of this while keeping MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) costs at an all time low by using digital communications.

I'm not sure what your experience is, but if sales cycles for complex solutions continue to stretch from 6 - 12 months, that's a heck of a long time to keep someone interested enough to continue receiving your emails without unsubscribing. Not to speak of the amount of content required to move people through the funnel with a personalized experience from the position of 'content and not even looking' through 'bothered I might have a problem, but not a priority' to 'active investigation of our options' (at which point Sales might be vaguely interested!).

Who writes all this content? How much does it cost? How do we match content with the customers' buying cycles? How many people do we need in Marketing Operations to analyze what is going on at a data level and act on it? Can only big companies do this?

I don't know the answer to these questions but the challenge is definitely emerging and to really exploit the power of the technology which is at last being thrust into Marketing, we need to redefine the resourcing and skills profile of not only our in-house staff but also those agencies we rely on to add value to what we do. And we all need to get a lot better at generating, harnessing and repurposing content.

Integrating Marketing with Salesforce to Track Results

Long time, no post...!

Apologies to all (two?) of you who have been hanging on my every word and are therefore disappointed that it's taken me 6 weeks to post another update. Life gets in the way.

Talking of which, I have just completed a new configuration of Salesforce with my ever-reliable support team at CRM Technologies and it has brought back to me the many times I have helped Sales to define their processes, created screens and fields to support them and then wrestled with data flows and marketing processes to ensure the front-end of the pipe and the back-end were in synch.

'But doesn't Salesforce take care of all of this?', I hear you cry. In a word, 'no'. Where CRM/SFA etc implementations have failed, it is because insufficient time has been spent on thinking through the basics:

• What is our sales process?
• How do we measure its effectiveness?
• What pieces of objective data do we need to collect to determine how healthy our pipeline is?
• How will we use this data for forecasting purposes?
• Where will it come from and how will it be maintained?
• What is a 'lead' and at what point does it become an 'opportunity'?

Luckily we implemented Eloqua and tied it into Salesforce back in July, so this was merely a change in the sales process prompted by new management and an acceptance (probably) that this time, perhaps we should actually use the system consistently after we've set it up as planned. As a result, it was a relatively short process, but even so it has had a big impact on Marketing - our lead scoring model, the Web form questions and how they are served, as well as the metrics delivered via the Salesforce dashboards. Why? Well, because a change in Sales process goes to the heart of things for Marketing: including what kind of leads we are delivering; how long and for what reason we nurture leads; what success looks like (what we are measuring).

If ROI, accountability and impact - ie. measurable results - are the watchwords of B-to-B techmarketing in this digital age (comments please!) then processes, systems, data and metrics have to replace the 'spray-and-pray' approach in marketing communications planning.

In other words, joined up thinking about Sales and Marketing drives joined up processes and systems. If Sales in your company are those slightly scary guys whose meetings you have to attend once a month to describe the marvellous campaigns you're going to run, only to find that all they want is 'more leads' then it's time to understand their world a little better!

So How Does Twitter Help B-To-B Marketers?

Twitter is one of those Marketing 'Tools' which I suggested last week could provide a new way to reach out to customers and prospects (as well as partners and other stakeholders) in this Digital world. But what does that mean in practice?

In a US software company I previously worked at, when Facebook was starting to become the phenomenon it now is, you may recall that the debate was raging around whether individual employees were accessing Facebook during work time, the impact this would have on productivity, privacy issues around data on the site and what companies' policies should be regarding this. This is just one example of the impact of social networking, which breaks down barriers between 'personal' life and 'work' life, on marketing and business strategy. My employer thought it would be cool and create some publicity, while many companies were tightening up corporate firewalls to prevent access to Facebook, to declare that we were embracing it and using it as the corporate 'Intranet'. It was really a stunt - and while it did promote use amongst employees, and create publicity, it was not really accompanied by any thought through strategy of engagement with the technology and its potential.

Arguably by exposing company information to anyone's gaze and trysting employees to self-censor, it did more to expose the company to risk than it gained in 'free' publicity.

So what of Twitter? As with Facebook, many people have joined Twitter as individuals, without necessarily thinking about their workplace - others of course have joined with a business-focused intent. How does a company combine the two? How does Marketing leverage the power of the tool to engage with stakeholders and create new communities of interest, without simply using it as a one-way advertising medium? More importantly, how do we measure its impact on the rest of the marketing mix and its overall ROI?

In my current company we have a corporate Twitter account, as many do, along with our corporate Blog, a PR/AR firm and a YouTube channel. We are looking to combine the power of all of these media in as part of our brand awareness activity and to engage directly with influencers in our market. Like many others, we also promote events and offers via the tool.

At a tactical level we can point to the impact of these media on the take up of certain marketing tactics (event registrations, web hits, downloads etc). But what kind of sustained impact should we be looking for? How much resource and investment is 'right' based on the associated returns? I can't pretend I know at the moment, and we are testing this and looking for media-relevant ways of measuring success. At the moment, I regard it a little like PR - important, necessary but ultimately a bit slippery when it comes to pinning down its overall contribution to business growth or other more financially-specific metrics. And the danger of that is that when it comes down to securing budget for investment in a down economy it is unlikely to fair as well as direct lead generation efforts.

In high-tech markets, heavily reliant on Sales as the primary tactic for winning business, 'leads' is what the Sales organization wants (more on what a 'lead' is in a future Blog!) so any activity which can not be measured in terms of leads passed to Sales is likely to get short shrift. Awareness and interest obviously generate action in the longer term, but how to make the connection? From a strategy point of view, it comes back to the fundamentals: who are we targeting; what is their buying cycle; what is their buying cycle; what tactics should we deploy at different stages of the buying cycle to move buyers forward and ultimately sell something?

I believe Twitter, and social networking in general, is going to continue to create a major upheaval in marketing engagement. The skills we will need as marketers, the tactics we will be deploying and the metrics we will be using to justify our campaigns, are going to continue to change fundamentally. We are already seeing major changes to traditional media - particularly display advertising and print mail. But our marketing objectives and a firm grasp of strategy must determine how - or whether - we use Twitter and the other tools in our armory, rather than because they are 'cool'.