Got Enough Facetime?
No not that facetime…talking to customers live, or next best thing on the real phone.
Now I am a big fan of social media tools, as they provide a great way to connect, communicate, and find information. However, based on a recent marketing initiative, I realized getting back to basics is never a bad idea.
The background is we had a large set of customers we want to try to upgrade to a new version. We also needed to build a better way to communicate. Social networking tools – right? Wrong! We learned that of the customer base over 75% are not even in LinkedIn, never mind getting them to join a LinkedIn group. Maybe they skipped LinkedIn and went straight to Twitter….Now we did do a basic e-mail campaign. Great open rates, awesome click through rates, poor conversion rates. The customers were instead picking up the phone…and calling us. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. We called them, asked what they liked…they liked being called live!
Never in my career have I ever left a call or meeting with a customer saying, “I should do less of that.” From this exercise I learned you really need to understand how your prospects and customers want t be engaged. I say engaged rather than talked at. Are your social marketing programs creating engagement or are they the next version of SPAM? To tell I would categorize your “followers” as below:
- Customers and prospects who read, comment and add value to your content
- Influencers to re-purpose (re-tweet, link-to, etc.) your content
- Groupies who follow you because they have nothing better to do
Given the social echo out there my guess is you have over 30% of #1, you’re in good shape.
Many years ago I ran a series of webcasts which had a set of groupies from various F500 companies. After a couple of webcasts, I was extremely excited to have them added to our lead list. However, after the series and no interest in buying our solution, I realized it was better to focus on the ones who were too busy to spend 10 consecutive weeks on the webcasts.
Social Marketing Tools Hype Cycle
Since joining Oz I have spent more time digging into the social marketing tools, and thought it would be helpful to create a Gartner style hype cycle of the major ones. Also my focus is for B2B marketing which will skew my perspective.
LinkedIn – Given this is the most business focused tool , LinkedIn is furthest along in the cycle. Users clearly know how to leverage LinkedIn for networking and prospecting, there are thousands of groups that can be leveraged. People get it. With their recent IPO, I put them as passed the “peak of inflated expectations.” The logic on entering the trough of disillusionment based on needing better tools to help leverage capabilities like groups and eliminate SPAM. The group analytics are a basic start, but too many groups are flooded with stupid questions, and unrelated discussions. The relevancy Google has incorporated into search needs to be applied here. Of course there is huge potential to leverage LinkedIn more into web sites, CRM systems, customer feedback post sales, and service, etc.
Facebook – Obviously the visibility of facebook is the highest, although the huge majority are end consumers. Although businesses clearly understand they need to leverage facebook, most business people I speak to are still trying to figure it out. This is especially true to small and medium businesses, whose facebook pages are mostly one way (from them) promotional posts (I would call it SPAM). Personally, I think the small business opportunity for facebook is huge, however, they seem to be more focused on the consumer side.
Twitter – Similar to facebook, the mix of consumer and business use has people trying to figure out the best way to leverage twitter. Although more so than facebook, many people do not get it. Surprisingly, when I was interviewing marketing candidates, although all of them used Twitter as a tool, very few could actually give me concrete details on how their company benefited. Ultimately, when pushed most said, “it helps Google find us”. I personally have focused less time on Twitter, but in last few weeks have learned how good it is to find specific information and facilitate engagement. The engagement piece is what too many marketers leave out, which is as critical as creating content.
Blogs – As a general marketing tool, company blogs are becoming pretty mainstream. I am putting them as coming out of the trough of disillusionment, simply because as companies kick this off they themselves go through this cycle. Starting enthusiastically for the first few weeks – posting regularly. However, after some time, they wonder, why don’t we have more readers, why do not get more comments, etc. Blogging is a marathon, so the key is sustaining great content, and engagement. Obviously, the other tools can be used to improved reach and engagement.
E-mail – Not much to say here, although dismissed as “Marketing 1.0”, regular e-newsletters, and promotions of content are a key element of your social marketing strategy. Obviously, the response rates, opt-outs, and investment need to be managed appropriately.
As you look at your companies initiatives with each of these, I would expect you will go through this same cycle for each initiative. My recommendation is to pick ones that you can sustain, and then use those successes to add additional elements.
What tools are shooting up the hype cycle? Can someone point out a good post covering “the next big thing?”
Metrics, Money, and Marketing ROI
Although what seems like it should be scientifically defined, I still get questions on how concrete ways to measure demand generation to either justify or increase your marketing budget.
In looking at costs, I typically include the “variable” costs which include development of content (eBook, video, etc.), and paid promotion (paid search, banner ads, e-mail list rental, etc.) While I do not include staff costs, you may want to do this as obviously they need to be paid for and justified. My reasoning is that the most important reason to measure is to assess your most effective programs and marketing channels. To the relative costs and returns are key. Including staff costs you are basically saying, should we do marketing at all. (Which may be a valid question…)
To compare campaigns, I use the following metrics:
1) Cost per acquisition (CPA)
2) Cost per qualified lead (CPL)
3) Revenue returned per dollar spent on programs (ROI)
An acquisition, is getting a new name into your database: someone to nurture, drip market to. They register for a web cast, view a video, register for your blog, etc. To be clear these are relatively unqualified leads. However, based on the marketing channel, I expect you will see large variation in costs and quality across your promotional channels. For example, someone doing an organic search and viewing a customer video is probably more qualified than someone responding to a direct e-mail. Since you might be promoting the same content across multiple channels, I do not include the cost of the content development (asset) in the CPA. The main goal of measuring the CPA is to see the most effective marketing channels.
Once you look at leads further into the pipeline, I include the cost of the content when measuring CPL. My logic being is that you will often create content and promote it across multiple channels. The main goal of measuring the CPL is to assess the most effective messaging and content.
Finally, the ultimate goal to close business. One question that always comes up is which campaign do you credit the deal to? Obviously, customers may participate in multiple campaigns. One option is to allocate the revenue across all campaigns a prospect participated in. However, I find that gets pretty messy. My simple rule is that is the campaign delivers a qualified lead that enters the sales pipeline, then the forecast and closes, it gets 100% credit. While I recognize there are influencers and drip marketing that builds brand, I treat that as gravy.
Of course the definitions of lead, qualified lead need to be well defined and consistent across sales and marketing.
What other variations do you find helpful? What program and channels produced your best ROI? Finally, with the shift to content and inbound marketing how does this affect you investment in promotional channels, content creation, and staff?
Does Automation Kill Creativity?
Or even worse….kill common sense. A while ago I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, in which he outlines how people with tremendous experience in a particular field develop an almost instinctual capability to assess a situation in a fraction of a second. His examples included art “experts” who got duped into buying a fake …., and a tennis pro who can detect a fault before the serve is completed. How does this fit with sales and marketing?
Around that time, a business development person came to me with a lead they were working. They had completed the initial qualification and spoken to the prospect. The customer was implementing a new global Oracle system, but their title and the “pain” they identified resulted in a lower lead score. “What to do?” – asked the rep. To me the answer was obvious: the customer is spending millions of dollars on an ERP system, and I could think of 10 other customers who had selected our solution as part of a global Oracle project. My conclusion: go find someone in the customers’ organization who does have pain, obviously we were talking to the wrong person.
While marketing automation, drip marketing, lead scoring, social marketing all provide value – they still need brainpower. Most professionals get paid because we leverage experience and make judgment calls. Should I invest more time here or not? Do I need additional support? etc. Too much focus on the tools can kill your best people and your creativity.
Nothing replaces smart people. In short the real question is do you spend more time on the process or the results?
Here are some other questions to ponder:
1) What are the top 3 things that you have learned from your CRM or marketing automation tools?
2) What revenue or customers have you achieved that you would have missed without these tools?
3) Do your sales and marketing teams still prospect or do they wait for the tool?
4) What new sales/marketing campaigns have resulted from using the tools?
5) What have you stopped investing in based on the results from the tools?
One Hundred Qualified Leads Please
Marketing and sales alignment…sales is our customer…closed loop….lead scoring…..visibility…campaign ROI….
Last night I got 3 orders for leads: Would you like budgets of $10K or $100K? Do you want them in the eastern region or western? Mid-market or Fortune 500?
Everyone agrees that “sales is our customer” but do we do a good enough job with our own “market strategy” for our “customer”? Do we know the set of “products” we should have available for sales? They should include
- Market strategy
- Target prospect profile
- Go to market plan
- Value proposition and messaging map
- Sales kit (collateral, presentation, pricing, etc.)
- Leads
So what does sales “owe” marketing? Instead of a vendor-customer relationship, best practice is a balanced relationship, since sales has responsibility back to marketing. These commitments consist of:
- Focus their prospecting and sales efforts on target market and prospects
- Intense and timely follow up to leads
- Objective feedback on quality of all marketing deliverables
- Collaboration on sharing win/loss information
- Provide early insight into significant opportunities that may impact product requirements
- Not bring small deals “that only need..” to close
Sales and marketing collaboration is a two way street.
Marketing Spin or Market Value?
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at a seminar next to an independent consultant. He was telling me about some new initiatives from Cisco around monitoring and controlling computer devices. The first example involved automatically turning all the phones & computers off in a call center when they are not in use in order to save energy. The idea being if it was a two shift operation, the devices could be automatically turned off for the idle third shift. The second scenario was putting RFID tags on newborn babies. If the baby left their room without authorization, the hospital elevators and doors would lock automatically, and the hospital would ensure the infant was not abducted.
After explaining these with much enthusiasm he said, “I do not know if there is any real value in these, but Cisco is a marketing machine, so we believe we can make some good money.”
Without debating the value of the initiatives, it made me wonder: How much success is inherent value versus pure spin marketing? Obviously on the strategic side of marketing the whole objective is to find new markets and deliver value, but fundamentally there has to be some core value. No question spin marketing can accelerate the success or even ensure it gets a strong enough foothold, but if there is not enough core value, the marketing efforts will be expensive and time consuming.
Do You Need a Psychiatrist?
Over the New Year’s holiday I was at a friend’s for dinner and we played a game called “psychiatrist”. It can be quite fun, if a little bit risqué. The game requires at least 7 or 8 people, with one playing the psychiatrist. The person being the shrink cannot have played the game before and here’s why. All the others have the same problem, and it is up to the psychiatrist to find out what that problem is by asking probing and personal questions. The condition that every player has is that they are answering the questions based on they believe person to their right would answer. The final twist is that when someone gets an answer wrong, the person to their right must declare “psychiatrist”, at which point they switch seats. You get the point.
The above game got me thinking about lead qualification and the sales process. Is your sales team wondering around asking diagnostics questions trying to find the pain and compelling event? In today’s world creating a strong differentiated value proposition is just the start. Even developing compelling and consistent messaging is typically best practice. However, these are not enough. What I believe complex sales require is a diagnostics map. A diagnostic map basically provides guidance on where to probe based on the prospects context. The context includes the customers business, vertical, organization, etc. as well as where you are in the sales process.
Do you have any good examples of a diagnostic map?
Messaging Fairy Tale
Recently I was walking through Heathrow airport and was struck by HSBC’s “Different Points of View” campaign. The main point of the campaign is that a simple word or image can mean very different things to people based on culture, context, etc. One example is shown above with a picture of a bridal couple on top of a wedding cake. There are three different versions with the messages: Fear, Fate, Fairy Tale.
It re-enforced how critical messaging and context is to high tech marketing. In this world it is almost always a complex sale, with multiple communications channels (e-mail, phone calls, meetings, formal PowerPoint presentations, etc.), each hitting different roles within the prospect. Although it is obvious the VP of transportation will have different perspective than the director of IT; getting the right message, delivered in the right way can be challenging. How the messages are “packaged” impacts their effectiveness as shown in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.
The following is a starting point to deliver strong messaging:
1) Define the titles and roles you need to reach
2) Based on role what are the most relevant value points
3) What are the best channels to reach these people? In this case channels might be as simple as an e-mail blast or as sophisticated as a complex discovery process.
A core messaging map is a useful internal tool that can be used by marketing communications, sales, business development, product marketing to ensure content and tools for the campaign are aligned. In today’s social marketing world with information overload, the right messaging and context are fundamental.
Getting Around The Leaf
The movie “Bug’s Life” has a great opening scene whereby the ants are all lined up dropping food for the fall “offering” to the grasshoppers. Unfortunately, a leaf drops down and breaks up the line of ants. This causes a panic since the ants are conditioned to follow the soldier in front of them, but now the leaf had broken the line!!
In the last 12 months my team has done a fantastic job creating world class use of salesforce.com and accompanying metrics. Now anyone in sales and marketing can track leads by source, campaign, channel, cost per lead, cost per qualified lead, conversion rate, etc. So what’s this got to do with A Bug’s Life? With metrics comes process. You need processes to ensure leads are distributed properly, process to ensure they are qualified consistently, clear criteria to define when a lead becomes an opportunity, clear definitions on what contributes to the cost of a lead, etc.
Last week one of the people on my marketing team came to me and asked how to route a lead as it did not fit the process. I reviewed the lead information and it seemed clear what to do. What this reminded me is that nothing replaces smart people. Although processes are important and are needed to drive continuous improvement, they can also cause everyone to work at the lowest common denominator. In this case my colleague could not “get around the leaf” – they were hand-cuffed by the process.
Do your processes help or hinder? Can you team get around the leaf?
Everyone is in Marketing
The glory is in sales…especially when the deals are big. Everyone in the company likes to take credit for a big win. Marketing created the lead, engineering added features for the demo, finance drew up new pricing….of course when the deal goes south it is sales fault: he did not sell high enough, she did not understand the decision process, we did not create a compelling event. Having said all this, it is true that most companies and employees are willing and able to help drive sales – we are all in sales…without the quota.
So why don’t people say “We are all in marketing”? Well in fact everyone should think about how they can be in marketing. May areas of the company can be fantastic champions of the message and can be used to amplify success. A couple of examples,
- When a press release is issued – Does your services team use to re-enforce success with customers? Does your sales team use it to nurture prospects drive home a key value proposition?
- When a customer testimonial is created – Does professional services use it to expand their relationship in their accounts? Does business development use it to target stale prospects?
One of marketing’s jobs is to create great content. In today’s world of Linkedn and social media all employees can be supporters of getting the word out.
