Sunshine is breaking through the recessionary clouds of the past few years. Signs of cautious optimism are sprouting everywhere, giving hope that 2012 will be a pivotal year that will show continued improvement in the global economy. Many companies report a stronger-than-expected Q4, the DOW is moving forward, and most business people I know have greeted the new year with a smile. This is why now is the perfect time to plan your Spring Customer Advisory Board meeting.

Quietly over the past few years companies have been investing in a CAB program. They’ve carefully selected a dozen or so of their most strategic customers, engaged them in an ongoing dialog about their business plans, priorities, and trends shaping their customers’ businesses, and they’ve been listening. These companies are now poised to accelerate their sales pipeline in 2012 precisely because they’ve kept contact with the decision makers and invited them to influence the company roadmap. But it’s not too late for everyone else.

A CAB is unlike any other customer engagement program. CAB meetings are not sales meetings, but the outcome can dramatically impact a company’s roadmap and sales pipeline. The CAB meeting is not a glorified user group meeting, although it can promote education, engagement, and energy surrounding a company’s products and use cases.

CABs are strategic investments that cater to the long-term strategic relationship company executives have with their best customers. Companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 will tell you they are well worth the investment. And now is the perfect time to build your own plan.

Ready to get started?

Here are a few tips to set you on your way:

1) The CAB is a program, not an event. It represents a chapter in a continuing dialog. While the discussion at the CAB meeting will be center stage for a while, the most important discussions will take place offline and after the event. Keep that in mind as you plan your inaugural meeting. Follow-up is the key to a successful relationship with your customers.

2) It takes 12 weeks to plan. Avoid the temptation to throw a CAB together quickly. Your customers are busy people, just like you and your team.  You need a runway to get on their calendars, and a 12 weeks “heads up” is usually enough time. You’ll also benefit from having enough time to build, critique, and update your agenda as you work the CAB-prep process. Don’t allow company executives (or an outside facilitator) to parachute in at the last minute.

3) Do your research before you begin. Search for CAB best-practices online. I’ve put together a “CAB Resource Center” with links to a number of articles, case studies, and tips for success. Take advantage of these free resources.

2012 is the year of the CAB. Consider it as part of your integrated marketing campaign.

Good luck, and good marketing!

Technorati Tags: CAB, CABs, Customer Advisory Board, Customer Advisory Boards

B2B companies still talk about the “sales cycle,” but that’s internal thinking. It’s about the company, not about the customer. For a long time now, customers have been in charge of the buying process — researching, finding, and comparing products on their own before ever speaking with vendors. So why are marketers still talking about “demand creation?” That’s still a useful concept, especially in consumer products companies, but B2B marketers also need to be thinking about the buyers they don’t even know yet — the ones who are already out there looking for solutions. Rather than just pushing information out to a big list of prospective customers, marketers need to have searchable, findable content available online, so that when prospects are ready, they can find you.

This means developing a variety of types of content, suited to the different buying-cycle stages where potential customers are at any given time. At some point, customers will talk to your sales people who will provide information in their own unique and valuable one-on-one way (presenting, objection handling, proposing). But even then, suitable content can help move the sale along.

Consider the customer’s buying cycle:

1.    Recognition of Need – The Buyer is looking for a solution to a specific business problem – Traditional demand-creation marketing blasts out information to many companies in the hope of finding buyers who are looking for solutions to a business problem. As lead generation response rates indicate, this type of communication falls on a huge number of “deaf ears.” Furthermore, the small percentage of businesses prospects who respond have probably already been out on the web searching for options. At this point, they may have already read articles in industry publications that identify types of product that address their particular problem. If any of the articles identify your company as one of the solution providers, all the better. Perhaps they have heard your executives or product managers speaking at industry events. These are opportunities where your PR people can help build awareness of what you offer. Collaborate with them to get the message right. If the articles are on-line and contain hyperlinks to your website, better yet. If you have informative product content posted on your own blog, prospects can learn that your company has a possible option for them. Do you have a user forum? Posts on a public forum may also lead prospects to consider you.

2.    Vendor Research - The Buyer is looking for companies that can provide some sort of solution to their problem – Having identified possible ways to address their problem, buyers start actively searching for solution providers. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important in the early stages of the customer buying cycle, but is most important here. Having findable, relevant content posted and downloadable is key to being one of the vendors included in the buying cycle. Static website content is important, but downloadable content such as White Papers is even more so. At this stage your content needs to explain what you do and how you do it. Wording should show understanding of the customer problem and an explanation of how you solve it. Consider whether requiring visitors to register to download your content is desirable or not. You will lose a certain number of potential customers who aren’t ready to identify themselves yet. But those who do register are qualifying themselves.

3.   Comparing and Evaluating – The Buyer is identifying product attributes and evaluating which ones most closely match their needs – When prospective buyers have reached the stage where they’ve found your information and that of competing vendors, you need to give them tools with which to make a thoughtful comparison. Videos and online demos can make it clear how your product functions. At this stage, case studies and customer testimonial videos can be persuasive.

4. Consideration – The Buyer is seriously considering choosing one of the identified vendors – By now either the prospect will have reached out to you, or if you had them register when downloading content earlier, your sales organization will have reached out to them. At this point Sales will need to learn who else the customer is considering. Now is the time for competitive comparisons. If you have a great deal of confidence in the accuracy of your competitive information, post the comparisons on your website. Invite the prospects who are now in your funnel to one of your webinars and take the opportunity to clearly differentiate your offering from the competition’s.

All of the bold, italicized terms above are forms of content. It is essential that your content is well-written, readable, and pointedly designed for the stage(s) in the buying cycle where it is most likely to be read.

To boost awareness of your content, use social media to draw interested parties. Tweet about your video or White Paper with an intriguing headline and a link so readers can reach it. Post a description of your latest case study and a link to it in a relevant LinkedIn Group. Some companies use Facebook, but prospects need to already “like” your brand for this to be useful, whereas Twitter and LinkedIn are more openly available.

The start of a new year is a good time to review your content strategy and identify what you need to develop to totally support marketing throughout the customer’s buying cycle.

Read more about Content Marketing in articles my Mary:

• Content: The Heart of Today’s Integrated Marketing Process
• The Right Tool at the Right Time

Technorati Tags: content marketing, customer buying cycle, Integrated Marketing, SEO, Social Media

With the launch of The Marketing High Ground, I was interviewed by the editors of DemandGen Report. Our discussion covered a variety of topics. I’ve captured excerpts of the interview based on specific topics of interest and thought I would pass them along.

*** Read part 1 on the dangers of being seduced by new marketing tools

*** Read part 2 on why market success requires having a focused positioning statement

*** Read part 3 on a tip for discovering your competitive differentiation

*** Read part 4 on mapping messages to the customer’s buying process

*** Read part 5 on tips for communicating your marketing plan internally

Technorati Tags: leadership, marketing best practices, marketing operations

There were several key announcements by Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, at this year’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Over 45,000 people attended the event while 35,000 streamed it live. It was the first time I had to wait in line to cross Howard at Fourth to get to the keynote.

The theme of the conference was the “social enterprise” – showing how social media and new collaboration tools are changing the way we do business. According to the Salesforce.com press release issued on August 31st, the social enterprise leverages …”social, mobile and open cloud technologies to revolutionize companies’ relationships with their customers.”

Here is a quick summary of a few of the announcements made during the keynote that sales and marketing professionals will find of interest. All offerings are scheduled to be available in late 2011.

• Chatter Now: Salesforce.com’s social collaboration tool, Chatter, will allow users to see who else is logged in Salesforce.com and fire up an instant chat session and screen share.
• Chatter Customer Groups: Chatter will also allow people from outside your company (partners and customers for instance) to privately collaborate on projects such as RFPs, account plans, and product implementations.
• Chatter Service: Creates self-service, social communities that allow customers to ask a question in a social feed such as Facebook and get an instant answer from agents monitoring the feed. This offering leverages Radian6 (which Salesforce.com bought earlier this year) for social media monitoring.
• Data.com: Salesforce purchased Jigsaw in April 2010 and has now entered into a partnership with Dun and Bradstreet. The combined offering has been renamed to “Data.com” which according to it’s website offers over 30+ million contacts and 200 million companies. For $99 per user per month, a Data.com button will appear on the Contact or Account screen allowing users to populate Accounts with D&B information or Contacts from the crowd-sourced Jigsaw database.
• Data.com Clean: This is an offline cleansing of your Salesforce.com data by the Data.com team. Pricing is based on the number of records processed.
• Data.com Lists: In addition, marketers can purchase lists from data.com. The records are refreshed quarterly and the license is good for one year.

Technorati Tags: dreamforce 2011, salesforce.com

In my last post I described the demographics and content usage of respondents to our recent survey of KickStart Accelerator (our newsletter) subscribers. This time, I’m reviewing results on the questions we asked our readers in that same survey about their current marketing and sales practices and initiatives. Since these were all “check-all-that-apply” questions, the percentage totals will exceed 100%.

Bear in mind from the last post that our responses were predominantly from people in smaller to mid-sized B2B companies that sell tech products or services. Here is how they responded to questions about how they are engaging with customers:

Q: What media “channels” have been successful in reaching your customers?

• 91% – Email
• 68% – Web
• 50% – Social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• 45% – Telephone
• 32% – Video
• 23% – Direct mail
• 23% – Podcast
• 0% – Mobile

“Other” write-ins:
– TV/print
– All things web (including webcasts and social media)
– Webcasts (multiple write-ins)

 
Q: In the last year, how have you learned about needs and concerns of your customers?

• 68% – Sales reps
• 58% – Surveys
• 47% – User group meetings
• 37% – Win/loss reports
• 32% – Channel partners
• 26% – Focus groups
• 21% – Customer advisory boards
• 16% – Customer satisfaction studies

“Other” write-ins:
– Talking with customers directly
– Old fashioned research

 
Q: How do you stay in touch with, nurture existing customers and prospects?

• 79% – E-newsletter
• 60% – Periodic emails
• 45% – Social media
• 35% – Blog
• 10% – Advertising

“Other” write-ins:
– Telephone (multiple write-ins)
– Community/Customer Meet-ups (regional)
– In person

 
Q: How is your organization developing new prospects?

• 65% – Webinars
• 50% – Cold calling
• 45% – Email lists
• 45% – Trade shows
• 35% – White paper syndication
• 35% – Other online advertising
• 20% – Banner ads
• 20% – Media site email blasts
• 15% – PPC ads
• 10% – Print advertising

“Other” write-ins:
– Events
– Telemarketing
– Downloads of open source versions and live cloud trials
– Networking
– Partner referrals

 
Q: What type of sales tools does your organization use?

• 95% – Case studies
• 80% – White papers
• 75% – Demos
• 45% – Sales playbook
• 40% – Competitive guide
• 40% – Proposal tool
• 25% – ROI calculator

“Other” write-ins:
– Presentations (multiples write-ins)
– Technical application notes
– Lots of demos, free tutorials, partial training days (really extended demos),

 
While our readers’ practices in connecting and engaging with prospects and customers seem not to have changed significantly in the past 5 years, we found they are dabbling in use of new tools and social networks for in their businesses. Could our readers be on the brink of big changes in the way they conduct marketing and sales? We’ll need to follow up and check the pulse again before this time next year.

Technorati Tags: customer, Marketing, Sales, survey

So much has changed in marketing and sales in the 9 years since we founded KickStart Alliance. Because we wanted to learn how our readers are operating in 2011, in April we sent a survey to our newsletter subscribers rather than publishing our usual monthly newsletter. The response rate was lower than we anticipated, at 4%, so we followed up in May asking for additional respondents. That generated just one more survey response. So while there wasn’t enough data to be statistically reliable, we’re sharing in this post some of what we did learn.

Completes – 85% of respondents completed the survey, including sharing information about themselves.

Demographics – Of those who completed information about themselves:

• Market – 89% are in the B2B market
• Business type – 83% are in corporations, 11% are contractors/consultants and 6% are in marketing agencies
• Business size – 61% described their company as SMB, 28% as a start-up, and 11% enterprise-sized businesses
• Industry – 50% are in the software industry and 23% are in tech manufacturing other than software. Under 10% each were in non-tech manufacturing, clean tech, business services, and “other.”

Content Sources – This was a check-all-that apply question, so results total greater than 100%:

• Webinars and Online Trade Publications – 60% each
• Trade group meetings/conferences and social media/networks – 55% each
• Analysts – 45%
• Blogs – 40%
• Classes/courses and Print Trade Publications – 25% each

Devices Used for Browsing – In addition to 100% using PC or Mac, there is plenty of mobile browsing:

• 50% use a smartphone
• 25% use an iPad or other tablet

Social Media Elements Used – For their own business, and again a check-all-that-apply question, responses were:

• 95% use LinkedIn
• 70% read blogs
• 30% post to a blog
• 30% comment/participate on others’ blogs
• 30% use Facebook for business
• 25% use Twitter
• 20% participate in online forums
• 5% use QR codes

Based on this information, we’re keeping a close eye on mobile marketing, including QR codes, and continuing to work social media and content marketing into our practice.

We’ll follow up in another post soon with information about the survey respondents’ current marketing and sales initiatives. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: content marketing, Marketing, Sales, social networks

By guest blogger, John Love.

I attended a webinar a couple weeks ago on content marketing entitled “Stay Relevant: Map Your Interactive White Papers to the Buyers Journey” featuring Tom Pisello, Chairman & Founder, Alinean Inc. The presentation started with a number of statistics to build credibility in white papers as a viable and engaging offer for prospects. And indeed they made a good case here (I’ll let the presentation speak for itself). The webinar was really to promote “interactive white papers,” which are dynamically customizable documents based on a quick survey – e.g. the examples might change based on industry, role, company size, location, etc. I wasn’t particularly impressed by those, but as with all such presentations, there were a couple nuggets that I thought were valuable and worth sharing.

1. White papers have a lot of influence as do peer referrals. I found it interesting that webinars have more influence early in the sales cycle but little influence later on, suggesting they may be best used for awareness and educational content that is most important early in the sales cycle.
2. Vendors need to become more like publishers, providing advice, best practices, and other relevant educational content, not self-centered, product, or sales content.
3. Vendors need to align content to the buying cycle and, where reasonable, customize it by job function or industry. I like his “provocative approach” earlier in the sales cycle (to get attention) and “value approach” later in the sales cycle.

To me, all of this is very consistent with the very definition of marketing, which is two parties with something that the other values entering into a process of finding each other and discovering the mutual benefit of doing business together. Vendors need to take the lead by openly sharing valuable information and educational content to no only build credibility but also trust.

About the author:
John Love is president of JLC Marketing, Inc., specializing in outbound marketing and communications strategies and programs.

Technorati Tags: Alinean, content marketing, JLC Marketing, John Love, mapping content to the buyers cycle, Tom Pisello

Charlene Li, CEO & Founder, Altimeter Group, coauthor of Groundswell and author of the newly-released book Open Leadership, spoke at the Northern CA DMA club last week. Here are some highlights from her presentation entitled “Social Media Revolution and Evolution” in which she shared her social media expertise from three different perspectives: past, present, and future.

Past: Coherent Strategies
It’s amazing to think of the global impact social media has brought in such a short period of time. It was only in May of 2007, four years ago, that the Facebook platform launched. Now with 650 million users, Facebook is easily on its way to 1 billion! The iPhone App Store launched in July 2008, less than 3 years ago. How did we get by without the 350,000 apps now available?

Even though Groundswell was published before any iPhone apps hit the market, the concepts and strategies Charlene and coauthor Josh Bernoff wrote about are still relevant today. The primary message: it’s not about the technology, it’s about the relationships you form with others. To build better relationships using technology, Charlene recommends four goals to define your social strategy:

1. Learn: all employees can now listen to customers via applications such as Twitter and better understand their needs.
2. Dialog: employees can not only listen, but converse with customers. For example, Dell Outlet uses Twitter to drive sales.
3. Support: a community forum can become a corporate asset and differentiator versus being viewed as a cost center. SolarWinds’ forum Thwack, for network engineers, is just that.
4. Innovation: suggestions from customers should drive innovation. Starbucks involved 50 people via their My Starbucks Idea program to evaluate ordering and paying for a favorite drink via the swipe of a card.

Present: Rethinking Leadership
Corporate leaders are not in control of the customer relationship (and never were) but must still be in command. They can do this by being authentic and transparent when communicating to the market. Charlene defines “open leadership” as “having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control, while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.” She referenced an example of the CEO of Dominos Pizza coming out and saying “our pizza sucks” and then working to do something about it.

Leaders are those who have followers and now can emerge from anywhere in the company. Chatter, the Salesforce.com enterprise collaboration application, has enabled employees to become leaders within their own companies by allowing them to post relevant content or answer questions to help their co-workers. The top 25 “Chatterati” at Salesforce.com are invited to a leadership offsite.

Future: Building Resilience
There are so many ideas and technologies popping up daily, how do companies know which ones to react to? Charlene has developed a three step framework to help companies evaluate and prioritize trends:

1. Does it change the user experience? Is is easy to use? Can people connect in new ways?
2. Does it change your business model? Can you tap into new revenue streams or lower costs?
3. Does it shift power in the market or change the ecosystem value?

Here are some trends that Charlene is keeping an eye on and evaluated using the three step framework:

• Likenomics
  What is the value of a “like” based on the behavior of the person? Do they like everyone or are they selective? Rohit Bhargava, SVP Global Strategy at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, defines this as “how personal relationships, individual opinions, powerful storytelling and social capital are helping brands…become more believable.” Evaluation: User experience impact: moderate; business model impact: moderate (around the notion of “social currency”), ecosystem value impact: none.
• Social Search
  Social search brings search engine rankings beyond friends to others who share your interests. Bing is ahead of the curve here, Google is trying with Google +1 which is similar to the Facebook “like” button. The goal is to present content that is most relevant to an individual. Evaluation: User experience impact: moderate (making search more relevant); business model impact: moderate (SEO changes and rewarding companies with social currency); ecosystem value impact: moderate (new players capture activity data and profiles).
• Big Data
  Social monitoring combined with web analytics is a hot area with players such as Omniture/Adobe, Coremetrics/IBM and Webtrends. Also hot is technology to store massive amounts of data, like Facebook’s Cassandra (structured storage system), Amazon Dynamo and Google BigTable. Evaluation: User experience impact: low; business model impact: high (as new companies leverage big data at low points of entry); ecosystem value impact: moderate (due to “owners” of big data asserting control).
• Game-ification
  Turbotax uses games to encourage sharing and support among users. Technologies such as Gamify, BigDoor and Scvngr can be used for training, collaboration, support and hiring applications. Evaluation: User experience impact: high (as experiences get more engaging); business model impact: moderate (work is performed faster); and ecosystem value impact: low.
• Curation Tools
  Applications such as Storify, thoora and Klout are emerging to help people pull content, mash it up and put their own spin on it. Evaluation: User experience impact: moderate; business model impact: moderate (easier to create content); ecosystem value impact: moderate (individuals challenge brands and media as authorities, impacting ad dollars).

This was a great presentation, packed with insight. Thank you, Charlene! For more information on Charlene Li and to buy her book, Open Leadership, visit open-leadership.com.

Technorati Tags: leadership, Marketing High Ground, messaging, personas, positioning statement

Are you doing the right things?  Are you doing things right?

Selling methodology and selling systems need to adapt quickly to accommodate changing business strategy.  Product management priority should focus on portfolio responsiveness, where the portfolio is your collection of product, services and solutions.  Marketing’s magic of messaging must adapt to changes in buying patterns and market needs.  Sales can often be a bottleneck between the multifaceted vendor portfolio and the complex customer world.

Forrester Research asked 299 executives about sales meetings.  These business and IT executives told Forrester:

• What makes a meeting valuable is when a sales person understands MY business issues and can clearly articulate how to solve them.
• Unfortunately this doesn’t occur very often. IT executives say this occurs 13% of the time and business executives say this occurs only a meager 11% of the time. Ouch.

For companies, innovating new products and services is not enough – companies must engineer product portfolios and customer messages for the customer outcome.  There are 6 attributes to engineer into an outcome:

1. Understanding the desired end state to be achieved
2. Comprehend the needs of the executive owner
3. Connect with a high level customer initiative
4. Achieve measurable results
5. Identify and involve impacted stakeholder
6. Deliver outcome over a life-cycle

New way of thinking: Customers don’t want your stuff, they want outcomes!  When engineering for outcome, alignment to the buying lifecycle is often too late.  The customer has figured out the buying process and critical market opportunity or market momentum may have been lost.  The optimal approach is alignment to the customer’s problem solving lifecycle. The time when the customer is becoming aware, concerned and assessing the problem puts sales and product portfolio consideration into the right conversation.

Outcome selling is the next step beyond customer centric selling.  To be successful at outcome selling sales, marketing and product management must all be well grounded in customer centric selling.  This is major shift away from the tradition, outdated 4 P’s (circa 1950): Product, Place, Promotion and Price.  It is a transformation into 4 new P’s of Outcome Selling: Problem, Pattern, Path and Proof.

• Problems that the customer actually has and cares about
• Patterns in problem life-cycles, addressing when, where and why they occur
• Path to success for customers to investigate, compare, test and purchase
• Proof that the results, outcomes and value are real (references, milestones, proof points)

This is an excerpt of a keynote address presented by Scott Santucci, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research called “Recalibrate Your Selling System by Driving Results for Customers.”   This was presented at the Forrester Research Technology Sales Enablement Forum 2011 in San Francisco in February.

Technorati Tags: customer centric selling, Forrester Research, outcome selling, Sales, sales enablement, Scott Santucci