A new mini-guidebook for marketers: The Role of the Campaign Manager

Nothing can hinder the success of an integrated marketing campaign (and your ability to claim the high ground) faster than an unseasoned campaign manager. So, what exactly is the role of the campaign manager and what is the profile of the most effective campaign managers? This guidebook answers these questions and provides helpful tips that can accelerate the campaign development process, navigate internal politics, and produce better results.

This mini-guidebook shares the job description and profile of the most effective campaign managers, including tips on how they address common objections when it comes to implementing this role and how to get started quickly.

I’ve been watching Simon Sinek giving a TED talk. This phrase comes from him. And I love it. This dovetails exactly with the positioning statement.

What he says in 20 minutes, speaks volumes about good, product positioning and meaningful customer-ready messaging. He paints a picture he calls “the golden circle” that includes the What, How, and Why of a company’s reason for being. Most companies, he says, are very familiar with “what” they do. They are even good at understanding “how” they do it. But, when it comes to “why” they do what they do, there is a pause. What’s their purpose? What are the beliefs that drives a company to do what it does? Are they in business just to make money, or are they driven by a belief shared by all employees?

He shares an example contrasting Gateway with Apple. Both companies have access to capital, access to brilliant minds and innovative staff, and can tap into the same market conditions. Yet, the ways these two companies communicate are completely opposite. And their relevant success is obvious to everyone.

Gateway might produce marketing messages that look and feel like this:

1. We make great computers.

2. They are simple to use and affordable .

3. Want to buy one?

Sounds pretty bland, right? Now Apple. Their messaging might be summarized like this:

1. In everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.

2. The way we challenge the status quo is in hiring people who share the same belief and by making products that are beautifully designed and easy to use.

3. We make computers, phones, and a variety of personal productivity tools that challenge the status quo. Want to buy one?

Where do I sign up? The secret is that Apple focuses on the “why” question first. Their message gives me something I can believe in, too.

Simon also shares the example of Samuel P. Langley vs the Wright brothers. Langley was driven to become rich and famous and saw the invention of the airplane as a goal to achieve his wealth. Orville and Wilbur believed that flight would change the world. They didn’t work for a paycheck. They worked for a belief. This is exactly why the world knows the Wright brothers and don’t know Langley.

The lesson is clear: when you draft your company’s positioning and messaging, start with the “why”. What do you believe? Because if you don’t know, then your customers won’t either.

Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist with HubSpot, recently gave a webinar entitled The Science of Email Marketing. He analyzed over 9.5 billion emails provided by MailChimp and came up with some unexpected results. Here is a brief summary of key findings based on the data, focus groups and an online survey.

• People are people. 88% do not have separate work and personal email accounts. So B2B and B2C emails all land in the same inbox. Treat business contacts as consumers. However, 58% have a junk email account (hotmail, etc.). Make your content relevant and valuable to increase the liklihood that recipients will sign up with their real (non junk) email address.
• People are creatures of habit. Most people treat their email as “homework” or tasks to do and read it primarily in the morning. Although they will continue to read emails throughout the day and evening, having your email in their inbox first thing in the morning increases the liklihood it will get reviewed as part of that morning email routine.
• People don’t hibernate on weekends. Surprisingly, the highest clickthrough rates (CTRs) and lowest unsubscribe rates were on Saturdays and Sundays. Most unsubscribes are on Tuesdays which is not surprising given that so many marketing emails are sent on that day. Experiment with your own list to see how weekend emails pan out for you. At KickStart, we started sending our monthly newsletter, KickStart Accelerator, on weekends several months ago. Our highest CTR was indeed on a Saturday.
• People are mobile. Over 80% of people read emails on mobile devices. Test your emails not only on traditional email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Entourage, etc.) but also on smartphones. For tips on optimizing for mobile, see this blog post by Adrienne Rhodes.
• People like links. The more links in an email the higher the CTR, even if it’s the same link presented multiple times and ways. More links means more ways to persuade the recipient to take action. Be sure to link to landing pages to help you gather metrics on conversions and especially if you are trying to generate new leads.
• People filter and archive their emails. To increase the liklihood that your email will land in the inbox or appropriate folder, use a consistent sender and subject line. If it’s a newsletter, digest, summary, etc. say so in the subject line. Pack the email with valuable information (data, statistics, how-tos) so it will be archived for future reference. You can send multiple emails per month to the same list without impacting unsubscribes or CTR as long as the content is valuable to the recipient.
• People like to feel special. Offer exclusive deals to your subscribers and remind them how important they are. They’ll look forward to receiving the emails and builds loyalty.
• People seldom forward emails. Nor do they Tweet about them. It’s okay to include Forward to a Friend and social share options, but more importantly include “Follow Us”  links to build your social media audience. Post your newsletter or other content on your website so it’s Tweetable.

View the presentation.

PPT Template: A Streamlined Integrated Marketing Framework

(NOTE: when you click on the above link, the template will download directly to your desktop. It doesn’t open a new window.)

Previously, this template for a streamlined go-to-market plan was available only to readers of my book, Marketing Campaign Development. Because this has been such a popular item, I’ve decided to make it available to everyone. Feel free to download it, adopt it, and adapt it to fit your own marketing needs.

Most marketing plans any lengthy tomes of data, charts, definitions, and lists — hardly a tool for communicating go-to-market plans internally quickly and clearly. While marketers do need to know all the details, other internal audiences only need the punch line. As such, I recommend following the outline illustrated in the attached template. Ten slides, each serving a specific purpose. Even so, ten slides may be too many for certain audiences. When all is said and done, the TOP 5 slides within this deck are:

1. Campaign objective
2. Persona
3. Positioning Statement
4. The Message Box
5. The Campaign Map

Everything else is details. Important, for sure. But let your audiences ask for those details rather than emailing a marketing plan the size of a small phone book to everyone.

The template includes a table of contents, examples of some of the key slides, and where you can get additional information on any of the concepts included in the template.

Good luck and good marketing!

Mike

Displaying their marketing blueprints in the corporate hallways have created a tighter bond between marketing and sales. “This is real enterprise marketing,” says the company’s president.

A hi-tech services company with roots in the SMB market wanted to up-level their profile in the enterprise arena. They knew they needed a more effective marketing strategy to engage and win new B2B customers. But their current marketing operations processes were ad hoc, and their marketing activities were driven individually, thereby looking more like the individual kernels of “marketing popcorn” rather than logical touch points in an evolving, interactive and integrated dialog with the prospect. Enter the Enterprise Marketing Director who had a vision for driving a more effective enterprise marketing campaign leveraging the best practices described in the book, Marketing Campaign Development. They now proudly display their marketing blueprints in the corporate hallways.

Their first marketing campaign is now underway, but they are already seeing positive signs of progress.  Positioning statements, value propositions, and the message box process are becoming ingrained across the marketing staff. The director and her campaign leadership team quickly earned praises from the company’s president:

“This is real enterprise marketing — something we’ve never had. It’s what’s been missing and what we need.”

Recognition of their new marketing planning process has also come from Gartner analysts and even some of their enterprise partners who have noticed the recent changes in their marketing sophistication. Specifically, their efforts have been rewarded with compliments that praise how “well planned, targeted and thought-through our initiatives are,” she tells me. In fact, the campaign leaders are now seen as resident subject-matter experts on the integrated campaign development process. They are now being asked to conduct internal workshops to help marketers in other business units up-level their game.

How have you put these best practices to work.  I invite you to share your stories.

Yesterday’s Sales Ops Forum meeting in Palo Alto, CA, sponsored by KickStart Alliance, featured a panel discussion on how to optimize inside sales (IS). Moderating the panel of three leading Silicon Valley software companies was Anneke Seley, Evangelist and Founder of Phone Works, and co-author of Sales 2.0. – Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. Here are key take-aways from the discussion:

Role of Inside Sales:
IS teams carry quota just like field sales reps, but perform their selling primarily via phone and email. It is a proven and cost-effective selling model. In addition to IS, most companies also have teams responsible for prospecting and following up on marketing leads, but who do not carry quota. Names for these teams include direct response (for inbound inquiries), inside marketing reps (IMRs), sales development reps (SDRs), and teleprospecting reps. These functions are often a mix of internal and outsourced resources. At one company on the panel, the field required inside resources to assist them in their territory, often with administrative tasks. So the company created Inside Sales Assistants (ISAs), a role that does not carry quota. This gives the field the help they need without burdening quota-carrying IS reps and offers a career path into IS for entry-level employees.

Reporting Structure:
In two of the three companies IS reports into the field sales organization. In the third, it reports into a general manager and has its own P&L. The latter model may be a growing trend that clearly proves in the value of IS.

Turf:
All the companies carve out IS territory based on deal size. One IS team handles transactional business of $50k and below, another covers deals up to $90k, and another handles deals up to $175k. Some companies also have IS focus on SMBs, certain verticals or products lines. One audience member uses employee size as the cut off between inside and field sales, with 2500 employees or less going to IS.

Team Selling:
All the IS teams partner with field reps in addition to carrying their own quota. Often an overlay model is used for IS  (where IS is not directly responsible for closing the business) and the IS/field team works as a franchise, deciding how best to tackle their territory.  The ratio of IS to field reps is usually 1:2, in some cases 1:1.

Compensation:
One company uses a mix of team goals and direct IS quota. To eliminate IS and field competition, they double comp. IS is paid a higher amount on deals they own. MBOs are used to drive teaming behavior. One example is an MBO based on number of net new customers. In another company, IS is compensated for deals up to $100k and then double compensated with the field beyond that up to $175k.  This model can create issues if IS discounts to keep the deal size within their desired range.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
One audience member’s company uses KPIs to also measure success of IS. These include contribution to the pipeline, pipeline growth week over week, number of executive meetings booked and creativity in running campaigns.

Spiffs:
Another popular way to drive teaming behavior and results is through spiffs. Gamification is one of the latest trends to manage spiffs. Companies such as Bunchball and Hoopla make spiffs fun and drive competition and results.

Tips:

• In companies where the leadership team is not on board about the benefits of IS organizations, IS leaders can help educate them by showcasing top performers and case studies from their peers at other companies.
• To build the “brand” of the IS organization, publicly celebrate their successes, especially to the field.  Carving out a campaign that IS can own – perhaps a product line or territory the field doesn’t want to focus on – and showing the incremental revenue IS can produce is an effective technique to gain recognition and support.

The Sales Ops Forum meets several times a year in Silicon Valley to share best practices. Membership is free. For information, visit: http://www.kickstartall.com/salesops.php

The Marketing High Ground series: PERSONAS is now available in both paperback and Kindle versions.

Over the years, many marketers have told me that they don’t have time to read all the marketing books they’d like to read. Many of these books lay unopened, waiting for their owners’ next airplane trip. With this in mind, people started to share with me that they’d find value in having a quick-hit mini-guidebook that can be easily read and understood in a matter of minutes. This gave rise to what I call The Marketing High Ground series of mini-guidebooks.

The PERSONA mini-guidebook is for marketers who want a fast, easy reference for building a persona — everything you need is in this 30-page instruction guide. It contains directions describing the technique, template, and examples for working cross-functionally to design, critique, and share your personas.

Other titles to follow include:

• Positioning Statements (coming in February)
• The Message Box (coming in February)
• Value Propositions
• Marketing Blueprints
• A Streamlined Go-to-market Plan
• The Role of the Campaign Manager
• Overview of the Campaign Development Process
• Customer Advisory Board (CAB) Programs

The Marketing High Ground series: PERSONAS is now available in both paperback and Kindle versions.

Tell me what you think and what other titled you’d like to see included.

Thanks and kind regards,

Mike

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!

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

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