You can interview customers to uncover their need

Once again, the best way to start is with client interviews. Find out what they would like to find on your site related to implementation, support, and other post-sale issues. Ask them to describe helpful content they’ve found on other vendor sites and get samples where possible. This can be a very helpful tool. We find that many clients want a road map of development plans. Work with product management to provide clients with insights that will aid their planning.

Work with implementation and customer support teams

Often, customers have common questions and support needs. Providing content on your website to address common concerns can go a long way to both reducing support needs and keeping customers satisfied. This content can be in the form of implementation guides, deployment instructions, support FAQ, and other content that is commonly used by the support teams.

Create targeted account expansion strategies

With large accounts, sales may have a “land and expand” strategy. Essentially, this means that they do a small deal with a large enterprise account as a way to get their foot in the door, and then they look for ways to expand the deal into other departments and geographic territories. But this can be quite challenging. Often, customers are reluctant to introduce sales into other departments or groups – either because they don’t know the right people or because they’re uncomfortable turning a sales person loose on their colleagues.

We’ve found that marketing can help a great deal in this area. Work directly with the account managers to develop account expansion strategies. Build email campaigns and offers that are specific to that account and seek buy-in from the account manager’s client contacts by letting them review and edit the campaign content. Acquire targeted contact lists and review these with the client in advance of sending the campaign. We even review voicemail scripts with clients. We find that clients are MUCH more willing to support your account expansion if they understand the plan. This also gives the account manager a cohesive strategy for penetrating the account.

Support cross-selling and up-selling

If your company sells multiple products, then cross-selling is an important part of the overall sales process. Focus in on product groups and provide content that helps explain to customers how their existing purchase is complemented by an add-on or another product in your arsenal.

Create targeted campaigns for clients who bought Product #1 that specifically spell out the benefits of using Product #2 in conjunction with Product #1.  The more specific and relevant your campaign, the more effective it will be.

Work with Sales to determine the ideal timing for sending these campaigns. Generally, it’s best to wait a while after deployment before beginning the cross-selling process.

Being a revenue marketer doesn’t start and end with new sales. Work with your account teams to come up with creative ways to help increase customer satisfaction and expand accounts. You might be surprised to find out how much Marketing can help. And if you’re worried about sales and marketing alignment, this might just be the solution.

Warm regards,

Candyce

A recent blog post by Ardath Albee got my thoughts percolating on the subject and my fingers got to typing furiously. I hope you find this useful.

Content marketing is not just for generating early stage leads. It should support the entire revenue cycle. Here is a list of six things Marketing can do to help the sales team move deals forward.

Interview customers to find out what they need

The best way to start is with client interviews. Find out what kinds of content are needed at every stage in the buying process. I start interviews by explaining the typical steps in a buying process, because the customer may not be familiar with this terminology. Once they have this understanding, ask them to describe their process, who was involved, and what kinds of information they sought out during each stage. Talk to multiple people in the client organization who were involved in the buying process to get multiple perspectives. You’ll usually come away from each interview with several ideas for content that can help drive future sales forward.

I don’t recommend a written survey for this step. Have a conversation. You’ll get better information that way.

Answer frequently asked questions

Find out the most common questions Sales hears from customers and create an FAQ. This might be for internal use, or it might be something you actually publish for customers. But this tool can simplify and speed up the process Sales has to go through to answer common questions.

Assist with objection handling

Talk to several senior sales people and get a list of the common objections they encounter and how they handle them. Create an internal guide of objections and approaches for handling, and keep this updated. These are often very helpful for newer members of the sales team. If you have a large sales team, try to get a cross section of objections. And if you have multiple products and sales models, develop specific lists for specific product lines.

Calculate ROI

Sales often needs a way to calculate return on investment (ROI) for prospects. Marketing can provide assistance here by creating templates and calculators. Remember, with complex sales, ROI is generally very specific to a given deal, so make sure the calculator is sophisticated enough to account for variation. Generally, a client will only buy into an ROI they’ve calculated internally, so if the tool can be provided where they can input their own data, it often has more credibility.

If the complexity of your sale makes a standardized ROI calculator too challenging, consider a white paper or article that discusses each of the key areas where customers typically experience return on investment by using your products. This is often enough to get the prospect thinking and facilitate their process of preparing an internal business case.

Support selling by proxy

In many sales situations, the sales team cannot get direct access to the economic decision maker. We find this to be particularly common in companies that sell infrastructure and other IT related technology where the economic buyer has little understanding of the technical nature of the purchase.

In this situation, someone inside the buyer organization has to “pitch” your product or service to the economic buyer. This is one of the most important areas Marketing can impact, and one of the most ignored.

Provide tools that the internal customer champion can use to convince his/her colleagues and boss that their company needs your product. We find that video can be particularly helpful in this area. The video should be brief, targeted specifically to the economic decision maker, and be specifically scripted to address their typical questions and concerns.

Business cases, e-books, brief white papers, blog posts and articles can also be directed to specific concerns of the economic decision maker. Then make sure Sales knows where to find the material so they can forward to their champions when appropriate.

Help mitigate risk

As sales move to the final stage, prospects start thinking very seriously about the risks they are taking in committing to your company. Talk to Sales about the typical documentation requests, objections, concerns, and issues that come up. Then provide content that specifically addresses these concerns. Typical risk factors include concerns around implementation risk, financial stability, system performance, and delivery.

Increased sales don’t happen just because marketing is generating increased lead volume. The best way for Marketing to impact revenue is to support content needs throughout the entire customer life cycle. Next week, we’ll talk about how marketing can support customer retention.

In the meantime, let’s discuss. Type your comments or questions below.

Warm regards,

Candyce

Have you ever noticed how most financial technology providers and sell-side players tend to develop marketing content that is focused on the product and offering – the features, the technology, and the company?

Why Should They Care?

This content does little to take into account how a customer would actually use the product, and even less about who it’s for and why the customer should want it in the first place. It leaves the onus on the customer to figure out how they would use the product, what the benefits would be, and why they should spend the time and money to buy and implement this product.

We strongly emphasize a very different approach – a customer-centric approach. This approach is usually why our clients engage us, and I thought I’d share a little of it today, in hopes that it might help a struggling marketer out there.

Customer-Centric Marketing

A customer-centric, solution-selling approach starts with the customer rather than the product. It focuses on the customer’s situation and how they do their job, their business needs, the pain they’re experiencing, the root causes of the pain from their perspective, and how they can solve the problem.

Focus on Educating

From this perspective, we develop sales materials like sales decks, collateral, video, white papers, web content, events and other marketing content with a focus on educating. We help our clients’ prospects understand and articulate their needs (thus demonstrating that we understand them). We help them understand the root causes, and we help them capture a vision of the solution. If we do this right, we position the entire team at our client as the trusted advisers – a company their prospects can trust to help them solve these problems. Given the complexity of our clients’ offerings and the complexity of their customers’ needs, this trust is vital.

It’s a Complex Sales Process

Financial technology vendors generally face a very complex sales process. There are multiple people involved in the decision process, each with their own needs and pains, distinct levels of technical acumen, and each with their own biases. We have to help the sales team win the trust of all these influencers and decision-makers in order to close a sale.

Using Customer Personas

Customer personas (also known as “buyer personas”) are vital in developing content that is relevant and incorporates the voice and point-of-view of the target customer. The goal is to capture the voice of the customer, so we can create content that is relevant and compelling to the target audience. The more directly relevant the content is, the more likely it is to inspire the prospect to reach out and request more information about how they can benefit from using your products.

This foundational information is also a critical tool to arm the sales team so they’re better prepared to go out and have conversations with their prospects.

Creating Buyer Personas

Here are some of the questions we ask in preparing buyer personas. The purpose is to capture detailed information about the customer’s situation, influence, wants and needs. We generally create at least four distinct personas. For example, if the product is a trading system, then we’ll need personas for the following:

• the users who will be interacting with the system
• the head of the desk to whom the users report
• the IT department tasked with providing the technology and support for the trading done by these users
• the economic decision-maker

We’re trying to get into the heads of the people we’re selling to. We want to know how they operate today, what difficulties they encounter with their current approach, and why it causes pain. Then we want to understand how the client’s product helps and what parts of the problem it leaves unsolved.

Here are some of the questions we ask about each buyer:

• What is his job and current situation?
• How is his performance measured?
• How does he do his job today? What are the hard parts of his job?
• What problems is he running into?
• What are these problems costing him and the organization?
• How is this affecting him personally?
• What could make him fail in his job, and what can make him successful?
• What options does he think he might have for solving the problem?
• Does he have the authority to push for a solution?
• What would be his role in the buying process?

I hope you find this useful. I’d also love to hear how you approach this problem. Please comment below or give me a call.

Warm regards,

Candyce

Yesterday, Apple made its much-rumored announcement of the iPad 3 release (or as Apple is calling it, “the new iPad”). Thanks to the vision of Steve Jobs, Apple has once again seized the day with the best selling mobile touchscreen device. With increased resolution thanks to its Retina Display technology, the iPad 3 looks to be yet another great platform for viewing video, among other things (ooh, Angry Birds in HD!). According to a recent report by Cisco, 2011 saw mobile video traffic exceeding 50% of all mobile traffic, and it is projected that mobile video will comprise over 70% of mobile data traffic by 2016.

Decision Makers are Viewing More Video

Overall, video is increasingly being adopted by B2B marketers as buyers gravitate toward it in growing numbers. Business 2 Community cites a Forbes Insights survey wherein 83% of executives were reported to have watched more online video than the year before, with 65% of senior decision-makers visiting a company website after watching a video.

Talking Heads, Boastful Claims

Yet many marketers still insist on cranking out promotional videos with talking heads making boastful claims instead of telling a compelling story. The logical conclusion to this is that online video will end up being just another channel filled with noise. Then what? When using video in a B2B content marketing strategy, the goal is to educate the audience.

Squandering Audience Attention

Jill Konrath is fond of stating that today’s customers are “crazy-busy people.” You have to grab their short attention spans with concise, compelling content. Why would you squander the precious currency of their time on taking them down a path of self-indulgence?

Seize the Moment

For centuries, the term “carpe diem” has been associated with the term, “seize the day.” The operative phrase for online video marketing needs to be “carpe momentum” — seize the moment.

For more on the subject, check out my earlier blog post on the B2B Marketing [r]Evolution video.

How are you using video in your marketing strategy? Where do you see room for improvement? Let me know by commenting below.

I have a confession to make. Well, two confessions, actually…

I was not an early adopter of content marketing or inbound marketing techniques. In fact, when my colleague, Phil Donaldson started experimenting with these strategies, I’d catch him on Hootsuite and accuse him of wasting his time on Twitter and social networking when he should be marketing and bringing us new clients.

There, it’s out. I really did accuse him of this (he reminds me frequently).

Let’s face it. I’m really a sales person at heart who became a marketer. No, scratch that.  I’m a BUYER FACILITATOR. I don’t sell anything. I help the buyer make a decision on how to improve their results, and if I do it well and am working with a buyer that I can really help, then they make a decision that benefits me and my company. I don’t really like calling it “sales.”

So as a “buyer facilitator” who is responsible for delivering results every quarter in terms of cold hard revenue, I need consistent results. And those results only happen when I’m on the phone, talking to prospective customers and driving leads into my funnel. It’s a numbers game. Right?

[You should have seen the look of disdain on her face when she would find me in Hootsuite or on LinkedIn! — Phil]

But back to Phil and his insubordination…

I hired Phil to run marketing for PropelGrowth, to help with client projects, and to expand our company’s offerings with some amazing motion graphic skills. Check out this content marketing video he created. I did NOT hire him to “play around” with social media all day.

[I was also reading blogs, listening to podcasts and attending webinars. More like "learning around." I was also getting other work done as well. Buyer facilitators can sometimes be so hyperbolic. – Phil]

Fortunately for PropelGrowth, Phil is an independent thinker (he likes to remind me that I wanted an independent thinker and not a “yes man”). So on his own, he started researching inbound marketing, content marketing, and thought leadership strategies and figuring out how to weave these into our marketing programs. For him this came naturally. He used to work in the pharmaceutical industry where the medical education part of the business had to be educational, not promotional.

He started pushing me to blog…regularly. He pushed us to create compelling thought leadership of our own. He inspired this white paper on thought leadership, that has now been picked up in lots of blogs and even been incorporated into a couple of professional marketing curricula.

Ok, now for confession #2. Deep breath…

I expected instant results.

When our blog didn’t attract 1,000 visitors the first week, and several qualified sales leads the first month, I said it wasn’t working.

But I have a pattern of expecting instant results.

A few years ago, I planted cilantro from seed. I’m not much of a gardener, so growing something from seed was new to me. The package clearly said that the seeds would germinate in 14 days. But after a week, nothing was happening. I wondered if the seed was old. I dug a few up to see if roots had sprouted from the seeds yet. Nothing. No change at all. I decided I needed new seed.

But I have a busy schedule, so it took me about a week to go get the seed, and before I got it in the ground, I noticed that I had hundreds of tiny cilantro sprouts in my garden. Exactly 14 days after I’d planted.

What does this have to do with sales or marketing? A lot, really. Every expert on content marketing points out that it takes 6-12 months of consistent work, delivering high quality content before you start to see results. That’s exactly what happened to us. After about 6 months of steady content publication, we started to attract a following. People started subscribing to the blog and following our work on social networks like LinkedIn, the TabbFORUM, SeekingAlpha and Focus.com.

[What's ironic is that Candyce told me to read Ardath Albee's book and apply the principles to our business. Then, I signed her up on Focus and would catch her in "fits of Focus," answering questions all over the place. — Phil]

So what happened?

About 8 months into the process, we started getting leads and closed a couple small deals that were generated from our content marketing activities.

Fast forward to today. We’ve now been blogging and publishing content since 2009. We’ve posted 64 blog posts (not impressive compared to other bloggers). We now have more than a thousand visitors a month reading our blog, and we’re generating a steady stream of new well-qualified sales leads. In fact, today, 100% of our recent engagements were influenced during their buying cycle by our content marketing.

Yes, I said 100%.

So what do I mean by that? Here are three recent examples:

One client saw my article on TabbFORUM about writing a white paper about FX eCommerce. They wanted something similar and called us.

One client has been following my updates on LinkedIn for a couple years, and saw the archived webinar we did on Content Marketing for Niche Markets. They emailed me asking for a similar program.

I met another new prospective client at a conference last year. I tried to open up an opportunity with them after the conference, but couldn’t get anywhere. So we connected on LinkedIn, and I occasionally pinged him with a friendly email. They followed our updates, saw the events we put together on emerging markets last year, and are engaging us to do a series of webinars on a similar topic.

So there you go. Yes, it does work. But follow the instructions.

1. Plant fresh and high quality seed (quality educational content – not marketing mumbo jumbo).
2. Consistently water and fertilize (add new content and syndicate it where your target audience is).
3. Don’t expect germination before the seeds are ready (6-12 months for germination, 12-18 months to start harvesting).

Here’s a link to some of our blog posts about content marketing.

So I’d like to hear from you…

Do you believe in the power of content marketing?

Have you seen it deliver results?

Would you like to give it a try?

Warm regards,

Candyce

The following is a guest post by Kevin Acott, Senior Vice President, Managing Director, EMEA at IPC Systems, Inc.

I recently attended a conference hosted by IPC called Emerging Markets: Opportunities and Obstacles. At the event, the TABB Group presented some of their latest research on trading in the emerging markets of Eastern Europe and Asia. Then a panel of speakers discussed a range of topics related to trading in these markets. The conference also introduced IPC’s new financial extranet, Connexus. Here are some of the insights I took away from the fascinating panel discussion.

Emerging market GDP growth has outperformed growth in the developed markets every year since 2006 by an average of 9.6% each year. During that time the combined GDP of the emerging world has more than doubled while that of the developed world has only increased by 23%. Taken to scale, this doubling is amazing. The emerging and frontier world accounts for almost 85% of the world’s population with 2.5 billion people in China and India alone. At nearly six billion people, if only six per cent of these attain a higher standard of living and a higher amount of disposable income over the next decade, the markets will be faced with another 360 million consumers. More than the entire population of the United States putting pressure on resources, prices, and production.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

Clearly, asset growth and investment opportunities abound in the emerging world. Many investors point to this opportunity and the GDP outperformance in emerging markets as evidence of decoupling, that emerging market growth is no longer dependent on exports and growth in the developed markets.

While overall growth in the emerging space has consistently outpaced that in the developed markets, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index (EEM) underperformed the S&P 500 by almost 20.5% in 2011 and is off its 52-week high by more than 25%. Global debt crises and uncertainty have kept correlations high since 2008 bringing down asset values in even the best performing economies. The correlation between the iShares MSCI EM Index and the S&P 500 were 0.84 over the last twelve months against a correlation of only 0.69 over the last six years. With asset correlations at these levels, relative economic growth means less than overall investor sentiment in the short-term.

The problem in the decoupling theme is that, while many emerging countries have shifted their export reliance from the U.S. and Europe, their economies are still largely based on an export model. The only difference is the name of the country on which they are dependent. Brazilian exports to the United States and Europe have shrunk from 41.1% of total exports in 2006 to a relatively smaller 32.1% in 2010, but exports to China more than doubled from 6.2% to 13.3% of the total. Exports to other developing Asian economies also increased from 9.1% to 12.6% of total exports.

And while many emerging countries are relying more on Asia for export revenues and economic growth, exports to the United States still account for 20% of Indian exports and 70% of Chinese exports are destined for developed markets. As Europe enters the third year of its escalating debt crisis and the U.S. is facing stagnant growth at best, the slowing economic environment will continue to show up in emerging market asset values.

Will the EM Outperformance Continue This Year? Does it Matter?

While investors and pundits alike are furiously bent on forecasting GDP growth and asset values for 2012, they run the risk of losing sight of the bigger picture. With the scale and long-term potential in the emerging markets, there is little doubt that the next 10 years will belong to BRICs, CIVETS, and the myriad of acronyms for the regions.

Short-term risks do exist. Much of the growth in the EM space is dependent on the voracious appetite of the BRICs for resources. The fate of the euro zone is more precarious than it has been ever in its 13 year history.

Rather than bet on some mystical decoupling, investors should invest for the long-term while hedging knowable short-term headline risk. The most obvious risk to global growth, and that which is keeping correlations high, is the risk that Europe cannot grow or restructure its way out of the debt crisis.

The alternatives to an orderly restructuring or growth are massive printing or outright default. Either option could be disastrous for the euro. Investors may look to shorting the euro in the futures market or through one of the available exchange traded funds to tactically position against short-term volatility. If the problems in the EU accelerate to the downside it will most likely take other asset values down with it, investors can use their short-term gains from shorting the euro to offset losses in the rest of their portfolio.

Here is a link to the TABB Group emerging markets research that was presented at the event.

Warm regards,

Candyce

The marketing experts continually exhort marketing teams to provide remarkable content for our audiences. What better way than to actually get four of those experts on a panel to speak on an evocative topic? During “The Great Marketing Conversation,” Robert Rose, Mike Volpe, Ardath Albee and Marcus Sheridan discussed today’s marketing practices – content marketing and inbound marketing in particular – in a pragmatic way aimed at helping marketers make a business case to their organizations. Great conversation. Great content. The response from the audience was, “Do more of these!”

Barbara Mooty sent Candyce this encouraging note:

“THANK YOU! for hosting #TGMC as it was: relevant, informative and the conversation moved at a ‘perfect’ pace for me.”

Candyce and I would like to express our great appreciation to the panel for coming together and making the webcast such a memorable event. Thanks also to DemandGen Report for providing the platform for “The Conversation” to take place. But the Gratitude Express doesn’t end there. Oh, no. Many thanks go out to our audience, an exuberant group who blogged, tweeted, shared and engaged in the conversation. Using the hashtag #TGMC, you were agents of wisdom as you quoted the panelists and shared your own insights. Take a look at the many tweets below.

If you missed the webcast, you can register to watch here:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/934411922

The discussion was lively, and we ended up running out of time before we got to all the audience questions. So Robert Rose followed up in a blog post that addressed some queries:

The “Great Marketing Conversation” Continues – A Baker’s Dozen Answers To Questions

If you’d like to keep up with other panelists, I encourage you to visit their blogs:

Marcus Sheridan – http://www.thesaleslion.com

Ardath Albee – http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com

Mike Volpe – http://www.mikevolpe.com

Be sure to respond in the comments section to engage with these experts and keep the conversation going. If you attended the event, what was your great takeaway? What would you like to have the next “Great Converation” touch upon? Let us know by leaving your comments below. But first, allow me to share the conversation on Twitter during the webcast (thanks again, let’s keep the conversation going):

jditlev 5:40am har været til webinar med 4 content / inbound marketing eksperter og blogget om det: ow.ly/8F6wg #tgmc
 

jlynnwrites Jan 24, 12:06pm
T minus 1 hour and counting #TGMC
landing.propelgrowth.com/TheGreatMarket…

Marketing in the Capital Markets

Having my head in emerging markets and cross-asset trading these days, I’ve been finding the term “alpha” unavoidable. TABBGroup’s Adam Sussman recently spoke on investment in emerging markets as a way to achieve alpha. The industry is all aflutter about cross-asset and multi-asset trading as a means to seek alpha. The concept of exceeding benchmark performance permeates our business in the form of whitepapers, webinars, forecasts and executive briefs.

But let’s some of us be honest, that concept is sorely lacking when it comes to marketing strategy. Many companies say they want the most bang for their marketing buck, but when it comes down to it, they hang all their hopes on one monolithic whitepaper or live event. This is similar to what I call “practicing wishcraft” – taking any action to say you did something and wishing for some magical outcome. There’s a difference between spending money for the sake utilizing available budget and spending it to achieve what I like to call “marketing alpha.”

I seem to be on a roll with the specialized terms. Like a marketer (LOL!).

Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, banks are under increasing pressure to reduce overhead and increase profit margins via technology consolidation. However, since the financial crisis began, companies across the board have been faced with budgetary challenges that have made buyers cautious and salespeople crazy. The new reality is one of longer, more complex sales cycles with today’s web-enabled buyer in the driver’s seat.

Brave New World of B2B Marketing

Unlike the Aldous Huxley novel, effective marketers have moved away from treating customers like cattle and feeding them marketing soma. Why? Because the buying behavior of capital market buyers has changed dramatically in the past few years, rendering the majority of old-school marketing practices ineffective (and as a result, expensive). Truth be told, old-school marketing was about creating noise to be heard over the competition and get in the door.  It used to be about one-way push. Now it’s about two-way engagement.

In earlier times (some might call them “the good old days”), the company with the most marketing dollars often got the most sales, simply because the customer recognized their name. But as more companies enter the race, more companies start making as much noise as possible. The Internet and email make it easier and cheaper to make noise, resulting in a virtual cacophony of marketing claims barraging customers every day – with everyone claiming to be “the leading, number-one, unique, value-added, trusted provider” of “robust, innovative, cutting-edge, high-performance, ultra low-latency technology….”

Yawn.

How can every vendor be the “leading provider”, anyway?

If you’re in marketing or sales and have not heard the terms “content marketing” or “inbound marketing,” then it’s time to start paying attention to the evolving best practices in marketing. The pressure is on for Marketing to support Sales and help to generate revenue. Your performance depends on it.

Let’s face it folks, our customers are not idiots. They’re sick of the noise, and they no longer trust the marketing puffery. They’re also getting really good at tuning out the noise. They use spam filters, caller ID, gate keepers, DVRs and any number of other methods to tune out advertising and marketing messages.

That doesn’t mean they’re not still buying, but they’re getting more savvy. THEY are in control of their buying process. Research shows that most business buyers of technology do all their early research about business problems and possible solutions BEFORE they talk to a sales person. In fact, their buying processes are generally 75% complete before they’re willing to engage with Sales. So how do you go about influencing the buying decision of a buyer who is wary and weary of traditional marketing hype? How do you now differentiate yourself from your competition?

Achieving Marketing Alpha

Content marketing is about creating educational content that helps your prospective customers understand their business problems, gain a vision of how to solve the problem, and build a business case to get internal buy-in. This content can take the form of whitepapers, blog posts, live events or video. As you provide the prospect with high quality content – information that they can rely on to steer their decisions, you’ll gain their trust and have a significant influence over the buying decision. To quote Ardath Albee, author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, “Publishing compelling content builds credibility.” This credibility is what gives you competitive advantage.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “That’s interesting, but how do I get this great content to the customer?

That’s where inbound marketing comes in. This technique uses high-quality content, strategically placed, that is found by prospects who are looking for it and as a result, are ready to engage with you. (talk about warm leads!). According to inbound marketing specialist HubSpot, “72% of companies who blog weekly have acquired customers through their blog.” As a new form of lead generation, inbound marketing is bringing in revenue for companies who have really dug in and focused on sharpening their marketing strategy.

The question arises, “O.K., now how do I incorporate inbound marketing and content marketing to my process?”

On January 24, I will be discussing this with a panel of the foremost experts on modern marketing in a live web event. These speakers are at the top of their game as authors, bloggers and recognized thought leaders in content and inbound marketing. They will discuss the differences between and the convergence of these techniques as well as practical approaches for getting it done as part of a holistic marketing strategy. The goal of this live web event is to give you clear insight into current marketing techniques, going beyond the hype to what works now.  We want you to be better equipped to build a compelling case to gain the funding to implement these techniques.

I highly recommend that you tune in for this hour long session. You can ask questions in advance of the event and online during the Q&A process. I’ll be moderating, and will be joined by:

• Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot and a master at inbound marketing (HubSpot generates 40,000 leads a MONTH!)
• Ardath Albee, author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. Ardath consults for some of the largest technology companies in the world and is well-known speaker on best practices in content marketing.
• Robert Rose is Strategist In Residence at Content Marketing Institute. He co-authored the book Managing Content Marketing – The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers for Your Brand and is also a speaker and consultant in high demand.
• Marcus Sheridan (“The Sales Lion“) is a master blogger who teaches companies how to blog effectively to bring in business. He’s also the author of three books and numerous e-books. Marcus actually inspired this event when he drew attention to a debate between proponents of content marketing vs. inbound marketing on his blog. That post attracted more than 80 comments. You can read that post here: http://www.thesaleslion.com/inbound-vs-content-marketing-compare-hubspot/

It’s No Longer About Marketshare, It’s About Mindshare

The days of “spray ‘n pray” are over. Buyers want to know what’s in it for them, what of value you have to offer them that meets their need. They’re unaffected by perceived market share. They’re seeking a Trusted Advisor to help inform their entire buying process. Achieving that coveted role requires an understanding of what works in this context and directly affects your ability to generate revenue.

Are you struggling with creating an effective marketing strategy? Do you find yourself mistaking tactics for strategy? Are you just a little bit shaky in your understanding of current marketing language? Are you struggling to achieve “marketing alpha”? Join us for:

The Great Marketing Debate Conversation
Tuesday – January 24, 2012
1:00 – 2:00 PM EST (10:00 – 11:00 AM PST)

Click here to register now.

The old marketing model is broken. Time to start the new year with a new foundation for a solid marketing strategy. Here’s your opportunity to learn from four of today’s top marketing thought leaders. They’re passionate about what they do, so the discussion will be quite lively.

Join us, won’t you?

Warm regards,

Candyce

In this the second part of this two-part TrendSpotters installment, I continue my conversation with Harry Gozlan of smartTrade Technologies and Greg Wood of Credit Suisse on cross-asset trading. You can listen to part 2 the discussion by clicking below:

Cross-Asset Trading, Part 2

You can also click here to read a transcript of the conversation.

During the second half of our conversation, we dig deeper into talking about the complexities of cross-asset/multi-asset trading, profitability and wallet share.

To gain further insight on the evolving landscape of multi-asset trading, read smartTrade’s informative whitepaper:

Meeting Multi-Asset Trading Challenges: Workable Approaches for Success in a Dynamic Capital Markets Arena

This whitepaper goes into detail about the components needed to build a global multi-asset trading platform.

Click here for part 1 of the conversation.

TrendSpotters by PropelGrowth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Warm regards,

Candyce

In this installment of the TrendSpotters Thought Leadership Series, we consider the evolution of cross-asset trading, how the industry is changing, and the drivers behind these changes. Joining me are Harry Gozlan, CEO and Founder of smartTrade Technologies, and Greg Wood, Futures Business Development Manager at Credit Suisse’s Advanced Execution Services.

Because of the complexity of this topic, we’ve segmented this episode into two parts. This post contains part 1.

My interview with Harry and Greg was fascinating. They stand at the forefront of this cross-asset trend, and the shared a lot of interesting insights with me. I invite you listen in by clicking below:

You can also click here to read a transcript of the conversation.

Emerging Trends in Cross-Asset Trading

The institutional investment industry not only wants, but needs, to do more with less. Bank consolidation continues worldwide, while the emphasis on holistic enterprise risk management increases challenges for dealing banks and their clients in a post-Dodd-Frank world.  These forces have combined to force the industry to simplify products to improve transparency. The process of simplification has spurred growth in cross-asset trading as asset managers look for alternative alpha.

In the interview, Harry Gozlan points out that buyside demand, particularly from hedge funds have driven the evolution of cross-asset trading. Hedge funds asked for a “single access point to multiple assets to do cross-asset trades, either through auto-hedged securities…,cash against futures, basis trades,” or other combinations. Gozlan points out that traditionally, banks have maintained “siloed FX, equities and rates systems… [assembling] a single entry point to all these assets to provide a kind of cross-asset service to clients.”

As Greg Wood comments in the interview, “People are taking natural steps of looking for alternative alpha. They may be trading domestic equities first. Then they look into cross-border trading. They use derivatives as a hedge… or as an alternative source of alpha. This introduces multi-asset capacity to their trading, where they want to be able to trade each of these asset classes in a similar manner, and then ultimately, manage, risk manage, [and] position-manage those asset classes.”

Cross-asset trading, much of it over-the-counter (OTC), can involve any number of instruments, from conventional equities and fixed income products with FX components, to interest rates and futures,  also often involving foreign exchange as well as options for hedging.  But while the siloed approach can work in the short term, growing volume in cross-asset execution requires the technological capabilities to exploit and actively manage an institutional client’s overall book of business with the trading partner.  This requires a standardized approach to pricing, routing and execution, and ideally should enable clients to use similar execution algorithms across a variety of trading instruments.

Client demand is not uniform and not static.  Whereas large institutional traders or hedge funds may need to execute and measure several components in multiple series of trades, other clients require reliable execution and reporting predominantly for trading in one instrument.  Servicing both kinds of client order flow – and any number in between demands a simply designed yet flexible system that standardizes the trading workflow.

Risk management and best execution mandates are also placing demands on sell-side firms to provide more execution transparency. This demand will only grow in the future, requiring firms to standardize their approach to market data aggregation, internalization, and smart routing while also consolidating and harmonizing their approach to risk management across instrument types.

We invite you to read smartTrade’s informative whitepaper on the evolving landscape of multi-asset trading:

Meeting Multi-Asset Trading Challenges: Workable Approaches for Success in a Dynamic Capital Markets Arena

This whitepaper goes into detail about the components needed to build a global multi-asset trading platform.

Click here for part 2 of the conversation.

TrendSpotters by PropelGrowth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Warm regards,

Candyce