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

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

Kathy Klotz-Guest gave a very educational and entertaining presentation at the NorCal BMA Marketing Strategy Roundtable last week. The topic: “What’s the Story with Video Strategies?” Kathy is founder of Powerfully Funny whose mission is to help organizations improve their innovation efforts, marketing and communications through humor, playfulness, and fun. As a marketing strategist and storyteller, Kathy specializes in helping her clients craft compelling stories to educate and drive awareness among their prospects and customers.

Recently, Kathy conducted a study of 130 B2B and B2C businesses to identify best practices for marketing with video. The study was sponsored by the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR.ORG). Here are the key take-aways from the study and her presentation, which focused on three areas: content, integration & distribution, and measurement.

Content
According to Kathy, “content is king, but story is queen!” Begin with a clear strategy for how the video or videos will be incorporated into the marketing mix. Video is a public-facing medium and is best for education and generating awareness. One study participant, an SVP at Cisco, stated it best – “video is a conversation starter, not a sales endpoint.” Engage the audience in an ongoing conversation and think through what action you want them to take after viewing the video. Other tips:

• Tell a story that is relevant to the audience, or “tribe”; the best videos have a powerful, unique story
• Don’t worry about making it go viral; focus on a tangible business objective
• Often the best storytellers are not in the C-suite but are employees, customers or fans
• Be brief, 2-3 minutes max
• Don’t push a sales message; think “community” not “product”
• Quick, non-professionally produced videos are fine and often seen as more authentic. Information outweighs slick production. Strive for a balance of both.

There is no single winning template to follow. Try humor, newscast formats, whiteboard techtalks, serial stories and monitor what resonates with your audience. Experiment, learn, adjust and repeat.  Check out Cisco’s “Valentine’s Day” and IBM’s “Art of the Sale” videos for examples of something fun and unexpected.

Integration and Distribution

• Include a call to action such as a white paper download, subscription or case study
• Post the video on your website and include title, description, tags and a video sitemap to boost SEO results
• Post on YouTube (the most important), and consider other video sites such as iTunes, Viddler, or Yahoo! Video
• Promote it via Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook, your blog and email
• Send links to the video to key influencers and your tribe

Measurement

To gauge success of the video, measure:

• Number of views
• Offer downloads
• Tweets and retweets
• Press coverage
• RSS subscriptions

There are other important measurements as well, the key point is to make them meaningful.

Bottom line: tap into your audience/tribe and engage them in a compelling story. As with any marketing medium, be creative, try new ideas, test, adjust and repeat.

For more information, visit http://www.powerfullyfunny.com/ and http://kathyklotzguest.wordpress.com

Technorati Tags: BMA NorCal, Kathy Klotz-Guest, Powerfully Funny, video

What does it take for a marketer to earn, then command, a seat at the leadership table?

A new book by Mike Gospe, coming Spring 2011

This is a good question that challenges many marketers. Traditionally, certainly in Silicon Valley, companies are founded by technologists. When executive staff members are added, engineering, operations and sales leaders are often added long before a marketer.  And who can argue success when a company’s products continue to sell without the aid of a marketing leader?

The irony with this approach is that its success is likely to be short-lived. According to Brian Gentile, a well-known marketing leader and CEO of Jaspersoft,

Eventually this model, driven by the engineers and salesmen whose roles were never designed to understand and target complete markets, always runs out of steam.

The answer is not to suggest that a marketer should overstep or replace the leadership of engineering or sales. Far from it. Instead, the real long-lasting value a marketer can bring is to rise to the role of leading the executive team, and by extension the rest of the organization, to the high ground. No other function is properly suited to do so.

The marketing high ground represents a special place where you know the market so well, so deeply, that you become the customers’ advocate. With this knowledge comes confidence in gathering and interpreting market data so that the best product, service, and go-to-market decisions can always be made.

Consider life at a company where no one owns the high ground.  What does this look like?

• Unaligned marketing and sales departments which lack clear goals and objectives
• Engineering and product management teams working in silos, focused on isolated features
• Frustrated marketers who write, then rewrite, then rewrite again messages, never able to get them right
• Poorly executed marketing campaigns that don’t produce the right quality inquiries and leads
• A set of individuals who don’t behave as a team, where decisions are made based on “whoever yells the loudest”

This is hardly efficient or effective.

On the other hand, when the marketing leader steps up to take ownership for becoming the customers’ advocate and sharing market perspectives internally, a whole different type of discussion takes place internally.  No longer are debates driven by random opinions; they are founded on customer use cases, market data, and customer feedback.

The high ground is not something owned exclusively by the marketing department. Every market-driven company gains its advantage from an incredibly aligned workforce. A workforce that clearly understands the organization’s vision, its core benefits and value ascribed to it by customers, and the distinct competitive advantages. This is what it means to own the marketing high ground.

This is what it takes to earn, then command, a seat at the leadership table.

This topic is the focus of The Marketing High Ground, a marketers’ playbook that acts as a tactical guide to the marketing high ground.  The book includes action-oriented best-practices templates, techniques, and examples.

Additional blog posts will explore these best practices in more detail in the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: High Ground, leadership, Marketing

What? Sales helping Marketing? That’s not the way we generally think of the marketing-sales relationship — We expect that marketing’s role is to help sales sell. Well, yes, that is marketing’s primary responsibility, but the relationship isn’t strictly one-sided. There are a number of things sales reps should be doing to improve the quality of Marketing’s deliverables.

Why is this in Sales’ interest? First of all, sales people are in conversations daily with customers. The knowledge that they obtain can be key to the success of marketing’s communications, because the audience for most of marketing’s deliverables is, after all, customers. Who knows them better than Sales?! But that knowledge is more valuable if Sales shares it with Marketing, where it can be used in many ways:

Targeting and segmentation – Sales can help marketing avoid messaging mistakes by providing feedback on the viability and importance of certain vertical markets and demographic segments.

Positioning – Experienced sales people who know well both customers and the competition can help help refine the positioning statement to align it with the world in which the product must compete.

Personas – Personas are profiles of typical buyers of your particular product. Sales, since you are the people who know these people best, share that knowledge with Marketing.

Social media – Not only can salespeople get into the conversation, they can and should alert Marketing when they come across important public opinion about the company or the competition. Just remember, social media is conversations on topics of mutual interest, so avoid pitching.

Messaging – Messages must address the concerns of prospective buyers. Sales needs to help marketing understand any new concerns they uncover.

Competitive Intelligence – As new information becomes available in the field, it is critical that Sales feeds competitive updates to marketing for verification and sharing with other reps. Nobody is better suited to this task than the feet-on-the-street salespeople.

Playbook – Most Sales Playbooks include an Objection-Handling Guide. It is important that Sales let Marketing know what objections they are hearing to help make a better Playbook.

Customer Stories and References – Sales should let Marketing know which happy closed customers might be good Customer Stories and references.

These are all marketing deliverables that benefit Sales. The better they are, the better Sales is at closing deals. And good marketing can shorten the sales cycle, too.

Because Sales’ involvement needs to be proactive, make it incredibly easy for them to share what they know about customers and competition. Marketers, you can start by getting to know a few of your company’s sales leaders, and show them the value of sharing what they know. Then, leverage your existing CRM system to create a feedback loop that will strengthen the sales-marketing relationship. Consider creating a wiki that allows both Sales and Marketing to make field information updates immediately accessible.  Break down those silos!

Technorati Tags: customer based selling, marketing-sales relationship, sales cycle, sales strategy, Social Media

At last week’s TechTarget ROI Summit in San Francisco, Marilou Barsam, SVP of Client Consulting and Corporate Marketing at TechTarget, shared the results of a Spring 2010 survey of what TechTarget calls the “hyper-active researcher.”  Key findings from the 1,700+ survey responses were that these buyers spend the majority of their research time online and nearly 33% are planning 4-6 IT projects within the next year. On the panel during her session was the CIO of a financial services firm. This individual represents the persona of the “hyper-active researcher” and shared with a packed room of B2B marketers how he approaches his role and prefers to interact with vendors.

This CIO is always on the lookout for the next solution to move his company forward. During a typical day he:

• receives 600-700 emails
• visits several technology-related websites, bookmarking sites of interest
• uses Twitter to become aware of new technologies and solutions
• reads articles by journalists or analysts as well as blogs by peers
• files content based on immediate projects or future needs
• watches short videos, especially product demos
• may attend a trade show as he likes to see products and demos in person

His buying process:

1. Conduct research to become somewhat of an expert on the technology and solutions available
2. Start looking at vendors, comparing the strength of the companies along with product features
3. Talk to vendors
4. Watch vendor demonstrations to make head-to-head product comparisons
5. Compile a short list of vendors and do more due-diligence. He uses online communities and his personal network to receive validation from peers.
6. Makes a vendor recommendation to his management team

When does he want to hear from a vendor?
Not in the early part of the buying cycle. He will reach out when ready. But if you do approach him, use email once or twice before calling.  Educate him, don’t sell and don’t be a nag. White papers should be technical discussions not product pitches. Provide product comparisons to help him make the right decision. If you don’t, your competition will.

Three key takeaways:

1. Content is king. Be found when the “hyper-active researcher” is looking for information. Publishing keyword-rich educational content on your own website as well as media sites such as TechTarget increases the chance of your company and solution making it to the short list.
2. Leverage video for product demos and customer testimonials.
3. Participate in trade shows and industry conferences to get face time with these influential buyers.

Thanks to TechTarget for the excellent research and informative panel presentation. To view the presentation, visit http://www.techtarget.com/assets/TechTargetSummitHyperactiveUser_2010.pdf

Technorati Tags: B2B marketing, cio buying process, content marketing, customer based selling, Integrated Marketing, Marilou Barsam, personas, product comparisons, techtarget