This article is by Guest Blogger Charlie Born, the newest member of the Shirman Group extended team.
Over the last five years, B2B selling has evolved from general concepts of solution selling to the ‘Buyer’s Journey’ – a journey driven by the large amount of information available online. A new sales and marketing reality is rapidly emerging as the internet plays an increasing role in buyer research. I’ve seen the impact of this in my own marketing work, and I strongly believe we are on the cusp of some important changes to the conventional marketing and sales wisdom of the past
Studies are consistently showing that B2B buying habits are shifting. Buyers are now 60-70% of the way through the buyer’s cycle before they reach out to your sales representative. By that time, there is less need for traditional solution selling techniques. In the new buyer’s journey, the buyers believe that, based on their own research, they have figured out what they need. When they decide to contact your sales team, they have most likely decided you are one of their top three choices – you are 1 of 3.
Maybe this sounds like good news. It’s not. Most often the buyer views all three choices as equally acceptable, and the final decision comes down to features, functions, support—and price, price, price. Exceptional sales representatives might be able to overcome this ‘1 of 3’ syndrome, but this is the antithesis of where you want to be with solution selling.
In this new selling environment your biggest hurdles are no longer your competitors or features and functions; they are:
- The ability of buyers to learn on their own
- How your company participates in that learning process
As the CMO of SAP, Jonathan Becher, said at a recent Churchill Club CMO Panel, “Being marketed TO is a mindset we need to end. It’s helping (the buyer) discover what they want to learn about.”
Are you experiencing this phenomenon? Has it changed your marketing strategy?
by Lilia Shirman on August 28, 2012
in Marketing
The fifth trend that emerged from Churchill Club’s recent Chief Marketing Officer Agenda 2013 event was the expansion and diversification of the marketing role and skillset. Several new, or newly important, areas of responsibility are driving the need for new skills:
- Marketing organizations are aligning more closely with sales objectives. The four speakers from SAP, Intuit, Google, and DreamWorks all mentioned revenue as a key marketing metric. Nora Denzel, Senior VP, big data, social design and marketing at Intuit, said her company considers its marketers to be “growth officers.”
- Marketers are often the customer advocates in the company. At Google, Marketers not only evangelize the company externally, but also “play a big role internally in evangelizing on behalf of the customer,” according to Lorraine Twohill, VP global marketing there.
- Marketers are also increasingly responsible for customer experience and engagement. Lorraine Twohill mentioned that one of her organization’s main responsibilities is to “make technology mean something to real people in their daily lives.” The focus on customer experience also translates into marketing having greater involvement earlier in the product design process. DreamWorks CMO Anne Globe describes integrating movies with games as a way to engage viewers – a tactic that erases the lines between product development and marketing. (See previous post: The Product IS the Sales and Marketing.)
These roles obviously extend well beyond marketing’s traditional purview of awareness and lead generation campaigns. Google’s marketing organization now includes coders, artists, analysts, and gamers. According to Lorraine Twohill, Google likes to hire marketers who don’t see the old functional limits, but can imagine completely novel ways of engaging customers. When Nora Denzel was asked about hiring, she echoed the sentiment: “We want a diversity of skills and backgrounds, and people who can do multiple tracks.”
Bottom Line: Consider what role your marketing team can play to provide the greatest value to your company and customers, and what new types of customer engagement are emerging in your industry. Then
- Identify the skills your team will need in its future role.
- As you outsource leading edge techniques and tactics to 3rd parties, pay attention to which specialists and skillsets they have on the team.
- Consider hiring people who have an in-depth understanding of your customer, but from a very different perspective and background than the existing team.
by Lilia Shirman on August 23, 2012
in Marketing
The four CMOs from SAP, Google, DreamWorks, and Intuit at a recent Churchill Club discussion panel were in agreement that social and digital marketing are now standard pieces of the marketing toolset, not distinct areas to be managed separately. Anne Globe of DreamWorks commented that “social is completely integrated into the fabric of marketing.” A sentiment echoed by Nora Denzel of Intuit, who said, “There is no such thing as digital marketing – it’s all integrated together.”
Taking it a step farther and reinforcing the previously discussed trend that the product IS the marketing, Nora added that Intuit is integrating social into the product itself by providing access to user forums and peer support directly from the product. DreamWorks is also leveraging social within the product by integrating movies with games, which Anne described as “the coolest newest way to engage viewers.”
Now that digital marketing has permeated go-to-market activity, what technologies will marketers adopt next to add some bleeding-edge luster? Seems the answer is the same as for everything else in tech these days: intelligence drawn from big data. Nora Denzel believes that “social media, smart mobile devices, and [intelligence gleaned from big] data will create a real market of one.” Intuit is already looking at ways to combine transactional, behavioral and social user-generated data to better serve customers. The company already offers new customer value by aggregating data across tens of thousands of businesses to create an employment and revenue index for small businesses.
Though Intuit’s service is free, Laura McLellan of Gartner pointed out that Marketing can use its new intelligence to help identify new revenue sources. Lorraine Twohill, VP of Global Marketing at Google, sees this as a great opportunity for marketing. “If you own the insights function, you are the oracle and sage and that’s a great role that marketing can play.”
Of course the bleeding edge has its name for a reason. It can be a risky place to walk. Lorraine pointed out that companies must balance customers’ privacy needs against the value that big data offers. That’s likely to be a challenge for years to come. Ultimately, the technologies available to marketers will evolve in ways we can’t predict. Anne Gardner described the implications: “Technology helps us get to where our customers are. But we have to keep our plan open so that we can leverage new technologies that we can’t foresee yet.”
Is you company using data about customers or product usage to provide extra value to customers?
The proliferation of SaaS and Apple’s demonstration of the impact of product design and user experience, have changed how marketers and their companies look at products. The lines between product management, product development, marketing, and sales are disappearing as quickly as chocolate from my kitchen.
At a recent Churchill Club CMO panel, Nora Denzel, Senior VP, Big Data, Social Design and Marketing at Intuit articulated this trend best with the comment, “our product IS the funnel.” She described that Intuit customers make decision based on product use, not marketing messages. Their experience in using the product determines whether they spend money on it. That should be old hat to anyone offering a freemium model, but may not be explicitly understood by companies new to the products as services environment. Even more traditional products are evolving to play a bigger role in sales and marketing. Interactive TV guides provided by carriers upsell on-demand channels and premium content, toys include complimentary on-line gaming components that cross sell more toys, and grocery packaging offers recipes that promote sister brands and products.
A key implication of this product-as-sales-tool trend is the accompanying change in product design and development, which marketing leaders clearly recognize. Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP remarked that “product launch is the day you sat down to decide what product you are going to build.” To which Laura McLellan of Gartner quipped, “If marketing gets involved when the product is done, engineering gets what it deserves,” voicing my own observations that R&D culture has been slow to change and, in some companies, still drives product roadmaps with a myopic focus on technology and features rather than user experience. (You know who you are.)
Taking it a bit farther, Jonathan Becher described a vision of product development in which just-in-time creation of features and designs that respond to the customer’s current preferences would replace precisely targeted marketing of existing products
Bottom Line: Whether you’re delivering products on-premise or as service, your Product Managers should have among their top design criteria:
- Ease of use and high quality customer experience
- Opportunities for customers to experience the product before they buy
- Usage and behavior-based upsell and cross sell features
- Seamless integration of usage, behavior, and request-based support and social features
- Intelligence and analytics capabilities that use information like product configuration, user behavior and preferences, and transactional data to provide additional value to your company and to customers
- Product architecture, design, and/or manufacturing process that allow fast and easy modifications, feature additions, and integration of complimentary products.
Please share your examples of products with built-in sales and marketing.
“We’re not in control. The Customer is.”
– Lorraine Twohill, VP Global Marketing, Google
We’ve talked here in our blog and in my book about the concept of collaborating with customers as the means to engage the more empowered buyer. The mindset that customers have greater control than ever was clearly evident among the CMOs on a recent Churchill Club panel.
When asked whether his organization was “marketing-led,” “engineering-led,” or “sales-led,” Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, answered, “There’s only one kind of “led” – customer led.” He described that at the last SAP conference, the decision about which topics to include was “crowd sourced from the customer.”
Nora Denzel, Senior VP, Big Data, Social Design and Marketing at Intuit provided more examples of how Intuit is sharing the reigns with its customers: Intuit’s CEO meets with customers each quarter before speaking to his staff at the ops reviews. Intuit has “outsourced product management and marketing to the customer.” That’s because Intuit’s new product features get exposed to customer in a web sand-box, and their viability is determined based on actual customer usage. Anne Globe of DreamWorks agreed that today there’s an opportunity for the customer to “take you in a different direction than what you planned” when you designed your marketing campaign.
Bottom Line: 2.0 didn’t just change the technologies we use to communicate, collaborate, and sell. It has completely transformed customer mindsets. Buyers in both B2B and B2C markets expect greater corporate transparency and increased influence over what is sold to them, where and how. They also exercise greater collective and individual power in the marketplace. Companies that can redefine their customer relationships from one of buyer-seller to that of a team collaborating to discover, learn, design solutions, and maximize their usefulness will command greater loyalty.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion with some of Silicon Valley’s top CMOs: Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, Nora Denzel, Senior VP, Big Data, Social Design and Marketing at Intuit, Anne Globe, CMO at DreamWorks Animation, and Lorraine Twohill, VP Global Marketing , Google. The moderator was Laura McLellan of Gartner.
Some interesting themes emerged from the discussion. Here, and in subsequent posts, I’ll summarize the CMOs’ comments and add some perspective about the implications for marketers and their companies.
The top 5 trends:
- Customer Power
- Shared ownership for Customer Experience
- The Product IS the Marketing
- Social and Digital Marketing disappearing as distinct disciplines, Big Data key new tool
- The expanding Marketing skillset
If individual employees have more power to select products and technologies, then should we market to them the same way we market to consumers?
Consumerization of corporate buying decisions is leaving B2B marketers asking if and how to use B2C techniques in B2B sales. I like to break the question up into pieces, starting with messaging, then sales strategy, and finally marketing tactics.
What’s really different between messaging in B2B vs. B2C environments?
First, consider the similarities:
Everyone develops initial preference based on emotional response, whether they are making personal or business purchases. So you must appeal to the individual and their personal priorities in both settings.
In B2B, recognize that business people often have unstated personal interests and decide how your sales strategy is going to address these. To make this a repeatable sales practice, include an assessment of personal objectives for key stakeholders in your account planning process. (Assumes you have one, but that’s a whole other topic.)
Now the big difference:
While the consumer might or might not bother to rationalize their decision, the business buyer almost always MUST demonstrate tangible (not just perceived) value to the company. While you can rely exclusively on brand image and emotional response with consumers, you have to message to BOTH the emotional and rational considerations for business buyers.
If you’ve used B2C-style messaging for a B2B product, tell us how that worked.
More on this topic in our next post.
by Lilia Shirman on March 9, 2011
in Marketing
I think we should banish the term “Marketing.”
Here’s why. I gave a presentation recently on Marketing 101 for entrepreneurs, and had listed a dozen types of marketing. We had a long discussion of which marketer does what, when to hire, what to outsource, and how it all fits together. At the end one new CEO asked, “So, why do people say they do Marketing?”
Good question. Even back when my job title had Marketing in it, I was never comfortable telling people, “I’m in marketing.” My answer was always more complicated. I realized why when I read April Dunford’s insightful recent post, in which April describes the complexity and diversity of “Marketing” and how these lead to bad hiring decisions, unmet expectations, and marketing failures. Then I knew what to do. The way to simplify marketing is to abolish it! Not the activity, but the word.
Here’s April’s list of what falls into Marketing:
The first step to hiring a great marketer (and for marketers to hird a job they won’t suck at) is to clearly understand what you mean by “marketing”. It’s a multi-faceted job that can include (but doesn’t always!):
1. Advertising
2. Branding
3. Product Management
4. Lead Generation
5. Install base/Customer engagement strategy and tactics
6. Inbound Marketing and/or SEO
7. Sales Support
8. Market Strategy
9. Messaging/Positioning
10. Channel strategy/management/marketing
11. Partnerships and partner marketing
12. Media and Analyst Relations
13. Content strategy and creation
14. Other stuff that I don’t even know about
It overlaps but does not duplicate my list, which included Event Management, Solutions Marketing, Industry / Vertical Marketing, Customer Intelligence, etc. Marketing is an umbrella for so many different skill sets and functions. Calling them all one thing is akin to calling anyone who works at a product company but outside R&D as being a “business person.” It’s meaningless.
Try it out for a day – see if you can avoid using the “M” word, at least by itself. Then let me know if you spent less time clarifying and explaining what you meant.
Many of my clients are neck deep in preparations for their annual sales meetings. They are creating presentations and content to get Sales jazzed about the year, and to educate them about new products, pricing, initiatives, etc.
Unfortunately after the dust settles and everyone has flown back to their patch, Marketing will moan about Sales not using all the tools they worked so hard to create. Sales will complain that they don’t have the right tools. How, after all this work, is that possible?
Part of the problem is that while marketers think about the content of sales and marketing tools, they often ignore usability. Just as with a complex product, great features (content) are only as useful as the user’s ability to access and exploit them.
To improve the usability of sales and marketing tools for your sales channel(s) and for customers, ask these questions BEFORE your create the assets.
Internal Usability Questions
- How is the offering (product/service/solution) marketed and sold, exactly?
- Who will use the sales/marketing assets and how?
- Which form or medium is appropriate for each type of marketing and sales activity?
- How much customization will be required with each use?
- How will the users obtain the asset when the need for it arises?
- What kinds of responses or questions are sales or marketing people likely to encounter when they use this asset?
- How will we know whether the asset is useful and effective?
Usability Questions for Customers
- At which points in their decision-making process does each audience need this information?
- Where and how do customers find this information?
- What medium is easiest for customers to access and use?
- Under what conditions will they most likely use this asset? (In a meeting? On the phone? At a computer? At a dusty job site? On a plane?)
- How much time will they have to interact with this asset?
- Will they want to share it? (If yes, how do we make that easy?)
- How will we know whether the asset is useful and valuable to customers?
Please share additional usability considerations when developing content and tools for us in sales and marketing.
I was thrilled to be a guest speaker on Linda Popky‘s Marketing Thought Leadership podcast series.
The podcast topics include:
– The definition of customer context
– How to use every aspect of context in messaging
– The customer use case as a tool for articulating credible and provable value
Listen to the entire podcast, “Customer Relevance: Why Use Case-Driven Value™ Matters to Marketing”
