The B2B Lead » Guest Blogger

Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures: Analyst Mentalpause

Guest Blogger — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:38:26 +0000

Kathryn Roy, marketing consultant and friend of The B2B Lead, has a great eBook, Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures, that we want to share with all of our readers. We will post excerpts that cover the diseases one by one but feel free to download the entire eBook here.

There are seven problems I find so rampant in B2B companies that I suspect they are infectious – passed along as marketing people switch companies or work with contagious agencies. In each blog post I will cover a diseases, its symptoms, probable causes, and suggested treatment.

Analyst Mentalpause occurs in industries where analysts are important influencers. Marketers confuse the language of analysts – who seize upon new category names that make concepts look fresh and exciting and help to sell research – with the language that actual prospects use. In ”Crossing the Chasm”, Geoffrey Moore recommends using a “new category” as a short hand that helps differentiate your product or service from the prior generation of (inferior) offerings.

Some examples would be 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) vs. 2D CAD or Web 2.0 recruiting applications vs. old recruiting applications without social-networking.

When the new category labels are intuitive to prospects, they have the desired effects. They seduce innovators into exploring how they can push the productivity curve for their company.

They make it easy for prospective buyers to determine if this solution is likely to help them.

The problem arises when new category names are not intuitive. One well-known example is

Lotus’s labeling Notes “Groupware” to distinguish it from combined email and calendar applications. As a label for a new category, Groupware provided analysts with fodder for columns and events. It attracted innovators who like to explore new concepts. But it was not intuitive to the less intrepid majority of buyers.

More recent examples include Talent Management and Human Capital Management (HCM) to describe the maturing suite of applications that automate HR functions like recruiting and performance reviews. In focus groups, it turned out that HR executives not only did not find HCM intuitive, they found it insulting. Talent Management, at the time of the focus groups, was a confusing concept: the test subjects each defined or described it differently. After extensive use by the press and analysts, Talent Management is starting to have a more consistent meaning to prospects.

Before leaning heavily on a new category name, determine first whether the term is acceptable and clear to your target audience. If it is not yet well recognized or understood, it is fine to use it in the body of marketing materials to label a concept you’ve just explained. But avoid using it in headlines intended to draw a reader in to read further. If they don’t intuitively know what it means, it won’t attract their attention.

SYMPTOMS

Heavy use of category names that don’t even register in the list of popular Internet search terms for your target audience.

SUSPECTED C AUSES

Analyst-blindness: the inability to distinguish between prospects and analysts.

TREATMENT

Use industry analyst terminology in presentations to analysts and at analyst events.

Test proposed terminology anonymously with prospective buyers.

Stay abreast of keywords popular with your prospects.

About the Author
Kathryn Roy is a marketing and strategy consultant with over 20 years of experience helping some of the most successful and fastest growing B2B companies including IBM, Avid, CA, Lotus, AT&T and dozens of other technology companies. She has helped companies:

hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures: Branderhea

Guest Blogger — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:13:01 +0000

Branderhea is a delusional psychological condition in companies that believe prospects will invest time to memorize vendors’ cute names for products and services that aren’t related to blockbuster consumer categories.

When Lotus conducted brand market research in the ‘90s, they learned to their surprise that many end users did not associate their spreadsheet, 1-2-3, with Lotus. These users thought 1-2-3 was the product and the company name.

Many startups, ambitiously anticipating the launch of multiple product lines, invest in both company and product names. Given the prevalence of URL claim-stakers who have locked up almost all valuable URLs in hopes of selling them at a future date for exorbitant prices, most of these new names are anything but descriptive.

To get prospects to begin to remember one of these names takes repeated exposure in relevantcontexts.

If you double the number of names a prospect needs to remember in any interaction with your company, you halve the probability that they will remember either.

B2C companies can use trademarked names for ingredients to impress consumers: “Try our facial cream with Rejuvens^TM microcapsules.” This technique doesn’t translate well to B2B companies unless you simply use the ^TM sign simply to stress some attribute such as

“One-minute-install^TM.” In this case, you don’t really expect anyone to remember the name but simply hope that the TM helps people notice your differentiator in speedy installs. It is not recommended with newly minted words. Limit ^TM use to recognizable phrases.

SYMPTOMS

More than one ^TM symbol per marketing deliverable.

SUSPECTED C AUSES

Insufficient interaction with prospects.

Asking friendly customers if they like your brainchild.

TREATMENT

Limit the number of “brands” to one for every $100m in revenue.

hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures: Ad Offerphobia & Venereal Offeremia

Guest Blogger — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:25:15 +0000

Ad Offerphobia

Ad Offerphobia is seen in companies that invest in advertising but do not include an interesting offer that will help track the ad’s performance and capture prospect contact information. Since business customers take months to make purchase decisions and are devilishly hard to locate, B2B ads need to pull double duty. In addition to building awareness/generating interest B2B ads must also try to capture contact information so you can interact with them during their purchase process.

Calls to action that motivate the prospect to share information, say by offering a topical whitepaper or analyst report, are much more useful. They allow the vendor to capture additional contact information, provide a reason to call and ask a few questions to assess the level of interest, and nurture the lead during their purchase process.

SYMPTOMS

In strain A of Ad Offerphobia, the only URL on the ad is for the homepage. Strain B is becoming dominant, however, with a URL to a page with an unappealing offer like “advice”.

SUSPECTED CAUSE

Lack of interesting fulfillment pieces.

TREATMENT

Identify an area your target prospect seeks education and create a great fulfillment piece.

Venereal Offeremia

A near opposite to Ad Offerphobia, Venereal Offeremia is seen in marketing campaigns that kill any desire of the recipient to ever talk to your company. Related to Venereal Linerea exhibited at bars with pickup lines like: “What’s your name? Wanna go to my place?”

It makes perfect sense with lower-priced consumer purchases to have calls to action like “Call now to get free Ginsu knives with your purchase!” More expensive B2B purchases have longer buying cycles and more cautious buyers. Asking prospects to call for an appointment with a salesperson assumes both that they are ready to buy and that you’ve persuaded them in very few words that you’re likely to be the ideal vendor.

Outreach vehicles like advertising and direct mail have very limited space to communicate with prospective customers. Typically, there is just enough space to relate to the underlying need, convey one reason that the vendor should be considered credible or merit further investigation, and make an offer in exchange for small pieces of information about their situation. But there’s not enough space to persuade them to confidently engage with a salesperson yet.

SYMPTOMS

Marketing campaigns with a call-to-action that asks for an appointment with a salesperson.

SUSPECTED CAUSES

A desperate scarcity of leads.

A paucity of interesting fulfillment pieces.

Sales driving Marketing plans.

TREATMENT

In general, the treatment for Checklistosis is also very helpful here.

Identify the recipients by stage of buying process and develop a fulfillment piece to help them move a step further.

hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures: Sleep Apendea

Guest Blogger — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:39:54 +0000

Commonly found in companies staffed with passionate sales and marketing professionals, Sleep Apendea is a disease whereby every conceivable reason customers should buy is stuffed into collateral, Web sites, and presentations. Coincides with the belief that prospects are patient enough to troll through your materials until they stumble across items relevant to them.

Mark Twain once wrote a friend: “I wanted to write you a short note, but I didn’t have the time.” There’s a corollary for marketing: the briefer the marketing piece, the more agonizing the process.

It’s hard to sift through the possible things you could say and choose the few that will have the greatest effect.

Studies show that, if anything, prospects are more impatient now than ever before. Eye-tracking studies of Web pages show that prospects laser in on headlines, tables, charts, and bullets, often ignoring much of the body.

There are phases in the buying process when prospects might take time to read information in depth – e.g., educating themselves about a new topic. However, for most phases, especially early phases of the buying process, expect an impatient prospect and choose carefully the few points you want them to retain – points that stress your differentiation.

Sleep Apendea is especially a problem with marketing staff who don’t have deep experience with the target audience. They can be creative in suggesting motivations for prospects to become interested. Not all of these suggestions will resonate with actual prospects, however.

SYMPTOMS

30- to 60-slide presentations forced on all prospects in first visit.

A high number of densely packed Web pages relative to number of products.

Multi-chapter collateral pieces.

SUSPECTED CAUSES

Not distinguishing between different buyer roles and stages of the buying process.

Passion for your product or service that is untamed by pity for the reader.

Inexperience with target audience.

TREATMENT

Identify and eliminate redundant messages with different wording.

Test messages to confirm relevance.

Map key messages to buyer role, buying-process stage, and market segment. Determine where to deliver which messages.

hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures: Checklistosis

Guest Blogger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:51:47 +0000

Checklistosis is a disease of marketing departments whereby marketing professionals are so focused on execution, they skip the planning stage – and pay the price.

All too often, a glimpse into a B2B marketing department shows a hive of activity focused on meeting deadlines for updating collateral, producing an event, or sending out the next email campaign. In these environments, it is not unusual to find marketers completing projects without having done the analysis that can determine which activities are valuable and which activities not on their list would make a larger contribution.

In some cases, it’s due to a natural tendency to replicate the process and activities from a prior company. Clearly, there is a set of deliverables, like Web sites, that are common to most companies.

However, the relative priority of activities and how they are executed should be based on the dynamics of the target market segment, including the competitive environment.

“Juicing the Orange”, a book by the advertising team that came up with United Airlines’ wildly successful advertising campaign, has a free 15-page workbook (pdf ) with 127 questions to help marketing professionals deeply understand a company’s market and challenge. This analysis is its prerequisite to prescribing messages and mediums for delivery. (Not all 127 questions will necessarily pertain to your situation.)

SYMPTOMS

Inability of marketing professionals to quickly and confidently answer questions such as these:

What is the biggest impediment to sales growth today?
What are the different market segments you are pursuing and how do they weigh the relative importance of different product/service capabilities?
How does your offering compare with competitive alternatives on the key product/service characteristics listed above?
Can you describe the buying process and buyer roles and specific concerns by role for your top segment?
What is the target segment’s current perception of your company and your competition?

SUSPECTED CAUSES

Measuring output instead of results.

Mismatch between marketing resources and expected deliverables.

TREATMENT

Carve out time and resources to do a thorough analysis. If staff is not experienced, bring in outside help for the initial round.

Build new marketing plan based on the analysis.

hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures: Glitzitis

Guest Blogger — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:13:38 +0000

Glitzitis refers to companies that produce gorgeous ads and collateral pieces that fall flat because they aren’t based on solid analysis.

When we conduct focus groups for clients to test messages with their target buyers, we always test their competitors’ key messages or positioning as well. I used to assume that companies spending millions of dollars on advertising and expensive collateral vet the relevance of their proposed messaging with their target audience. It was a shock to see how off the mark many of these messages are.

Mark Twain said it best: “It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Sales trainers use a research study conducted years ago by Xerox to remind salespeople that their effectiveness declines after roughly 18 months. The reason is that as salespeople become more confident of their assessment of the prospects’ needs they spend much less time questioning and listening to their prospects.

The corollary for marketing professionals is this: The effectiveness of marketing professionals declines as their confidence increases if they don’t take the time to properly test their gut instincts.

A “trust but verify” attitude can also protect Marketing from Sales. In big-ticket item companies, salespeople can over-influence messaging. Their instincts are just as fallible as those of experienced marketers. A discipline of testing before investing will help prevent wasting marketing funds on the wrong messages.

SYMPTOMS

No exterior symptoms. Occurs with unexpected frequency in B2B companies with fabulous looking Web sites and collateral.

SUSPECTED CAUSE

Relying on the following sources for messaging without verification of relevance to larger target audience:

A close customer contact
An analyst
Salespeople
Company executives

TREATMENT

The only reliable means of correction is to test candidate key messages anonymously with the target audience or devise tests using interactive marketing techniques.

hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

3 Guidelines for Effective Email Personalization – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #263

Guest Blogger — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:55:15 +0000

This post comes to us from one of our friends at ExactTarget, Joel Book.

Having observed how email has become the backbone of successful one-to-one marketing solutions, I have 3 guidelines that will help you use personalization for more effective B-to-B email.

1. Remember that People buy from People.

With all due respect to brand marketers, creative directors, and copywriters, it’s important to remember that nothing is more important in selling than the customer’s relationship with the person with whom she is doing business. That person may be a dealer, an agent, or a field sales representative.

When you send email, send it on behalf of the “relationship owner” and include that person’s photo and contact information so it’s easy for the customer to contact him. This type of personalization dramatically improves email marketing campaign performance.

2. Serve. Don’t Sell.

Customers don’t want to be sold. But they do want to be helped in making their buying decision. That’s why using email to deliver information and offers that aid the customer’s decision-making process is the best way to support – and accelerate – the buying process.

Once a person has been attracted to your web site, use email to engage with and move the prospect through the consideration and evaluation stages . . . all the way to purchase. Serve your subscribers well, and they will reward you with their business. In fact, Forrester Research reports that “those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.”

3. Put the Customer in Control.

One of the smartest things you can do to maximize email marketing performance is to personalize email content to the subscriber’s needs. When a new subscriber opts in to receive email from you, invite her to go to your preference center where she can check off her needs and topics of interest relevant to the products or services you offer. Then, use the Dynamic Content feature in ExactTarget to deliver content that’s relevant and timely. This is the essence of ExactTarget’s Subscribers Rule mantra.

What is ExactTarget? – Marketing Automation Who’s Who

Guest Blogger — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:07:58 +0000

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Colby Cavanaugh at ExactTarget for this post.

What is ExactTarget?

ExactTarget gives B2B marketers the ability to harness the power of one-to-one communications to nurture leads, engage prospects and improve customer relationships. ExactTarget supports the backbone of your B2B marketing strategy with:

The ability to automate emails, processes and programs—from lead nurturing campaigns to welcome emails—with ease.
A single management console that triggers mission-critical messages across emerging digital communication channels, including SMS, Voice, and Email.
Robust integration capabilities that offer an opportunity to improve customer value management and seamless integrate your business systems, no matter how many disparate data sources you may have.
A scalable architecture to ensure your time-sensitive emails are delivered. Whether you’re processing hundreds of transactions an hour or millions a day, our system is designed to scale as your demand dictates.
Precision targeting tools to reinforce local relationships and dynamically turn your emails into powerful marketing messages that your customers want to receive.
A powerfully reliable data center that takes the worry out of your data storage and availability, no matter how much data you have.

Use what you know about your prospects and customers to improve customer relationships and increase conversion.

Industry leading research shows that integrating sales and marketing technologies can help organizations deliver more relevant communications—and improve their return on marketing investment by delivering the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. ExactTarget offers a variety of tools to help you integrate your critical business systems and allow for seamless, pain-free Marketing Automation. From customer relationship management (CRM) tools (e.g. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM) to web analytics applications (e.g. Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics), we’ve partnered with the leaders and done the difficult integration work so you don’t have to.

Get the support and expertise you need to be successful.

ExactTarget provides our clients with the email marketing support they need to solve complex marketing challenges. Our team combines both marketing and technological expertise with a proven approach to understanding our client’s objectives to help you develop the best possible email marketing strategy.

Serve your subscribers well and be rewarded with their business.

At ExactTarget, we believe it is the duty of every Email Service Provider (ESP) to help marketers deliver permission-based email and digital one-to-one communications to their customers, prospects, and partners. To better convey what we feel is our best-in-class approach, we have developed our SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy which consists of three simple tenets:

Serve the individual
Honor each individual’s unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency, and channel
Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives

We not only embrace the reality that subscribers own the inbox, but we also work diligently to develop products that provide consumers control over the manner and frequency by which companies communicate with them. By helping clients pursue more strategic segmentation and personalization efforts, we help them better deliver on the true promise of one-to-one communications—the right message, to the right person, at the right time, through the right channel.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about ExactTarget, we invite you to visit www.exacttarget.com. You can also get tips, best practices and other marketing insight from our blog and featured whitepapers.

What is Engagement Systems? – Marketing Automation Who’s Who

Guest Blogger — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:56:28 +0000

What is Engagement Systems?

Engagement Systems helps companies leverage their CRM investment and maximize sales and marketing resources to grow sales revenue and improve ROI with an automated marketing campaign system. The web-enabled software works with existing CRM systems to access prospect and customer information and make that data actionable to more efficiently capture and nurture leads, retain customers and win-back defecting clients.

From single communications to multi-step, multi-channel campaigns – utilizing email, direct mail, pURLS and landing pages – each personalized communication is automatically created, delivered, tracked and reported within the CRM record; eliminating time-consuming manual processes and ensuring consistent, relevant, timely communications that move prospects through the buying process and build valuable relationships with existing customers.

What Makes Engagement Systems Different?

True Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Communications

Engagement Systems is the only CRM integration that truly automates the execution, delivery and tracking of multi-channel communications via direct mail, email, and personalized web pages (Personalized URLS) from within a single application. Eliminates the need to coordinate multiple vendors.

1:1 Personalized Marketing

Both single communications and multi-touch campaigns can be executed to one contact at a time or to a segmented group of contacts. There are no minimum orders.

Trigger Automation

Engagement Systems automated campaigns are governed by a set of business rules that create automatic triggers to initiate and manage what communications are sent and when. The configuration and integration is completely handled by Engagement Systems; there is no manual intervention on the client’s part to create, set up or kick off communications. This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources or IT involvement.

Customer Lifecycle Optimization

Engagement Systems addresses the entire prospect and customer life cycle with custom-developed campaigns and programs for lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer reactivation, up-selling and cross-selling.

Integrated Reporting

All automated communications are written back to and tracked through the CRM system. Clients have the option for custom reporting and metrics or can use the tools inherent within their CRM system. Because of Engagement Systems’ complete integration, all data resides in a single location.

Value-Added Services

Engagement Systems makes it easy to adopt and use the system by providing a combination of optional marketing services that delivers an end-to-end solution. Unlike other systems, Engagement Systems is virtually hands free for both sales and marketing, requiring no one to upload or manage artwork or to initiate campaigns. This makes implementation pain free, quick to deploy and low-maintenance to sustain.

Cost Effectiveness

Engagement Systems’ automated direct mail, email and Personalized URL production systems streamline the creation, execution and delivery processes, making multi-channel marketing campaigns cheaper and faster to execute. All aimed at increasing your sales, profitability and ROMI. This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources, consulting, IT and training expenses. Additionally, there are no expensive recurring seat charges.

For more information, visit www.EngagementSystems.com, call 866.938.3658 or email info@EngagementSystems.com . You can also check out an Overview Demo of Engagement Systems at http://www.engagementsystems.com/onlinedemo. And be sure to look at our Resources (Case Studies & White Papers) http://www.engagementsystems.com/resource-center/resource-center.html

What is Silverpop Engage B2B? – Marketing Automation Who’s Who

Guest Blogger — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:40:45 +0000

What is Silverpop Engage B2B?

There are many challenges facing B2B marketers today, but they are almost all traceable to one inflection point — a fundamental, Internet-age shift in power that has taken place. Today, the B2B ‘buying unit’ has immense information-based resources at its disposal. Couple this with a corporate accountability and transparency mindset, and the result is a B2B buyer that is now calling the shots … not the B2B vendor.

The implication is a new B2B marketing dynamic that demands responding to customer ‘pull’ over a traditional marketing ‘push’ mentality. MarketingSherpa has published data indicating that for every sales-ready lead that comes into a B2B vendor, there are 5-6X more leads that are longer-term and must be patiently nurtured until they are ready to purchase.

Buyers increasingly set the ground rules on when and where they will engage. Buyers also increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education, not sales people … whom they engage as an almost final stage in their process. This means B2B marketers must focus heavily on ‘getting found,’ nurturing prospects and managing pre-sales buyer dialogue.

And yet the impetus for B2B marketers to proactively generate leads, drive sales and support customer lifetime value has never been stronger. Enter marketing automation.

How We’re Different

The drivers above explain the rapid growth in the marketing automation marketplace. But what makes one vendor different from another?

At Silverpop, we believe assessing how one marketing automation vendor is different from another comes down to understanding their approach to helping marketers address this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing as described above.

Our approach is simple.

Total Focus on B2B marketing. First, we have a marketing automation solution built, from the ground up, around the unique needs and issues of B2B marketers. This is our focus, and it’s how we rationalize everything we do to extend, expand and innovate its features and capabilities.

Orchestrating buyer-centric marketing; powering sales and marketing collaboration. Second, our products and services are designed to address the major external and internal issues facing B2B marketers today. What are these issues? At an external/marketplace level, it is being more buyer-centric than ever before (given the environment described above). At an internal/organizational level, it is better aligning and collaborating with the sales organization.

This is the approach that underpins and drives our Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform.

Total Focus on B2B Marketing

B2B marketing is different. Sure some of the trends cited above — especially the shift in buyer power — are common to both B2B and B2C. But B2B marketing is still different. How?

In B2C marketing — especially with ‘fast moving consumer goods’ — scale matters. Thus, a top-down strategy is taken … where mistakes in customer communication may be made at the individual consumer level, but that is assumed to be okay as long as it is a small percentage of total interactions.

But in B2B marketing — especially with high price points and low unit volumes — relationships really do matter. One mistake made upstream in the lead-cultivation phase can have disastrous effects downstream. Thus, a ‘bottoms-up strategy’ in marketing is more appropriate.

The challenge of modern B2B marketing, thus, lies in building that granular and continuous ‘one-to-one’ relationship with a prospect, pre-sales, while also scaling overall activity to ensure a sufficient volume of leads to meet revenue targets.

This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is built around the entire lifecycle of developing and nurturing B2B buyer leads upstream through converting leads to customers and maintaining those customers downstream.

Lead management: The lead management capabilities within Silverpop Engage B2B are an integral part of the entire platform. These capabilities include: information capture, scoring, routing, nurturing and monitoring.

CRM integration: The system has pre-built integration with industry-leading CRM suites, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Netsuite and Salesforce, and the system can integrate with any other CRM suite via standards-based Web application programming interfaces (APIs).

Marketing measurement and ROI tracking: The system tracks every action taken by a marketer to cultivate and covert leads into sales. The result is a granular, account-level picture of what campaigns worked (and what didn’t). This helps marketers continuously tune their tactics.

Industry-leading B2B marketer education: Successful marketing automation begins with successful B2B marketing strategies. That is why Silverpop spends significant time and resources on marketer education. The keystone of this effort is the company’s recently-launched B2B Marketing University series.

Service and support: An intelligent technology platform, alone, is not sufficient to ensure the success of a marketing automation deployment. That’s why service and support is a hallmark of Silverpop’s offering and one of the top reasons why customers select Silverpop Engage B2B.

Orchestrating Buyer-centric Marketing

I highlighted the critical issue in B2B marketing of having a bottoms-up strategy and of driving one-to-one dialogue with prospects. This leads to a subsequent operational challenge: It takes a tremendous scale of raw leads to filter down to a single buyer. Research from SiriusDecisions indicates that an average B2B organization yields 2-3 sales conversions for every 1000 raw/upstream leads. Given this, how do you effectively market on a ‘mass’ one-to-one level — building a repeatable lead management strategy that gives each and every lead individual and tailored attention and personalization and that responds to their pull?

Laura Ramos with Forrester touched on this in a recent blog post on sales-marketing alignment: “As any rep can tell marketing, no two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use. ”

This is why at the core of Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is a smart, powerful, yet easy-to-use campaign management interface for building and managing buyer-centric marketing.

Dynamic campaign management: The campaign management interface allows you to build complex, dynamic campaigns that deliver marketing communication actions in response to the ‘pull’ of buyers. For instance, did your prospect recently visit your Website, download a white paper or dial your call center? By identifying actions and dynamic responses, Silverpop enables B2B marketers to manage complex, buyer-centric campaigns.

Campaign GUI: A key differentiator of the campaign management interface is something we call our ‘campaign GUI’ — a graphical environment that allows marketers to drag and drop campaign planning elements, that operates a lot like video-editing software and that is highly intuitive.

Industry-leading e-mail expertise: Often prospects’ actions respond to or trigger an e-mail. E-mail communication is a critical component of modern B2B marketing, and with a decade of experience, expertise in e-mail communication is a core competency of Silverpop.

Multi-channel campaigns: The system is not limited to e-mail communication. It can manage and trigger multiple communication channels, both online and offline — ensuring you engage with prospects when and where they prefer.

Powering Sales and Marketing Collaboration

The major ‘internal’/organizational challenge marketers face lies in better syncing up with their sales teams — an issue closely related to being buyer-centric and of critical importance as sales people are tapped by buyers later and later in their buying process. This requires B2B marketers to better understand and empathize with their sales team colleagues. It also requires systems that can promote transparency and collaboration.

SiriusDecisions highlighted this issue in a recent blog post, which discussed the era of ‘Buyer 2.0′ and its impact on sales/marketing alignment.

Technology is the driver behind the shift in buyer/selling behaviors, but more so in terms of its impact on the buyer rather than the seller. Buying 2.0 amplifies the power technology has given buyers and further increases marketing’s role throughout the buying process beyond demand creation. Buyers seek out knowledge in their education phase independent of a campaign or cold call. Content, collaboration and knowledge drives marketing’s messaging impact into the opportunity. Pipeline acceleration initiatives and nurturing strategies further influence the buying dynamic. Measuring marketing’s contribution and improving its ability to target their initiatives puts marketing in the cross-hairs of sales productivity. Sales and marketing integration is a requirement for success in the next “new” economy.

This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform also focuses on improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams — so lead management and buyer dialogue is seamless.

Lead scoring and routing: A robust lead scoring and routing engine both creates a catalyst for improving sales and marketing agreement on what constitutes a ‘good customer prospect’ and also helps to manage roles and lead hand-off on an ongoing basis. Key features include the ability to score based on a variety of demographic (explicit), behavioral (implicit) and BANT (budget, authority, needs and timing) factors, as well as mechanisms for returning cold leads from sales back to marketing for nurturing.

Sales-team transparency: Another key feature is the ability of sales team members to view granular details of lead activity from their Salesforce account. This ensures that a sales team member has complete insight into the pre-sales dialogue that has occurred and can pick up and run with a lead with maximum insight.

Are You Ready for the Brave New World of B2B Marketing?

Responding to ‘buyer 2.0′ and leading in this new B2B marketing environment requires a blend of know-how and firepower. Silverpop is focused on both.

The Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform combines best practices with robust performance. And the Silverpop team is dedicated to delivering solutions that meet the unique needs of B2B marketers. We invite you to take a test drive of the system.

And if you’re interested in taking your B2B marketing ‘game’ to the next level, we hope you will join us this Fall at B2B Marketing University — either in Palo Alto, Boston, Atlanta or Seattle, or in another city after the New Y ear.