By now, we are all tired of hearing how the world is coming to an end.  The financial markets are down, companies are struggling and people are losing their jobs every time we turn around – times are hard and we’re all suffering.  But quite frankly, we’re tired of talking about it.  So instead, this month we’re focused on all around best practices that we should all be applying in any economy.

Optimizing your marketing mix for success – are you doing it?  If so, how’s it working for you?

As marketers, we have a lot of options for reaching our audience.  We use some for overall awareness and others for one-to-one contact with our customers, prospects, media contacts, etc.  And in most cases, we are building programs using a variety of tactics to get our desired outcomes.  Here at ReachForce, we categorize tactics into two buckets – air wars and ground attacks.

Air wars are things like PR, social media, and SEO.  All necessary but can be difficult to measure real ROI.  Ground attacks are direct one-to-one initiatives, things like email programs, webinars, and targeted live events.  You have to have both to get the results you really want.

We’re going to be exploring the following questions over the next few weeks on The B2B Lead, be sure to check back in.

• So how do you decide what combination of activities is driving the most value for your business and your audience?
• Are you just spinning the wheel of luck and hoping it lands on new customers?
• How are you measuring your programs for success?
• When do you decide a tactic isn’t working and you need to cut it out of the mix?
• How often are you adding new tools and tactics that help you drive ROI from your efforts?
• Is there a specific combination of activities that work with specific audiences?

Not too long ago a couple of us here attended Eloqua’s Marketing Effectiveness Summit.  One of the most interesting things we came back with was their Marketing and Sales Relationship Map.

Check out this post on one of Eloqua’s new blogs, Marketing Insights. It includes a sample relationship map that “can help you identify gaps in perception and prioritize areas for improvement [between sales and marketing], without pointing fingers.”  The idea is to have sales and marketing separately rank performance in specific demand generation criteria.  Both teams ultimate goal is to drive revenue and this map helps define key metrics and align goals so everyone wins.

I like to think Marketing and Sales here at ReachForce are all one team but I must admit I was a little scared to turn the map over to our Sales team to see how they really felt.

Have you ever done anything like this with your Marketing and/or Sales team?  If so, please share.

I know you have probably read somewhere that even if you aren’t blogging yourself you should at least be out there to see what other people in your space are talking about.  The best way to do this is by reading industry related blogs.  To ensure you are keeping up on a regular basis, set up your Google Reader.  All of this sounds great but where do you find the right blogs to read for your business?

Here’s what helped me:

• Alltop – or “all the top” sites on the web. ReachForce’s space is B2B Marketing and I looked here for “all the top marketing news.” It has all the top Marketing blogs (even including this one!) based on results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us.
• Just Google your space…like “B2B Marketing Blogs.” First on the page was Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs by Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog. And keep moving down the page for more. Other bloggers also compile lists of top blogs in their space. For example, Web Market Central has a list of Marketing-Related Blogs.
• When looking at other blogs, be sure to check out their blogroll. It is a good way to see what blogs someone else follows and recommends.

So…now start looking for blogs in your industry and get into the conversation!

When times are tough we are forced to make use of what we already have.  After many events, lead forms, list exchanges and sales rolodex’s you have probably built a nice size database of prospects.  Before you get ready to launch your next program to your in-house database consider these things:

1. Marketing Sherpa has said that 2.1% of data goes bad every month. (This stat is about 2 years old, with so many people losing their jobs over the last couple of months I bet this number has gone up, but for this, we are going to use the 2.1) This means each year almost 25% of your contact data gets dirty.  Do you know which 25%?

   Contact records stay fresh about as long as a gallon of milk. Well maybe a little bit longer but you get the idea. Here’s some other interesting stats (also about 2 years old) According to Gartner, more than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. In the same time, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  Again, I bet these numbers are up too.

2. Are you marketing to the entire DMU (decision making unit)?  Do you have your entire DMU in your database?

   B2B purchases are typically made by a group of people.  Each one with different concerns and specifications.  To accelerate sales cycles it pays to start the connections before your prospect moves into the sales funnel.  DMUs can include – end users, business managers, finance specialist, technology specialists, senior management, key influencers, procurement specialists, etc.

   Marketing Sherpa also says…For purchases of $25K or more -
   100 – 500 employees    6.8 people in the DMU making buying decisions
   501-1000 employees    13.5 people in the DMU making buying decisions
   0ver 1000 employees    21 people in DMU making buying decisions

3. If you are trying to upsell or cross sell to your existing customer database, do you have the right buyers and their contact information?

   If you are selling a platform or have solutions that affect multiple groups within a company, there’s a chance you don’t have the right buyers for your new product or solution.  Here’s an example:  You sell a CRM platform and have recently added accounting and marketing modules.  Marketing to the sales leader that bought the CRM piece probably isn’t your target audience for the new modules and won’t get you very far.  Their needs are already met. And while they may be involved in the additional purchases they probably are not the ultimate buying decision maker for your upsell or cross sell.

4. Do you have all of the relevant contact information needed to executive your marketing programs?

   Example – You are planning a breakfast city tour and want to invite people in each region via email and also with a direct mail piece.  Do you have everyone’s correct physical address for the actual events and the direct mail?  Do you also have correct email addresses for the series of emails you plan to send reminding people about the event?  Missing just once piece can hinder your results.

5. Have you considered international privacy and SPAM laws?

   While we’re all very familiar with our US CAN-SPAM laws, have you researched the other countries you are marketing to?  Each countries laws are different, like for example Germany requires a double opt-in for email marketing.

Am I missing anything here?  Remember the grass isn’t always greener with the unknowns.  Work what you have, at some point you thought these people were worthy of holding on to.

On with the 8th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6) (#7)

In case you’re just dropping in … as B2B marketers we know that our businesses are fundamentally made up of three types of customers. The ones we have, those we’ve lost, and potential accounts doing business elsewhere. CEI is a metrics-based planning tool for driving revenue growth from all three of these targets and over the past few weeks we’ve been working our way down the following outline:

1. CEI Initiative Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
5. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
6. (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting

As of last week we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.
• Using metrics for Reference Account Management and sorting a top 10 list of best customer references, and why.

A Rant About Reference Account Management – cont’d

In my view, good Reference Account Management is perhaps one of the most overlooked things about B2B sales and marketing today. It’s seems to have been subverted by what the 1990s called “relationship selling” or “relationship marketing.” (By the way I am so tempted to try out a new acronym “RAM,” but I won’t).
After last week’s post I devoted some time on Google checking on as many high quality Sales, Marketing and Account Management job postings as I could stand. I had hoped to call some folks up to talk about how different companies are using CEI-type metrics and try to get some understanding of who is responsible for them. After a while I logged off in dismay. I’d read more than forty job descriptions and only one mentioned anything at all about the act of –or responsibility for (call it what you may)– maintaining an index of Sales-ready reference accounts.

As a sales person this finding (unscientific, yet time consuming) makes me feel needy. As an account manager it makes me think nobody is looking. As a marketer I just feel dirty. Even after the much needed influence of Fred Reichheld’s “Ultimate Question” (note to self: call Howie about game show idea) and Net Promoter Scores ― it pains me greatly to think this means that if we asked 1000 companies who their top-10 sales ready customer references are (and why) possibly only 20 could produce the information. Wow.
Because of this I’m sort of ranting this week.

If the discipline of stock managing Sales-ready references is being ignored at your company – especially in an economy where heroic customer experience is required – fix it, or buckle your seat-belt please. I say this because I believe a proper tool for this type of microanalysis and segmentation is the real brass ring for customer experience professionals.

To explain, let me bust out some John Lennon and ask you to imagine what you can do once you’ve managed your CEI metrics into a real-time data driven Reference Account Management list:

• Match prospects you are selling to with just the right customer references during the sales cycle
• Align customers with other customers for:
  • Account assignment groupings
  • Sales plans and quotas
  • Geo-analysis
  • Vertical-analysis
  • Predictive analysis
  • Campaign planning, newsletters, webinars, user conferences, PR etc.
• Align product roadmaps with prioritized customer needs
• Anticipate customer needs
• Use rules-based market profile of your most satisfied and loyal customers to frame market-to-market searches for new prospects

My point is this is that all of the above mentioned stuff sounds great if not essential ― and I think the last 7 posts I’ve done on this subject show that this is not so much about rocket science as it is about ownership and effort. Every company that is serious about growth (sometimes survival) needs to have a CEI-type initiative in place as a part of the organizational DNA. To that, I now add that these metrics are a tool to be used for holding the right people accountable for the right things. Knowing why customers become genuinely loyal to a supplier has everything to do with taking actionable intelligence from the bottomless well of information that is “the customer experience” and plying it back into the strategies and tactics that make your company tick.

Sales organizations that rely too much on relationship selling may not be as inclined as others to take a metrics driven approach. In fact, some studies say that in sectors such as manufacturing just more than half are less likely to consistently use comprehensive customer experience metrics as a part of their prospecting strategy. I think that could be a reason why American manufacturing is getting its collective butt kicked.

Stay tuned for more next week.

This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke.  Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems.  She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient.  She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.

Metrics, metrics, metrics…don’t know about you, but our sales team hates the word!  Some of them claim it’s the big brother feeling, some of them just hate having to keep track of one more thing, but for management, metrics are the lifeblood of our organization.

Here at ReachForce we have an inside sales model so we sell just about every deal over the phone.  We used to be content just tracking meetings set, proposals sent out and deals closed.  We felt like keeping up with these few metrics was enough.  We were at ease knowing most of what was going on, but when our sales team struggled we had zero visibility into why.

As we have grown as an organization we have learned that we can’t be lax on metrics, regardless of what someone “typically delivers”.  When we would notice a hiccup in our sales results, our initial knee-jerk reaction was to change how we approached things, re-visit our value proposition and the way we are communicating it to potential prospects, talk about what triggers, etc.  All great things to discuss and reinforce but it didn’t lead to the big change we wanted to see.  We went back to the drawing board.  We started looking at things a little differently and we noticed some trends among the metric conversion rates and numbers for our top performers, trends we had no line of sight into before.

Here’s what we did:

Displayed activity and metrics for the entire company to see.  It now was very obvious when someone is struggling.  Everyone’s information is updated every day – metrics reporting is now mandatory. Does our sales team like this?  Probably not but my thought is, if they are delivering then what does it really matter?  And, let’s face it, like most start ups sales is the lifeline for our business.

Since instituting mandatory metrics tracking and “the board” we have seen some pretty great results.  Having an instant, always available picture of sales activity makes tracking things through the funnel and forecasting much clearer for us.   Just imagine, if you know how many connects a sales rep has to make to set a meeting and how many meetings it takes to get a proposal, partner that with your proposal to close rate and bingo, you’ve got a good idea of how much activity will be needed to drive a close.  The cool thing about this is that for us, the reverse engineering of activity translates pretty well into results.

On the other side of the house, instituting mandatory metrics has made sales more transparent to marketing.  Our marketing team now has a much better idea of what our sales team needs to hit our company goals.  Additionally, our marketing team uses the same numbers to gauge:

• what marketing messages are the most effective
• what messages aren’t driving hand raisers
• what kinds of programs are needed to drive the leads sales needs
• how many or how big programs need to be so our sales team can spend time talking to warm prospects, not cold leads

Simply put, metrics may be a hassle for some but they are a necessity for both Marketing and Sales to keep a pulse on their ultimate challenge – driving more business faster and more efficiently.

What key metrics are you tracking?  Are they giving you the information you need to make the right decisions for your business?

I’d also love to know if anyone else is tracking daily or weekly metrics in a public place.  It seems to be working here.  In fact, it has really upped the competition among our sales team.

This is the final post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 5 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title, Predictable vs. Spray and Pray and Nurture vs. Capture

A survey of B2B Marketing organizations by SiriusDecisions determined that the marketing departments of high performing companies significantly influenced or contributed at least 30% of the opportunities in the pipeline.

With Deliberate Marketing, virtually any marketing organization can achieve similar or even better results.  Not to toot my own horn, but here at ReachForce, Marketing contributes over 80% of new customers.

Deliberate Marketing focuses B2B Marketers on business objectives like adding opportunities to the pipeline, increasing revenues, acquiring new customers, and maximizing the return on marketing programs.

No longer is marketing worried about meeting or exceeding a 2% response rate. Deliberate Marketers value lead quality over lead quantity and they are motivated to move qualified buyers through the pipeline as efficiently and quickly as possible.

If you want to learn more about Deliberate Marketing and how to increase qualified buyers in the sales funnel, check out our new eBook, Funnelnomics I: Deliberate Marketing.

This is the 7th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEITM) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6)

Here is the outline we’ve been following:

1. CEI Initiative Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
5. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
6. (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting

So far we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for scoring to examine three existing customer scenarios as examples:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying CEI-metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building CEI-lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.

Next on the list is to take a look at using CEI response data to help locate, target and engage with net-New prospects.

Reference Account Management

The most obvious and useful way CEI scoring benefits the new sales process is the buttoned down way it sorts advocacy dynamics and pinpoints which current customers would make the best references based on data analysis, not on someone’s opinion. There is nothing more powerful from a news sales perspective than having a well stocked supply of sales ready references. It happens every day across the world, thousands of times a day ― a sales person bursts into the marketing or account manager’s office needing three references to connect with their prospect. Not only is the list of needed attributes arms length, but it all needs to happen before tomorrow afternoon. Sound familiar? Yes it does.

This scenario takes us back to the first exercise we did for determining what a customer’s advocacy rating is. Remember it’s a matter of reading how a customer feels about their entire experience with your company using a scoring schema that takes metrics from both qualitative (loyalty) and quantitative (satisfaction) feedback into account. So if asked to produce recommendations about what customers should be the best sales-ready references we’d produce response scores rendered from a two-step lens build that would look something like this:

Step 1 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

Once each row on the customer list has an assigned CEI Advocacy Score, simply sort this column in descending order and in combination with the column for customer response time to your survey plus overall satisfaction scores, plus Key Weight. This  (if you remember back to the 1st and 2nd posts in this series) is because the survey invitations were sent as an integrated campaign, i.e. first an email, then another, then a phone call reminder from the account manager, then another from an executive, then perhaps another email, etc., thus determining how quick to respond each survey taker was. It stands to reason that someone who responded quickly in combination with high scores from Advocacy, Satisfaction and Key Weight are going to be a good sales ready reference account.

Step 2 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

So the above mentioned sort produces a top 10 list based on:

Next week we’ll cover ways to build rules-based profiles of your most successful customers and your relationships with them and then use the data to score how well new company targets match the rules.

Here on The B2B Lead we declared Barack Obama (of course now President Obama) to be Marketer of the Year (and Advertising Age had something to say about that too) on November 5th, after winning the presidency.  He and his team had a marketing strategy unlike any other before him.  They had a clearly defined message of Change and targeted that message to the people by speaking to them in a way and through a forum they already understood.  He understood the power of viral marketing and social media and embraced it, using it to his advantage.  I believe this played a major role in him first winning the democratic nomination and ultimately the presidency.

My question now is – will he continue?  He united many Americans under the promise of Change and reached out to them where they were to deliver his message.  By having a presence on many social networking sites, he seemed accessible, a people’s politician.  I believe that his presidency will be strongest if he continues to communicate with the people the way he did during his campaign.  Don’t we all want a people’s president?

But it seems since the campaign ended, there is little to no involvement in the same social sites that were instrumental in getting Obama elected.  For example, his LinkedIn profile still lists him as US Senator and Presidential Candidate.  His Facebook page still has over 3.8 million supporters and over 500,000 wall posts but little to no interaction from Obama or his team.  His supporters seem to still be interacting on Facebook but without much from the big guy himself.

What Obama did do after the election is create change.gov.  This site was set up to allow Americans “opportunities to participate in redefining our government.”  The site did offer some neat opportunities for Americans to give feedback and their opinions for where the country should be headed.  Unfortunately, as of today, the site has been taken down and directs you to instead visit whitehouse.gov.

The new whitehouse.gov includes a blog as well as the President’s soon to come weekly video addresses (past Presidents did these too, in case you didn’t know, but have always been on the radio).  The first blog post comes from Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House.  It is very informative and gives you an idea of what to expect from the new administration.  I felt the most notable was that they “will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”  You can also sign up for email updates from the President.

The new website went up exactly at 12:01pm today so not everything has been completely fleshed out.  Phillips wrote, “We’d also like to hear from you — what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know. Like the transition website and the campaign’s before that, this online community will continue to be a work in progress as we develop new features and content for you. So thanks in advance for your patience and for your feedback.”

I am looking forward to seeing what else they add.  I hope there is continued involvement in the social networking sites that contributed to Obama being elected to the White House.  Or is his Facebook profile now a matter of national security?

This is the fifth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 4 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title and Predictable vs. Spray and Pray.

Deliberate Marketing doesn’t involve capturing any and all leads, then tossing them over the fence to sales. Deliberate Marketing is about engaging with prospects, understanding their needs and scoring them based on their interests and behavior to determine their stage in the buying cycle. It’s about nurturing them with targeted communications and offers until they are ready to engage with sales.

A prospect that downloads a whitepaper probably needs to be further nurtured by marketing before being passed on to sales, whereas a prospect that requests a 30-day trial can be immediately handed off to sales.  This is different for each business; be sure to have an agreement with sales on when leads should be handed over.

With a Deliberate Marketing approach, B2B Marketers can ensure their leads receive the proper follow-up and that buyers are not discarded simply because they are not ready to make a purchase immediately.  Feedback loops between marketing and sales are necessary so that any leads that are passed to sales too early can be sent back to marketing for continued nurturing.