The Innovative Marketer

Can You Align Sales and Marketing?

If you do a search for "sales and marketing alignment" on Google, you'll see we've been talking about this elusive concept for more than 20 years. So if some of the brightest minds in management and systems thinking have been ruminating on this problem for so long and it's still plaguing board rooms all across the world, is this a solvable problem?

Yes and no.

It's a challenge of multiple facets including change management, systems thinking and proper implementation of technology. And most of all, you need discipline and honesty throughout your company. If you have the willingness to solve the problem of functional mis-alignment, here are a couple of places to start:

1. Get agreement from the CEO that this is important.

If you don't get buy in from the head of the company, trying to do this is an academic exercise. And you'd be surprised how many CEOs aren't interested in the change management exercise that makes up the backbone of really bringing marketing and sales into alignment. Advice: If your CEO is one of these, quit your job, short the company's stock and be grateful that you escaped the pit of doom that the company will become.

2. Promise sales that if they tell you what they want, marketing will deliver it.

Doesn't matter what it is. Do they want a list of names? Provide it. They looking for fully qualified leads with all BANT (budget, authority, need and timeframe) criteria defined? Fine. it just costs money. But the flip side is once sales agrees to it, you write it down, sign it, send it to everyone who may be called in a deposition in the future, and make it law. Because marketing departments who are trying to fix a problem with sales often have low credibility, this is critical.

3. Report on the same metrics.

If you ask sales and marketing leaders what they report to the management team (or the Board), very often you'll get things like this from them: Marketing: downloads, names of trade show attendees, "touches" (unless you are in the spa industry, this probably isn't an important metric), web traffic, social media mentions Sales: closed deals, total revenue, opportunity pipeline, sales forecast, qualified leads Make sure the management team cares about, and talks about, the same measures. and here's one bonus action that's been a controversial topic these days:

4. Bite the bullet and give marketing variable compensation.

There's a lot of resistance to this in the marketing world. The logic goes, "we can open the door to a lead, but sales has to close it." That's pithy. And hogwash. Marketing can do a lot to affect lead volume, quality, velocity and close of business. If it means one less doodad they produce and get out in the field to help close, so be it. By paying marketing in part on closed business, the organization puts its money where its alignment is.

Lastly, you can't tell your marketing and sales organization HOW to do this. Alignment is a code word for change management and the only way you can be successful is if all stakeholders have a part to play in figuring out the tactics to implement. If you try to impose things on the organization (like forcing marketing and sales to attend each other's meetings), you increase the chances of fomenting resentment among people who are very creative at inventing ways not to do things.

How to Not Get Fired as a Marketer

Consider this job description on LinkedIn:

 Pre-IPO startup looking for a marketer with experience in advertising, trade shows, long-cycle product management, public and analyst relations and big-budget campaigns.  Must be able to create 18-to-24-month marketing plans and adhere to them rigidly.   Experience managing a creative team of marketers and Madison avenue agencies.  Must be able to present in front of management team on metrics to include reach, brand value, amount of marketing activity and hits in conventional media.  

What do you notice about this description? 

Well, first of all, it doesn't exist.  And it will never exist again.  It's a relic, a souvenir of an era that is coughing and sputtering its final breaths.   This job description embodies the closed, herarchical, company is in control of the buyer's process that was so prevalanet in industrial marketing during most of last century.

What else do you notice?

It's probably the job description of someone you know, someone who went to a top-tier school, got a great education, maybe lives in a great house with Italian marble entryways and sub zero refrigerator.  Someone who is great at Scrabble and likes to golf.  Someone whose educational background has left them as unprepared for the new world of marketing as a bicyclist at the Daytona 500.  Someone who will soon be fired.

If you want to ensure a short-lived career at a company as a B2B marketer, limit yourself to only those skills you learned in business school years ago.

Today's marketing leaders must have a diverse set of skills, perhaps more diverse than anyone on the executive management team. The ideal CMO has the analytical mind of Galileo, the creativity of Picasso, the leadership skills of Ghandi, the foresight of Nostradamus, the design sense of Steve Jobs, the communication skills of Franklin Roosevelt and the patience of Mother Theresa.  

Modern marketing automation solutions have democratized the availability of the tools necessary to tie the jumble and pace of marketing activities to real revenue results for business.  The way to not get fired is not to buy a piece of marketing automation.  It's to become a better marketer and contribute to real revenue growth.

Lauren Carlson over at the Software Advice blog wrote an interesting article last week about the skills gap in most marketing organizations.  She spoke with Carlos Hidalgo, who started the Marketing Automation Institute (I'm an advisory board member) earlier this year to help address that gap.  My partner and I also started DemandCon in order to spread best practices in the world of demand generation to the marketing world in general.

And there's evidence that the battleship of marketing is slowly adjusting its course towards a brighter future. Consider these other promising signs:

• The average CMO tenure is up to 42 months, a huge increase over five years ago, when it was less than two years.  
• There's a tremendous amount of capital flowing into the marketing automation market now, indicating that investors see this as a huge area for growth in the coming decade.
• Sales is coming around to the idea that they are no longer in control of the sales cycle.  The buyer is.  And that requires good sales people to work closely with marketing to stay close to customer's needs and intents.

Now is a great time to become a demand generation marketer.  See this article over at the Post-Click Marketing Blog which gives some advice on how to succeed as a marketing professional.

 

 

 

Put the Fun Back in the Funnel

Content marketing is a gaping maw, endlessly begging for a variety of words and pictures and videos, insatiable in its need for the new and better and more attractive.

Some of the hottest trends in B2B marketing this year -- Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, Twitter, Inbound Marketing -- all require you to have something to say and an interesting way in which to say it.

So why is content marketing so boring?  Does it always have to be this way?

In working with hundreds of demand generation marketers this year, I've seen the same situation over and over again:  Folks have been told to focus on people, process and technology.  

And dutifully, they get their organization primed for change management, organize dozens of meetings (held while standing, because that's also the trend these days) with sales and marketing leadership to get alignment, and buy sophisticated marketing automation systems to power it all.

Then they write copy like this:

The proliferation of mobile devices within the enterprise is one of the hottest technology trends in business today. The explosion of mobile devices in use has created a headache for IT managers struggling to cope with the security implications of this growth. At the same time, this disruption has created a unique opportunity for solution providers to capitalize on this need.

XXX has expanded our XX lead delivery service to adapt to this rapidly growing segment of the market and help our customers identify and reach qualified prospects at every stage of the purchase cycle... Blah blah blech

We need to step up our game. But how?   Here are a couple of ideas:

• Hire a great direct response copywriter.  
• Find an out-of-work humor columnist to write for you.  
• Get a little loose and attempt it yourself.  

Just stop with the boring corporate-speak, please?

And if you think you don't have it in you, you need only to look to our B2C colleagues for inspiration, this one from Woot.com's web site on August 2, 2011 this year, selling a ballistic grey looking USB drive:

BURIED TREASURE

There’s gold in them there USB Flash Drives.

Legend has it that Thornton B. Centon, reclusive billionaire and founder of Centon Electronics, buried his treasure in one of these here 32GB USB flash drives. Legend has it that upon his deathbed, as his twelve spoiled-rotten children begged him to reveal the secret of the location of his wealth, he screamed “I shall never tell. I will take the secret, compatible with both Windows and Mac and ensconced in durable aluminum, to the grave!” And then, legend has it, he patted his pockets nervously and said, “Oh crap, I think I forgot it!” and with those words, he died.

Some say that the treasure is the access code to an off-shore bank account. Some say that what is on the drive is not a treasure but a map to a treasure. And some say it is a map that leads you to a treasure map. And some say the second map will bring you to a chest, in which is a second USB drive which contains a document that says, “there is no treasure.” And some say that the knowledge of there not being a treasure is a treasure in itself, but those people are just dumb.

Some believe that the treasure is an executable file that takes up all 32 gigabytes of the Flash Drive. And when its finder runs the file, his computer’s DVD-drive will eject a platinum DVD ofRequiem for a Dream except all of the characters are played by cats, making it hilarious and fun to watch. Others claim that the file will transform the finder’s computer, in front of your very eyes, into the woman of his dreams, as long as he dreams of a woman who only likes to talk about backing up his hard drive and has lips that taste like hard plastic...

 You can do it.  Put a little more fun into your funnel.

B2B Marketers Are Getting it All Wrong

Recently, I was introduced to Sharon Drew Morgen, an Austin-based, marketing veteran and NY Times best-selling author who created a buyer-centric sales and marketing model long before those of us in the demand generation discipline started teaching the process.

Sharon Drew is whip smart, opinionated and (in typical Texas fashion) not shy about calling it as she sees it.  Here’s an excerpt of our interchange:

Sharon Drew, you coined the term "buyer's journey" decades ago. How has the buyer's journey changed in recent years?

Not as much as you think. To begin with, we haven't spent much time considering the buying decision path.  Sales focuses on needs assessment and solution placement, and ignores  the behind-the-scenes change management issues that buyers must  address before they can buy.  So the trip between the non-solution based decision issues necessary for internal agreement/buy-in and purchase, still has the same steps it always has (Even more, given the economy and global workforce.)

Note that until a Buying Decision Team is fully formed, and their voices added to the solution choice, no solution will be purchased.

The computer and net has made it both easier and more complex  for the buyer to decide. But the journey is still a human one: without buy-in and change management addressed, our brilliant solutions and technology are meaningless. The addition of marketing automation is offering prospects more data, but that doesn't change the buyer's off-line journey.      

Billions of dollars in time and purchasing is wasted every year in pursuit of the "lead."  What is everyone doing wrong? 

The baseline assumption  is  that because it there is a 'need', there should be a sale.  But a 'lead' is  merely a name until the entire Buying Decision Team determines all of the folks who will touch the solution.  With our Marketing Automation System, we have no idea at what stage of the buying decision path this 'lead' is at. The time it takes for buyers to come up with their own change management answers is the length of the sales cycle, regardless of the data we send them.

And our leads are most likely not leads, as evidenced by the very low closing rate we have. Sales closes 7%; marketing automation closes less than 1%. We spend so much time trying to figure out the behavior of what a 'lead' looks like, but we are merely looking through the solution placement prism. It's an entirely different picture when you realize the off-line, private, buy-in journey they must take prior to a purchase.  And we aren't facilitating them, which we could be.

Why are companies getting it all wrong, Sharon Drew?

I see companies throwing a lot of money at sales and marketing automation, and still maintaining the focus on lead generation and appointment setting - all with the belief that getting in front of the right people (impossible until the entire Buying Decision Team has been put together) will allow them to present their data. But they end up getting small numbers of people into a meeting - often only a fraction of the Buying Decision Team - and offering good data far too early for them to know what to do with.

I also see a lot of time/resource waste, chasing prospects rather than helping them navigate the decision path and change management issues. At the moment, I'm not seeing a lot 'right' in the field, although some marketing automation folks are working with me to design software that will enter the buyer's decision path at the point of the first idea. 

Is the problem with marketing automation the technology, the process people use to take advantage of the technology, or the people themselves?

Marketing automation technology follows the  inefficient  sales model of needs assessment and solution placement.  We should use technology at the beginning of the buyer's decision path. I have coded the 13 steps that happen behind-the-scenes, and prospects get on line for three of these steps. We can not only "follow" them but also influence them early on in their path. 

We need to start thinking differently about what we want to do: do we want to sell? or have buyers buy? There is a different technology need for each.

If you were giving one piece of advice to a newly minted demand generation professional, what would that be?

Begin as a change agent. Develop your site  and marketing automation capability to help buyers align the entire Buying Decision Team and figure out how to get the buy-in with everyone who touches the solution. Put on a leader hat, rather than a marketer/sales hat first. Until or unless they do this portion - it's about 90% of the buyer's decision path - they can't buy anyway. Instead of pushing on those few who we believe to be 'leads'  and picking off the low hanging fruit , we can help so many more  buyers  to buy.  There is no reason we can't have a 40% close rate - from first call.

Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? Two different activities. 

Sharon Drew Morgen is a self-professed marketing automation curmudgeon.  She's based out of Austin, Texas.  You can contact her at http://sharondrewmorgen.com

Crafting Messages That Stick with Chip Heath

This is an all-time favorite of The Innovative Marketer radio show listeners.  And the principles are even more releveant in today's content marketing-obsessed B2B circles.  Enjoy.

A lot of authors have written books on copywriting, but Chip and Dan Heath have written the definitive book on crafting lasting stories.

Dan is a teacher and Chip is a Stanford professor, who has studied and analyzed hundreds of urban legends (remember the man who woke up in his ice-filled hotel bathroom to learn his kidney had just been harvested?) to determine what makes them so memorable.

The result are six concrete attributes of stories that I guarantee you'll remember.

Listen to this Podcast I recorded with Chip a few years back for a lot more on how you can create messages that stick. And, he'll be speaking live this fall at the Eloqua Experience in San Francisco if you want to hear more from him.

Here's a link to the urban legend catalog site I mentioned during my intro.

Why Salesforce.com Might Buy HubSpot

Yesterday on a Focus roundtable, I asked the panelists to make a prediction about what, if any, Salesforce.com would announce in the area of marketing automation at their big Dreamforce conference in San Francisco next month.

Their consensus:  nothing.

I decided to place an outside bet and go on record that Salesforce would acquire HubSpot, a fast-growing marketing automation vendor.  I predicted that Salesforce.com would incorporate HubSpot's offering into its marketing cloud and hedged my bet by saying it may not be next month (almost certainly not), but it is possible.  Here are some reasons why that just might happen:

1. Marketing automation helps drive CRM adoption success.

From its earliest days as a sales force automation system, Salesforce.com has required sales people to enter account information, enter forecasts, enter deal information, seemingly for the benefit of management.   Adding a sophisticated marketing automation system into the mix increases the value of the overall solution to the sales team.  Salesforce has already indicated they are interested in making their product a "destination" site for the enterprise with the introduction of their Chatter product last year.

2. HubSpot fills a gap in Salesforce's product offering

Most marketers know that the marketing functionality in Salesforce.com could be more complete.   Sure, you can capture web leads, track prospect activity through a campaigns tab in the application, and perform some data manipulation.  But the features are way too basic for a sophisticated marketer and way too confusing for a small business marketer.  HubSpot's easy-to-use interface, along with recently acquired company Performable's great analytics would make Salesforce an even more attractive option to companies of every size.

3. Salesforce has been dancing around the space for years

From early announcements after buying Kieden, an early search engine marketing AppExchange partner, to recent rumors that Salesforce was in negotiation to buy an email/marketing automation provider in recent years, it's clear Salesforce has been thinking about beefing up its marketing offering for some time.  The recent investment in HubSpot could be a signal that they are finally interested in making a move.

4. The one who has the most enterprise data wins

Salesforce has clearly stated in recent years that they want to be the Google for the enterprise, transforming themselves from a set of products into a platform for companies to run their business on.   In recent years, they've added Database.com to their offering as well as platform development tools.   Marketing automation generates the biggest amount of enterprise data of any back office software, and most of the current marketing automation partners do NOT use the Salesforce database to warehouse that data.  There's a risk that a Salesforce.com customer could unhook their CRM system and integrate their marketing automation data with Oracle's CRM on Demand, SugarCRM or Microsoft's solution.  By offering their own marketing solution, Salesforce.com brings that important data under its own covers.

5.  HubSpot and Salesforce.com could grow the marketing automation market

Industry analyst David Raab tagged the marketing automation industry as experiencing lackluster growth.  While it's been around for 10 years, it hasn't seen nearly the growth of the CRM business.  

Part of the reason for this is that marketing automation vendors haven't substantially grown their industry penetration beyond technology and business services.  Sure, there are early adopters in other industries, but there is still a lot of money out there for the company that can take a good story to the B2B market.  HubSpot has a great story and Salesforce has the industry's best platform from which to tell that story. 

Sure, there are dozens of reasons why this might not be a good idea.   Salesforce makes plenty of money from the existing marketing automation vendors, from event sponsorship to helping to lock customers into an integration between MA and CRM software.   And there's an argument that the seat-based licensing model of Salesforce is inconsistent with the transaction or database size pricing of many of the marketing automation vendors.  Still, with the recent Salesforce acquisition of Radian 6, the company has shown that it won't hesitate to enter a segment it finds attractive, regardless of the business model.

Join me for a discussion on the future of demand generation

While the summer might be seeing its dog days, the world of demand ten is just heating up.   The Marketing Automation Institute launched this month and demand gen marketers are commanding significant salary premiums for their expertise.  Is the industry poised for explosive growth or has marketing automation jumped the shark?

Tomorrow we'll be convening a mighty roundtable of demand generation experts, including Jason Hekl and David Lewis, both of whom have been VPs of Marketing and managers of sophisticated marketing automation operations, along with Thor Johnson, a veteran of the marketing automation industry and a true systems thinker. 

We'll talk about the current state of things in the demand generation industry, what companies are getting it right, and maybe even make some side bets on what will be announced at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce show next month.

Join us for this free wheeling discussion.
 
If you have questions you'd like me to ask the experts, you can Tweet me @sgersh

Why I Joined the Marketing Automation Institute

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post for the Post Click Marketing Blog called, It's a Good Time to be a Demand Generation Marketer.  In it, I wrote about the tremendous opportunity and near-zero unemployment a talented demand generation professional experiences today.

 Companies are hurting for talent, specifically the left brain/right brain approach to creative marketing with a focus on revenue generation that today's B2B companies require in order to be successful. 

And that translates into faster promotions, higher salaries and better job security for those who take demand generation education seriously in their careers. 

A few months ago, my partner Shawn and I added our contribution to the widening of the demand gen discipline with the inaugural DemandCon event in San Francisco.   Over 300 marketers from around the country got together to teach, learn and debate current issues in demand generation today.

Yesterday, another organization launched, dedicated to the idea that marketers who acquire new skills, education and best practices are those who are poised to achieve superior career success.  

The Marketing Automation Institute (MAI) will provide education, community and certification for marketing professionals who want to learn how to become true revenue marketers.  The institute is helmed by Carlos Hidalgo and features a fantastic faculty, including Craig Rosenberg (The Funelholic), David Raab, Trish Bertuzzi and Larissa DeCarlo, among others. 

I joined the Executive Council and will teach the first course on Marketing Automation Foundations because the more people we can bring in to the marketing automation fold, the more quickly this industry will grow.

What's unique about the MAI is that it's not tied to one vendor or analyst's approach, but rather pulls from some of the foremost experts in the industry in translating the state-of-the-art marketing automation approaches into easily learned step-by-step lessons to help formalize the development of demand generation professionals.

Marketing Automation is a fast-growing field with a very mature set of technology companies.  Chances are, your company can benefit from getting the training and support necessary to best take advantage of the software available to help improve your sales and marketing effectiveness.

 

Do We Need a Set of Generally Accepted Marketing Principles?

Last month, the New York Times printed an article in collaboration with the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Default Major: Skating Through B-School.”   In the article, Times writer David Glenn reported on the concern that business spend less time preparing for class than students in any other broad field, and mentioned that generally, the areas of management and marketing were considered to be “soft” fields of study.

As sales and marketing professionals, our credibility is under attack.  The article suggests that we are less prepared, less focused, less disciplined and less hard working than any other area of the business.  Are they right?   And if they are, what do we do about it?

At DemandCon, a sales and marketing show for which I’m a co-organizer, we’re focusing making sure that the people involved in the marketing process are well prepared for the challenges in demand generation today.  With ever more fractionalization of customers into new communities of interest, plus the addition of mega-channels like Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s more important than ever to be aware of how we can make ourselves more available to our customers in ways that help them learn, and eventually, buy from us.

At many marketing shows, you hear the old chestnut about the three-legged stool — people, process and technology.  While it’s easy to find information on the Web today about technology, and consultants who focus on process are rampant, there is less information available on how to attract, hire, train and retain the best people to make your demand generation efforts successful.  And there is no standardized certification for demand generation professionals that assure you that who you are hiring have the skills and abilities necessary for today’s hyper competitive business environment.

One of the goals of DemandCon is to explicitly recognize that demand generation is a discipline and as such needs a set of common language, activities, processes and measurements so that companies can benchmark themselves and align their sales and marketing metrics with the rest of business.  Just like there is a set of Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP) which businesses adopt, there should also be a set of Generally Accepted Marketing Principals (GAAMP) that companies should follow, and these skills should be transferrable across organizations.  Through educational events like DemandCon and also more focused institutions of learning, demand generation must transform into the vanguard of the GAAMP approach.

By focusing on the People part of the equation we can reframe the discipline of marketing and sales from a “soft” field of inquiry to a discipline as rigorous and credentialed as law, medicine or accounting.

The Quickening Decay of Interest

Wham! 

It's a beautiful thing -- when a prospective customer's need briefly crosspollenates with something you are providing.   Maybe it's a captivating trade show exhibit.  Or an online advertisement.  Or a compelling piece of video.  Or a Tweet.

You have their interest, just for a moment. 

What do you do?

Smart marketers practice catch and release marketing, the type of marketing where once you hook them, you let them go and put out bigger bait.  Why?   It builds trust, the most precious currency you can hold as a marketer these days.  By making sure that a prospect doesn't regret having responded to your offer, you build credibility for your next offer.  Next thing you know it, they're engaging in a conversation with you.  Building rapport.   This sets you apart from 80% of the majority of marketers out there who go to generate leads with a giant club in hand.

So how do you stay in touch so their interest doesn't wane?   This is commonly called lead nurturing, or content marketing.   What you want to do is send little bites of information, easily consumable, imminently relevant to the person you are sending it to, the company they work for in the industry they are in.

And then wait.  A bit more information, just to stay in touch.  Always useful. 

The point is that interest and focus on you is a perishable commodity.  You have to continually earn it or you lose it.  And getting it back once you've lost it is decidedly more challenging than gaining it in the first place.

Try this:  call up a prospective customer.  Or, if you're too shy, call a friend or relative.  Tell them one small thing about what you do.  Wait for their response, hopefully a question.  Now you have permission to provide more information.  And so on. 

Interest - treasure it and recognize that just like any organic thing, it ages and withers over time.