B2B marketing blog

Inaugural ABMie Awards Recognize 7 Top Performers in Account Based Marketing

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 16:38:47 GMT

Account-based marketing is arguably the hottest trend in business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing. But is it likely to outlast the initial wave of enthusiasm? This month brought one indication of its potential staying power.

In mid-December, the ABMie awards became to account-based marketing what the Emmy awards were to the fledgling television industry in January 1949.

The ABMie awards are a tongue-in-cheek allusion to television’s popular Emmy Awards, now a 67-year-old tradition that attracts millions of TV viewers.

At a gala banquet, about 150 well-dressed attendees applauded the seven first-ever recipients of ABMie awards. Presented at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Atlanta, the awards honor excellence in account-based marketing (or ABM).

Recognizing an emerging business segment

ABM will never be as broadly influential as television. But it has a shot at becoming similarly transformational for a niche of B2B sales and marketing professionals.

Like television, ABM offers a new lens through which an industry sees itself and the world it serves.

Honoring top performers

Both the Emmys and the ABMies began as ways to recognize star performers and draw attention to a nascent industry.

The ABMies are a brainchild of Sangram Vajre and Nikki Nixxon. Mr. Vajre is chief marketing officer at Terminus and Ms. Nixon is director of marketing for #FlipMyFunnel. Terminus, which hosted the awards, is an Atlanta tech firm that provides systems and services to help B2B companies practice ABM at scale.

Ms. Nixon said the goal of the new awards is to recognize and to honor the best and brightest practitioners in account-based marketing, sales, and customer success. She said Terminus plans to continue the awards annually.

And the winners are...

The December awards recognized winners in seven categories:

Top ABM Newcomer

For an organization that has been practicing ABM for less than two years and is driving high return on investment from their campaigns

Winner: Kristen Wendel, Director of Marketing Operations at Version One

Best Comprehensive ABM Program

For the B2B organization that best aligns their marketing, sales, and customer success teams to drive revenue and create an amazing customer experience

Winner: Joe Quinn, Americas Section Manager, Account Based Marketing at National Instruments

Best Account Based Demand Generation Program

For the B2B organization that best generates new demand through a highly targeted, account-based approach

Winner: Lisa Skinner, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Localytics

Best Customer Retention and Engagement Campaign

For the B2B organization that uses an account-based approach to reduce churn and get customers more engaged with their product

Winner: Adam Polaszewski, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Support.com

Top Female ABM Leader

For the female ABM Leader who best challenges the status quo in her organization to drive revenue and improve customer experience

Winner: Masha Finkelstein, Demand Generation Lead at BetterWorks

Best Account Based Sales Development Program

For the B2B organization that best uses an account-based approach to B2B sales development

Winner: Carolyn Feibleman, Solutions Consultant at EverString

Best Pipeline Acceleration Campaign

For to the B2B organization that demonstrates creativity and operational efficiency to best accelerate pipeline

Winner: TJ Nokleby, Manager of Demand Generation at InsideSales.com

A fast-paced, light-hearted ceremony

The awards were presented in a style similar to that of the Emmys, with a dramatic video introduction for each category. Before announcing each award, a presenter opened a sealed envelope containing the name of the winner.

Unlike the bloated Emmy awards, this program moved at a fast clip. Presenters offered no description of the winning programs, and recipients offered no comments.

In this emerging field of practice, it would have been helpful for the program to provide more information about what distinguished the winners.

How winners were chosen

Eight judges chose the winners from a list of nominees that Terminus assembled. No one at Terminus knew who the winners were before the attendees did, Ms. Nixon said.

The judges were:

Maria Pergolino, SVP of Global Marketing at Apttus
Matt Senatore, Service Director of Account-Based Marketing at SiriusDecisions
Koka Sexton, Founder of Social Selling Labs
Julia Stead, Director of Demand Generation at Invoca
Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD
Matt Heinz, President at Heinz Marketing, Inc.
Tyler Lessard, CMO at Vidyard
David Raab, MarTech Guru at Raab Associates.

Ms. Nixon noted that none of the judges worked for an organization that would benefit from selecting one recipient over another.

Why did the program committee think it appropriate to recognize the "top female ABM leader?" Might Masha Finkelstein, who won the award in that category, feel challenged to explain to her team at home why gender is relevant to excellence in ABM?

"Women are historically under-represented in tech," Nikki Nixon said. "Because most of our community represents tech companies, we try as an organization to always ensure women are highlighted, whether it's ABMies, #FlipMyFunnel conferences, or even our [marketing] content."

#FlipMy Funnel is a one-day conference and roadshow that has convened seven times in various U.S. cities since August 2015. An Atlanta #FlipMyFunnel conference followed the day after the award dinner.

Sponsors of #FlipMyFunnel helped pay the cost of the ABMie awards and the event. Proceeds from the dinner were donated to an Atlanta non-profit called PowerMyLearning, which makes computers and educational software available to students in underserved primary schools.

A historical perspective

At the time of the first Emmys in 1949, fewer than a million television sets were in use in the United States.

The first Emmy ceremony recognized only six winners, all for programming local to Los Angeles.

The first Emmy award for Most Outstanding Television Personality went to 20-year-old Shirly Dinsdale, with her puppet sidekick Judy Splinters.

By comparison, the ABMies appear to be off to a much more promising start.

Q4 Deal Triage: Time to Focus on Opportunities You Can Win

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 13:03:22 GMT

For many sales organizations, the starting bell for Q4 sounded on October 1. Now only two months are left.

The heat is seriously on for any sales team that must stretch to achieve their year-end number.

This article provides suggestions for how to perform something I call “deal triage.”
Triage is a concept from emergency medicine. Its goal is to focus attention and limited resources on the most urgent cases that can be saved.

Here's an example: Eight patients need your attention, but your ambulance accommodates only two. You have to choose which two go in the ambulance.

The topic is especially timely for companies that engage in big, business-to-business (or B2B) sales transactions. Q4 is challenging because of the holiday season.

Anticipate resource constraints

Because it takes a lot of resource and effort to close a big deal, you need to budget your resources carefully.

Resources are especially constrained when everyone's trying to close business at the same time. So double down on your commitments to a few carefully chosen deals.

Think where to focus the limited time and attention of your senior executives. In which deals should you "bridge" them to their counterparts on the customer side?

Remember, the procurement organization in your customer company is also going through their own triage process. They're trying to figure our which deals will go on their list of high-priority purchases to close before the end of the year.

If your deal doesn't make it to their short list, you'll be standing out in the cold when December rolls around.

Assess your risks

Big deals always involve risk and uncertainty for both buyer and seller.

On the seller’s side, the risk that the deal will close late – or that it won’t close at all – increases as more decision influencers and business units get involved on the buyer’s side.

Consider the probabilities:

The chances of losing a deal to indecision are about one in four. Last year, 23% to 24% resulted in no decision, according to CSO Insights. The one-point difference was between the highest- and lowest-performing sales organizations. Other studies have shown the risk of indecision is as high as 60%.

The odds of losing a deal to a competitor are about the same as a coin toss. The average win rate for forecasted deals was about 48% in 2015, CSO Insights found in another study. Top-performing sales teams achieved 51%, and the worst performers 41%.

Slow economic growth and the election year are likely to increase the risks and uncertainties for deals occurring in the United States. So you may close even less than half of the deals you're counting on.

Prepare your short list

That's why triage is so important. It focuses your company's time and attention on your best deals first. You hold your more doubtful deals aside until you’ve attended to the ones on your short list.

Here’s some specific advice to improve the odds of achieving your number:

1. Quickly assess the opportunities in your pipeline.

Identify the deals you must win because of their size or their importance to your company.

Evaluate which of these you have the best chance of winning.

Distrust the forecasts your sales reps have provided. Remember, most forecasts are less reliable than a coin toss.

Be skeptical. This is no time for wishful thinking.

2. Handicap your most important deals.

Allow a margin of safety to allow for your team’s typical close rate.

Suppose you need an additional $2 million to achieve your quota. Add a margin of safety to allow for any quota credit you may lose during negotiations with the customer.

If you add a 20% for safety, your target becomes $2.4 million.

Then factor in your close rate. Focus on enough deals to net you $2.4 million if you close, say, 48% . That means you should target deals with a combined value of $5.0 million. (48% X $5.0 million = $2.4 million.)

If you achieve a better-than-average close rate, you’ll be solidly in the quota club.

Spread your risk across several deals if you can. Put your eggs in a few baskets.

If you find you don’t have enough good opportunities to reach a combined value of $5.0 million, you have a different set of problems. Triage is still helpful, but it’s not enough. Next time around, you must fix your lead generation and sales prospecting processes.

3. Double down on resources.

Make sure you short-listed deals get the resources and management attention they need.

Fast track them for resources such as pre-sales consulting, engineering, technical consulting, professional services, proposals, financial review, legal review, and so on.

Unless you have plenty of unused capacity, don’t waste precious resources on opportunities that haven’t made it through your triage process.

4. Keep a close eye on the deals you've chosen.

Coach your sales team to help them win the deals on your short list.

Good coaching can increase deal win rates by 9%, according to CSO Insights.

Set up a system for weekly – even daily – updates.

Be ready to provide any resources you may need to adapt to fast-changing situations.

Get help making the hard decisions

The math of your deal triage is simple. But other elements are much harder:

Judging which deals you can win
Coaching your team to win, using appropriate strategies and tactics for each
Monitoring changes in each deal
Responding fast to changes.

To manage these elements, I recommend a framework or methodology called Sales Compass. It’s a kind of deal-navigation system for managing deals you must win.

The framework is lightweight and portable. You can use it anywhere without need of special software, forms, whiteboards, or other paraphernalia.

The Sales Compass process is fast. You can use it during pipeline review calls. It doesn’t require your team to fill out paperwork. You can review an individual deal in a few minutes.

It’s also collaborative, meaning that it involves both sales managers and sales reps in creating appropriate strategies and tactics. Everyone learns.

You can use it with any sales methodology, including The Challenger Sale, Strategic Selling, Solution Selling, Customer-Centric Selling, Solution Selling, Baseline Selling, SPIN Selling, and Sandler.

Sales Compass has helped about 15 companies close millions of dollars of incremental business in the past five years. It probably works to your advantage that the method isn't more widely known.

You can get details from my friend and business partner, John Stopper of Northstar8 Performance Strategies.

Sources cited

Sales Management Optimization Study 2016. CSO Insights.

Sales Performance Optimization Trends 2016. CSO Insights.

Content Marketing For B2B Complex Sales: 10 Ways To Help Win the Deal

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 17:18:56 GMT

It's the fashion these days to write short, minimal content for business-to-business (or B2B) websites, even when the product or service is complex. The theory is that no one reads anymore.

Nonsense.

Websites are mainly for reading, or at least for browsing. When people make important decisions, they're hungry for information to guide their choices. They'll digest your content if you make it useful and interesting.

This post is for people who work at companies that sell complex, expensive products or services to other businesses. It focuses on ways that your website and the content you offer on it should be different from those of companies that sell simpler products.

Does your website provide enough of the right kind of information to help visitors make big buying decisions?

Hare are 10 suggestions to help you ensure that it does.

But first, a few words about what makes complex sales different from other B2B transactions.

How complex sales are different

A complex sale, by definition, is one where two or more people influence the buying decision.

B2B sales represent a broad range of complexity. The information needs of buyers vary widely across the spectrum of complexity. It's one thing to buy a new copier for the office. It's quite another to buy an enterprise software system for the entire company.

How complex are your company's sales? The answer depends on your customer's buying process. Here are a few of the many variables that add complexity:

How many people are involved in the buying process?
How many business functions or departments are involved?
Do your customers normally issue a detailed request for proposal?
Do they expect a formal ROI analysis?

These and other factors each add complexity. You can download a list of 22 factors here.

If you're unsure about the complexity of your customers' buying process, interview some customers and prospects. This is a great way to improve your website and your content marketing.

Sadly, few B2B companies interview customers to see how they can improve their content marketing. That's one reason why so many visitors to B2B websites find them lacking.

For more on this, see the 2015 B2B Web Usability Report.

10 ways to improve your content for complex sales

1. Anticipate a range of buying needs.

No two complex sales are ever exactly alike. A purchase decision that's very complex for one customer may be much less so for another customer. One customer may use different buying processes with the same vendor at different times.

Even if you intimately know your customers and their buying habits, each opportunity presents different circumstances.

Good salespeople know to handle each complex sale differently. They adjust their behavior to each situation.

In contrast, it's hard to adjust a website for sales of varying complexity.

Some websites use technology that displays different pages to different groups of visitors. Unless you have a website with this capability, you must design yours to work well for a "typical" sale.

With proper thought and planning, a good B2B website can accommodate common variations in the buyer's decision process.

For example, you can layer the information on your site so visitors can select the level of detail they want. You do so by using the "inverted pyramid" information structure used in news stories. You provide the general, high-level information first. Then you offer more detail deeper in your stream of content.

2. Provide clear and easy-to-find information for "scouts."

Early in a complex buying process, a company usually performs online research to identify potential vendors. The company may appoint one or more "scouts" to create an initial list for evaluation.

The scouts may be administrative assistants or junior employees who don't fully understand the business or its needs.

Scouts may also be senior executives. Surveys show that members of the C-suite often do their own research early in buying decisions that interest them personally.

If your company doesn't make it onto the scout's initial list, it will be hard for you to be considered later in their decision process.

Losing a potential customer early in their research process is especially damaging for big, highly complex sales. That's because there are fewer potential customers, and you have fewer opportunities to close such sales. Every loss, even at the top of the funnel, hurts that much more if your sales are big and infrequent.

So how do you appeal to a scout? First, your website must be easy to find through Google search and social media. It helps if your company is also listed by major directories and is covered by industry analysts and appropriate rating sites.

Second, your homepage and landing pages should provide clear and simple value propositions, without jargon. Clearly state the industries and kinds of organizations your company serves.

3. Provide enough detail.

Among companies that sell complex products or services, few provide enough information online.

Companies cite several reasons for providing less information:

"Our product information or sales messages change too fast. It's hard to keep the website up to date."
"We want prospects to talk to our sales reps, not make a decision from looking at our website."
"We want to hide sensitive information from our competitors."

All these reasons make good sense. But they risk frustrating your visitors, and they may hurt your chances of getting the sale.

Today visitors expect you to put more information online.

Until recently, vendors could assume that a buyer would call a sales rep for more information. But today this is a riskier assumption, unless your company is among the best-known vendors in its industry.

Recent research suggests that many buyers are waiting longer before they contact a salesperson. I believe this research applies less to complex sales than to transactional B2B sales. Serious customers are likely to interact with a salesperson throughout a complex sale. Even so, the research suggests that all buyers are forming more of their opinions and preferences through online research before they talk to salespeople.

Don't kid yourself that most visitors to your website will pick up the phone to ask for information they can't find on your site. Some won't do it, especially during their scouting process.

Some portion of your potential customers may move on, never to come back.

Here's a safe rule of thumb: The more complex your customer's decision process, the more information you should provide on your website.

Many companies seem to have this backwards. The more complex their product or service, the less information they provide online.

You can provide shorter and more digestible content for early in the buyer's decision process, when you're still trying to build awareness and interest. But you should also offer more substantial information for later stages when visitors want detailed information .

If you're worried about providing too much information your competitors can see online, put sensitive or customer-specific information behind a password. Make the password available only to visitors your sales team has qualified.

3. Provide information for the variety of people who influence the buying decision.

CEB (the Conference Executive Board) has published an often-quoted research finding that on average, 5.8 individuals are involved in a B2B purchase decision.

Don't fixate on that exact number. It may not apply to the kind of sales your company closes.

The CEB survey polled buyers who work mainly in larger companies. For an average of 5.4 influencers, the range is probably between 2 and 20, depending on the size of the customer's company and the complexity of the purchase.

The important point is that several buyers are likely to be involved. Maybe many will have a say, and your sales team may not be able to identify and reach all of them. To improve your chances of winning the decision, your website should serve their diverse information needs.

Effective websites provide information that helps your customer's scouts, internal advocates, or champions sell your solution on your behalf, at times without direct help from your sales team.

Decision influencers in your customer's company may come from various business functions, including Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, Finance, Legal, Information Technology, Engineering, Manufacturing, and so on.

These people are likely to have varying levels of seniority, ranging from mid-level managers to the C-suite and even board members.

Each business function and each level of seniority is likely to have different perspectives, preferences, requirements, preferred benefits, concerns, and perceptions of risk.

Each individual will have different preferences in the way she conducts research and digests information. Some will use social media. Others won't. Some will prefer video to text. Some will prefer text to video. Some prefer more detail, and others want only high-level information.

These factors affect not only the kind of information to present on your site, but also the way you organize it. You must make the right information easy for each kind of visitor to find.

4. Provide useful information for different stages in your buyers' decision process.

Buyers need different information at various stages of their decision process. In the early stages, they may want only high-level information to determine whether they need your solution.

For these visitors, you might offer diagnostic information that helps them link their symptoms to causes and possible solutions.

As buyers progress in their decision process, they have different questions and want different kinds of information. (See the table below.)

Source: The content of this table was adapted from Neil Rackham's book Major Account Sales Strategy. 1989. p. 14.

It's short-sighted to think your website has served its main purpose when a prospect contacts your sales organization. A well-crafted site can still add plenty of value after a salesperson is involved.

In buying processes that last weeks or months, your website can provide good reasons for different decision influencers to keep coming back. Each time they're likely to be looking for something different. Anticipate that, and give them what they want at every stage.

5. Address the conflicted motives of your buyers.

Business buyers may have two driving motives. They want to do what's right for their company, and they want to serve their own interests.

Sometimes these motives are in conflict. For example, an influencer may see that a software product is good for her company, but it will make work life harder for her department. It may eliminate jobs for people on her team. Maybe the manager is concerned she'll lose power or authority. Or she thinks a different software product will offer her better career opportunities.

Often the manager can't talk openly about all of her personal motives.

Effective web content addresses benefits for the company overall as well as for specific business functions, departments, or employees.

6. Subtly engage your buyers' emotions.

In the past decade or so, research into the human brain has proved that people can't make decisions without engaging their emotions. Some psychologists and neuroscientists have suggested that emotion drives all human action.

We act emotionally, they say, and we justify our actions rationally.

Yet many senior business leaders still cling to the view that effective managers are rational, objective decision makers.

Don't believe it. Without emotion, humans don't act. And without action, there's no sale.

In complex sales, your website must evoke the right emotions without appearing to do so. This a matter more of art than science.

A good copywriter can achieve the right balance, with just the right tone for your audience.

7. Address the customer's pain.

Marketers know your website should sell the benefits of your offerings.

But often they don't understand that an effective website for complex sales must also help the visitor see his current situation as unacceptable.

Why? Because your sales and marketing materials must help buyers overcome their fear of change.

Pain can help buyers overcome fear

In big purchases, buyers are hesitant. If they have one foot on the accelerator, other is riding the brake. They want the benefits for their company and themselves, but they don't want the risks.

Fear is a dominant emotion in most big B2B purchase decisions. Many decision makers don't like to acknowledge their fear, so their more likely to talk about it as "concern."

People who make important buying decisions are very much aware the hazards of making the wrong decision. If the purchase goes well, the company gets most of the benefits, and decision makers get some of the credit. It the purchase goes badly, the decision makers are likely to get most of the blame.

Some may lose their personal credibility. They could miss compensation incentives and opportunities for promotion. They may damage their reputation, lose their job − even hurt their career. Maybe they'd have to move to a new city, uprooting their kids and putting them in new schools, forcing a spouse to change jobs.

For really big decisions, such risks are a real possibility. And whether they're real or not, they certainly cross the minds of decision makers.

In big buying decisions, it's often safest to recommend doing nothing. That's why so many big deals end with "no decision."

In big sales, benefits alone may not be persuasive enough

The buyer's perception of personal risk also explains why in big sales it's usually not enough to focus solely on the benefits of your solution. You also have to sell against the status quo.

Experienced sales people know this maxim for complex sales: No pain, no sale.

This comes as news to many marketers who know little about complex sales.

Have you been to a hospital emergency room lately? They often have a chart on the wall that shows patients how to rate their pain on a scale from 1 (no pain) to 10 (worst possible).

Every sales person is eager to find a prospect who's feeling pain in the range of eight or higher. Sometimes a good salesperson can uncover latent or unrecognized pain in that range. Several popular selling methods teach salespeople how to find, define, and connect sources of pain.

That's because the bigger the purchase, the more intense the current pain, or the potential for future pain, must be.

In most cases, companies will accept the risks of a major purchase only if the projected cost and risk of the purchase is smaller than the cost and risk of continuing with business as usual.

To put it another way, the pain of making the change must be smaller than the pain of continuing down the current path.

Some marketers avoid the topic of pain

Many marketers are uncomfortable with this idea. They prefer to stick with the traditional litany of features, advantages, and benefits.

Here's an example. One senior marketer in a multi-billion dollar B2B software company said her company's marketing materials can't speak to their customers' pain because to do so would be "off brand."

This marketer had helped write her company's branding policy. She holds a master's degree in fine arts. Poetry writing, in fact. She's apparently sold nothing more complex that Girl Scout cookies.

Why can't salespeople explore the depths of their prospects' pain, without involving marketing in that dreary work? Why can't marketing keep to the sunny side of the street?

Many salespeople have never been properly trained to identify and diagnose a customer's sources of pain. Some sales training programs, including Solution Selling and SPIN Selling, teach salespeople how to do it. But your sales team may not have had this training.

Sometimes even a well-trained salesperson simply doesn't have the opportunity to develop a customer's understanding of her pain. So it helps if your marketing materials also carry the message.

8. Help your visitor see the high cost of doing nothing.

A salesperson think she's sold your offering to a low- or mid-level manager, only to find that her best advocate can't get higher-level approval. That's why it helps to build a financially oriented business case for your product or service. It should focus on loss as well as gain.

Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Tversky, who worked together in behavioral and cognitive psychology, defined the principle of loss aversion. They and other researchers found that when we make economic decisions, our fear of loss is often twice as influential as our hope of gain.

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. For more on the work of Kahneman and Tversky, see Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Loss aversion helps explain why benefits alone are often insufficient to close a high-stakes sale.

It certainly helpd you close a big sale if your prospect is feeling intense pain. But pain alone doesn't make companies buy. Most executives won't make a big investment to relieve a source of pain whose effects they can't measure.

Jeff Thull, author of three excellent books about complex sales, says that if you can't attach a cost to a problem, the problem isn't likely to get the attention of a senior decision maker. For more on this, see The Prime Solution: Cost the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale and Thull's other two books.

In complex sales, it's usually not enough for some employees to feel frustrated or even miserable. The pain has to be big enough to appear on the company's balance sheet or its profit-and-loss statement.

To win the sale at a healthy profit margin, you often have to help your prospect do the math. Where does the pain show up on the balance sheet or the P&L? How big is it? How much will it cost for every month and every year they continue on their current path?

Your sales and marketing materials can and should help perform this service for your customers. Don't expect them to be as interested as you are in establishing the value of your solution.

9. Provide information about return on investment and payback.

Speaking of math, the other calculation your customers will eventually need is a calculation of their return on investment (or ROI).

For big purchases, a corporate finance organization is unlikely to accept a vendor's ROI projections. But a vendor's ROI model can help teach the customer where to find value and how to calculate it.

For more on this topic, see ROI Selling: Increasing Revenue, Profit and Customer Loyalty through the 360 Degree Sales Cycle, by Michael J. Nick and Kurt M. Koenig.

10. Provide information that mitigates perceptions of risk.

The buyer's perception of risk rises at the beginning of the decision process. Then it declines in the middle stages and crests toward the end.

The buyer is thinking about risk even you don't mention it. The bigger the purchase, the more risks your buyers will consider.

If your sales and marketing materials don't address risk, your buyer is left to resolve the topic on his own. A buyer's unguided assessment of risk may not go well for your company.

Your challenge is that you don't want to raise risks the buyer isn't already thinking about.

You can provide assurances without raising concern over specific risks. For example, you can provide legal protections such as guarantees or warranties.

You can build credibility and confidence by providing names of customers, investors, executives, board members, and important business partners.

You can build social proof by offering testimonials, third-party product reviews, and ratings or certifications by analysts or other independent services. You can provide specifications for data security, quality control, and so on.

Two risks are especially hard to protect against, even for big vendors:

The vendor may not respond fast enough when the customer needs help.
The vendor may not stay committed to improving and supporting the solutions the customer plans to buy.

Even big companies abandon their customers. All companies can be acquired, lose control of their business, or otherwise change strategic direction. And most companies stop investing in products that become hopelessly unprofitable.

For companies of all sizes, stories of a vendor's past behavior are the best assurance any customer can reasonably hope to receive. So by all means, share stories of how your company has taken care of your customers.

When you apply these 10 ideas, you'll be far ahead of most companies that create content marketing for complex sales.

What additional ideas do you suggest?

B2B Sales & Marketing: Top 6 Research & Advisory Firms [Part 2]

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 17:31:21 GMT

For B2B sales and marketing leaders who want to improve revenue generation, several first-rate research, benchmarking, and advisory firms can offer great ideas and counsel.

This is the second in a two-part series about the top six North American firms of this kind.

This Part 2 covers CEB (Corporate Executive Board), Aberdeen Group, and Forrester Research. Part 1 considered SiriusDecisions, CSO Insights, and SBI - Sales Benchmark Index.

CEB

CEB offers strategic insights and recommendations for many business functions. In addition to Sales and Marketing, CEB provides information for and about Finance, Compliance, Legal, Human Resources, Information Technology (IT), Procurement, and Operations.

Target clients

CEB's clients are most likely to be big or mid-sized companies across many business segments. But smaller companies can also learn a lot from the steady stream of high-quality information CEB provides free or at low cost.

Topics covered

CEB's sales and marketing practice is probably best known for the work CEB employees Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, authors of the 2011 book The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation.

In the foreword to that book, Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling (1988) said "the research they have done is the most important advance in selling in many years and may indeed justify the rare and coveted label of 'sales breakthrough.'"

The authors updated their thinking in 2015 with publication of The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results.

Besides Challenger selling, CEB also addresses sales compensation, customer relationship management (or CRM) systems, indirect channel sales, inside sales, key account management, sales operations management, talent acquisition, and talent development.

On the marketing side, CEB's research and advisory services cover branding, B2B demand generation, customer experience management, customer understanding, marketing communications, new product development, organizational management, planning and measurement, product management, sales and distribution, segmentation, and social media.

Subscription services

CEB engages with its members at two levels, says Tate Smith, CEB business development manager. At the higher level of service, CEB provides a "hands-on, customized consulting relationship." At the lower level, CEB offers annual memberships by subscription.

Fees for membership vary with the size of the client's company, Smith says.

Memberships offer a way for leaders of sales or marketing to digest CEB's content, Smith says. Members also get access to an account manager who aligns them with the right CEB resources for their needs.

Membership also gives the leaders of a member company unlimited access to CEB's online resources.

Sales and marketing leaders can also participate in what CEB calls leadership councils and skills development services.

Another offering focuses on how to apply the principles of Challenger selling. CEB provides these services through a group of certified independent consultants.

CEB's Challenger consulting services may be out of the reach of many small companies, Smith concedes. Leaders who want to implement the Challenger process in small companies can do so as a do-it-yourself project. They can buy the book and piece together the free CEB information available online.

Free online resources

CEB is prolific in content marketing, and they generate a constant flow of free information.

The company runs several very active blogs, with one focused on sales and service and another on marketing and communications. Oddly, you can subscribe to email updates to these blogs only by submitting an inquiry for full CEB membership.

The company has different Twitter accounts, one for sales, one for "news and insights," and one for Challenger-related information.

They have an active presence on LinkedIn and a YouTube channel with 1,200 subscribers at the time of this writing.

CEB has posted so many presentations to SlideShare that it's hard to sort out the ones related to B2B sales and marketing.

Aberdeen Group

Of the six companies on this list, Aberdeen Group has the most divergent business model. Unlike the other firms profiled here, Aberdeen is not in the business of helping its clients apply research and insights to improve their own internal sales or marketing operations.

Instead, Aberdeen helps its clients market their business by using Aberdeen's research-based content.

Even so, Aberdeen's reseach on B2B sales and marketing provides plenty of insights companies can use to refine their own operations.

Target clients

Aberdeen's target client is a company of any size that wants to use credible, vendor-neutral research to help market itself or its offerings. This is according to Steve Melville, Market Development Manager at Aberdeen.

Topics covered

Aberdeen offers research on many topics other than sales and marketing, including supply chain, analytics and business intelligence, financial management, and 13 other areas.

The Sales Effectiveness & Strategy practice at Aberdeen serves enterprise sales leaders, specifically with respect to sales operations. The content in this practice addresses technologies and best practices that facilitate B2B sales cycles.

Recent Aberdeen studies and reports have addresses these sales-related topics:

Sales performance management
Sales enablement
Sales forecasting
Sales analytics
Customer relationship management (CRM)

Aberdeen's Marketing Effectiveness & Strategy practice addresses these topics:

Content marketing
Marketing analytics and technology
The Hidden Sales Cycle^TM (This is the part of the buyer's decision process that occurs without direct involvement of the vendor's sales people.)
Demand generation
Marketing operations
Web marketing
Advertising
Public relations
Brand strategy

Services

You can view all of Aberdeen's content online for free. But if you want to download, copy, print, or share most of the content on the Aberdeen website, you must pay a license fee.

That means you must license their content for use in white papers, brochures, and other commercial documents. Blog citations are the only exception to the rule.

Aberdeen provides content in many forms, including research reports, campaign bundles, assessments, videos, ebooks, webinar content, blog posts, and infographics and interactive graphics.

Aberdeen will also create what they call "vendor-neutral content" for its clients, says Steve Melville. This is material Aberdeen creates to meet a client's specific marketing need.

For example, Aberdeen may use data from its archives to prepare a special report on a topic it hasn't previously covered. The report may address an industry trend or an industry need.

The custom report will not contain the names of any vendors, and it will carry only the Aberdeen logo, Melville says.

The sponsoring company pays Aberdeen for the right to distribute the report in full or to cite portions of its content.

Aberdeen also offers several packages of fee-based services. For example, Aberdeen analysts will help you promote their research to the benefit of your company.

You can hire them to appear with you in webinars or at events such as conferences. But they won't endorse your company or its products. Nor will they comment on your competitors.

At a separate new URL the company says it offers unique value by integrating data, analytics and content in ways that help its clients generate more sales leads and conversions. The firm touts its capabilities in both science and storytelling.

Free online resources

Aberdeen makes all of its content visible to members who have registered on the company's website. Membership is open to all, and registration is free.

But beware of their tight restrictions on all public, commercial use of any Aberdeen content.

Aberdeen's content is strong. The company publishes a steady flow of research and insight on both sales and marketing effectiveness and strategy. It's worth your time to browse their libaries.

The main Aberdeen blog is segmented by topic category. You can easily find posts on sales and marketing effectiveness and strategy. But oddly, you can't subscribe to updates.

Aberdeen publishes a separate blog, CMO Essentials, which Aberdeen positions as a resource "for and about marketers." It covers the topics of brand and content, customer experience, demand generation, and operations and technology.

The content of CMO Essentials is mostly written by Aberdeen staff members, but authorship is open to outside contributors. You can subscribe to email updates.

Aberdeen has its own YouTube channel with 109 videos posted and 107 subscribers. The channel includes many of the topics Aberdeen covers, not just sales and marketing.

The Aberdeen LinkedIn page is a good place to see all the content Aberdeen produces across formats and topics. You can also follow Aberdeen on Twitter, where they've posted about 9,800 tweets and have about 2,300 followers.

Finally, Aberdeen maintains an active presence on SlideShare, with many postings on sales and marketing during the past year.

Forrester Research

Forrester Research appears last on the list of six because they make it hardest to evaluate what they offer.

Compared to the websites of other firms profiled here, the Forrester website feels a little like a convenience store in a rough urban neighborhood. Nearly everything worth more than a dollar, it seems, is locked up.

Have you seen those cashiers who work behind a thick plexiglass barrier? Forrester was similarly guarded in responding to a telephone inquiry.

Asked to comment on the kinds of companies Forrester targets, Jenna Burpee sent a terse email message that their policy doesn't allow "customized commentary for vendor-based outlets."

Next, Sean Higgins, senior citations specialist, sent a message saying that any use of Forrester's content is subject to their "citation policy." That policy requires Forrester's prior approval for "all external or commercial citation of Research and Custom Research, including without limitation... links to any websites maintained by Forrester and/or its subsidiaries."

OK, then. We won't provide any links here.

Hey, I just wanted to talk to someone at Forrester who's open to explaining information that isn't clear on their website.

Looks like you'll have to find and interpret the Forrester website on your own.

Target clients

When you parse the Forrester website, it appears they want to appeal to small and mid-sized businesses (or SMBs) as well as bigger companies.

Topics covered

The Forrester website provides marketing-related content for chief marketing officers (or CMOs) and other leaders in these marketing roles:

VP or director of marketing
VP or director of sales enablement
VP or director of channel marketing
VP or director of demand generation
VP or director of product or solutions marketing

Forrester publishes information about sales and marketing alignment but apparently nothing about sales operations.

Services

Because Forrester wouldn't answer questions, you'll have to discover for yourself what services they offer for companies like yours.

The company publishes a free newsletter that lists Forrester's new research. The newsletter comes out several times a week. In the newsletter, an icon of a closed padlock appears beside most of the new titles. The icon means you have to pay to see the document.

When you click on a title beside a padlock, you go to a landing page. On these landing pages, Forrester is refereshingly open and transparent about their pricing for a single document. It appears that $499 is a common price for many of their shorter pieces. Longer research reports may cost a few thousand dollars each.

As an alternative to paying for individual documents, clients can pay a flat annual fee for access to clusters of gated content. Annual memberships may include other bundled services.

The Forrester website says the company provides consulting services in the areas of customer experience, content marketing solutions, and a topic they call "digital business transformation." All three may be of interest to B2B marketers.

Forrester clients can also participate in a series of councils or "leadership boards," where Forrester says participating members drive the agenda. For B2B marketers, the CMO Group, the B2B Marketing Council, and the B2B Marketing Council for SMB Clients appear most relevant.

Finally, Forrester sponsors a series of events, including summits, forums, and webinars for clients and other paying participants. Webinars often cost $300 each for non-subscribers.

Free online resources

You can ferret good free Forrester insight online. But beware. If you cite any of it publicly, you may run afoul of the Forrester citation police.

Forrester's blogs cover a broad range of topics, but you can click a filter to bring up posts related to B2B marketing.

Forrester's blog post are consistently good. That said, sometimes Forrester analysts don't distinguish between marketing for transactional sales versus complex sales. The lack of clarity may be confusing at times, because many marketing strategies and tactics are (or should be) different for complex sales.

On the Forrester blog you can use a filter to bring up posts that to appeal to CMOs. The CMO content seems slanted toward B2C marketing. Readers must sort out for themselves how well the blogger's insights may apply to B2B.

Hypothetically, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for notice of new blog content. But that function wasn't working at the time of this writing.

Forrester has a strong presence on LinkedIn. In the absence of a working RSS blog feed, Forrester's LinkedIn company page may offer the most convenient way to keep up with new releases of content.

Forrester has an active Twitter presence. They've posted more than 12,000 tweets and have about 15,000 followers. Their YouTube channel displays about 400 videos and boasts about 3,200 subscribers. This is a good place to find recorded highlights from Forrester forums.

In general, Forrester's YouTube videos contain very good content. But it's hard to find titles on topics related to B2B Marketing. And most of the videos are quite short.

It may be faster and easier to find good material in Forrester's SlideShare presentations, which they post on many topics. In the big Forrester library of Slideshare presentations, it can be tedious to find the titles that apply to marketing. I've achieved good results searching on "Forrester + marketing" or "Forrester + B2B."

Between Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, you now have a good idea of the six leading North American firms that provide research and insight about the current state of B2B sales and marketing.

Note that the series has intentionally left out any references to big strategic consulting practices such as McKinsey and Accenture. But it's worth watching their websites because they occasionally publish great content on sales and marketing.

Have you found other good sources for research and benchmarking information about B2B sales and marketing? If so, please share them in the comments.

B2B Sales & Marketing: Top 6 Research & Advisory Firms [Part 1]

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:44:45 GMT

Nearly every business-to-business (B2B) sales or marketing leader is asked hard-to-answer questions that deserve careful consideration:

Are we doing the right things?
Do our sales and marketing teams have the skills they need?
Does the company have the right performance metrics and motivators in place?
How much should a company like ours be spending on sales and marketing?
How should we organize our people and activities?

When senior executives in your company ask questions like these, you want to think before you respond.

Fortunately, a handful of advisory firms offer good ideas, backed by survey research and benchmarking studies. This two-part series provides an overview of the top six in North America.

All six firms provide varying amounts of free information online. For a fee, you can also turn to them for counsel and perspective. They get their insights from surveys, benchmarking studies, and experience working with companies like yours. They'll even custom-tailor their recommendations to your situation.

Part 1 of this series covers Sirius Decisions, CSO Insights, and SBI - Sales Benchmark Index. Part 2 looks at CEB (Corporate Executive Board ), Aberdeen Group, and Forrester Research.

Each firm, you will see, has a somewhat different market focus and business model.

Can your company afford these services?

All six firms were unwilling to go public with their pricing. They cited competitive concerns. Price transparency is rare in this industry.

Responses to direct questions about pricing gave the impression that fees are somewhat flexible and may vary by circumstance.

In general, even a small company is unlikely to spend less than about $10,000 for any subscription service these firms offer. At least one firm charges about that much to license use of a single document.

Annual memberships may cost $30,000 to $40,000 and up. And full consulting relationships can go well into six figures.

A few of the firms offer digital products and courseware priced at less than $2,000 each.

Although the fees of all these firms are substantial, they may be small compared to the cost of making bad decisions when your company faces high-stakes decisions about revenue generation.

Sirius Decisions

For laser focus on B2B sales and marketing, you can't do better than SiriusDecisions. The company offers research, consulting, and advisory services. They also provide the greatest volume of high-quality, free online information.

Target clients

SiriusDecisions targets leaders of marketing operations, sales enablement, and sales operations.

About a third of SiriusDecisions' clients are companies with annual revenue of more than a billion dollars, and a third generate less than a hundred million dollars. This is according to Jason St. Onge, team leader there.

Within the group of smaller companies, clients skew toward the lower end of the range, St. Onge says. These smaller clients are typically trying to scale quickly to achieve fast growth, he says.

Some SiriusDecisions clients sell sofware or technology to B2B sales and marketing functions. Analysts at SiriousDecisions help these tech vendors tune their strategy and positioning to the needs and interests of B2B marketers, St. Onge says.

Topics covered

Sirius Decisions aims to help its clients align their strategy and operations with respect to marketing, sales, and product.

The firm is probably best known for its work on the topic of demand creation, St. Onge says. They also appear to be establishing a leadership position in the very hot area of account-based marketing.

You'll also find useful research and insight in these additional marketing topics:

Campaign framework
Channel marketing
CMO strategies
Communications
Content strategy
Customer marketing
Field and regional marketing
Portfolio marketing
Web and mobile strategies.

Research, consulting, and advisory services

The Resources and Tools section of the SiriusDecisions website provides access to a library of documents. Most are available only to paid subscribers.

Clients buy annual memberships to SiriusDecisions, St. Onge says. They pay a separate fee for each practice area.

Smaller companies can sign up for an offering SiriusDecisions calls the Emerging Growth Service. That service offers a blend between demand creation, marketing operations, and other areas of interest to smaller companies.

A C-level executive is often the person who brings SiriusDecisions into a smaller company, St. Onge says. Such executives often want three things: They want benchmarking data for companies like theirs. They want to anticipate key inflection points for their business. And they want to know how other companies like theirs are structuring their operations.

Executives can often justify the cost of the service because they don't have to "reinvent the wheel," St. Onge says.

What subscribers get

Members of SiriusDecisions get access to newly published research and other content specific to their topics of choice.

The company also provides unlimited access to a team of analysts aligned to the topic or area covered by the client's subscription.

Some clients want little more than information or education, St. Onge says. And in other cases, "we roll up our sleeves and help someone work through an initiative."

Educational resources

Even if your company doesn't subscribe to SiriusDecisions research or advisory services, individuals can sign up for a range of online education and training offerings.

The company offers these through various "pathways" that provide video learning and certification. Topics are mainly in the areas of demand generation and product marketing.

Events

SiriusDecisions offers a variety of events for both clients and potential prospects -- including summits, exchanges, webcasts, forums, and live video roundtables.

The annual SiriusDecisions summit is open to the public for a registration fee. The North American summit is a four-day even in May, and the European summit is a two-day event in London in October. The next North American summit will be in Nashville in May 2016.

SiriusDecisions offers many public webinars rhoughout the year. Recordings are often available online at no charge.

A good example of the quality of their free webinars is one titled "Demystifying B2B Buyer Behavior in 2015 and Beyond." It challenges some of the research behind CEB's Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer approaches. (For more on CEB and their Challenger work, see Part 2 of this series.)

Free online resources

SiriusDecisions offers an impressive amount of free information online.

Their blog, SiriusPerspectives, posts new articles several times a week. Posts are clearly tagged by topic, and the archive is easy to search. You can subscribe to a feed, and you can also sign up for a weekly email newsletter.

I suggest you browse through Sirius Quotes, a series of short factoids and findings from benchmarks and research studies. The list is easy to filter by topic. You can find such gems as this:

Sixty to seventy percent of content in b-to-b organizations goes unused. The number-one reason? Irrelevance. The number-two and number-three reasons? People don't know it exists or can't find it. (Source: Erin Provey, Research Director, September 2014)

SiriusDecisions offers a rich set of SlideShare presentations, a YouTube video channel, and recorded Google+ hangouts. All are available through Google search. The company also maintains an active presence on both LinkedIn and Twitter.

CSO Insights

CSO Insights specializes in sales performance for B2B companies engaged in complex sales.

Target clients

The company works with large, mid-sized, and small companies across many industry segments.

Topics covered

"We help organizations optimize what they're currently doing, innovate in areas of opportunity, and, where necessary, transform," says Joe Galvin, chief research officer and executive vice president at the firm.

"We focus on providing sales leaders with an external perspective, with the research, data and expertise they require to make better decisions."

CSO Insights differentiates itself through its focus in B2B sales research and expertise, Galvin says. "We have more than 400 metrics on sales performance, with a minimum of a five-year history. This data gives our clients a fact-based comparative for where they are and what they need to do to improve."

The parent company of CSO Insights is MHI Global, a rollup of six formerly independent brands. The brands include Miller Heiman, Huthwaite, CSO Insights, AchieveGlobal, Channel Enablers, and Impact Learning Systems. Other than CSO Insights, all provide B2B sales training.

The main topic areas for CSO Insights are:

Sales leadership
Sales enablement and training
Sales operations
Sales technology.

Research, consulting, and advisory services by subscription

Galvin says his company offers an annual subscription that gives clients access to all its services. The firm publishes new digital content through its website several times a week, including research, data, webinars, and six to eight special reports a year.

"We have an advisory relationship with clients," Galvin said. "Clients can have a deeper level of interaction with analysts. They can have individual one-on-one sessions. We also offer a variety of services, including assessments, benchmarking capabilities, and the workshops and presentations.

Subscription fees vary with what individual clients need and want, Galvin says. Annual contracts run from low five figures to the low six figures.

What subscribers get

Clients can also get help interpreting and applying the research information to their own circumstances, Galvin says. "The folks on our teams have many, many years of practical experience in the areas they focus on."

"When we connect with our clients, we're prepared to talk about what their segment looks like, the success factors and issues it faces, and how the issues are likely to play out," Galvin says. You can span the string of issues that face sales leaders today, and we've got research, data, and expertise in all those areas."

The value for the client shifts with the size of the client's company, Galvin notes.

"A small company with four or five salespeople is preoccupied with finding the right paths forward. They're trying to learn how and where to grow. They face critical decisions about adding another person in the field or adding an inside salesperson to build up demand gen."

As a sales team grows to 10 or 12, different questions and issues arise. Do they need some kind of training function? Often the sales manager is doing everything. When does it make sense to establish specialized roles to support sales?

CSO Insights helps smaller clients consider what makes sense for where they are in their development, their position in the market, their product, and how their product fits into the market, Galvin says.

A sales force with 100 people faces different issues, Galvin notes. Bigger companies have more organizational factors to consider. They want to optimize their sales assets. They're interested in best practices, how other companies handle onboarding for new reps, and the like.

In contrast, a company with 3,000 sales reps is thinking about how to drive 300 telemarketers or telesales people to generate leads more efficiently. "For them," Galvin says, "it's a question of scale and complexity. And the bigger a company gets, the more politics come into play."

Free online resources

The CSO Insights blog publishes good posts several times a week. Posts carry the bylines of a solid team of 10 contributors, all staff members.

After MHI Global acquired CSO Insights in May 2015, some information about the organization shifted to a section of the MHI Global website. There you can find additional downloadable free information, and you can subscribe to a series of free newsletters.

CSO Insights has a presence on LinkedIn, where they mainly republish posts from their blog. They have several good videos on a YouTube channel. And they have a moderately active Twitter account with about 600 tweets and 500 followers at the time of this writing. They've also posted a few presentations to SlideShare.

Sales Benchmark Index

Sales Benchmark Index, or SBI, addresses B2B sales and marketing in fairly equal measure.

The SBI website addresses six audiences: CEOs, sales leaders, marketing leaders, sales ops and sales enablement people, HR leaders, and sales reps.

Target clients

SBI divides its target markets into two segments: companies with more than 500 employees or $250 million in revenue, and those with less revenue or fewer employees.

The firm provides information that's relevant across many industries, for sales of varying levels of complexity. SBI's services are appropriate for companies of widely varying sizes, says Drew Zarges, general manager of a service called SBI On Demand.

SBI works with companies that range from startups to very big businesses, Zarges says. "We tailor our services to the needs of the individual customer."

SBI has worked with SaaS startups that may engage in transactional sales with "fast turn and low touch," where a deal closes after a few phone calls from an inside sales team, Zarges says.

For more complex sales, SBI may help a big ERP software vendor build an overlay organization to support sales reps. Clients can learn how to enlist multiple functions in their own company for smoother sales cycles.

Topics covered

A services page on the SBI website divides the firm's offerings into two broad categories. One category addresses growth through acquisition. The other covers five broad areas for achieving organic growth:

Strategy
Planning
Process
Organization
Execution
Support

Subscription services

For SBI's bigger clients, the firm offers what Zarges calls "full-on consulting services" where SBI people may provide on-site advisory services for extended engagements. SBI custom-tailors these services and structures them like those of the other firms listed here.

For smaller companies, a service called SBI On Demand provides access to online courseware and other digital content.

SBI On Demand has a practical focus, Zarges says. It shares information about how to do things and what problems to avoid in execution. "It covers the hurdles and potholes we've run into in trying to execute projects using these tools. In the materials we provide, we advise our clients, 'Be on the lookout for this.'"

The on-demand service also offers access to telephone support and to on-site workshops, where an SBI consultant may visit a client for a few days.

Free online resources

The SBI blog posts new articles almost daily. You can sign up to receive email alerts of each new post. On a well-designed resources page, SBI also offers free access to podcasts, monthly Web TV productions, and occasional webinars.

On the resources page you'll also get free access to digital case studies, templates, magazines, presentations, tools, ebooks, and books.

SBI publishes a big annual guide to trends in B2B sales and marketing. The most recent edition, How to Make Your Number in 2016, is 228-page PDF ebook. It's in the form of a workbook with sections to fill in for your business.

The document offers practical, step-by-step, research-informed guidance in planning for revenue growth. You can download it here.

SBI has a strong YouTube channel and a strong presence on LinkedIn and Twitter. At the time of this writing, they had more than 28,000 tweets and more than 34,000 Twitter followers.

If you face big B2B sales or marketing decisions for which you need a well-informed perspectives from outside your company, these three firms all offer great places to start your research.

Unlike many other sales and marketing advisory firms, they won't make you wonder whether their advice is appropriate for B2B companies.

Although their membership fees are substantial, all publish helpful research -- plenty of which they make available at no charge.

For information about the remaining three of the top six B2B research and advisory firms, see Part 2 of this series.

Selling Software to Retailers: 4 Ways to Appeal to Elusive Executives

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:15:00 GMT

How do you attract the attention of retail executives during their busiest season, weeks before their biggest industry trade show? This is the challenge of nearly company that sells software to retailers.

Even software makers who don’t sell to retailers can borrow a few useful strategies from those who do. You’ll read two relevant stories in a moment.

Biggest industry trade show

Every year as the Big Show of the National Retail Federation (or NRF) draws near, hundreds of software vendors scramble for ways to win the attention of the key executives who may attend.

The NRF show occurs toward the middle of January, always at the Javits Center in New York City. It attracts about 10,000 C-level or senior executives from retailers of all sizes and from many countries.

Best prospects are often hardest to reach

Here’s the challenge for exhibitors: If you find someone in your target audience who is easy to reach, he or she probably isn’t a decision maker. The bigger the company, the more elusive your prospects will be.

How, then, do you reach the right people? Whether or not you sell software to retailers, you can use these four principles to reach busy senior executives in any tightly focused market:

1. Before you communicate, be sure you understand their needs, desires, interests, goals, challenges and beliefs.

Have you developed buyer personas to help you define the interests and needs of people whose attention you want? If not, you can find some guidance here on how to do so.

Read what they read

Immerse yourself in the media they use every day. To understand what’s on the minds of CEOs, general managers and financial executives, read the best general-business publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, The Economist and others.

Study the trade press

For retailers, also read publications aimed at the retail industry and its relevant sub-segments, including STORES, Chain Store Age, Supermarket News, Drug Store News, Hardware Retailing, Apparel, Women’s Wear Daily, and the like.

Also stay on top of the primary cross-industry publications for the business functions you’re trying to appeal to, such as finance, risk management, supply chain, information technology, etc.

Research keywords and social media

Conduct keyword research to understand the most popular search topics in the industry. And finally, follow the many industry-related groups on LinkedIn and monitor their discussion topics.

Interview your customers

You can get the clearest and most direct insight by conducting brief interviews with half a dozen executives from the each of groups you want to reach. This isn’t easy if you can’t get their attention to begin with. So start by interviewing your customers, who have a vested interest in helping you succeed.

Although this research takes a lot of work, it can pay you back in nearly every sales and marketing initiative you undertake with the insights you gain.

2. Talk about their interests and priorities, not yours.

Recognize that only about 3% to 7% of any market is ever actively looking to buy any product or service. Another 5% to 8% may be willing to listen, even if they’re not shopping.

Everyone else – about 85% to 92% of your target audience – will not be open to hearing about your latest widget. They’re too busy to give you their attention.

You probably won’t connect unless you speak to a senior executive’s current priorities.

3. Establish a link between their current interests or priorities and your offering -- even if the connection is indirect.

Blue Ridge Inventory Group wanted to appeal to chief financial officers (or CFOs) at mid-sized to large retailers. They knew from past experience that nearly all CFOs want to keep their inventory under control, but it may not be a top priority at the moment. Few are interested in the details of how to do it.

So Blue Ridge appealed instead to a topic that interests nearly all CFOs: The valuation of their company.

Cite recognized experts

Through research of the kind described above, Redwell helped Blue Ridge identify David Berman, a hedge-fund manager and private-equity investor who links inventory to share value. He has the chops to get the attention of CFOs at big retail companies. He’s been interviewed about retail trends on CNN and Bloomberg News, and he also appears in a case study for his alma mater, the Harvard Business School.

Before investing money in a retail company, Berman looks carefully at the way they manage their inventory. If inventory values are rising faster than sales, he reasons that the retailer will eventually have to take markdowns to liquidate the excess inventory. Gross margins and net margins will suffer, and the value of the retailer’s stock will fall. So Berman avoids the investment or he shorts it.

Promote helpful ideas before you promote your product

With this insight, Blue Ridge’s CEO posted an article about the connection between inventory levels and stock valuation on the company’s blog. He then sent an e-mail message to retail CFOs who may be attending the NRF show. His message focused on ways to protect a retailer’s share value -- with “inventory discipline” (not the dull topic of “inventory management”) being paramount to a shrewd investor like Berman. The e-mail message links to a blog post for details.

The Blue Ridge blog post notes that Berman is an expert in evaluating retailers, not in helping them reduce excess inventory. That’s where Blue Ridge fits in, the post says. Blue Ridge’s CEO then invites CFOs to visit the Blue Ridge booth at NRF for a free diagnostic consultation. The consultation, he says, can help them maintain the value of their stock by improving the inventory discipline of their organization.

4. Be of service. Provide real value.

Your goal should always be to provide useful, valuable information -- even if a retailer has any current interest in doing business with your company. By establishing your reputation for helpfulness, you become a go-to resource when they later need something you offer.

Jesta I.S., a software provider in Montreal, recently followed this model with good success. The company sells merchandising, supply-chain and store systems to retailers. Many of Jesta’s best customers are retailers of apparel, footwear and accessories. They typically operate from about 50 to about 500 stores each.

Not many of these companies are actively shopping for new merchandising systems. Even among the few companies that are evaluating such systems, only a handful of people would be eager to talk to Jesta about a topic most people think is duller than flat black paint.

Broaden your appeal

Even so, Jesta I.S. attracted the interest of many dozens of retailers at November webinar – well into their busiest season. How? By talking about markdowns. The potential audience for markdowns is much broader than for merchandising systems.

Nearly all apparel and footwear retailers are preoccupied with markdowns – especially during the holiday shopping season – because markdowns are a major factor in their profitability.

In addition, the topic appeals to managers in many functional groups within a retail organization. Many can help reduce the excess inventory that causes unwanted markdowns – including buyers, merchants, demand forecasters, replenishment analysts, supply-chain executives, financial executives, marketers, regional store managers, local store managers, and others.

Don't pitch your product too directly

Redwell helped Jesta I.S. develop a webinar on markdowns to help make this broad target audience aware that Jesta’s systems can help them reduce markdowns. But the webinar focused on economic benefits and practical ways to reduce markdowns, rather than on the functional capabilities of Jesta’s software.

References to Jesta’s software were intentionally brief and oblique. You can view the recorded webinar through at NRF’s Stores Knowledge Series.

Jesta I.S. also provided a document that reminds attendees of the value they got from the webinar. It makes the content available to people who didn’t attend or who don’t have time to watch a video replay.

Both the document and the webinar still have a productive life for lead generation, months after their debut. The related white paper is available for download here.

To recap, you can often attract more attention and respect from busy executives by talking first about their needs, priorities and interests; by providing truly helpful and useful information; and finally – after you’ve earned their respect and appreciation -- by talking the value your solutions provide.

For information about the techniques and benefits of inbound marketing, go here.

B2B Social Media: What You Need to Know

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:33:00 GMT

With more than 812 million users on Facebook at the time of this writing, social media are clearly more than a passing fad. As useful as social media have become for business-to-consumer (or B2C) marketers, what is their relevance for business-to-business (or B2B) marketing?

The question is addressed and answered--at least in part--by the new 2012 State of Inbound Marketing report, released at the end of February 2012.

The report, compiled by HubSpot, Inc., summarizes the findings of a survey 972 B2C and B2B marketers conducted in January 2012.

Respondents work in retail, technology, professional services, communications, media, and other industry segments.

Most (72%) of respondents work for B2B companies. Their businesses range in size from a few employees to more than 500.

Businesses increase spending for blogs & social media

The average marketing budget increased for both blogs and social media between 2009 and 2012, the survey found. Here are the details:

Blogs and social media rose from 9% of budget in 2009 to 21% in 2012.

Social media grew more than blogs, from 8% in 2010 to 13% in 2012.

Blogs grew only from 7% in 2010 to 8% in 2012.

Social media deliver leads & new customers

Social media offer several benefits that are important to B2B marketers, including the building of awareness and brand. For technology marketers, social media can also help establish a reputation for thought leadership.

But to satisfy internal skeptics, social media must deliver benefit that are easier to measure, with a clearer return on investment. They must generate sales leads, help acquire new customers, and deliver revenue.

How, then do social media measure up against other channels for acquiring customers?

More new customers than ads, mail, phone, & tradeshows

More survey respondents said they acquired new customers through search-engine optimization, direct traffic to websites, referrals, and paid search than through social media.

Even so, nearly twice as many respondents (4%) cited social media as a good source of new customers over outbound marketing (2%) channels. Outbound marketing channels include advertising, tradeshows, telemarketing, and direct mail. (Please see the chart below.)

LinkedIn tops other channels for new B2B customers

Among social media, a somewhat higher proportion of B2B marketers (65%) identified LinkedIn as a source of new customers than their company blog (55%).

Among social media, LinkedIn far outpaces both Facebook (43%) and Twitter (40%) in attracting new B2B customers. (Please see the chart below.)

Note that survey participants were asked which sources delivered at least one new customer. They were not asked how many customers each source delivered.

While fewer reported that both Facebook and Twitter delivered new B2B customers, both sources contributed.

Social media climb in lead-generation effectiveness

If we look at social media as a source of leads rather than of customers, we see that social media have grown the most in importance over the past six months. (See chart below.)

Note that everyone is so enamored with blogs; 10% of respondents said blog had become less important as a source of leads in the past 6 months.

Implications for B2B: Fix blog, then focus on LinkedIn

As a cautionary note, remember that general trends can't tell you which marketing channels are best for the markets you serve. The B2B markets you serve may be atypical. It's possible they don't use social media at all.

Your best bet is always to ask your customers and prospects how they prefer to gather the information they use to buy products or services like yours.

But if you haven't asked your markets, the HubSpot survey data suggest a logical sequency of action for you to get more involved with social media:

If you don't already have a company blog, start one now. Although social media have become more important of late, blogging is still a more effective channel for generating B2B leads.

Increase the frequency of postings on your company blog to improve search rankings and generate more sales leads. Publish at least one blog post a week.

Start your B2B social media work with LinkedIn.

Once you're rolling with LinkedIn, explore Twitter and Facebook. Also keep a close eye on Google+.

If you follow this simple sequence, you're likely to see the biggest return on your investment of time and effort.

Do you have any thoughts or insights to share? Please tell us your own experience.

Best Lead-Generation Techniques for B2B? Blogs Win

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:03:00 GMT

Blogs are no longer an afterthought on most B2B websites. In fact, they've become one of the most cost-effective channels for generating sales leads in business-to-business marketing. Yet plenty of companies are missing the boat by not posting to their blogs often enough.

These are among the eye-opening findings a recent survey of more than 900 marketers, business owners, enterpreneurs, and executives. The survey, conducted in January 2012, is the latest update in an annual series of State of Inbound Marketing reports from HubSpot, Inc.

Here are the survey's key findings with respect to company blogs:

Fully 81% of respondents rated blogs as "useful" (22%), "important" (34%), or "critical" (25%) to their marketing efforts.

Blogs are the single lowest-cost source of leads, with 52% of respondents identifying them as being "below average cost." The next lowest-cost sources of leads are social media (according to 45% of respondents) and search-engine optimization (38%).

Respondents identified their company blog as their most important media channel, well ahead of LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.

Blogs have grown in importance from 2009 to 2012, with 60% of respondents saying their blogs were "critical" or "important" in 2012. This compares with 52% in 2009.

Among technology companies, 61% reported they had acquired a customer through blogging in 2011. (LinkedIn ranked equally with blogs as an important source of new customers for tech companies.)

More than 30% of respondents said blogging, social media and search-engine optimization had become more important sources of leads in the prior six months. But blogging hasn't worked for everyone. Some respondents (12%) said blogs had become less important.

A full 70% of respondents said they blog at least weekly, with 10% reporting that they blog daily.

The frequency of blog posts correlates directly with the likelihood of landing new customers. A whopping 92% of those who blog multiple times a day said they had acquired a customer through their blog. Among weekly bloggers, 66% acquired a customer; and among bloggers who post less than once a month, the number shrinks for 43%. (See figure below.)

The companies ranged in size from a few employees to more than 200. Business-to-business companies account for 72% of respondents.

A future post will report other important findings of the HubSpot study.

B2B Marketing Will See More Online Spending in 2012

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:47:00 GMT

Nearly 9 in 10 business-to-business marketers say their budgets will grow or stay the same in 2012 compared with 2011. And online marketing is the biggest area of growth.

These are among the findings of an online survey BtoB Magazine conducted among 343 B2B marketers in late November and early December 2011.*

Nearly half of marketers (48.4%) say their budgets will stay the same, and 40.8% say their budgets will grow. The balance (10.8%) say their budgets will shrink. (See chart below.)

What areas of spending will see the biggest changes?

Most marketers report increases in online spending

Nearly three quarters (74.0%) of marketers said they'll increase spending for online marketing, and none expected cuts. For all other categories of marketing tactics, some marketers reported increases while others reported decreases. (See figure below.)

Websites and e-mail tie for most important online tactics

Among online tactics, marketers most often reported that they use websites (at 67.9%) and e-mail (at 67.6%). Social media (64.3%), video (50.5%), and webcases or virtual events (45.6%) were the other areas of spending they cited. (See chart below.)

Revenue growth eclipses other marketing priorities

The primary B2B marketing goals for 2012 focus mainly on customer acquisition (as reported by 75.4% of respondents), followed by brand awareness (14.9%), and customer retention (9.7%). (See chart below.)

Social media much more prevalent than mobile marketing

Seven B2B marketers in 10 (70.3%) say they use social media. They use it to advance four main goals:

to build their brand (82.6%)
to generate leads (51.4%)
to build a reputation for thought leadership (47.4%), and
to collect feedback from customers (39.5%).

In contrast, just less than a quarter (24.0%) of B2B marketers use strategies that involve mobile technologies. These include websites enabled for use with smartphones as well as development of content and applications specifically for use on tablet computers and other mobile devides.

Reference

*"Outlook 2012," BtoB Magazine, January 16, 2012, 1.

Lead Generation Tops Priorities for B2B Marketers in 2012

dave.vranicar@theredwellgroup.com (Dave Vranicar) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:40:00 GMT

B2B marketers have said generating leads is their top goal for 2012. And converting qualified leads into paying customers is their biggest challenge. This is the finding of a survey of about 1,750 B2B marketers, conducted by MarketingSherpa in June 2011. (See chart.)

Why lead generation and lead management?

B2B marketers now put a higher priority on lead management and lead conversion over branding, reputation and awareness.

Why the change?

Three reasons appear likely:

Revenue growth is more challenging in a slow economy.

In the past lead generation was often considered a sales responsibility. But now marketers may be more eager to show measurable contributions to revenue growth.

The effectiveness of all B2B marketing tactics declined dramatically from 2010 to 2011. (See chart below.) Marketers must beef up their efforts to generate as many leads as they did in the recent past.

Inbound marketing tops list in effectiveness

The three tactics at the top of the list--website marketing, search-engine optimization, and e-mail marketing--are primary tactics of inbound marketing. The fourth primary tactic of nbound marketing is social media, which ranks second from the bottom of priorities.

Although all four inbound marketing tactics showed relative declines in effectiveness year over year, three of the four still rank as the most powerful lead-generation techniques.

Oubound marketing still gets bigger budgets

It's interesting that the tried and true tactics of traditional outbound marketing still get the lion's of the average B2B marketing budget allocation. These tactics include the following:

tradeshows (with 21% of total marketing budget, on average)
paid search (13%)
print advertising (12%)
direct mail (10%)
public relations (9%)
telemarketing (8%), and
virtual events or webinars (7%).

If inbound marketing continues to gain in effectiveness and outbound tactics continue to decline, surely the traditional balance of B2B marketing investment will shift more dramatically.