Hey, Sales & Marketing. . .You're not Meeting Prospects' #1 and #2 Needs!

What do your buyers value most during the pre-purchase phase for their IT products or solutions? Spending quality time with your sales reps? Doing a feature by feature comparison versus your competitors?  Hardly.  The top 2 most valued activities by buyers are:

1. Interacting with your company's technical teams. (e.g., CTO, presales engineers)
2. Consumption of vendor content à Financial justification/ROI is #1 here

Sure, buyers put "interacting with sales reps" as next in line; and reps are the ones that will be the key facilitators and match-makers to make these activities happen as part of customer enablement.  But what's most surprising, are the results that just came out of IDC's 2012 Sales Investment and Productivity Benchmarks study. (click here for full study for Sales Advisory clients) We asked many of the largest BtoB vendors in the world how long it takes for their sales rep to find different types of information within their organization in response to buyers' needs.  Can you guess which two types of information took the longest to find to meet buyers' needs? (refer to Figure below)

1. 45% of companies indicated that it takes their sales reps 1 to 5 days or longer to find ROI-related sales assets from across their organization.
2. 39% of companies indicated that it takes their sales reps 1 to 5 days to find the best fit presales person for their prospects.

Yup, that's right, as technology sales organizations, we're having the greatest difficulty fulfilling the top two most valued activities in the buying process for our prospects. 

A couple of questions to consider as you look within your own organization to resolve these challenges:

• Do you know what your buyers' expectations are along the buying cycle, and how you are doing at meeting them? (e.g., Are you leveraging customer satisfaction insight as part of your account planning process?  Do you do a win-loss analysis? What does your own buyer experience research indicate?)
• Are you providing your best clients and prospects with access to your technical teams when needed and justified? Is your ratio of presales engineers to sales reps high enough? (check out IDC sales staff allocation benchmarks)  Are your presales folks productive? (e.g., using teleconferencing to best leverage their time, connecting with sales reps through social media (Social Collaboration for Sales study for IDC clients)) 
• Is your sales operations team collaborating with your marketing team as part of the content and marketing asset development life cycle to ensure that ROI-related assets are being developed to meet your buyers' needs?. . . And how are you ensuring that your reps can get access to this intelligence ASAP when needed? (yes . . . . sales enablement)

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Facebook Announces 1 Billion Users – It’s Time for All Marketers to Give it a Go

A few days ago Facebook announced that their active users surpassed 1 Billion. This is a huge number and like it or not, as a Marketer, you cannot ignore a community of this size. At this point, it is irresponsible to write Facebook off as a fad. Its user base covers all demographics and geographies – chances are, as a business, whoever you are selling to is on Facebook. While I certainly do not advocate for suddenly changing your advertising mix to a 25% Facebook Ad spend or hiring a brand new agency to build a Facebook Page that rivals Coke or Jet Blue, I do believe there are plenty of good ways to start dipping your toes into the giant ocean that is Facebook.

I readily admit that the standard thinking is Facebook is a B2C tool - Facebook is great to reach consumers, however I believe there is something for everyone. B2B marketers need to think creatively, manage expectations and take learning’s from similar communities (think LinkedIn). And if you’re worried that you might be behind the curve or not sure the amount of time and energy to spend on social, through IDC's 2012 Tech Marketing Benchmark Study (full results to be published this quarter), we learned that only 0.9% of tech marketing program budgets are spent on social media. So, while there is a lot of hype around social, we are still in the early days of truly leveraging social as a powerful marketing tool.

Below I've listed three ways you can start utilizing Facebook to make sure you aren't missing an opportunity:

• Skunk Works Project

While it’s great to have an agency who can own Social and Digital, having staff internally that are just as skilled is important. Facebook advertising is relatively easy to get started with, so it lends a perfect opportunity to give a key staff member a skunk works type side project and see if they can get value out of Facebook. Let them be creative, see what you can get out of Facebook, a worst case scenario is results are unsuccessful but you have a staff member who learns new skills – this can’t be overlooked in a world that continues to rapidly move towards digital. 

• Don't Forget Mobile

It’s easy to think of Facebook as a website where people go to when they want to take a quick break from work or inconspicuously “catch up” with old friends, but the future of Facebook is Mobile. In fact Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that 600 Million are Mobile users. With that many users on Mobile already, you can be sure that any major updates to the platform will have mobile users top of mind. Combine that with Facebook’s need to continue to monetize, it’s probably safe to predict there will continue to be new and creative ways to reach your target audience through Facebook’s Mobile platform. Be sure to keep your ear to ground when it comes to Facebook and Mobile, test out new products, you never know when one might be just what you need to reach key targets!

Quick heads up! 
For more research on Social Marketing please view our report: Despite the Hype, B2B Social Marketing Is Still in Its Infancy: 2012 Guidance for New Investment Dollars and Staff

• Ask For Help

No one is expecting you to be a Facebook expert - it is still a very new platform and it is ever changing. Thankfully, there a ton of innovative companies that work with the platform or leverage Facebook to help large brands reach their goals. Start with your agency, see if they have resources, partners, or experience with building out the type of campaigns you are looking for, if they don’t have the answers, find out what vendors are leaders and schedule a call with them to see what they can offer. You don’t have to go at it alone. 

Regardless of what you do remember to measure measure measure. We never advocate aimlessly trying new strategies without a solid plan and a way to track and compare.

Have you had any experiences with leveraging Facebook? Let me know how it went and how you think it can be best used to reach your audience (if at all!).

Sam is a Research Analyst within IDC’s CMO Advisory Service you can follow him on twitter: @SamMelnick. 

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Back of the Envelope Marketing Budgets

Here is a simple and I think helpful budgeting rule-of-thumb that a CMO at a $5b software vendor shared with me yesterday:

1) 75% of your budget should be in support of revenue-generation for your current operating year.

2) 15% of your budget should be placed towards efforts that have a 2-3 year time horizon.

3) 10% of your budget should be for activity or initiatives with no time horizon,

-- Rich Vancil

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How bright is the silver lining of Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud?

At their annual Dreamforce shindig last week Salesforce.com announced the formalization of their marketing capabilities as the Marketing Cloud. Essentially it is a coupling of four key pillars of Salesforce.com's front end:

1. Customer intelligence: Data.com enriches contact and account information with fresh feeds from sources such as LinkedIn and many others. Enables both sales and marketing to create detailed contact profiles for segmentation, targeting and campaign management.
2. Social advertising and content management: The recent Buddy Media acquisition provides support for a wide range of social channels (social, web, mobile) and formats including contests, videos, and photos. Users can coordinate their publishing and advertising activity and measure impact throughout the social sphere.
3. Social listening and analytical tools: Radian 6 monitors popular social services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, as well as blogs, forums, communities and more. Supports 17 languages and mobile access.
4. Core CRM functionality: Salesforce.com consolidates resources to provide sales reps with a single source that can connect them with other applications, contacts, colleagues and workflows. Pulls data together into account/opportunity context. Delivers reporting data to sales and sales managers and can provide opportunity and pipeline performance data into other systems such as marketing and order management.

Salesforce.com is taking its "Social Business" mantra to heart by building its marketing functionality with a "social first" philosophy. The question is: will this be enough to satisfy Salesforce.com customers (and the company itself)? The answer is probably not. The functionality you won't find in Marketing Cloud is significant - the core campaign management tools, workflows, analytics and more offered by marketing automation vendors (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo, Neolane, Pardot, etc.) Even though there are fewer seats to be sold to marketers as opposed to sales, these two worlds are rapidly converging. The systems needed to automate them will need to do likewise, as evidenced by the tight integration of most marketing automation systems with Salesforce.com and the recent announcement of Chatter for Eloqua.

But Marketing Cloud is undoubtedly only the first step, in fact it's well beyond the first step for Salesforce.com and the only issue going forward is how do they continue to expand functionality in this area?  The build or buy equation for Salesforce.com currently favors the build approach as valuations for marketing automation vendors are sky high, at least in terms of an acquisition. Salesforce.com has plenty of time to creep into the marketing automation arena, establish itself as a more serious threat and then re-evaluate its strategic decision around marketing functionality.

In the meantime, marketing automation vendors have their work cut out for them. They must stay well ahead of where Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud may go. They must continue to grow rapidly, prove their staying power and market value. Customers, however, should have no illusions that Marketing Cloud is an enterprise marketing automation platform in its current state. There is much more to marketing than social engagement especially for B2B models. Waiting for Marketing Cloud to evolve or for social to mature is simply not a choice, there is way too high a price to be paid in terms of market share, growth, and profitability. So if you're considering marketing automation don't delay or change course because of Marketing Cloud. Charge ahead full steam and should the social engagement of Marketing Cloud pop your ROI, by all means add it to your arsenal. 

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IDC Tech Marketing Benchmark: Behind the Scenes

This week the IDC CMO Advisory Service will start revealing results from the 2012 Tech Marketing Benchmark. In this 10th annual study we found some surprises – as you might expect in this era of marketing transformation. In anticipation of the results, I thought I would share a bit of what goes on behind the scenes in the benchmark.

First – what is a benchmark? The term was first used by early land surveyors to describe the fixed point against which all others were compared. Today, benchmarking means the systematic practice of comparing your business processes to what others are doing in order to achieve superior performance. Companies benchmark against peers to learn how they compare with similar companies and best-in-class to compare with those that achieve optimal results.

Why do companies benchmark? A benchmark provides context for decision-making. You spend a million dollars a year on social marketing. So what? If your CEO asks you this question, what will you say? Tech marketers tell us that they like to benchmark for the following reasons:

• Improve the quality of annual planning: Last year’s program budget and gut feelings are no longer sufficient input
• Gain insight into critical trends: Learn what industry leaders and competitors are doing – and how you stack up
• Reallocate costs: Identify areas of overspending and opportunities for better value
• Transform with confidence: Answer questions such as how much to invest in new areas like social marketing or how should I re-organize my department?
• Drive with data: C-level executives increasingly expect marketing leaders to manage their business with the same level of operational excellence as other corporate functions.
• Get an independent view: Benchmark data provides IDC analysts with a wealth of information that make guidance to clients personalized and accurate guidance

How does benchmarking work? At IDC, we use a six-step method.

1. Participants are given a standard taxonomy. This is SUPER important.  IDC requires that participants bucket responses in accordance with rigorous activity-based costing methods and a marketing taxonomy based on 10 years of experience so that we're truly comparing apples to apples. We start agonizing over the taxonomy early in the year. It must evolve with changing times but maintain enough consistency for trending.  This year, we carved out marketing automation as a new category and adjusted definitions to accommodate new media and practices.
2. Participants bucket their marketing investments into categories.  We start participant recruitment in the spring. Fortunately, IDC has a large constituency of companies that participate annually, but we always conduct outreach to get new blood. 
3. IDC collects the data. For IDC's benchmark, the tech company participants are primarily mid-sized and large companies and we have a 95% B2B focus.
4. IDC creates a database of normalized data. This is our secret sauce and takes a ton of work.  Every survey gets scrutiny. Anomalies get investigated. We use statistical methods, sophisticated tools, and marketing experience to work the data so that it really means something.
5. IDC analyzes the database for benchmarks and trends. We conduct analysis of various kinds – comparing years, industry sectors, and program and people data. We also conduct interviews with CMO's to lend color to what we are seeing (although we are constantly out talking to practitioners and marketing leaders during the year).
6. IDC reports.  All participants are invited to a webcast and get a free report that includes a large amount of data and IDC insights.  Over 100 tech companies each year contribute to the database and get this free report.  For participants who desire a more personalized view, IDC offers a custom service that compares their data with a "market basket" of appropriate peers. IDC conducts an analysis of this custom benchmark and then works with companies to provide guidance decision-making and for instigating change.

Watch this space as well as the press for this year's findings!

 

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Lead Management Report: IDC Finds Leaders are Smart, Agile, Automated, and Aligned

IDC CMO Advisory Service's latest best practice report, Realizing the Vision of 21st Century Lead Management, presents a newer, smarter way to conduct lead management that is better adapted to the reality of how customers buy today.  Combining proven management science methods with best practices from leading technology companies, the new model is more scientific, more data driven, more agile, more automated, more aligned between sales and marketing, and more customer service oriented, than the 100+ year-old funnel.

 

It's becoming common knowledge that the Internet has revolutionized B2B buyer's behavior, knowledge, and expectations. B2B marketers and sellers have outgrown the traditional funnel approach and are scrambling to adjust to the impact of the new buyer dialog.  The new B2B buyer dialog presents the following challenges for lead management:

• Complexity: Lead management used to consist only of qualifying leads and passing the best ones to the sales team. Now marketers must juggle this task while simultaneously conducting a perpetual digital dialog that informs and influences the prospect. Wrestling this complexity requires a more sophisticated and formalized lead management process.
• Orchestration of digital and human communication: The traditional funnel dictated a one-way "hand off" from marketing to sales. However, because buyers are always online, the concept of a binary "hand off" is obsolete. Marketing can never truly disengage. Rather than make a true marketing exit, a team orientation is maintained.
• Marketing accountability: B2B marketing departments are under considerable pressure to be accountable. Financial pressure from economic uncertainty and slipping sales productivity has brought the lead management process into harsh scrutiny. Expectations have risen because of the availability of spreadsheets, dashboards, and analytics tools to slice and dice any facet of marketing. The C-suite is becoming aware of how much more of their destiny now rides in the hands of the CMO.

Although each company must operate lead management with an eye for their own unique set of environmental requirements and logistical challenges, there are basic tasks that remain the same in every case. The tasks are: strategic planning, capture, assess, advance, develop, close and monitor/measure/analyze.

The building blocks of lead management success

One common misconception is that the tasks assessment (qualification), advancement (routing), and development (nurturing), occur only once in a lead life-cycle.  This may have been true in the simple, old, days. However, most companies today have a requirement for a more sophisticated multi-channel approach.  The IDC model treats the assess/advance/develop tasks as a modular block or cell. A simple workflow starts with a single cell that can do a little work. By using multiples of this same simple block - and applying best practices to the tasks in each block - marketers can build a measurable, optimized, multi-celled organism that can do amazing things - including blending with the sales methodology.

IDC found 16 important success factors including:

• Define consistent global standards, including a common language. More companies attribute their lead management success to this practice than to any other. By eliminating unnecessary complexity and redundancy, companies gain better control and achieve more predictable performance. Calibrating data to standards also opens the door for predictive analytics and trusted insight.
• Establish long-term, cross-functional councils. Best practice companies realize that lead management, while led by marketing, is part of an enterprise process. One firm teams up a 30-person council each year for three months to prioritize projects, determine standards and processes, and resolve issues.
• Treat leads like valuable but limited assets. Companies experienced in 21st century lead management operate in ways that express respect for buyers. Leads are carefully vetted, nurtured in a personalized way, and sometimes recycled rather than merely captured, qualified, and thrown over to sales. Best practice marketers use automation extensively. To remove hurdles and assist a buyer, this automation is integrated with the human factor — telefunctions and blended media, such as chat and social, as well as high-touch sales.

Clients of the IDC CMO Advisory Service can access the full report here.

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Data-Driven Marketing: A Survey of Marketing Automation Maturity in Global High-Tech Companies

Marketing has become technology, process, and data driven. On average, marketing operations teams at the large high-tech companies in this survey manage over a dozen major systems in an ecosystem that is rapidly evolving. The purpose of this survey was to assess the technology load on marketing organizations in terms of number, scope, and scale of systems as well as adoption, effectiveness, resources, and overall satisfaction levels. There are many interesting results from the data:

• Companies that take an enterprise approach to managing the customer creation process make the most effective use of their marketing infrastructures.
• Data-driven marketing requires many types of systems working together. They must be managed, matured, and optimized together to be most effective.
• Business intelligence (BI) competency is critical — it's one thing to have the data, it's another to use it.
• Penetration into the intended user base for each marketing system is the key:
• Leaders have achieved 90% or higher user adoption for the four pillars of any digital marketing infrastructure: campaign management, Web content management, CRM/SFA, and customer database. By comparison, laggards average only one over 90%.
• Leaders have achieved 75% or higher user adoption for 9 out of the 13 key digital marketing technologies categories we included in our survey. Laggards average only five systems at or above 75% adoption.
• Most respondents (even leaders) believe they have not realized much of the potential they see in their marketing systems.
• Organizational, process, content, and data readiness are seen as the major impediments to reaching the full potential of digital marketing infrastructures.

Clients of IDC's CMO Advisory can access the full document here. 

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