If you found an oracle and could ask it anything, what would you want to know?  Most of us would go right to life’s great questions, like “What happens when we die?” and “Is that Donald Trump’s real hair?”  But I’ll bet a lot of marketers would also reserve a little time to unlock a few mysteries that hit a little closer to home, namely, “What do my customers want/need/expect from me as a supplier?” and “How can I convince my customers that I am providing something more than just goods or services – and that they should pay more for it?”

In our recent conversations with B2B marketers, we’ve heard a lot about these very questions.  Many feel that there is a competitive edge to be gained through superior customer understanding, but most haven’t yet seen those efforts translate into bottom line results.  Ultimately, the goal is not learning more about customers just for the sake of knowing it, but figuring out those key insights that can shape and inform Marketing and Sales strategy, approaches, and collateral.

From our early work, there seem to be two key elements: Read More »

Marketing has some basic rules no matter what is being sold, and some might argue that successful political campaigns are waged along many of the same lines and the battles for dish soap dominance or soda superiority.  While there are definitely some commonalities, there are also key differences in the marketing of consumer products and presidential hopefuls.  First let’s look at what is the same: Read More »

Marketing is sometimes glamorized, sometimes scoffed at, and frequently misunderstood.  In fact, Marketing seems the perfect profession to feature in the popular “What People Think I Do” meme (and a quick web search reveals many people agree).  Internet sensations aside, perhaps some of the confusion about marketing stems from the fact that the role is rapidly changing and expanding.  Channels are proliferating, technology is evolving, customer behavior is changing, and marketers today have more responsibilities to juggle and objectives to meet than ever before.

Some of the most significant additions to Marketing’s “To-Do” list include:

Owning More of the Funnel: Specifically in the B2B world, Marketing is taking on more responsibility in part because of customers’ tendency to delay contact with Sales.  As we have posted about several times before, on average customers are 57% of the way through their purchase decision making process before they allow Sales to play a role.  As a result, Marketing owns more of the funnel and its role expands beyond generating awareness and helping customers gather information to addressing customers’ underlying purchase motivations and building momentum towards the sale.  Our 2011 B2B work, Influencing the Newly Empowered Customer, addresses Marketing’s new role in the mid-funnel head on.

Generating Radical Innovation: While a technology- or engineering-led approach can produce incremental improvements, truly radical innovations have to start with the customer.  In addition to their responsibilities of taking new innovations to market, Marketing teams are increasingly tasked with helping product and R&D teams understand customers and uncover their unmet/unarticulated needs.  Check out our recent work on innovation, which turns the numbers focused approach to innovation on its head and argues in favor of fewer, bigger, more protected innovations.

Surfing the Technology Tidal Wave: Marketing and technology have always been frenemies – while tech offers new ways to interact with, understand, and target customers, it can also make marketers feel like they are trapped in a hamster wheel trying to keep up with the rapidly evolving set of channels and tools they must master.  As customers latch on to new tech trends, so must marketers (and frequently without any additional budget).  One of the biggest tech-related changes in the B2B world as of late has been the adoption of marketing automation tools.   If this is a priority for you, click through to our Marketing Automation Resource Center to find ideas and advice for handling the demands this new technology brings from other marketers in the trenches.

Many of Marketing’s expanded duties seem to tie back to one central theme that we are increasingly hearing this year: customer centricity.  Companies are growing wise to the fact that orienting everything they do around the customer is the best path to profitability (to give credit where credit is due, it is not as though this is a totally new realization, more that it is a more urgent priority today thanks to a confluence of many economic, technological, and social factors).  And who knows customers best?  Who has been oriented around customer wants, needs, and expectations from the beginning?  Say it with me – MARKETING!

Marketers, what other roles have you been asked to take on?  Overall, do you see Marketing’s expanded role as a curse or a blessing (or something in between)?  Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Greetings from the land of cable cars and Rice-a-Roni.  I am currently at the Satmetrix Net Promoter 2.0 conference in lovely San Francisco learning how companies big and small across a variety of industries employ this method of collecting customer feedback.

For the uninitiated, Net Promoter Score (often referred to as NPS) is a way of assessing a company based on just one question: “How likely are you to recommend ABC Company to a friend or colleague?”  on a scale of 0 to 10.  Those who answer 0-6 are “Detractors,” 7’s and 8’s are “Passives,” and 9’s and 10’s are “Promoters.”  Net Promoter Score is determined by subtracting Detractors from Promoters.   The system is based on the joint work of Bain & Company, Inc. and Satmetrix.

Honestly, I am not really sure what I think of NPS – can you really figure out what you need to know about how your company is doing with just one question?  As questions go, it seems like a good one, but is it enough?  While it may be “The Ultimate Question” (as so declared by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 book that popularized this method), the answer is certainly not that simple.  To be fair, even within the book, Mr. Reichheld (who is a speaker at the conference) admits you don’t just ask one question.  At very least, you ask two – the second being “Why did you reply the way you did to the previous question?” Read More »

Happy New Year!  December and January are common times for people to reflect on the year that was and make predictions about the year that will be.  The B2B prognosticators have been out in full force.  Some of them take the easy route, proclaiming 2012 as the year of mobile marketing or the year of content marketing (uh, 2009 called, it wants its title back).  Among the more creative titles I came across: 2012 as the year of “preference-driven multichannel marketing breakthroughs” (that one really rolls off the tongue).   But what do those in the trenches see on the horizon for the coming few years?  To find out, we went ahead and asked them directly.

At the end of last year we conducted a survey of 92 B2B marketers asking them to evaluate some of the big changes looming on the horizon.  From the list of 14 potential shifts threatening to rock marketers’ reality, five emerged as holding the greatest potential for impact on business results (from the survey takers’ perspective).  They were: Read More »

Despite increasing pressure to provide Sales with a robust pipeline of qualified leads, most B2B marketers admit they don’t have formalized processes in place for things like lead generation, qualification, scoring, or nurturing.  Many are turning to marketing automation – the use of technology to systematize and automate many marketing tasks and processes – to add a little method to their madness.  It is a hot topic in the marketing trade press and a solution space crowded with vendors (all of whom promise extremely impressive returns).  We first saw marketing automation emerge at the top of marketers’ lists about a year ago when we fielded a short poll asking members where they were planning to make investments in the coming year.  In response, we decided to do a deep dive on the topic and help our members figure out the ins and outs of success.

Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research we discovered a few key lessons that everyone considering, implementing, or optimizing marketing automation tools should know.  Our findings, ideas, tips, and best practices (including data from a benchmarking survey of 161 B2B marketers) are all collected on a dedicated Marketing Automation Key Findings page on our website.  Top takeaways include: Read More »

The key to growth for a large portion of B2Bs hinges on suppliers’ abilities to successfully leverage channel partnerships.  This can be particularly challenging because frequently, your marketing strategy’s priorities do not 100% align with those of your partners.  To bridge the priority gap, marketers have long tried to influence desired behaviors in channel partners with monetary incentives – the most common one being volume-based discounts.  While simple to administer and easy to track, volume-based incentives often don’t deliver what we want them to.

We’ve all heard the saying, “You get what you pay for.”  Oftentimes it is spoken as an admonishment after something we bought for what seemed like a too-good-to-be-true low price turns out to be, to put it bluntly, a piece of crap.  The idea also holds true when thinking about channel partner incentives– if you pay for volume, you are going to get volume (oftentimes crappy volume), not growth or margin.  In pursuit of volume, channel partners often subjugate or just plain ignore the other priorities you value.  As a result, “good” partners get paid the same amount “bad” ones do.  For example, imagine two partners with the following profiles under a primarily volume-based incentive structure: Read More »

Our second annual Sales and Marketing Summit, “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision,” wrapped up in Las Vegas on this past Wednesday.  Over the three-day event, I had the privilege to be a part of many fantastic presentations, events, and member conversations, all focused on arming Marketing and Sales professionals with the ideas, strategies, and tools to deal with the newly empowered B2B customer.

One presentation, in particular, offered a very unique perspective on the purchase process – our colleagues at the Procurement Strategy Council (PSC) offered us a peek behind the curtain at how procurement professionals view the world today.  I have to admit, it felt a bit like I had snuck behind enemy lines.  After all, it’s fair to say that many in B2B Marketing and Sales (including most of those in the room with me in Las Vegas) think of Procurement as price-haggling, value-killing, nickel-and-dimers.  And that’s what we say when we are being nice. Read More »

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas. Despite the pull of the pool and the blackjack tables, I am currently sitting in the Grand Ballroom in the famous Bellagio hotel at the second annual Sales and Marketing Summit hosted by the Sales and Marketing Practice of the Corporate Executive Board. More than 400 members are here with us to learn more about how to get “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision” – this year’s theme. We have an agenda packed full with presentations based on the combined work by MLC and our sister program, the Sales Executive Council. My fellow MLCer Pat Spenner and I are both here and we’ll be bringing you some of the highlights on Wide Angle over the next few days. Read More »

A marketer at a member company recently summed up his current situation as follows: “We’re awash in data, but short on information.” A difficult challenge to be sure, but not a unique one.  A recent Unica survey found “measurement, analysis, and learning” was marketers’ top bottleneck and “turning data into action” as their top organizational issue.  And according to a February 2010 Economist article, the amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years.  This data supernova presents obvious issues for CIOs and CTOs dealing with server capacity and security protocols, but it also clearly impacts marketers struggling to plug into and make sense of the right data streams in order to infuse decision-making with fact-based evidence. Read More »