(this is a guest post by Taylor Mitchell of our sister program for Sales executives, the Sales Executive Council. It originally appeared on their blog.)

A fundamental shift in customer buying behavior has created a rift where Sales and Marketing have traditionally engaged customers. This void in the purchase process where customers are free from supplier engagement, a “no-man’s land” so to speak, has several implications on what successful selling looks like in today’s environment, but one of the more immediate concerns is that most suppliers haven’t fully recognized the shift has even occurred

This lack of awareness could partly be blamed on the fact that there is significant internal confusion in supplier organizations over the ownership of certain commercial responsibilities. Data from the MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic illustrates that companies don’t have a good sense of which function, Sales or Marketing, owns some of the most important commercial activities—almost 70% of the member companies surveyed were unsure of who owned the insight generation responsibility, for instance.

As such, many sales organizations lack the scalable organizational support reps need to successfully sell in today’s environment, and are therefore leaving individual reps to do much of the heavy lifting themselves.

What makes matters even more difficult for sellers, and sales organizations alike, is the fact that buyers are not contacting suppliers until they are, on average, 57% of the way through their purchase process —meaning they have already determined their needs, completed due diligence, and have even begun to do some comparison shopping.

Given that this emerging commercial rift or “no-man’s land” is essentially enabling customers to make purchase decisions without supplier influence, it is all the more important that suppliers alter their strategies to drive customer engagement at the earliest, most formative stages of a sale and shape customer demand.

The SEC is focusing on just this in our forthcoming 2012 research. Initial findings suggest that the best companies are developing an organizational capability spanning both marketing and sales to generate unique insight, develop scalable commercial messaging based of that insight, and to generate leads/select opportunities based on customer receptiveness to that insight. By doing so, these companies are able to successfully support their sellers in engaging customers early and shaping their demand.

What is your organization doing to tackle no-man’s land and increasing buyer sophistication? Does developing an organizational capability to generate unique insight and support sellers sound like the right approach to you?

Marketers are getting more personal. Not only do they anticipate my needs on Amazon, invite me to sign in with Facebook, they also peek at my browsing history and plant “cookies” where I can’t find them. As much as I like being delighted with right-on-target recommendation, I, as do most consumers, remember most clearly the times we’ve been annoyed. I mean all the time spent deleting and junking emails, unsubscribing, getting rid of cookies, adjusting privacy levels, putting certain numbers on the “no-call” list or just giving up.

Usually, when the customer has an issue, customer service is there to help. But in this case, the reps are often as confused as the customer. As a rep at a national retailer recently told me when I called, the personalized ad “is not on our site so it’s Pandora’s ad not ours”. With personalization being a relatively new and under-regulated phenomenon, the chance to be exactly right is often counter balanced by the chance to be completely wrong. Sophisticated algorithms running in the background don’t guarantee success – any financial firm can tell you that.

As marketers rightly understand it, personalization is on their turf. While they are positioned to take the lead in delivering greater relevance to consumers, marketers can’t hope to ace it on their own. Here’s why:

• Personalization calls for inter-departmental coordination. Your interactive marketing vendor isn’t the only party you’ve got to work with. Not letting your left hand know what the right is doing when it comes to targeting customers is inviting trouble. At the very least, sales and customer service need to know what personalization is and be able to give a informed explanation when customers call with questions/comments ranging from “Why am I seeing this?” to “Stop spamming me!” To consumers, anything with your logo on it is your ad and hence your responsibility to explain / fix / make disappear. Having a short, scripted FAQ beforehand on how personalized ads work and how settings can be adjusted could save reps from coming up with their own explanations. For sales, integrating the detailed customer data your use for personalization into the CRM system could help them gain valuable context before each conversation and more willing to track additional consumers metrics for you next time around. The simple fact is, if you don’t talk to other departments beforehand about what’s going on, they’ll come back to you later about what’s going wrong.

• Personalization calls for coordination within marketing itself. In the same vein, marketers involved in personalization shouldn’t be allowed to sit in their own niche while keeping the rest of the department in the dark. Digital and social marketers can tell you who is poking around on brand’s Facebook and campaign pages; product managers can help you zoom in on purchase motivation in a particular segment; and market research analysts have primary research and tracked metrics that would add another layer of do’s and don’ts.

Hippocrates said, “First, do no harm.” Embarrassed or annoyed consumers aren’t likely to be loyal – they said as much in our recently concluded consumer survey on personalization and privacy. The bottom line: consumer data can be bought but consumer trust cannot. We’ll talk more about how you can get personalization done right in your segment so stay tuned for more insight.

If you’re a B2B marketer, you know that one of the biggest overarching trends in your work over the last few years has been the gradual complication of the sales process. Budget pressures facing business buyers, the greater availability of information via the internet, buying committees and all sorts of other roadblocks and tangles have managed to fit their way into the path between Sales and the sale.

These factors are creating the “no-man’s land” facing Marketing and Sales, one that we told you about last summer in our annual B2B research project. But they’re also making Sales’ job harder by making the process more complex: when buyers have ideas in their head that they get from internet research, or when a committee makes a purchase, rather than an individual, complex contingencies quickly develop, ones that can be hard to manage for individual reps.

Johnson Controls, an industrial controls and facilities management company, sells complex products and solutions. Its reps ran into the problem described above, and had trouble making complex sales. The company’s solution was to embrace game elements to help reps unearth critical, unarticulated customer needs that aren’t being met effectively – and, in turn, reconcile competing priorities among multiple stakeholders.

Johnson Controls first gets all the stakeholders into a room and asks them to fill out two kinds of cards: “needs cards” represent key priorities for each participant in the buying process, and “practice cards” represent the organizational actions needed to meet the needs.

Cards are then mapped onto a special gameboard developed by Johnson Controls, that graphically represents where the customer thinks critical needs are going unmet. Armed with data and benchmarks from across the customer’s segment, reps can challenge customers in the moment by comparing them to competitors.

For more, including how Johnson Controls reps balance multiple priorities among stakeholders, check out the full case, or listen to this webinar replay to see how this and other companies have revamped their needs assessment process.

Many B2C marketers these days are turning to data and analytics to drive customer-centric outcomes. But the higher you go up in organizations, the more difficult it is to get a true picture of what your customer is like – competing priorities and the abstraction needed to run a very large enterprise run counter to focus on details of the customer experience.

Payless, an American shoe retailer, faced this problem a few years back. Facing competitive threats from big-box discounters, a deteriorating customer experience, and a management team far-removed from the average customer, the company’s CMO tried to drive improvements in the customer experience but predictably failed due to lack of senior management buy-in.

Realizing that the company needed to make the lack of customer focus “real” to senior executives, Marketing arranges a series of executive-immersion sessions. They listen in on focus groups to learn the characteristics of core segments, then “act out” those segments in a series of visits to Payless and competitor stores – a constraint that forces them to remove their functional hats and view stores from the perspective of a consumer, rather than an operations or a finance executive.

A key part of the visits to Payless stores is that they are unannounced and incognito. Executives, assuming their roles as a particular customer persona, shop in the store as any other customer would, avoiding the problem of stores “preparing” for pre-announced visits.

The end result? Executives quickly figured out where the customer experience was lacking and identified a few key elements to fix, leading to higher same-store sales and increased foot traffic and customer satisfaction.

MLC members, check out the full case, or listen to this webinar replay on how companies – including Payless – have pioneered consistent, differenteated, and delightful customer experience.

While it’s looking like 2012 might be a better year for business than 2011, it’s still essential that marketers focus on ways to ferret out waste and inefficiency in operations – both to minimize the impact on corporate bottom lines, but also to remain flexible for the new channels and investments that are sure to pop up in the coming 12 months.

And so, we measure everything – campaign effectiveness, brand investments, even the internal operations of the marketing function. But a marketing organization is a complex organism, and can be measured in an infinite number of ways – ways that might be contradictory or misleading.

Unsurprisingly, MLC members have come up with a number of ways to measure marketing’s effectiveness. Here are a few of our most popular strategies:

Measure adherence to the brand promise. Large organizations face inherent difficulties in consistently delivering on ambitious brand promises, and FedEx was no different; performance to brand promise was wildly inconsistent across channels and geographies.

In response, the company created a scorecard that boiled down the brand promise into discrete employee behaviors, incenting the front line to comply in the process. MLC members, read the full case here.

Measure marketing’s contribution to firm financial performance. This one can be difficult to figure out – it’s hard to determine, with any sort of certainty, which marketing activities have led to which performance benchmarks at the corporate level.

Xerox moved to this model after years of throwing large volumes of performance data at senior decision-makers. They used a lean Six Sigma process to arrive at a manageable number of insightful metrics aligned with broader firm performance, leading to higher levels of senior-staff buy-in. MLC members, read the full case here.

Measure marketing’s contribution to firm goals. We highlighted this case in this week’s post on sustainable brand growth, but it also explains a key insight into what Marketing should prioritize when it comes to effectiveness measurement. Given the somewhat ambiguous nature of marketing, it’s key that senior folks buy in – and most often, getting buy-in is contingent upon answering the question “What have you done for me lately?”.

One MLC member solved this problem by creating a purpose-built dashboard that shows exactly how marketing and branding initiatives align with and contribute to corporate goals. MLC members can see the whole case here. We’ve also blogged about this case.

More and more, 2012 is looking like a year of growth, and a prime brand imprint moment for companies looking to recapture wallet share lost to the recession.

We thought we’d take you on a brief tour of four proven strategies for sustainable brand growth, as illustrated by MLC members:

Establish a repeatable brand-building framework. Think about it: a lot of dominant brands in various markets are dominant not necessarily because of planning and business acumen, but tradition and accidents of history.

American spirits manufacturer Brown-Forman, famous in particular for making Jack Daniels whiskey, arrived at a set of tools and processes to establish and build on a meaningful and differentiated brand position. MLC members, for more, click here.

Develop a marketing and brand plan that supports overall corporate strategy. It’s vitally important that your brand resonates with your actual consumers, yes. But almost as important is whether it resonates internally – if marketers can’t communicate their contribution to the corporate bottom line, it makes it pretty easy to cut a popular brand from the market.

One MLC member solved this problem by creating a purpose-built dashboard that shows exactly how marketing and branding initiatives align with and contribute to corporate goals. MLC members can see the whole case here. We’ve also blogged about this case.

Develop a clear, differentiated brand strategy. Many of our readers and members work for mature brands – ones that have been around for decades or centuries – and in the intervening years, brand promises and strategies can get muddled to the point of ineffectiveness.

Recognizing the problem, Clorox (which will be 100 years old next year) launched a study into what made brands consistently outperform their categories, and found that each had a single-minded growth strategy that all activities aligned with. They then created the HighFlyer program that helped brands find that growth strategy. MLC members can see the whole case here, our toolkit here, and we’ve blogged about it before, too.

Focus on consumer focus. Ultimately, we marketers are here because of customers and consumers, but the complexity of many firms’ business, our marketing plans often revolve around something else – the demands of television partners, for instance.

Kellogg’s, recognizing this, refocused its planning process to concentrate on measures of customer engagement and focus, leading to stronger, more sustainable brand growth. MLC members can see the whole case here or listen to a webinar replay.

Over the last few months, we’ve surveyed the membership a lot (thank you for helping us out, by the way). And those that we’ve talked to seem to agree on one big thing: 2012 is going to be a year of change. We explored a few things that might change last week.

But no matter what changes, it’ll be important that firms are ready for what’s coming around the bend. Marketing has a key role to play in driving change internally, and to get ready for what might be a tumultuous year, here are a few examples of how member companies have done just that:

International Truck and Engine’s Strategy Support Groups. New customer behaviors and market realities often make it necessary for companies to rapidly implement new strategies – but change fatigue is real, and traditional techniques don’t always create the atmosphere of high employee/manager engagement necessary to push changes through.

International’s marketing and communications teams came up with a novel approach: small “support groups”, designed to help managers internalize strategy and advocate for it with their staff.

Standard Chartered’s Brand Values Activation Team. Shifts in brand positioning are a particularly difficult form of internal change; employees internalize brand attributes even more than consumers do. Typically, companies try to drive internal adherence to new brand standards through centralized communications campaigns – but they believe that such a campaign wouldn’t engage employees well enough to drive new behaviors.

Similar to International Truck and Engine’s small-group oriented strategy, Standard Chartered created a “brand values actvation team” that culls enthusiastic, change-oriented managers from around the organization, and co-opts their passion to spread new standards to the rest of the firm.

Novelis’ Solutions Innovation Gameboard. As markets loosen up, and as recessionary habits begin to fade away, innovation will be a key element of re-capturing wallet share. But a lot of times, innovation efforts are poorly structured – and the result is incremental changes in product or service offerings, nothing that captures the market’s imagination.

Realizing that their traditional innovation process was freezing out the voices of lower-level employees, Novelis’ marketing department developed a game-based ideation session that creates an engaging setting for identifying, evaluating, and further developing a broad range of early-stage ideas from the entire employee base.

MLC members, want to learn more about Marketing’s role in organizational change? Check out our internal communications and NPD/innovation topic centers for the latest cases and studies on these topics.

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 »

Ah, New Year’s – the time when we step back, reassess, and resolve to do better in the coming 365 days. Most New Year’s resolutions are pretty predictable – stop smoking, lose 20 pounds, finally set up that household budget – but what should marketers, specifically, be thinking about for the coming year? Based on our conversations, we came up with a few resolutions we’re hearing: Read More »

Americans (and maybe some of our non-American friends) all know the familiar gameshow scene of the Price is Right: Bob Barker (or Drew Carey, if you prefer the new guy) inviting crazed contestants to guess the price of everything from oatmeal to cars to exotic trips to Fiji.  And as the title says, the focal point is price, price, price.

Outside of the gameshow arena, consumers are arguably just as obsessed with price, and this attitude has become a pain point for many a sales representative.  How does a sales rep keep the conversation away from price when that’s all that a customer is thinking about?

Teach them something else that’s right.

Let’s look at a case on truck driver engagement and retention to see how Marketing at Volvo was able to deal with this issue.

Initially, no matter what sales reps went in with…

“We have a better product!  We have more features!  We can address your needs!”

… the customer always brought the conversation back to price.

“Well… a truck is a truck, but hey maybe you can throw in some free chrome bumpers!”

Volvo convened a small group of mid- to upper-level directors in a workshop to brainstorm and develop a new message for the sales reps.  MLC members, read more about the key elements to this workshop here.

They recognized an opportunity to improve driver management for their customers…

“Customers are underestimating how much unsatisfied drivers are costing them.”

… and crafted a pitch that teaches customers the value of Volvo solutions.

“Instead of telling them how our 2,092 square inch windshield will reduce the likelihood of an accident, let’s talk to them about the costs associated with driver turnover.”

Notice that instead of leading with the value of product features and focusing on known customer needs, the new approach leads with issue(s) costing customers money and telling them something they don’t already know about themselves.

And voila, you’ve shown your customers that the price is not the only thing that’s right when it comes to your business!

MLC members, read the full case study here.