But if you’ve got the budget for it, there’s a smart way that Super Bowl ads can fit into B2B marketing plans. Recall that, in last year’s research project for B2B marketers, we talked about the “mid-funnel” – that grey area between awareness and purchase that, increasingly, it’s Marketing’s job to own:

That area – the second half of customers’ information-gathering process and the first half of the evaluation process – is currently an area not covered well by Marketing and Sales organizations, and it’s a prime vacuum for what we in a B2C context might call branding – the provision of well-designed mental shortcuts that address areas of customer need. In the B2B space, those needs tend to be more practical. “I need a blade server that won’t burst into flames during key processes” is something you might hear from a target of B2B branding, while a B2C consumer would say – perhaps subconsciously – “I need a potato chip that makes me feel young and vital again.” But the needs of business buyers are needs nonetheless – and they’re complex and subject to heuristics that simplify the buying process.

How might a B2B Super Bowl ad work in an empty mid-funnel world? Let’s look at last year’s ad for Chatter.com, Salesforce’s enterprise social media platform:

There’s an emotional message here: the cloud, as embodied by Chatter, is a futuristic, quasi-magical solution for keeping far-flung, overworked teams on the same page. But emotions typically aren’t enough to justify a B2B purchase, one that typically has to be worked through a committee or a procurement department. Pairing the emotional message with one tailored for the four profiles of B2B buyers yields functional and emotional differentiation, and consistently using the symbols of the original ad allows marketers to re-invoke the emotional cue whenever they’d like. In other words, the advertisement serves as both the opening salvo for a campaign – driving customers into the wide end of the funnel – but also as a template for more functional, tailored messaging as the funnel narrows.

Now, Chatter hasn’t done that. The original ad was not well received by pundits, and perhaps it wasn’t well-liked by customers, either. (Using the Black-Eyed Peas, who later turned in a sub-par halftime performance, probably didn’t help). But one could imagine a successful campaign along these lines.

MLC members, what do you think about B2B ads in a Super Bowl setting? Let us know in the comments.

(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?

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.

Part of this has to do with greater information availability – customers are educating themselves about products and solutions before they ever see a rep, and, as such, are in a better place to make more thorough and deliberate decisions about what they buy. Time pressures have led business leaders to spend less time with reps, as well, reducing the amount of messaging purchasers absorb prior to the buying decision.

But one important element of buyer scrutiny is fear: fear that the solution will fail or not work as advertised, and that their key metrics – or, even worse, their careers – will take the hit. And who can blame them? In today’s networked world, the cost of failure is a lot higher than it once was.

Autodesk, a 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software company, solved the problem using a purpose-built online community that connects credible customers to qualified leads, enabling customers to assuage the risk-oriented fears of the prospects. Using a variety of incentives for existing customers, the online forum enables conversations across customer groups. The best conversations are converted to product messaging – helping bring “social proof” into the company’s marcomm efforts.

MLC members, for more on this solution, check out the full case.

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.

Thinking, Fast and Slow. Just when you thought the cognitive-science fad in business circles was wearing out, Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman releases what is likely to be considered his magnum opus on the way people think and make decisions, particularly commercial ones.

In general, I think marketers intellectually know that consumers are not rational and will often make unexpected choices, but our models often assume a rational or quasi-rational consumer. I think that, in some respects, this book will help folks truly re-think what drives commercial behavior.

The Filter Bubble. Here’s one that describes a phenomenon marketers are (in part) responsible for: the splintering of society made possible by long-tail affiliations and the internet, and the resulting “bubble” most people find themselves in when it comes to news, information and products.

This is an important phenomenon that really does limit the kind of serendipity that drives a lot of product adoption and preference switching, and it’s worth looking in-depth at author Eli Pariser’s argument. His examples are primarily from the world of politics, but the parallels are clear: when algorithms and social circles control what one is exposed to, serendipity dies.

Steve Jobs. I’ll be honest – I’ve only just picked this one up, and I’m not quite sure I have well-developed thoughts on what the book has to offer folks. I have read a number of excerpts from the book, around the time it was released – and I can say that they paint a picture of an incredibly enigmatic leader, the kind whom we’re not likely to see again any time soon.

I think, if anything, the big takeaway from this book will be just how reliant Apple was in its early days on Jobs’ genius, and how other companies that compare their innovation and design acumen to Apple’s are likely chasing unicorns.

The Challenger Sale. You know we couldn’t write a post about the best recent business books without plugging our own. Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, both of our sister program for sales executives, have a great new book out explaining how the relationship sales approach is becoming less effective, and how the best sales reps for the new environment are those that don’t acquiesce to the customer’s every demand, and who push back and remain in control of the sale.

The book teaches executives how to implement a Challenger sales strategy in their organization, and even includes great information on how marketers can help enable Challenger selling. Definitely worth a look.

2011 Marketing Investment Benchmarks. Review select marketing, marcomm and digital spend and budget allocation benchmarks from our 2011 benchmarking initiative, including previews by business model, revenue size and marketing priority.

Marketing Automation: Lessons from the Front. In recent years, Marketing Automation has grown in prominence but as with any new technology, many marketers are struggling to separate fact from fiction when it comes to what these software-based tools can really help them accomplish.

Help Your Consumers Become Better Advocates. As many marketers know, word of mouth is one of the most trusted forms of marketing. However, even when consumers do advocate for a product or service, their recommendations often provide too little context and detail to convince shoppers to buy. Learn How to improve the quality of your advocates’ recommendations.

Managing the Transition to Head of Marketing. As marketing organizations take on a greater role in the functioning of the enterprise, and as enterprises themselves become more global in scope, the role of the CMO has become much more complex. Heads of marketing must now assume responsibility for a bigger basket of activities, from customer understanding to analytics to creative development, and are under even more pressure to show returns on those activities.

Improve NPD Opportunities: Know Your Customers’ Goals. Too often, customer understanding efforts end up yielding only incremental improvements in product and service. Here’s how one member company sought to understand what really drove their customers, super-charging their innovation efforts in the process.

Know What Your End-To-End Customer Experience Looks Like. Product and media proliferation make it harder than ever to maintain a consistent customer experience. Well-intentioned efforts to improve individual touchpoints based on customer feedback often sum to a disjointed experience for the customer. Moreover, even when acting on the same insights, independent functions’ approaches can clash with one another.

Citrix’s “Anti-Newsletter” Nurture Program. Citrix’s automated quarterly newsletter—a content catch-all including multiple calls to action—was not generating the quality or quantity of leads that Marketing or Sales needed. The solution was an “anti-newsletter”—a system of targeted, timely e-mails with discrete calls to action.

Teach Customers with Your Sales Pitch. Are your customers paying attention to your differentiators, or are they focusing on price and forcing you into the commodity bucket? Here’s how Volvo brings the conversation back to unique supplier benefits.

Make Your Touchpoints Resonate: Reverse Your Marketing Plan. In an age of media oversaturation, brands without principled touchpoint selection strategies risk irrelevance – or worse.

First, some background, if you’re not knee deep in health-related social media circles. The US Food and Drug Administration, in addition to determining which pharmaceutical products should and shouldn’t be allowed in America’s pharmacies, also regulates the ways in which pharma companies are allowed to market to doctors and patients. Sounds smart, right? After all, we’re talking about potentially-dangerous drugs, here.

As such, they’ve developed guidelines and rules for the use of electronic marketing in a pharmaceutical setting. The only problem is, they haven’t been seriously updated since the late 1990s – and do not account for social media at all. This has put pharma companies in the weird position of being able to use social to broadcast certain messages but unable to have meaningful conversations with their customers, lest a side effect or adverse event is reported, setting off a chain of regulatory red tape.

The FDA listened and, in November 2009, held two days of hearings where pharma marketers, consultancies, doctors and scientific groups testified and gave suggestions on adapting the agency’s guidelines for a shifted communications landscape. And then, we waited – until Christmas Day 2011, when the FDA published this – entitled “Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices” - in the Federal Register, without even issuing a press release. This particular issue is one small facet of the pharma/social media problem, and it looks as though that the agency, rather than issuing sweeping guideline shifts that acknowledge a new communications landscape, is going to attack issues piecemeal.

But this specific guidance gives very little evidence that the FDA is thinking about social media as a systemic phenomenon, as opposed to a special case, capable of being dealt with with one-off regulations. First, the basic assumption is that marketers will be using social channels to “disseminate product information”, i.e., to advertise. That’s a given, but social offers organizations a lot more than just more space to plaster messages; we’ve talked about how social media trends mirror those in real life, and presumably the ability to listen to consumers better might lead to better health outcomes.

So here’s what I’d like out of future FDA guidances: an acknowledgement that social is a conversational medium, not a broadcast one; that it has benefits for pharmaceutical companies and broader public health outcomes beyond providing a place for Pharma to advertise; and that rigid rules on what Pharma can and can’t discuss in certain circumstances is bound to fail in a landscape where drugs are prescribed for all kinds of purposes.

Maybe we’ll get it, but I’m not hopeful.

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:

• Marketing’s primary focus will shift from traditional marketing activities (e.g. demand/lead generation, value proposition development, etc.) to enabling cross functional, end-to-end customer experience management among customer-facing departments.
• Marketing’s primary role will be product, service, and business model innovation, rather than traditional marketing activities (e.g. marcom, branding, segmentation, etc).
• Marketing’s role will be about producing customer information, as much as using information (e.g. campaigns will be designed to collect customer information, not just build awareness or generate leads).
• Customers will be significantly involved in customer-facing ideation activities (e.g., new product development, messaging) beyond episodic feedback solicitation.
• Marketing will be able to accurately predict customers’ purchasing needs and stage of the buying process early on, before Sales reps’ conversations with customers.

Marketers also evaluated how soon they expected the shifts and the top five had varying timelines associated with them – some marketers predicted would materialize within a year, whereas others were 3-5 years out.  Among these five, the shift from just using to producing content was seen as the most near term while the ability of marketers to predict purchasing needs was thought to be the furthest out.  But regardless of timeline, as these changes occur, what will they mean for B2B marketers?  Some thoughts:

• Marketing departments will not be organized by touch-point (i.e. tradeshow, web, direct), but rather by customer needs at least partly aligned to where customers are in the buying process.
• Marketing will work closely with IT to strategize, implement, and optimize the increasingly important and vital role of technology in day-to-day operations.
• Collaboration across the organization in service of true customer-centricity will be the norm and the best marketers will excel at internal politicking and influencing other stakeholders.
• Collection of customer voice will focus on understanding the context customers are operating within rather than their opinions with products/services/customer touch points.
• The ability to quickly understand and synthesize data (quantitative, qualitative, and in between) into a compelling story will be a requisite skill.
• Editorial calendars will be as important to marketing departments as strategic plans with content purposefully and precisely plotted out according to company strategic priorities.
• The number of “touches” between supplier and customer will decrease as the impact of each interaction increases.  The monthly e-newsletter will be a thing of the past, replaced by more targeted, relevant, and timely communications.
• Because Marketing will be able to prove the superiority of its lead gen and qualification efforts, Sales will accept and follow-up on qualified leads without incessant questions and complaints (okay, so maybe this is just something I think marketers hope is true…).

What else do you think the future holds for B2B marketers?  What are some of the big shifts you anticipate in 2012 and beyond?  Discuss in the comments below and/or email me to set up a conversation with the MLC B2B research team – we’d love to know what you are thinking about/working on/losing sleep over.

Now that I’ve tempered expectations a bit, I will say that one thing in particular is making me tremendously excited about this suite of technology: the idea that long-tail purchase motivations and special cases can be targeted with much greater ease than is capable with traditional marketing staffs and technologies. In the real world, that means a gradual replacement of general-purpose marcomms with increasingly-tailored communications.

That’s a process that’s well underway at Citrix, a networking and connectivity software company. Marketing noticed that the firm’s quarterly newsletter – a content catch-all that included multiple calls to action and spoke to many different kinds of current and potential customers – was underperforming expectations.

In order to extract the most value out of their marketing communications, the company turned to the best of automation and human judgment to create a lead nurturing program – one that starts with pre-programmed, automated content, but transitions to more tailored, targeted e-mails to convert prospects into sales-ready, qualified leads.

MLC members, want to learn more about how Citrix used automation and judgment to get more from their marcomms? Be sure to check out the full case, as well as the rest of our work on marketing automation.

If there’s one thing the past few years have been notable for, for marketers, it’s instability and uncertainty. Core assumptions of the craft are being called into question by technological shifts, a growing impetus on globalization is running into geography-specific challenges, and it’s unclear whether consumers and business buyers will re-learn pre-recession habits.

A lot of these are longer-term issues, ones that we might not get clarity on for a few years. But some might be decided in 2012. Here are some things to look out for:

B2B social/digital media.In the B2B space, we think this might be the year that marketers gain a bit more visibility into how best to use social media in the business buying environment. A number of variables are falling into place: for instance, marketing automation technologies are helping marketers use social data and platforms more effectively and a greater percentage of buyers are becoming more comfortable with social media.

I’m not suggesting that we’ll learn “the answer” to all B2B social media related questions, but I think we’ll get quite a bit closer.

Geograhpic uncertainties.A number of the major markets big firms have invested in across the last 10 years are showing signs that idiosyncratic issues might affect consumer and business outcomes in the next year. In the United States, the November presidential election is very important for – among others – the finance and healthcare industries, as legislation passed under President Obama may be rolled back in the event a Republican unseats him. In Europe, the ongoing sovereign debt crisis still threatens big consequences for the Eurozone, and if the situation isn’t resolved well (and soon), consumers could feel the pain even worse than they do now.

In India, the government has begun to show signs of wariness towards Western business, such as shelving a plan to allow foreign retailers to open stores in the country. And in China, there are some signs that phenomenal economic growth may be slowing.

In general, firms have done a great job of hedging their bets geographically, but significant challenges in each of those geographies remain – challenges that may shake out between now and December 31.

Erosion of sticky recession habits. We’ve talked about it here before, but there’s significant evidence that it takes consumers and businesses quite some time to retreat from frugal habits learned in recessionary times – even if those habits aren’t strictly necessary anymore.

Those habits have created some pretty tough times for marketers, as margins have decreased, price comparison and individual research blunt the impact of messaging, and budget contractions have shrunken the spending pie.

We know that habits shift through some combination of changing economic circumstances and time. Will 2012 be the year your customers loosen the strings a bit?

Mobile and e-commerce. Pretty much everyone buys some things online these days, but in recent years, we’ve seen a vanguard of early adopters shift to doing most or all of their shopping online or with their phones (you can count me as one; I hate malls). With Amazon Prime and a subscription to a grocery delivery service like Peapod or FreshDirect, one can just about get away with never stepping into a retail store again.

Now, clearly, there are benefits to the retail environment that, for some, make up for the hassle of having to actually enter the store. I think this may be the year where brands and retailers figure out exactly what those things are, and find a limit on consumers’ willingness to shift their shopping online.

What have we missed? Let us know in the comments.

Give more than we take. Marketing’s job, at its most basic, is about a) gaining customer attention and b) converting that attention to dollars. The strategies for doing that vary, obviously – some firms opt for longer-term relationship and brand-building, deferring the attention to dollar conversion to a later date, while others choose shorter-term strategies.

Regardless, it’s worth remembering that that attention is as limited a resource as the money it leads to, and the best firms will do everything they can to extract the most value out of every minute of consumer brain time. For most, that will mean something that might be a bit revolutionary – positioning marketing efforts to add value to the life of the customer.

How to do it? Last year’s major research projects (B2B, B2C) suggested some examples of how big companies have made the buying decision easier and more valuable for customers.

Get empirical (well, as empirical as possible). “Data-driven marketing” is repeated so much by vendors and consultants that it’s nearly at the cliche level, but our initial impression of how large-enterprise marketing organizations use customer data is that there’s a lot of room to improve. In a number of organizations, we’re seeing that data is used mostly to give an empirical veneer to already-formed conclusions; that’s not what empiricism is about, to say the least.

Our best-practices research into this topic is ongoing, obviously, and subject to change. But one key area we think marketing organizations can pretty easily key in on is reducing the cost of being wrong. Why? Well, making fact-based decisions requires people willing to be proven wrong by data – the market is a complex place, and our assumptions about customer behavior, marcomm effectiveness, and any number of critical knowledge areas will sometimes – perhaps often – be wrong. If the stakes of being wrong aren’t quite as high, decision-makers will have more incentive to bring an open mind to customer data.

Forge better cross-functional connections. Critical to progressing on adding customer value and making the most out of data is an old Marketing bugaboo: forging effective relationships with other functions. For instance, making the best use of data requires an effective partnership with IT, at the very minimum, and incorporating added customer value into marketing activities likely requires us to play nice with customer service and R&D.

This is an old standby topic for MLC; for more, check out our cross-functional alignment topic center.

Get serious about establishing a truly global marketing organization. Most large enterprises have marketers around the world, but, judging from the best of the best, that’s not quite enough to call your marketing department “global” anymore. What’s needed, rather, is a focus on building out local marketing staffs and incorporating local practices and knowledge, to the extent possible and necessary.

Last year, we did a project on global marketing that lays out how some of the best companies are structuring their Marketing organizations to take advantage of all that a global footprint has to offer.

Do you have any marketing-related resolutions for the upcoming year? Let us know in comments.

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.

While segmentation can be approached in many ways, some of MLC’s members have evolved best-in-class winning segmentation strategies that have propelled them to success. Presented below are a couple of strategies our members have used to segment their customers and consumers. The key take-away, as you read through these examples is that these are simple to enforce, yet innovatively different ways to segments your customers and consumers.

B2C Consumer Segmentation Examples:

LG Mobile’s Adaptive Customer Personas: Going over and above the conventional psychographic consumer segmentation, LG developed real life consumer personas at the work place. Employees could interact with the personas personally. Listen to LG’s M. Ehtisham Rabbani on how LG got it’s segmentation to stick with it’s employees.

La-Z-Boy’s In-store Diagnostic Protocol: Furniture retailer – La-Z-Boy developed distinct segments based on purchase motives of consumers, while in a retail store. It then equipped sales reps with a short two question diagnostic, which helped them map the customer, in-the-moment, into different purchase segments. The diagnostic also provides next-step recommendations to reps, to facilitate in-store interaction, leading to purchase.

B2B Customer Segmentation Examples:

Dow Chemicals’ Need-based Segmentation: Dow chemicals embarked on industry focused exercise to determine company-neutral loyalty drivers. However, instead of fitting drivers of loyalty within customer segments, Dow built its segments around them. This needs based segmentation enabled Dow to meet customers’ stated, and latent needs. By addressing previously unmet customer needs, and increased customer loyalty by 15%.

Square D’s Segment Selection Methodology: Square D (A Schneider Electric Division) defined valuable customer segments on two-criteria – opportunity” (long-term revenue potential) and “fit” (a comprehensive measure of a customer’s alignment with Square D’s strategy). The company allocated more marketing resources toward these key customers, who scored high on both the criteria. By carefully defining their customer segments, Square D was able to grow its key accounts by 54%, as opposed to 12% growth in other accounts.

MLC Members: You can find our extensive topical coverage on our Segmentation Topic Center. We have also assembled a Segmentation Pre-launch toolkit, which will help you to put in place the pre-requisites before launching a segmentation exercise.

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:

• Marketing automation success is a long, hard road.  Just 31% of those we surveyed said they had seen positive, measurable ROI from marketing automation that met or exceeded their expectations.  One of the things that distinguished those folks from the rest of the crowd was the length of time they had been using marketing automation – the overwhelming majority had been at it for a year or more.

• Have reasonable expectations for returns.  The most commonly realized returns included things like better alignment between Marketing and Sales, better qualified leads (and a higher volume of leads), and more engagement with marketing collateral (in the form of higher email click-through-rates, more thought piece downloads, and improved website metrics).  Very few respondents had seen things like bigger or faster deals or higher close rates.

• Put people first.  While the majority of marketing-automation-related angst we heard was about which software vendor to select, it is the people and processes that plug into and overlay the software that are going to lead to success or failure.  One of the best practices featured on the Key Findings page is a great profile of Sutherland about Marketing and Sales collaboratively hammering out a lead hand-off process.

Marketing automation is not a magic solution to all that ails B2B marketers, but it can enable those who use it smartly and strategically to accomplish some great things.  Check out our profile of Telus for what can happen when marketing automation is firing on all cylinders.

MLC Members – find all this and more on our Marketing Automation Key Findings page and share your marketing automation thoughts, opinions, and experiences in the comments section below.

(the following is a guest post from Nick Toman, head of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for heads of sales. It originally appeared on their blog, The Sales Challenger.)

We hope you’ll read and share this.

It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. In 2011, the Sales Executive Council had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences, examined hundreds of thousands data points, and we ended the year with a series of intimate roundtable discussions with leading CSOs.

Given this, we’d like to share the fundamental shifts we expect to play out in increasingly significant ways in 2012.

Granted, it’s not a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive list – there is overlap and implications shared throughout these trends, but we hope you’ll take a minute and reflect on how these trends are manifesting in your own organization, disagree if appropriate, and highlight trends you expect to see that we missed. It’s meant to be a reflective, but fun list. We look forward to your input!

1. Customers increasingly don’t need Sales’ help or expertise.

Our data shows that, on average, 57% of a purchase decision is complete before a customer contacts a supplier.

At this point in the purchase, needs are scoped, the purchase is funded, and price is often being benchmarked. Customers aren’t new to this “solutions purchase” game any longer. They’ve put in place strong buying systems, processes, infrastructure, consultants, and professionalized their purchasing approach.

We’ve hit a point where customer capability to buys things has outpaced our capability to sell things. And this is why customers are increasingly able to de-bundle our solutions and drive the purchase into the realm of price-based order fulfillment. The customer now has the upper hand and is forcing us to reconsider the nature of entire commercial relationship.

Leading sales organizations will find ways to shape customer demand. Our leading hypothesis is that sales channels will take on responsibilities that have traditionally belonged to Marketing, including upstream demand generation, awareness, and early consideration. Such approaches will help mitigate the “no man’s land” phenomena that exists between sales and marketing, where customers typically make the bulk of their purchase decision.

2. Finding “ready-made” customers will lose out to “making customers.”

Most sales organizations are unwittingly encouraging their salespeople to pursue opportunities falling into the previously discussed 57% range, where the customer is abundantly clear on their needs (and what they want to pay). For many salespeople, and FLSMs, they’d much rather pursue an opportunity where clear needs, funding, and senior support all exist. This is the strategy of finding good business. High performers look at those opportunities skeptically, at best. They see the impending RFP, concessions, the price pinch, and/or strong likelihood of being the dreaded comparison set.

Increasingly, the best salespeople will not find “ready-made” customers, but rather, make customers. They will seek out change-receptive customers who are not fully settled in their needs. The immediate goal will be to educate that customer on potential ways to change. Through the course of those efforts, these sellers will earn the vaunted “frontrunner” status (for whom our data shows 76% win-rate).

Our current research is focused precisely on how high-performers make customers, and rationalizing these insights for scalable adoption across the entire sales force. Stay tuned for more as we uncover those findings.

3. De-prioritization of traditional discovery skills.

On the heels of the previous trend, traditional discovery skills have largely served the purpose of determining how well a customer’s needs align to a given solution. The critical flaw in this rationale is that pursuing business that is well-aligned and ready to move forward is pursuing a customer who is well-informed, likely pursuing other suppliers, and best positioned to have price leverage.

Leading organizations will shift mind-share away from traditional discovery and questioning around alignment to an offering, and move towards discovery of receptivity to change. Qualification of leads who are in the very initial stages of reconsidering the status quo will provide the best opportunity to shape the needs of that customer.

4. The lines of distinction between Sales and Marketing will erode.

The “no man’s land” that exists between sales and marketing is permitting customers the opportunity to make their purchase decision without supplier involvement.

Given this, the most progressive suppliers are driving customer engagement from the most formative stages through recognition of value. This new model focuses on extremely early customer engagement, teaching the customer about new opportunities or threats before the customer senses these issues. There is no “handoff” from marketing to sales in this model – in fact, the lines of distinction between sales and marketing are increasingly obscured this in model.

Winning commercial organizations will build a capability spanning sales and marketing that is centered on engaging customers with such insight. This capability includes insight generation, insight messaging, lead generation and opportunity selection based on receptiveness to insight, and insight-focused sales interactions. Keep in mind, these insights are most certainly not generic insights on the market, but unique insights meant to drive commercial success for the supplier. Accordingly, these insights must teach customers about unique supplier capabilities.

Here are the big four headline trends for spend this year:

Marketing budgets are projected to increase in 2012. Our survey suggests that B2B budgets are likely to increase in all segments. Budget growth is expected to be much more robust in B2B services organizations than with B2B manufacturing.

This is a continuation of a pretty long-term trend. B2B marketing is still maturing, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see budgets continue to rise for the foreseeable future (barring the very real possibility of a renewed recession). With margins higher in the services space, its not surprising to see marketing spend rising faster, either.

What is interesting, though, is that marketers are increasing program spend faster than people spend – which likely represents the increasing importance of digital, analytics, and marketing automation. The embedded assumption is that human expertise is, on the whole, less important – an assumption that we’ll see tested, I think, in the coming years.

Budget allocation for digital is increasing. This shouldn’t be surprising to any Interestingly, while budgets on the whole are set to grow more slowly in the B2B services space than in manufacturing, digital spend should increase significantly in manufacturing. Part of this, I think, is catch-up growth, but it speaks to how manufacturing marketers are embracing non-traditional sales and marketing techniques.

One interesting thing will be to see how vendors will adjust their strategies for the B2B manufacturing market, which does not at all match the core competencies those companies have developed for the consumer market.

Budget for traditional marcom activities and direct marketing is decreasing. Our survey suggests that spend on traditional marcom activities has decreased between 15% and 23%, and spend on direct marketing has dropped between 15% and 17% from 2010 to 2012.

Part of this is a necessary corollary to increases in spend on digital, but it appears that part is a genuine shift in tactics. Budget cuts in the late aughts, we think, led marketers to experiment more with virtual events – webinars and the like – which proved effective and have gradually replaced spending on live events, which are much more expensive.

Marketers are cutting back on sales support activities, and shifting spend to marketing automation. We’ll have more on marketing automation and analytics  in a few weeks (get excited!), but for the meantime, the big takeaway from this report is that spend in this category is increasing fast. B2B services organizations have increased spend by 45% on the suite of marketing automation technologies, while manufacturers have upped their budgets by 25%.

It seems like there’s some room for caution here, as big increases in spend and complex, not well understood technologies can sometimes equal vendors on the prowl.

Facing a mismatch between internal processes and the things they had learned from their customers, health care products company Cardinal Health had to do just that. Looking at sales data, the company’s marketers realized that customers – seeking to dampen costs and not seeing the value in Cardinal Health’s complete offering – often purchased one element of what was intended to be an integrative solutions deal. Not good!

The company realized that the problem wasn’t with the customers, it was with them – while they had some insight into their customers, they weren’t baking it into key internal processes, like new product development. The result was that their solutions offers didn’t resonate with their intended targets.

To fix it, Marketing developed a cross-silo innovation framework, designed to do a few things:

1. Get consumer insights from around functional silos on one page. Marketing divided internal stakeholders into three teams, and asked them to get in the heads of their customers and think about deep-seated marketplace beliefs, Cardinal Health’s key areas of competency, and their customers’ desired outcomes.
2. Identify the best opportunities. The teams then meet together, and develop links between the beliefs, desired outcomes, and areas that Cardinal Health can help.
3. Define the business concept. The ideas from stage 3 are then advanced through successive levels of scrutiny.

Want to learn more about Cardinal Health’s process? MLC members can read the case here, or listen to a webinar where we talk through this solution, as well as another from IBM.

That’s one of the questions Sales is asking itself, as recessionary habits persist in the buying centers of big organizations. The dynamics of internal buying centers are too complicated to be solved with a single solution, but one way Marketing can help is to make sure those buyers that love you – the ones still receptive to “relationship selling” – are equipped to make the case around the organization.

That’s exactly what Iron Mountain, the document management company, did when presented with a similar problem. They noted that typical Iron Mountain buyers – typically too junior to engage in strategic-level relationships – faced three obstacles that stood in the way of advocating for their solutions internally:

• Lack of appreciation for the strategic relationship. The company’s advocates loved the way Iron Mountain served their needs, but didn’t understand the broader, more strategic ways Iron Mountain could help their business.
• Minimal personal gain for advocates. Simply put, what’s in it for them?
• Fear of risking personal reputation. Potential advocates were wary – and who wouldn’t be – of sharing sharing overly-commercial resources and information with senior stakeholders, and secondarily were concerned about bringing a commercial proposal in front of decision-makers without a holistic understanding of Iron Mountain’s offering.

To teach these buyers how to advocate for Iron Mountain to senior staff, and leverage the company’s insights to raise their own profile at work, Marketing designs materials to do three things:

• Engage the heart. Iron Mountain highlights links between the advocate’s job, the solutions offer, and the value at stake for the broader organization. Doing this sells the advocate on pitching the solution internally.
• Motivate the mind. To get the advocate over the hump of pitching the solution internally, Marketing designs materials to reveal similarities between the advocate’s document management challenges and the pain points of senior decision-makers. This helps the advocate make a credible case to those stakeholders.
• Equip the hands. Finally, Marketing creates tools that the advocate can use to actually make the case to peers and senior leadership.

Want to learn more about Iron Mountain’s process, including the tools they armed their advocates with to make the case internally? You can read the full case here, or listen to Laura McDaniel, Iron Mountain’s director of marketing, talk through the approach.

It seems clear that, for a variety of reasons, energy and resource constraints will continue to be key concerns for small business owners for the foreseeable future. Those constraints take a few forms – sometimes they’re around environmental concerns, other times they’re around cost. But what language should you speak to business owners concerned about energy costs?

We know that green marketing can be effective in the B2C world, but how influential are environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility on small businesses’ purchase behavior? This year, the Enterprise Council on Small Business tested the impact of a myriad of factors on small business owners. As it turns out, value alignment – such as on green – has only moderate influence on owners.

Source: ECSB Research, July 2011, n=1099 N.A.

So, if green marketing isn’t an effective way to reach small businesses, what is? ECSB recommends positioning how members’ products and services can alleviate business owners’ pain points. In a recent study, ECSB asked owners what their biggest pain points are in all areas of managing their businesses. In the area of building and office administration, the cost of utilities ranked highest – despite the majority of owners not anticipating price increases for 2012.

At the end of the day, messaging how your products and services can positively impact the bottom line is likely to be more effective than green marketing per se in targeting small businesses. So, rather than focusing on going green, show business owners how your company can help them save some green.