Last week, my colleague Shelly wrote a preview of this year’s B2B research, which we’ll present for the first time in Chicago later next week. She mentioned 4 purchase need profiles: Total Cost of Ownership Buyers,  Service Buyers, Risk Avoidance Buyers, and Innovation Buyers. It’s the last category, Innovation Buyers, that I want to discuss in some more detail today.

Innovation buyers make up 30% of B2B buyers. The key question they ask of suppliers is “How can you make me better?” They’re most likely to categorize purchases as “strategic” as opposed to “transactional”, feature larger-than-average buying groups, and are more likely to use RFPs to attract potential suppliers.

In the past, the sales force managed these buyers with deep conversations and solutions tailored to their innovation needs. But since our research indicates that customers are delaying contact with Sales departments until they’re 57% finished with the purchasing process, we’re finding that those Sales conversations don’t happen early enough in the process to actually make a difference on the ultimate decision. Marketing needs to step into the “middle funnel” to speak to innovation buyers – but how can it be done in a scalable way? We’ve found that part of the key to engaging innovation customers is to articulate unique, valuable supplier perspectives.

This year’s research process unearthed a great best practice from Danisco, a food ingredients company based in Denmark, whose marketing team is getting the “valuable supplier perspective” thing right. Want to learn more? We’ll unpack that concept in great detail at this year’s executive retreat! But, in the meantime, we can leave you with three concrete steps to increase your mind and wallet share among innovation buyers: Read More »

At the end of this month, the MLC B2B team will present our findings from a nearly six-month research dive into the customer purchase process.  We’ve been highlighting the findings from our customer survey in posts for the past few months (check them out here, here, and here), but that survey is actually only one of the many ways we collected data.  In addition to that survey, which took the pulse of over 2,000 customers of some of our member companies, we also conducted a second survey of B2B buyers that focused on needs-targeted marketing.  We’ve had over 80 conversations with Chief Marketing Officers, Global Marketing Directors, Social Media Chiefs, and other marketing professionals doing the hard work at our member companies.  And lastly, we’ve picked the brains of numerous B2B marketing experts, consultants, and vendors specializing in everything from lead gen to social media to value calculators.

So, you may ask, what did we find?  As I mentioned, we’ll lay it all out in our first Executive Retreat on June 30 in Chicago (followed by meetings in San Francisco, Atlanta, London, Sydney, and Johannesburg).  But at a high level, the story is this: Read More »

MLC will be at the DMA11 Conference—insights and discounts herein!

We know from recent research that the top reason consumers follow brands in social media is for discounts.  So, MLC members, here’s your bone—you can save 25% off the regular price to attend the Direct Marketing Association’s 2011 conference in Boston this October.  Interested?  You can find details here.

And, if you’ll permit us to be so self-promoting, there’s extra reason to attend the DMA conference this year.  We’re facilitating two different sessions at the conference—and we think you’ll be excited about both of them! (we certainly are)

First, I’ll facilitate a stellar panel of New Media Ringmasters on Monday, October 3^rd during the general DMA conference. The stars of the show will be: Read More »

No matter your level of interest or involvement in social media, every organization should have a social media use policy in place that quickly outlines the dos and don’ts of social media activity for employees. Putting a social media use policy in place is the quickest and easiest way to decrease the overall level of risk that social media poses for your company – and we’ve also found that it’s one of the best ways to broach a conversation with your Legal team about the risks of social media. Starting out the discussion with well-crafted guidelines can help assuage compliance and regulatory fears, while offering a starting point for your company’s engagement in the social space.

MLC has collected best-in-class social media use policies from organizations like Intel, Best Buy, Telstra, the US Air Force. For regulated industries, we’ve created a library of policies collected from companies under greater regulatory and legal scrutiny.

From studying the policies we’ve collected from the most progressive social media organizations, we’ve isolated three key elements in all effective, well-understood social media use policies: Read More »

By Ana Lapter

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post describing two different types of user communities as viable options for B2B marketing organizations:  communities of practice and communities of interest.

Our most recent customer purchasing survey reveals that supplier communities enjoy a higher degree of influence over customer purchasing decisions than other types of communication channels. We believe this is due to the interactive nature of peer communities.   Despite their large influence, however, many B2B community programs are far from reaching the level of maturity and sophistication needed to fully capitalize on their potential.   A variance analysis shows significant gaps in how marketers leverage this channel to interact with their customers.

To enhance the effectiveness of community programs, marketing professionals should consider the following: Read More »

Tooling around CEB’s Sales, Marketing, and Communications blogosphere this week, two seemingly unrelated items struck me as a reflection of where our society is going, and what that might mean for those of us whose responsibility it is to grow brands and market share.

First, from Jamie Kleinerman over at the Sales Challenger blog:

The ‘elevator pitch’ has long been a staple in Sales’ lore. We’ve all heard the stories of the elevator pitch that got a rep a meeting with the senior decision-maker or helped close that big deal.

But new technology in elevator systems could make the elevator pitch a thing of the past…

New elevator systems now have the capabilities to route riders, sometimes according to rank and seniority.

And, from Brennan Kelly, here at Wide Angle:

While algorithms that predict consumer tastes have been around for some time (think Amazon, Netflix, and Pandora), the technology has leapt forward with its ability to analyze consumer preferences to predict what they will like.

What can advanced elevator routing and online shopping algorithms tell us about where we’re headed? It shows that humans are increasingly comfortable substituting the decision-making power of machines for something called serendipity – not the terrible early-aughts romantic comedy, but the act of finding something one doesn’t expect to find. Serendipity is sometimes used as a synonym for “luck”, but the concept is a little different – while “lucky” can sometimes connote a zero-sum gain for one individual or group (i.e. someone must be unlucky for someone else to be lucky), serendipitous outcomes are beneficial for all parties involved.

Serendipity can be small – someone learning about a new band by hearing them by chance in a record store, or big – like reggae music’s heritage in the jazz, R&B and blues radio broadcasts that would sometimes make their way to Jamaica from New Orleans and Miami. Or they can be somewhere in between, like the senior executive who finds a great new supplier because she met a rep by chance in the elevator.

But in the age of the algorithm, when my new favorite bands are predicted entirely by my previous favorite bands, and social interaction is increasingly governed by things like elevator routing technology, what’s the role for serendipity? What’s the future of cultural or market syncretism, when human learning and discovery is increasingly pathed by deterministic algorithms?

Writer Eli Parser, former president of MoveOn.org, has a book out on this subject called The Filter Bubble, which, given the author’s biography, talks mostly about how the algorithmic revolution affects the range of political viewpoints we’re exposed to. I’m still in the middle of the book, but one of the key points Parser touches on is the endgame to all of this – once we’re firmly ensconced in a filter bubble of our own preferences, where’s the opportunity for new ideas or new products to gain votes or market share?

My question for marketers: by seeking the undeniable short-term gains algorithmic marketing has to offer, are we sacrificing serendipity, the lifeblood of market shifts? As a user of several algorithmic recommendation engines, but as a lover of discovering new things unexpectedly, I’m genuinely torn. What do you think?

Over the past few years, marketers been faced with a seemingly exponentially-increasing set of information channels through which to communicate.  Every day a new website or social network or mobile app seems to pop-up, leaving marketers scrambling to figure out if they need a presence on it.  This change has been a bit slower for B2Bs who have largely been able to stick with more traditional channels…for now.  But we all know this won’t last forever and B2Bs will have to reconsider and reconfigure their own marketing mixes to include new sources.

As part of our B2B research this year, we surveyed over 2,000 B2B customers across a wide range of industries.  A major part of this study was the channels these customers use and are influenced by when researching business purchases.  Not surprisingly, the sales conversation and the supplier website were the two most influential sources.

More interesting to us was how the various channels grouped together when we plotted them in a 2 x 2 matrix with influence on the vertical axis and variability of influence on the horizontal (see below).  For those who aren’t familiar, variability or variance is a measure of how far a set of numbers are spread out from each other.  So two sources might both rank a “6” in terms of influence, but Source A may get that score because everyone rated it a 4, 5, or 6 in equal measure (low variance), whereas Source B may get that score because some people rated it a 2 and some people rated it an 8 (high variance).  This suggests that some suppliers use Source B really well and others really poorly.

You see three clumps of channels in the matrix:

Emerging: Circled in green, these are newer sources that haven’t yet hit the mainstream.  They currently have low influence and low variability because very few B2Bs are using them at all.  While this is good news for some B2Bs who are worried that they haven’t yet figure out social media, it also suggests the chance for first mover advantage. Do something truly innovative with social media or blogs and you can own the space as the definitive source.

Tried-But-Not-True:  Circled in tan are three very traditional marketing channels with low-to-medium influence and variability.  These channels have been around for a long time and are used by virtually every supplier – yet it seems no one is employing them with much success.  Customers generally don’t rate them very highly, perhaps suggesting it is time to shift some resources away from these channels (or at least relegate them to pure awareness-building tools).

Opportunity: Highlighted in the blue oval, this group is a mix some newer channels with some more traditional ones.  Characterized by medium-to-high influence and high variability, these sources are ones that many suppliers are using well, but many are not leveraging to their full potential.  Note the interactive/conversational nature of many of these channels.  Additional resources here could net big returns.

At this point, this data is more food for thought than justification for a total marketing mix overhaul, but hopefully it can provide some guidance to B2Bs trying to figure out which channels they should prioritize.  One caveat, so far, we haven’t found much in the data about the impact of channels on any critical post-purchase outcomes (i.e. those who do research in a particular channel or set of channels are no more or less satisfied or likely to recommend than anyone else).  Ultimately, it is more what you say than where you say it.  But in a few years the dynamic might be different.

MLC members, want to learn more about the research that led us to these results and, more importantly, the innovative practices the Council has uncovered to help you solve the most pressing B2B Marketing challenges?  Register for our Annual Executive Retreat, “Responding to Heightened B2B Customer Uncertainty.”

As brands start to recover from the recession, we’re noticing that many formerly-shelved plans to enter new markets are moving forward. Companies are targeting new segments and new geographies, challenging entrenched incumbent competition in doing so.

One of the biggest problems “challenger” brands face is that they lack the credibility to compete in the new space. After all, if you’re a maker of Product A, and decide to start selling Product B, your potential customers need a good reason to consider switching from the existing set of options. So, how do you bridge the credibility gap, and condition the market to consider your solution?

The key to this can be found in Cisco’s Market Dialogue Seeding program, a key element of any new product launch within the company. Using insight marketing as a lever to move tech-industry thought leaders and the broader market to their solution, Cisco goes through a four-step process to establish expertise around a new product offering, which ultimately lead to the company’s insights being received by the market. Read More »

If you’ve read a B2B post on this blog in the last two months, you have most likely come across the banner statistic from our survey of over 2,000 B2B customers – that customers are, on average, 57% of the way through the purchase process before seriously engaging Sales.  This held true across purchases of all types of products and services as well as up and down the scale of purchase size.  This fact is undoubtedly troubling for many suppliers who rely on stellar sales reps to inform, persuade, and close customers.

A few weeks ago, my colleague, Yi, wrote a post about some of the proactive things B2Bs can do to encourage customers to contact Sales a bit earlier.  Among her advice – make customers smarter and harness the power of word-of-mouth.  Excellent suggestions (proven by the quant) and both linked to a myriad of other good things such as higher customer confidence, loyalty, and likelihood to recommend.  But Yi left out the darker side of our quant analysis on this topic – that the strongest drivers of earlier contact with Sales would require some Dr. Evil-esque machinations on the part of Marketers.

Before I reveal the results, make no mistake – I am NOT advocating Marketers actually engage in these activities.  I am simply sharing this data to cement the point that delayed Sales contact is pretty much here to stay.  Marketers should concentrate more of their efforts on working within this reality than trying to change it.

Now, on to the good stuff (insert evil laugh here – mwa ha ha ha).  Among the strongest statistical drivers of earlier contact with Sales are:

• Larger Buying Groups: More people in the mix leads customers to pick up the phone earlier, marking perhaps the only aspect of more people involved in the buying decision actually seems like positive news for Marketers.  But, not only is the size of the buying group out of your control, but it also causes bigger headaches down the line in the form of longer sales cycles, more no decisions, and just generally more work.

• More Customer Effort:  The harder the customer has to work to find the information they need about you, the earlier they contact you.  On the flipside, making information quick and easy to find leads to later Sales contact.  This pairs nicely with the next driver…

• Feeling Overwhelmed:  When customers feel like the volume and complexity of the information they are gathering is just too much for them to handle, they reach out sooner.

These last two bullets in particular could be taken to suggest a clear strategy: bury information of you under layers of clicks and “Registration Required” gates and make it so confusing and complex that customers have no choice but to call you for help.  I don’t think I need to go into why this is a bad idea.  You may hook them earlier, but the chances of them becoming satisfied, loyal customers are notably decreased.

So, the bottom line is, take Yi’s advice and work hard to teach your customers something new and find ways to build and spread positive word-of-mouth about your solutions.  But also realize that later Sales contact is a trend that is here to stay.  Customers prefer to do more research on their own and you should enable them to do so.  When in doubt, remember Google’s mantra: “Don’t be evil.”

MLC Members – want to learn more about the survey underpinning these results and the best practices we’ve uncovered to help Marketers deal with this new reality?  Register for our Executive Retreat here.

Also, to be a part of our ongoing research, answer this quick four-question poll.  I’ll share the results in a future post.

By Ana Lapter

A question that I frequently hear during conversations with B2B marketing professionals is: “Which marketing channels will get me the best bang for my buck?”

The question sounds perennial, but the specifics of today’s networked environment add an additional layer of uncertainty to the already complicated marketing planning effort. Unlike in the past, when Sales was the main source of customer information, customers now have access to a much greater range of information.  Many of these new channels suggest not just an increase in choices, but a fundamental shift in how various audiences find, consume, and share information, and ultimately form opinions and influence others. Read More »