(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.

As I’m guessing everyone is aware of by now, MLC’s B2C team is currently knee-deep in our 2012 research project. This year, we’re looking into analytics and “Big Data” – a space where there seems to be a lot of potential (and a lot of hype) but not too much in the way of best practices or frameworks for moving forward.

So we’re currently trying to tease out, exactly, what people are using analytics for, and what ultimate goals those actions feed into. When we’re on the phone with members, overwhelmingly we’re hearing that data brings enterprises closer to the consumer, leading to all sorts of better outcomes: more resonant marcomms, higher margins through more effective price discrimination, and, for some companies, better products that arise through access to protected, proprietary data assets (like Nike+).

I could imagine two ways that data might feed into customer centricity (whether it’s helping or hurting). Story number one more or less goes: we as a company had very little idea who our customers were, what they liked, how they socialized and what kind of products they bought from others that they could be buying from us. When we integrated advanced marketing analytics and unstructured data, the numbers told us more about our customers than we already knew, and we became more customer-centric.

The other story goes: we as a company had very little idea who our customers were, and therefore we integrated big data and advanced analytics. But we couldn’t choose which data to use, and our analysts and marketers got caught up in a never-ending cycle of analysis paralysis. Moreover, thinking about the consumer as an abstract concept in data led to people forgetting the importance of experience and observation. In the process, we lost sight of the softer, qualitative ways that we learned about customers, and ended up becoming less customer-centric.

Which of these is more plausible? I’m not sure, but my gut says it’s the second story. I can count the number of companies with great, consumer-apparent uses of data on my fingers and toes, and analytics vendors have bigger appetites than that; there are surely hundreds of companies out there with data on their hands of varying effectiveness.

So, we thought we’d bring the question to you. Answer the poll below to let us know how you feel about data and analytics’ role in customer-centricity. Want to add some details? Let us know in the comments section.

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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.

As detailed in our decision simplicity work from last summer, using trusted brand advisors can help build a brand.  These brand advocates help consumers relate to the brand, and they have much more credibility than other branded communications.  This trusted advice, along with helping consumers learn about your brand and weigh their options, simplifies decisions for consumers; these simpler decisions make them more likely to have brand intent, to follow through on that intent, to repurchase, and to recommend the products to their friends.

But many brands struggle with the risk involved when using consumers to market the brand.  After all, giving consumers the license to share their thoughts on your brand allows them to share the bad along with the good.  In addition, it can be hard to select the right people to represent the brand.

Ford tackled these challenges to launch the U.S. model of the Ford Fiesta by using consumer advisors, or “agents.”  To ensure that both consumers and the brand could trust the agents, Ford implemented a rigorous selection process to ensure good brand fit and social media reach.  Ford selected a very diverse group of agents, so most consumers in the Fiesta’s target demographic can find agents like them.

A larger struggle for most brands, though, is giving up control over what the consumer advisors say.  Ford knew it needed to balance the need for some brand control with the need to generate authenticity by giving agents uncensored speech, so they assigned monthly missions to give some structure to the agents’ experiences. Ford then allowed the agents to use their own blogs, tweets, and YouTube channels to tell their stories in their own words, pictures, and videos.

In addition to providing structure for the agents, Ford further leveraged these missions by selecting some that highlighted the car’s features.  For example, one mission had one agent drive until his car ran out of gas, showcasing the car’s high gas mileage; other missions included turning the car into an ice-cream truck (showing off a large amount of trunk and storage space) and taking a road trip (to demonstrate its comfort over long distances).

Using the agents to tell the brand’s story had really positive results: Ford generated the same name awareness for the Fiesta as the Ford Edge and Flex had after two years of traditional advertising at just 10% the cost of a traditional media campaign.

After seeing such great success in the United States, Ford adopted the campaign for India.  MLC members, click here to read about how Ford used the agents to generate brand interest in an emerging market.

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.

The US economy might be improving, but business leaders are still walking a tightrope: budget pressures and the increased cost of failure have led to buyers scrutinizing purchases more than ever before – both as individuals and in group buying settings.

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.

Yesterday afternoon, I watched eMarketer’s recent webinar on measuring social media success.  What particularly caught my eye were the top challenges that marketers face when managing their social media marketing efforts: measuring the ROI, making the case for investment, integration/measurement with other marketing channels, getting the right talent, and deciding who does what.

This list was eerily reminiscent of the results from MLC’s Marketer Quick Poll from a couple of months ago.  Only in our case, we had asked marketers about their top challenges on the data management frontier.  If these challenges are so similar between such different subjects, then perhaps it’s time to reposition and take a step back to look at the broader marketing environment.

The easiest big-picture framework that came to me was the traditional supply-and-demand curves.  For simplicity’s sake, we can consider the consumer market for baby food.

Assume we hold the supply curve constant.  To increase the amount of consumer surplus under the demand curve, we can do one of two things:

1. Try to make our captured demand hug the full consumer demand closer.  (Gerber battles Baby’s Best!)
2. Attempt to shift both demand curves further out along the supply curve.  (Expand the economic pie – for instance: Gerber using analytics to discover that older adults without teeth were an underserved market)

Most marketers would agree that achieving both would be ideal, and if they had to pick, they’d aim for the latter.  But if we look at actual practices, most marketing departments are focusing their social media and analytics efforts in the first one.

Their thought process might go something like this:

Sure I’d like to just burst through the innovation bubble and find a whole new untouched consumer population…

But we don’t have the innovative power, and it certainly won’t be easy justifying riskier, creative ventures to the rest of the organization.

Besides, the consumer landscape is changing so fast, I’m having a hard-enough time just keeping up with my competitors!

So let’s just work on speeding up current activities and getting as much consumer information as possible.  Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and come across something that will push innovation forward!

However, while aiming for “real-time” relevance has its merits, it may not be the smartest way to secure customer value and loyalty.  Consider the following: are marginal increases in market share sustainable?  Are consumer preferences really changing so quickly, or does it just seem that way with recent technological/analytical advances?

We’ve recently been thinking that focusing on speed may lead to smaller marketing improvements with fleeting market advantage.   Keep an eye out for our survey in February, when we’ll be gauging Marketing Agility (speed, flexibility, and all the factors that represent entrepreneurial readiness).  Participating companies will get a benchmarking report.  Email me if you’re interested in taking the survey or learning more: yzhang@executiveboard.com

For the last few months, we’ve been working on our major research project of 2012. As you’ve probably read, it’s all about data and analytics – how companies should use the Big Data consumers generate to create more compelling products, experiences, and messages.

But bridging the gap from data to action almost always requires an intermediate step – testing. And with big, real-time data, the B2C space just might be entering a golden age of testing and learning, as the test-to-results cycle speeds up and decisions can be made faster.

It’s important, though, to keep the possibilities here realistic – tweaking products, experiences, or messages will almost certainly produce marginal results, ones that might be eaten up by the macro factors at play in any business success – technological trends, the economy, that sort of thing. Case in point is Sears/KMart – a company that’s come on some hard times in the last few years, and one that recently announced that it would close between 100 and 120 stores in the coming year. Read More »

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. Read More »