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.

This weekend, most of our readers will celebrate Halloween – a celebration of the macabre and scary in life. In honor of that, we’re posting some of marketers’ biggest fears. Here are five we came up with, along with ways to fight back. What else are you scared about? Let us know in comments. Read More »

By Ana Lapter

B2B marketing – particularly in the technology space – is not an easy job. Due to the complexity and risks associated with the adoption of new business solutions, customers take more time to analyze options, exercise due diligence using third-party sources, are risk averse and engage larger groups in buying decisions.   Much of the traditional marketing “playbook” does not effectively address these challenges.

Not surprisingly, tech-industry marketers are ahead of other industries in terms of leveraging new techniques, channels and strategies, such as social, mobile and digital media as well as technology and predictive analytics.

Tech marketing has become increasingly digital and more sophisticated in terms of engaging users, tracking customer data, predicting buying behavior and generating leads.  In fact, tech marketing has probably the highest concentration of bloggers, content creators and data analysts.  While this is not bad news, it isn’t necessarily good news either.  With everyone in the industry seemingly taking the same approach, marketers have created a race about who produces more content, has better search optimization engines or captures the biggest share of digital conversations.

What are the key things that tech and other B2B marketers should consider to avoid an unproductive competition? Read More »

None of the big boys of Madison Avenue made to the top of “Advertising Age’s Top 100 US Agency Brands for 2010” list. Acxiom Corp., an Arkansas-based database marketing company has been topping this list for the last two years. Only eight leading advertising agencies could make it to top 20, with digital and PR agencies filling the rest of the positions.

Tim Williams wowed the audience with this fact as he opened the seminar organized by International  Advertising Association in New Delhi that I attended a couple of weeks ago. Tim is a thought leader in the advertising and marketing business, and also the author of the bestselling “Take a Stand for Your Brand.” Here, he was speaking about “How Agencies are Transforming for the Future.”

He explained how the advertising landscape has changed over the years. Many CMOs are shunning “agency of record” relationships. A number of them are bypassing agencies to work directly with media companies, production companies, and even directly with creative talent via crowdsourcing. Tim called this trend of bypassing as “disintermediation” of agencies.

So, what has caused this disintermediation, and the blurring of roles between agencies and media companies? What are marketers’ expectations from their agencies? Read More »

Last week, Rick Karlton over at the Sales Executive Council wrote a great post on the role iPads and other tablet computers are playing in re-shaping the pharma marketing landscape. Playing off a Wall Street Journal article from a few months back that posited a link between increasing tablet use and declining sales employment in the pharma space, Rick makes the point that fewer salespeople are almost certainly a function of a slowing R&D pipeline, not technology.

Since a key role of pharmaceutical salespeople is product education, it’s expected that the relative importance of Sales might decrease as pipelines slow. But the relative importance of Marketing only increases as fewer products enter the market, and marketers will need a way to reach healthcare professionals with a potentially-smaller sales staff.

Given the restraints that pharma marketers are likely to face, there is absolutely a role for an intimately-personal technology like tablets to step into the void. But marketers should be careful not lose sight of how doctors trust various channels. Read More »

When it comes to selling, industrial manufacturers appear to have an edge over service providers – their offering is tangible, labeled and goes wrong less often. As anyone who has ever wondered where all the familiar buttons went after a software upgrade will agree. Our B2B Purchase Decision Data, collected from over 1500 customers for this year’s research, affirms this seeming advantage for manufacturers:  their customers are more likely to say they’ll recommend, repurchase, consider new offerings and prefer a specific supplier.  But the victory rings empty, as you’ve just been running a race with the wrong set of companies.

Indeed, given the inherent industry advantage, many manufacturers may feel entitled to think themselves relatively secure. But when customers are asked questions that entail comparison between manufacturers of the same industry, they become indecisive, delay contacting suppliers and are swayed by details that suppliers overlook. From a competitive angle, here’s how things shape up: Read More »

Remember “The Sims”? My personal favorite game in college, it asks players to control a virtual human being. These “Sims”, as they’re called, are plopped into a virtual neighborhood with certain rules (such as gravity, aging, and an economy) and are left to their own devices to interact with the objects in their world and one another. The result is a functioning model of a human suburban neighborhood – one that undersimplifies things a bit, but is recognizably human. But what if marketers had a version of the Sims especially for them – one where they could put a marketing message into the environment, and watch how the “Sims” interacted with it?

One of the coolest parts of this year’s research into consumer process was getting to speak with a number of vendors and companies that do just that, using a process called agent-based modeling. Agent-based models are mathematically-created worlds populated by mathematically-created people, who are then exposed to a certain stimulus. In marketing, that stimulus is usually a message or marcom effort; other disciplines use diseases or changes in the economy.

The end result is a plausible estimate of the effects of a marketing campaign on a customer base – something that can be used to test proposed marketing plans to see which delivers the highest returns. For B2Cs, the “agents” can be consumers, for B2Bs, agent-based models can estimate the effect of marketing campaigns on corporate buying centers and within broad discipline areas.

MLC members, to learn how agent-based modeling works in marketing planning, please visit the members-only insight page we’ve put together on the subject, and register for our September 15 webinar, featuring MLC researchers and ThinkVine, a vendor in the modeling space.

Marketers and technology have a long and tortured relationship filled with both good times and bad.  It seems every few years (or sometimes months) there is a new tech-based trend that has big implications for how Marketing interfaces with consumers and customers (websites, social media, mobile) and how it manages its pipeline (Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems – first in software form, now “in the cloud”).

The latest tech trend that is generating a lot of buzz among marketers is “marketing automation.”  For the uninitiated, in the B2B world, marketing automation is the umbrella name given to the software and other technology tools that allow marketers to systematize and mechanize tasks like lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead qualification.  It can be as simple as automatically sending out a segment-focused monthly newsletter to a list of prospects and current customers and as sophisticated as an algorithmic model that segments, targets, and scores potential leads based on a combination of tracked web behaviors and information collected through web-forms. Read More »

“To do a Domino’s”: To admit your mistakes and take steps to amend.

“Doing a Domino’s” entered the vernacular following Domino’s self-critical 2010 campaign, which acknowledged that its pizza “taste[d] like cardboard” and promised to improve the taste.

Domino’s mea culpa coincided with a 14% revenue boost, a 10+ percentage point increase in taste perceptions, a 613% growth in Facebook fans, and a 83% share price increase.

Could admitting your failings do the same thing for you?  MLC’s 2011 research on purchase drivers suggests so. Read More »

As marketers, we’re often significantly separated from the front lines of our business. Particularly in the retail, banking, and utilities industries, the plans we craft to engage our customers and make their lives better are heavily dependent on the execution of a frontline workforce, often paid hourly, with significant competing pressures and motivations.

A few years back, MLC took a look at the biggest drivers of motivation among hourly frontline employees in the retail space, and what we found was interesting: contrary to the assumptions of a lot of managers, employee satisfaction and motivation wasn’t mostly driven by compensation. In fact, it was soft factors – things like perceived importance and connection to organizational strategy and having the right tools to do the job – that were the biggest drivers of performance.

We’ve selected a few of the most interesting findings below. For the whole list of motivation drivers, please visit the full report, Engaging Frontline Staff. Read More »