Wide Angle

Running a commercial organization is hard – no one denies that. How do we come up with a unique value proposition that will resonate with customers? How do we coach our reps to become commercial teachers? How do we keep our employees focused on their jobs now that the fourth season of Mad Men is on?

But you would think that one of the easier parts of running a commercial organization would be knowing who owns what tasks. You put Employee #1 in charge of voice of the customer, Employee #2 in charge of sales support, Employee #3 in charge of customer portfolio management, and you take care of commercial strategy. Sounds simple enough, right?

Actually, no. The results from MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that:

• 67% of companies don’t know who is in charge of Voice of the Customer
• 63% don’t know who is in charge of Commercial Strategy
• 64% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Portfolio Management
• 54% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Segmentation
• 50% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Experience Management. Read More »

American Idol has dominated the airwaves for a number of years now.  While Simon Cowell’s outrageous lambasting of singing hopefuls is a draw for some, sales reps and marketers should pay attention for another (somewhat surprising) reason: Idol’s crowdsourcing of talent through multi-round competition is a powerful way to improve the delivery of your sales pitch. Sound far-fetched?  Stay tuned… Read More »

We just held our inaugural business-to-business meeting looking at our content engagement strategies and what it really means to be a thought leader (and whether that’s even the right goal).

Not surprisingly, when talking about current challenges, we had lots of conversation around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

For Marketing to support that, one thing we need to do is engineer our content to make people want to share it.  But how? Read More »

It’s no surprise to marketers – especially those who frequent Wide Angle – that the power of relationship-based selling strategies is waning.  To build consensus across customer decision makers, Marketing needs to shift resources into producing valuable content rather than building relationships with advocates.

A necessary function of content that can convert the buying center is establishing the supplier’s credibility.  This is key since decision influencers must feel comfortable sharing content with their peers.  Previously a close supplier-customer relationship might have built the needed credibility – now, marketers achieve it through content.

One approach is using social proof.  This concept in organizational theory suggests that when we are uncertain about a decision, we are strongly influenced by choices we see peers make.  A supplier can tap into social proof by showing prospective customers peers who are in similar situations and choosing the supplier’s services.  This could be done with tactics like online communities, case studies or word-of-mouth initiatives. Read More »

B2B marketers spend a lot of time churning out content—white papers, collateral, podcasts, online tutorials, etc.—but production is only half of the equation.  Marketing also needs to consider how customers actually consume the content it generates.  The goal isn’t to just provide product information; it’s really a balancing act between this and setting the buying cycle in motion.  Sequencing becomes critical in that the consumption of materials needs to gradually lead customers closer to the point of sale.

We typically see three modes of content delivery: Read More »

Our sister program, the Sales Executive Council, spent the last nine months looking at what drives sales manager performance.  Along the way, they amassed a huge dataset from their Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys about over 1,000 managers – and talked to over 100 different companies about the current environment and the skills they’re focused on for first-line managers and up.

They found some very clear conclusions for what managers should be doing differently – certainly differently than most do today. Read More »

Advocate amplification will always have a place in the B2B marketer’s toolbox, especially as the trend toward consensus-buying strengthens.  However, shortcomings of the strategy in today’s environment are causing marketers to scrutinize the investment.  Three factors seem to be sapping the power of advocate strategies.

#1 Ever More Customer Stakeholders Are Involved in Deals

This key change in customer buying behavior (noted in this Sales Executive Council post) makes an advocate’s job much more challenging.  Coming out of the downturn, businesses are keeping a tight fist on the moneybags by increasing the number of folks needed to sign off on a purchase or bringing in outside consultants to audit deals.  These moves severely limit an advocate’s capacity to influence broadly and deeply enough. Read More »

Admit it.  We B2B marketers have all looked on with thinly veiled envy as our counterparts in premier consumer goods companies pit their products against competitors with minimal (or no) actual differences and still manage to command massive price premiums. 

The magic of branding and emotional connection, so powerful yet so mysterious that—remember now—it was only fairly recently that GAAP rules were amended to account for brand value in financial statements; official acknowledgment of the reality and potential of such intangibles. Read More »

MLC has long extolled the virtues of “commercial teaching”—i.e., providing insight to customers in a way that makes them better appreciate your distinct value.  Despite our obvious marketing bent, our past research has perhaps inadvertently implied that the delivery of these insights comes down to a “moment of truth” between sales reps and the customer.  We’ve tended to focus on ways that Marketing can support Sales in this interaction, everything from working together to craft a teaching sales pitch to tools that reinforce key teaching points after the rep has performed the heaving lifting.

The rep interaction undoubtedly plays a crucial role in many purchase decisions; in fact our sister program, the Sales Executive Council, has put plenty of time into understanding the specific rep skills and manager characteristics that make this teaching effort most effective. Read More »

When we talk with heads of marketing about what “good” information flow between sales and marketing looks like, you can imagine the usual suspects that pop up: marketing updates provided to the sales team, sales providing feedback on messaging that’s resonating (or not resonating), and some type of ongoing win-loss analysis.

One conversation that stood out for us, though, was a conversation we had with the marcomm team at TELUS last year (TELUS is one of Canada’s top telecom service providers).  We were discussing their “Who Knew” marketing communications campaign (a submission from last year’s B2B MarComm Campaign Awards), which was an initiative that targeted influencers and decision-makers at medium and large businesses in Ontario. Read More »