(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?

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.

(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.

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.

Which brings up the question – how can B2B companies better understand and serve their customers? We’ve gathered some of MLC’s research over time to help marketers identify what their customers want. The following will help marketers gain an insight into their customers’ mind:

Identify Customer Jobs and Outcomes: The customer world is made of a number of units of work flow – the jobs. Customers have a desired outcome for each job. Leading marketers, such as Reynolds and Reynolds (R&R), identify customers’ desired outcomes that provide R&R with a clear and unambiguous view of how customers measure value, enabling the company to align organizational resources behind a small number of new ideas. R&R’s exceptional understanding of each segment’s needs fueled innovation, and sparked a sevenfold increase in the number of new concepts selected for development funding.

Qualify Your Customer: Consumers needs evolve over the purchase cycle, as they figure out what they really want to purchase. Marketers, who track customers on their purchase path can understand evolving customer needs better, and design more relevant offerings when the final purchase decision is due. Telus qualifies its customers using an online community, and ensures a tailored interaction through their purchase path.

Let Them Do The Talking: When customers talk, they don’t just talk – their words often have hidden clues about their needs. Progressive companies use various touchpoints used by their customers to discuss their jobs, to understand the desired outcomes better. MLC Members can access a text or video version of the Customer Jobs TouchPoint Assesment at Texas instrument to gain deeper insight into the practice.

Integrate Sales Force Knowledge: This might sound basic, but many companies are yet to fully utilize the benefits of using the knowledge their sales force has about their customers. Companies can leverage CRM systems or consider marketing automation to know more about their customers, and have a more targeted conversation.

Join us for a webinar to learn more about the keys to marketing automation success (including the challenges to expect and pitfalls to avoid) based on our research, including a survey of over 150 marketers and conversations with top vendors and marketing automation consultants.

MLC members can access our topic center on customer understanding for in-depth guidance on understanding customers better from companies such as 3M, General Electric , Johnsons Controls, Motorola, etc.

Never again an unwanted dish!

Have you heard any other good ones? Let us know in comments!

Marketing’s good for creative stuff, but nothing that requires left-brained thinking. We hear pretty regularly that there’s an assumption within companies that marketing staff are mostly right-brained creative dreamers – folks who spend all day making paper airplanes or doodling, only to come up with random strokes of genius at exactly the right time.

Obviously, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In the era before pervasive data, this assumption might have been more relevant, but the gradual arrival of more and more data (anything from sales numbers to direct mail metrics to consumer sentiment tracking and beyond) has transformed our function into one that’s as data-driven as any other.

Across the next few months, we’ll be studying how marketers should best use data to inform their decision-making. Interested in helping out? Start by taking this survey (or, if you’re B2B, this one) and let us know what you think!

Marketing and advertising are more or less synonymous. Similar to the misconception above, there’s a notion inside companies that marketing is mostly about creative development and adjacent fields like media planning, buying, and analytics.

In fact, marketing does have a lot to do with those things; for consumer brands, especially, mass media is one of the few avenues to scale demand. But stated more broadly, marketing is about the intersection of brands and markets, and advertising is only one way that brands interface with buyers, and marketing folks also participate in enterprise-wide decisions around R&D, public relations, sales, new product development, and more.

For tips on playing nicely with other functions, check out our Cross-Functional Alignment topic center.

For B2B’s, Marketing’s role should be limited to sales support. Perhaps some of the toughest turf battles in modern business occur between Marketing and Sales in B2B companies, and its easy to understand why. Professional salespeople want greater leeway to customize their approach and craft deals that fit the customer, while marketers seek to standardize go-to-market practices and messages. Sales folks – and many corporate leaders – settle this turf battle by giving marketing a role subordinate to that of sales.

Truth be told, Marketing does have a legitimate role in supporting sales folks; for B2B’s, Sales remains one of the major channels to market. But declining budgets, increasing independent research, and proliferation of channels means Marketing should take on a greater operational role to keep deal sizes constant or rising and capture the attention of customers pre-Sales contact.

Slow internal processes shouldn’t affect Marketing’s ability to do its job. Marketers in most consumer brands have come to a scary realization: that, unless messaging, pricing, placement and product attributes are evaluated on a continuous basis – and by “continuous”, I literally mean every few minutes – brands run the risk of losing ground to competitors.

But other functions haven’t caught up yet to marketing’s need to continually engage the market, and there’s a misconception that our efforts to get new initiatives up and running fast is naive, reckless, or both. In reality, speeding up internal processes around things like social media is an effort to stay relevant in a market that is constantly shifting.

For tips on getting buy-in from, ahem, slower-moving peers, check out our library of best-in-class social media policies, and keep an eye out in the next few weeks for some tips on working with IT teams to implement more market-responsive systems.

Our advice to them has been to read our work on influencing the empowered customer that predicts a larger role for B2B marketing in the sales process. B2B marketing must tag-team with sales to diagnose and respond to customer needs drive urgency toward the purchase. At the same time as they need to play a larger role in sales, B2B marketers are used to segmenting based on who customers are and what they are buying. They must now move a step further and address why customers are buying and how they can differentiate and adapt to the evolving buying process.

Presented here are our learnings from our B2B MarComm Awards Showcase, on what B2B manufacturing companies can do to make their marketing campaigns differentiated, and successful:

• Own a higher-order need: Conventional B2B manufacturers maybe tempted to talk more about the unparalleled efficacy of their product, but the product differences can be less obvious to the buyers. Companies can benefit from a positioning differentiation, by positioning themselves as fulfillers of the overarching needs their product caters to. For example, AEL Mining introduced electronic explosives with a focus on safety and well-being of miners, rather than product attributes. The campaign got an average of 10,000 visitors a month.
• If you’re a leader, flaunt it: This might sound clichéd, but companies must emphatically claim leadership in categories in which they enjoy a sustained competitive advantage. When Siemens ran its impact campaign, it positioned itself as the only true partner for American lawmakers to answer the Nation’s toughest questions. This reduced the risk perception of the company and led to impressive gains in brand loyalty, consideration and purchase.
• Break communication conventions: Let’s admit it, manufacturing companies are often guilty of creating marketing collateral with uninspiring copy and dull imagery. Cummins realized that in their industry, the ads are usually conventional with trucking equipment and parts photos shown. The company stepped over the acceptable bounds and norms with their big and bold, Cummins red identity in their “Hard to Miss” campaign. They made message the king – 1-800-DIESELS got a lot of recollection and recognition.
• Market internally first: Since the B2B sales and marketing processes rely heavily on each other, any marketing campaign must be sold internally first. Sales reps must be made aware of the strategic objectives of the campaign, and given tactical guidance on achieving the objective. Like Emerson, prepare internally facing marketing collateral before you market externally.

MLC members can register for our upcoming Webinar on the Best of B2B MarComm Awards 2011, which will feature the winning entries of this year’s B2B MarComm Awards to be held at The Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas.

This post was written by former colleague Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council. Visit the original here.

In my previous post, I argued that the conflict of interest between energy & utility companies and their customers makes these companies’ business models unsustainable. In short, the more efficiently customers use energy, the less money energy suppliers make—and customers won’t remain in the dark forever.

The solution, I believe, is to stop selling stuff (kilowatt-hours, therms, or joules) and start selling outcomes (light, heat, and motion). Indeed, one forward-thinking utility company recently shared with us their new Commercial Teaching pitch that focuses B2B customers on the money they could save from energy efficiency building retrofits, and off the price per kilowatt-hour.

It’s a compelling pitch, especially in deregulated markets. The customer saves money off its energy bill (the payback period is typically just 3-5 years), and the supplier picks up a new account.

But while energy investments make economic sense, customers have been surprisingly slow on the uptake, frequently rejecting energy projects that are in their economic self-interest.

For example, a contact in the green building industry warned me that most decision-makers are unreasonably skeptical of energy solutions, due to a lack of case studies proving they work, and the inherent difficulty with quantifying energy savings (i.e., external conditions may cause energy use to increase, even though that increase may be less than it would have been otherwise thanks to energy saving projects.).

Therefore, just as in any case when a customer is not thinking about its business properly, the burden falls on Sales to reframe how customers think about energy use.

To successfully shift to outcomes-based selling, marketing and sales leaders in the industry should develop Commercial Teaching pitches and train sales reps to do four things differently:

1. Reframe energy as a service, not a commodity. Teach customers that what matters isn’t the price per kilowatt-hour, but rather the outcomes a customer can achieve at a given level of energy spend. This might mean producing the same output using 20% less energy, or improving their brand by switching to cleaner (though more costly) energy.For example, Schneider Electric, a major player in all things energy, refers to itself as the “global specialist in energy management,” not “a leading energy technology provider.” The emphasis is on how customers use energy, not the technology itself.
2. Challenge customers’ investment filters. We often assume that top executives are always experts, but the CFO Executive Board (a sister program of MLC) found that CFOs typically apply investment filters that fail to accurately capture the true potential of energy investments. To counter these flawed assumptions, commercial teaching pitches should correct four CFO mistakes:
   1. Underestimating the total impact of energy projects (e.g. reduced compliance risks and maintenance costs)
   2. Disregarding future energy price increases
   3. Prioritizing speed of payback over total savings potential
   4. Ignoring the lower risks associated with energy savings compared to other investments.
3. Build innovative deal structures that move CAPEX to OPEX. SEC has found that star sales managers innovate on deal terms to work around customer obstacles. In energy sales, this typically means some form of performance contracting, which is becoming more feasible than in the past due to the falling cost of measuring energy use. Performance contracting is especially helpful when the obstacle to a deal is lack of capital or a principle-agent problem (e.g. the party who pays the energy bill does not own the building).
4. Agree on the method of measurement before closing the deal. Many customers remain skeptical of energy projects, not because they don’t save energy, but because savings are hard to precisely quantify. To avoid fighting over results retroactively, make sure customers agree on how their energy outcomes will be measured before any paperwork is signed. The desire to remain consistent with prior commitments is a powerful psychological motivator to agree with the results you find.

Energy management is a new field for most customers, and one in which they often make poor business decisions. By following the above guidance, sales leaders can make themselves indispensible partners both to their own companies’ growth and their customers’ bottom lines.

By Ana Lapter

Rising event expenses, declining consumer attendance, and increased competition from suppliers of virtual event solutions: these are three factors forcing many B2B marketers to rethink whether trade shows are any longer worth the expense.

I certainly don’t believe that trade shows are worthless.  Our B2B research last year indicated that, if planned and executed correctly, trade shows are effective channels for enabling conversations with customers who are ready to buy.  MLC members – please click here if you want to see the full list of the most effective conversational channels that influence mid-funnel purchasing decisions.

So, what are the ingredients of an effective trade show strategy?  Our recent case study profiling Hill-Rom’s trade show approach illustrates a few critical ingredients that transform a trade event into a lead generation machine:

Focus on key influencers in the buying center. Several months back, I wrote a post regarding the psychology of business buyers. I argued that marketing strategies should focus less on seniority and formal role in the buying center, and rather emphasize functional experience and personal authority, as drivers of specific purchasing decision-making outcomes.  For instance, Hill-Rom’s marketing team targeted the hospital nurses as key influencers in buying centers and built the trade booth around these critical purchasing stakeholders and their critical work outcomes.

Apply the concept of commercial teaching. We define “commercial teaching” as reframing the way the customer assigns value to the product areas where you outperform your competitors.  Hill-Rom successfully applied this concept when building its trade show strategy.  First, Marketing discovered that a critical outcome for health professionals is reducing the number of days in ambulatory facilities, as critical care patients commonly face serious or even deadly complications.  Once this problem became obvious, Marketing identified an under-appreciated solution that helps patients become mobile sooner – namely, special hospital beds that enable patients to recover faster by enabling progressive mobility.  They then set out to teach customers about the value of progressive mobility – a lesson clearly dovetailing with Hill-Rom’s differentiators.

Deploy an experiential approach. Unlike many trade shows where customers pass by various booths and get inundated with brochures and explanations of products benefits and features, Hill-Rom’s trade booth provided its key visitors with a memorable, visual experience. The booth reproduced a real “progressive mobility” process inside a hospital, allowing visitors to experience the solution as a patient. By turning the visit into a real experience, Marketing created a long-lasting experience.

Hill-Rom’s example illustrates the power of a live trade event in building the momentum for a purchasing decision, by blending knowledge of a group’s decision-making psychology, the “commercial teaching” philosophy and experiential marketing strategies.

MLC members, how important are trade shows in your overall marketing mix? And how are you driving conversions from your investment in trade events?

Tell us about your marketing automation experiences, challenges, and successes by taking our short survey.  As a “thank you,” we’ll send you an advance copy of the key findings.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, marketing automation is an increasingly popular arrow in marketers’ quivers – helping them sense and respond to customers’ needs in a more targeted, buying-stage appropriate way.  But, when it comes to making marketing automation a success, marketers can’t do it alone.  Seeking the advice, buy-in, and support of three key individuals within your company can go a long way towards extracting the maximum value from your investment.

The CFO: While the blessing of person who holds the purse strings is always important in a major purchase, marketing automation tools pose some additional challenges that make the CFO’s commitment to the endeavor especially important.  First, the cost of a marketing automation tool is on-going.  Rather than a one-time purchase, most tools are now sold on a software-as-service model, meaning they have monthly subscription fees.  You can’t just earmark a certain dollar amount in this year’s budget, you need a lasting commitment.  Second, buying a tool is just the first expense in getting marketing automation up and running.  To truly extract the value these powerful tools can offer frequently requires significant investment in systems integration, training, new hires, and consultants.

The Head of IT: No matter how loudly marketing automation vendors scream and shout that their tools are “plug and play,” the truth is most of them require some work to get up and running.   Something is going to need to be tweaked, customized, recoded, or overhauled in either the tool itself or in the systems you are trying to hook it into.  Most vendors offer some level of implementation support, but your IT department will definitely need to be involved.  Don’t wait until you hit a snag to try and get on their priority list – a list that one member described as “where my requests go to die.”  Bring IT in at the vendor evaluation and selection stage and use their expertise to figure out how complicated implementation is going to be.

The Head of Sales: Ultimately the point of marketing automation is more, better qualified leads passed on to Sales.  The most sophisticated adopters of the tools use them for lead scoring.  The problem is, many Marketing and Sales departments can’t agree on what a qualified lead is in general, never mind when in connection with an automated system.  Just because Marketing puts a lot of insight, experience, and hard work into designing an algorithm to objectively measure lead quality doesn’t mean Sales is going to trust or use it.  Loop Sales in from the beginning to settle on what “qualified” really means and agree on an SLA for leads that meet a certain threshold.  If your relationship is marred by past acrimony, consider a neutral third-party to come in and run a workshop for you.

Marketing automation is a technology solution, but, as is nearly always the case, the tool itself is only one element of success.  Some pre-investment internal politicking can prove invaluable in ensuring your marketing automation initiative is embraced and supported across the organization.

Tell us more about your marketing automation experiences by taking our short survey – as a thank you we’ll send you an advance copy of the results.  And be on the look-out for the results of our research coming mid-Q4.  In the meantime, if you have any experiences with marketing automation you’d like to share, please email me to set up a time to chat.

Now, you’ve heard this before: every marketer reading this post has their company’s value proposition memorized or internalized. But sometimes the value prop becomes such an integral part of what we do, that we never question whether our customers are actually seeing the same value. MLC research from a few years back shows that B2B customers typically don’t perceive supplier differentiators – at least, not to the degree that marketers expect them to – and we should be sanguine about how well the marketplace understands value propositions, too.

Informatica, an American enterprise data integration software firm, ran up against this problem when they realized that their innovation-oriented messaging wasn’t working. It wasn’t that the messages were poor – it was just that, although the company enabled groundbreaking innovation at its customer firms, they had no credibility as an innovative supplier.

To solve the problem, the company created an annual Innovation Awards series that recognized the innovative ways that companies were using Informatica products. The result? Happy customers, lots of great press, and a newfound reputation for innovativon.

MLC members, check out the full case, and for more, see our tips on marketing to innovation-oriented buyers.

With that in mind, the MLC B2B team decided to probe into the customer decision process earlier this year provide some guidance to marketers trying to regain influence.  Among the key findings we uncovered in our quantitative survey of 1,900 B2B customers is the fact that, on average, customers are 57% of the way through the purchase process before they allow Sales to play a real part in their purchase decision.

This delay in Sales contact opens up a gap in the purchase funnel that Sales used to own.  So what are Marketers to do?  They have to own the mid-funnel.  And that suggests the need for a meaningful shift in focus and behavior.  Customers in the mid-funnel are not the same as those in the earlier purchase stages.  Their information needs are more complex, which requires a more customized, targeted response.

Marketing, in effect, needs to act like Sales – but without the advantage of one-to-one customer contact that Sales enjoys.  How do the things that Sales used to do in the mid-funnel (diagnose customer needs, uncover and address objections, scope solutions, and set priorities and deadlines) translate in Marketing?  Based on our research of what the best companies are doing, marketers must now do two things in the mid-funnel: 1) Tailor messages to customer purchase motivators and 2) Build deal momentum.

Of course we don’t expect that a two-line summary is enough for you to move forward.  That is why we structured our Annual Executive Retreats around what marketers actually need to do to in this new world of delayed Sales contact.  We answer the questions about what does motivate B2B customers to buy (in fact, its simpler than you think) and how marketing can use non-Sales channels to emulate the personal energy of Sales to move deals forward.

MLC members can check out our online resource center that includes all the materials from this year’s study including case studies from companies like Danisco, FedEx, Hill-Rom, and Telus.  And there is still time to catch this material live.  Register for one of our remaining meetings in Atlanta, Sydney, London, or Johannesburg or join us for the Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas.  Can’t get away?  Check out our webinar series or call your Account Manager for a custom walk through.

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:

Spot topic areas where you should develop a unique perspective. The key to doing this is finding the intersection of core priority areas for your company and “adjacent” priority areas for your customers. Focusing on your customers’ secondary growth opportunities, as opposed to their primary markets, allows you to develop a perspective outside of areas where your customers are generating deep insight themselves.

Conduct credible analysis in the topic area. You can’t pepper the market with your message without building a little credibility first: you should partner with a respected, credible third party in the space and present authentic end-user voice in your findings. But most of all, to get maximum mileage out of your thought leadership efforts, any conclusions should overturn or correct the industry or segment’s conventional wisdom about the topic area.

Create “guided self-discovery” workshop sessions for prospective customers. Engage prospective customers in a dialogue that helps them discover and co-create ways to move forward in the targeted topic area. This isn’t a sales interaction; rather, it’s a genuine opportunity for knowledge transfer and ideation for your customers. These sessions should lead back to your core strengths as a supplier.  Leading marketers are investing in their virtual events channels to turn them into more potent workshop sessions like these.

Okay, so it’s not that simple – we’re leaving out a number of important details that are key in getting this right. You can find many of those details in the full case study. The results here can be quite powerful – suppliers end up with more customer-initiated sales interactions, and those interactions are happening with business managers focused on strategy and innovation, as opposed to procurement departments, largely focused on squeezing price concessions from suppliers.

MLC members, for more details, check out the full case, or register for one of our upcoming Annual Executive Retreats today.

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:

• As we’ve reported several times before in this blog, customers are, on average, 57% of the way through the purchase process before they meaningfully engage with Sales (and there is no turning back).
• This leaves a gap that Marketing now has to fill and one of the ways to fill it is to be more targeted in meeting customer purchase needs.
• We looked into those needs and found that customers cluster into four approximately evenly-sized groups based on what they are looking for out of the purchase.  Those groups are: Total Cost of Ownership Buyers, Innovation Buyers, Service Buyers, and Risk Avoidance Buyers.
• Every company has all four and none of them can be ignored.  The four groups are unique in what they care about in a purchase and in what Marketing must do to influence and satisfy them.
• In addition, given delayed Sales contact, Marketing must find ways to connect with customers and build momentum in non-Sales channels.  A set of channels we’ve identified as “Conversation-Enabling” hold the greatest opportunity for Marketing to do this.

At the meeting, we’ll not only dig more into the implications of delayed Sales engagement and meeting the needs of the four customer profiles, we’ll also present several best practice cases showing how the smartest companies are tackling these challenges.

MLC members – want to find out more?  Register for a meeting today.  For those who can’t attend, check back over the summer as we start to put everything up on the MLC website and contact your Account Manager to schedule a conversation.

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.

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.

In response to these challenges, marketing organizations are increasing both the number of channels and the type of messages they create, hoping for increased visibility and preference.  Yet, this strategy is not sustainable given the scarcity of B2B resources, leading to “bits” of activities here and there with no clear benefits or returns.

My colleague, Yi Kang, revealed some of our newest customer data illustrating the most influential channels in connection with a purchasing decision.  Based on this data and my conversations with many B2B marketing professionals, here are some ideas on where to place your channel investment bets:

Increase Support to Sales Reps: While many marketing organizations focus on handing over leads to Sales, some companies allocate more resources to equip their Sales reps with effective messaging.  For instance, Qwest created an online database of testimonial clips and integrates targeted testimonials into the sales cycle.  Providing targeted messaging support is critical not only for enhancing Sales reps’ effectiveness, but also for influencing the early stages of the purchasing process – most of which is finished by the time Sales conversations begin. 

Invest in a better website: Despite a belief that tracking tools and more product-centric information are the keys to a successful website, there are simpler and more efficient ways of turning a commercial website into an influential channel.  MLC customer data shows that the following factors drive confidence in a supplier:

• I feel knowledgeable and informed about my decision
• I had the information I needed to advocate for my purchase decision within my company
• I was able to find what I needed quickly and easily
• Information from the supplier was credible, easy to understand, and thought provoking

Our data also revealed that customer confidence in a supplier is negatively influenced when a purchaser   encounters complex levels of information from vendor sources. Vendors should consider the following: fewer white papers, less “commercial” communication style, more insight-driven content, a flatter design, and more credible third-party or customer voices.

Targeted Social Media Investments: A networked environment poses specific challenges for marketing.  Because marketers cannot always infiltrate the network by pushing information alone, they must work to influence communication flow through customers’ natural networks – like blogs or user forums – that are conducive to “organic” acceptance. While our data suggests that these channels currently enjoy a lower level of influence when compared with Sales reps and commercial websites, social media is still an emerging phenomenon.  Business professionals’ familiarity with social media in the B2C world will inevitably enable the B2B world’s acceptance of forums, blogs and other on-line community programs as critical sources of information.

When designing channel strategies, B2B marketers should avoid planning based on an archaic company-centric model with the vendor at the center, sharing messages with customer through multiple channels.   Today’s networked world requires a more focused approach on channel planning, as well as novel ways of scaling messaging efforts at lower costs.

The current low level of influence from our data is due to today’s lack of B2B customer engaging social media programs and content.  Those B2B social media pioneers (e.g. Cisco, Telus, National Instruments,to name a few), prove that social media is not just one of their channel choices, but a new strategy  for collecting customer insight, demonstrating thought leadership and enabling advocacy programs.

As you can expect, this leads to some growing pains. But Johnson Controls’ Ideation Workshop is a simple and innovative way to streamline solutions selling – one that ultimately left them with significantly higher average deal size, a shorter sales cycle, and detailed information about the common challenges faced by customer segments.

It works like this: instead of asking individual reps to piece together the complex web of stakeholder relationships and map them to a slate of available products to sell as a solution, Johnson Controls just asks the customer directly. Marketing leads an in-person workshop – in a standardized, repeatable format ideal surfacing customer needs and their relative importance.

The first part of the workshop focuses on organizational priorities. Participants, who are culled from the list of key stakeholders identified by the rep, are asked to focus on a few overarching business questions, including the organization’s vision, specific outcomes tied to the vision, the challenges to reaching those outcomes, and, finally, a “wish-list” of how they’d implement those outcomes. The brainstorming is not intended to be limited to challenges that Johnson Controls can solve, and participants are explicitly asked to avoid the word “facility”, which represents the company’s line of products. The facilitator then chooses the items most closely related to Johnson Controls’ core business.

The second part of the workshop is needs assessment – given the list of priorities, which ones are the highest need and most underserved? The facilitator asks each participant to plot each priority on a chart, and the result is Johnson Controls’ holy grail: a chart that neatly sums up the aggregated opinions of stakeholders as to which organizational priorities are the highest unmet needs.

This is gold for the sales team, clearly: they can now craft a solution that meets all of their customers’ most pressing needs. But how do you get this to scale? It’s a little unreasonable to expect each solutions deal to require a workshop along with it. Johnson Controls takes the extra step of inputting the fruits of each workshop – i.e., the organizational priorities and needs assessment – and categorizes them by segment. As the company’s database of successful workshops grow, reps can get access to a wealth of data points about segment needs – making it easier to craft solutions without the need for a facilitator.

MLC members, to read the whole case, please click here. For more on solutions selling, check out our topic center, featuring additional cases from Ingersoll-Rand, Lafarge, and FedEx.

Here are the 9 (plus one) trends for 2011:

Growth from new customers.  In 2009, flat was the new up.  In 2010, it was about getting back to growth, and generally that involved getting your best customers to give you new business.  In 2011 it’s time to go back to growth from new customers—and probably not the same ones you lost before.  This in turn means B2B marketing focusing on lead gen, content marketing, marketing automation and intelligence.

Global reorganization.  Speaking of growth from new customers – in many cases those customers are in new markets, given the much faster rate of growth expected in emerging markets overall.  This often means reorganizing the function; we’re seeing a focus on centralization to make sure expansion in emerging markets follows a central strategy.  Check out our resources on global organizational structure to help you through this transition; more to come here as we put finishing touches on our latest research.

Social media breaks through for B2B.  At the end of 2009, we had almost every B2C company asking us what they should do about social media.  By the end of 2010, many had figured out their strategies (to see how we helped them, look at our resource center here).  We’re seeing the same trend in B2B now: 2011 is the year social media goes from a few experiments to a real strategy in B2B.

Of course, we’re not necessarily talking about B2Bs tweeting; I believe B2B organizations in particular have a real opportunity to build the kinds of communities their customers crave.  Every time I hear a success story about social media in B2B it seems to involve a dedicated community of customers who work together on projects or discuss common issues.

Rise of content marketing and thought leadership.  Your sales reps are no longer the information gatekeepers, and customers know it.  Examining rep time spend from 2004 to 2009 shows that time spent with the customer is down 26%.  More and more, customers are going through large parts of the purchase process on their own.  Marketing’s response?  Trying to plug the gaps with content  marketing.  However, with the massive changes in how customers consumer information (see social media, above), most B2Bs are unclear what information – through what channels – is most influential to their customers.  We’re targeting this one squarely with our Customer Purchase Research Assessment – for MLC members, we can deploy this to your customers for free and give you a custom report of where they get their information and what’s most valuable.

Marketing automation and intelligence.  Recently, we saw a sharp uptick in requests for information about marketing automation/intelligence.  Why?  A combination of trends: the focus on new business means lead tracking rises in importance (these are customers our sales reps haven’t talked to yet); the complexity of the sale and need for consensus in the buyer means sales cycles are longer and take many different forms so companies are trying to analyze and understand them better; the increasingly self-sustained customer is hard to read and places extra emphasis on the right content at the right time.  Last, there’s the fact that the technology appears to at last be able to fulfill many of the promises made for years.

A return to the customer experience. In 2009-2010, budget cuts, rapidly shifting priorities (like figuring out if customers would stay in business), plus short-staffed teams all meant that customer experience initiatives were on the back burner for many companies.  But now it’s back, and more important than ever.  Especially given the experience now crosses so many channels for most customers.   If this describes you, take a look at our resource center.  Plus we have a diagnostic we can deploy for a small fee to help you understand how differentiated your customer experience is compared to competitors.

Sales and marketing integration. Maybe this is just wishful thinking.  I’d like to think this is this the year when sales and marketing finally figure out how to get along.  Certainly there are so many pressures on the interface between sales and marketing – the emergence of commercial teaching as the most successful sales strategy, the increasing focus on selling solutions, not just products, and the need for everyone to be involved in demand generation – that this could just be the year of the Sales and Marketing Peace Accords.  Back in 2009 we kept hearing about the rise of the Commercial function with a mandate over both sales and marketing, but then that stopped with the economic downturn.  Perhaps it will be back again.

Marketing skill-building. So much is changing in marketing, particularly around social media and growth from emerging markets.  Does your marketing team understand the shift?  If you’re like most of our members, the answer is no.   Plus it’s probably been a few years since you invested in serious marketing training so you’re probably overdue!  Check out our resources on building effective training; we also offer a separate marketing skills assessment called the Marketing Excellence Survey.

Commercial innovation. This one’s pretty broad, but generally we’re seeing that marketing and sales are playing a big role in the innovation trend.  All companies see innovation as key to growth, but that definition is a bit broader than it used to be, and includes business model or commercial innovation as well.  Confused by what we mean?  We have a great case to illustrate the point: marketing at Volvo Trucks changed the messaging they used to sell trucks (see the case here) and reduced sales cycle time by over 25% while increasing price.  Changes in messaging and sales/marketing approach can make a big difference, without massive R&D investment.

And one to grow on:

Mobile?? 2011 is probably not the year for mobile in B2B, unless you’re in an industry where content consumption is really high.  But 2011 is the year when smartphone sales will exceed PC sales, and mobile broadband will surpass wired broadband.  We’re tackling it head on with some research on the B2C side – let us know if you’re interested and we can give you the findings.  So far, mobile appears to be more about browsing than buying, and used more at home than on the go.  Things are changing very fast here, though, so perhaps mobile will eke into 2011 trends for B2B

What do you think?  Are these the trends for 2011?  Am I missing anything big?  Let us know in the comments.

Wondering about what your counterparts in sales are worried about?  Check out our sister program for sales executives on that very subject.

Thankfully, it is pretty much fully available online, so I’m fully prepared to offer 3 marketing trends observed from Dreamforce – with MLC resources to help you get after them – as well as my opinion about the most interesting salesforce.com announcement for B2B marketers.

What is Dreamforce?  It’s Salesforce.com’s annual user conference but it has turned into a bonanza of 325+ sessions, hands-on labs, and an enormous expo of partners and salesforce.com applications.  This year the conference included former President Bill Clinton, Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, Stevie Wonder and more.  Plus Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff wearing rainbow-striped socks during his keynote speech.

First, the biggest announcement (from a marketing perspective):

Chatter Free.  Salesforce Chatter was launched last June as Facebook for enterprises.  We think Facebook-style internal communication linked to CRM data can game-changing for Sales and Marketing coordination.  For example, Chatter (or similar systems) allow salespeople to coordinate when they’re calling on the same account, or vote on what collateral is most helpful, even get real-time advice from sales or marketing how to approach a potential sale.  You have the flexibility to build and disband communities working together in a way traditional CRM (or portals) typically don’t allow. We profiled NBC Universal’s success with a very similar system here.

Now Salesforce.com is making Chatter free (for limited functionality).  This has to mean increased adoption of this and other social CRM platforms.

Now, the trends:

Consumerization of business.  Our business and personal lives are more integrated than ever – and the way that we work and talk doesn’t change that much when we step into our office or cubicle.  Most companies have had to deal with employees using personal smartphones for work, and of course social media makes it even more difficult to separate our personal and professional lives.

Salesforce.com is betting on Chatter to take advantage of this trend.  But even if you’re not ready to launch social CRM, there are some great lessons to learn here.  We found that allowing collaboration tools (like your employee portal, or crowdsourcing platform if you have one) to be used for personal or ‘fun’ activities as well as work will significantly improve adoption.  Check out our profile of Sabre’s digital collaboration platform that found personal content and photos help spur employee connections.

Social media and mobile for B2B.  Social media is essential for any B2C marketing organization; now we’re seeing it increasingly embraced by B2B organizations as well.  Dreamforce featured several panels talking about social for B2B; one of the most popular slideshows from the event is a who’s who in social media from 10 vendors.   Our take: before you look at vendors or start Tweeting, make sure you have a strategy – find the right social media to differentiate your company.  We’ve got lots more resources here.

Sales and marketing integration.  Seems like this one will never go away.  At our own conference, we recognized that it is more urgent than ever that sales and marketing just figure out how to coordinate.  One of my favorite suggestions from a Dreamforce panelist: marketing needs to embrace sales metrics.  Working toward the same metrics is one of the best ways to improve alignment.   Here’s a great article from Harvard Business Review about recognizing the state of sales & marketing alignment and moving forward together.

If you went to Dreamforce, what did you learn?  Armchair attendees like me – what do you think about these trends?  Is Social CRM in your future?