Given the dire state of our 401K’s, savings, pensions and the price of our houses, retirement which once seemed a long way off has ridden off into the sunset on a stolen horse. While many have been worrying, I have been continuing to plan for my early departure from the work farce however this time I plan to do it while still collecting a pay check.
Now we have entered the age of Obama, or the Obamaera, I have decided like all good Obamerites to lay out a multi-step plan for success. It will sound simple, while at the same time be so incomprehensibly detailed your employer will never be able to see through it. I call this Geithneromics. Due to my current focus I will start by helping marketers join me in this quest, I may help sales people in the future, thought I will be selective. Those that helped themselves for the last decade, riding high in corporate jets, collecting fat bonuses and generally living it up will have to help themselves as all the additional thought I have had to put was wearing.
The secret to success is to do more with less but not be seen to be doing anything differently.
Rule #1 – Be in when you are out.
Buy the following items to leave in your office.
Identical Blackberry to your regular one – you don’t need a plan, just a phone (please see Rule #4)
3 spare jackets
Laptop
You must leave the Blackberry and your laptop plugged in at all times, leave your jacket on the back of the chair. This way when anyone comes by your office (OK, I know. That is so last century. When they come by your open plan, open topped, not-a-cube more of a “zone”; it will appear you have just run out. Who leaves their Blackberry behind or without their jacket? You will need to move the items whenever you are in the office and occasionally swap out the jacket. This not only allows you to appear as if you are in the office, in addition you appear to work early and late.
Rule #2 – Say you are triaging leads old school but don’t.
Print out lots of leads from your salesfarce automation system. Get a magic marker and randomly write “A”, “B”, “C”, in the upper right hand corner of the first 20 or so in the pile. If you want to do well at our next HR review, come up with a color code, red for “A”, orange for “B”, etc. You will appear really efficient; color-coding? This person’s a genius, give them a bonus. Now the good news is people expect this process to take forever and be a full time job so if you automate it using a tool like Marketbright you can tell people you are manually updating your salesfarce automation system while it actually happens automatically while you are sitting on the beach.
Rule #3 – Re-use content mercilessly
Use a marketing automation system that is template-centric and provides for re-use of content. When you are creating nurture emails, re-use and re-purpose the same content. You know less than 2% of the people are reading it, they aren’t going to notice if it is the same content they didn’t read last time. Those people who are reading them are only reading the subject lines anyway. This is a tremendous time-saver and if your vendor has the world’s best HTML editor and a template-based approach, you can even edit the content a little and do what used to take your agency months in a few minutes.
Rule #4 – Get a Blackberry
I am sure it is true of iPhone’s too in terms of functionality, but in terms of looking like you mean business a Blackberry is invaluable. The key to the success for this plan I propose is looking like you live, breathe and mean business. Putting TwitterBerry, Facebook, LinkedIn and all other social media applications on a Blackberry couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do now is take the content you post on one, and re-post it everywhere else. Personally I recommend setting up a work alias for all these accounts and just having these logins on your “post-work still-paycheck” Blackberry. Then you don’t run the risk of Twittering, “Just dropped my Blackberry as my hands are greasy with sun lotion.”
Rule #5 – Funding the project
We all know marketing has the most fungible budget of virtually any department. Always amuses me that sales has zero budget but all the headcount, and marketing has all the budget but relatively little headcount. This is a huge asset to you in your attempt to be on the beach while collecting a paycheck. (By the way, you don’t actually need to go to the beach, this is just an idea. You may want to walk in the park, go to a quilting festival, or run naked through the woods. It is not really important, other than the last one as a) you don’t have anywhere to easily put your Blackberry; which is a critical part of appearing to be perma-on-line and b) if you are going to do this please let me know in advance and whether you are attractive or not as that will dictate whether I avoid said woods or not.) The fungibility (Ahh, you have to love it when marketing makes up new words.) of your budget means you can implement a system to deliver Rules #2, #3 and #4, and so long as you put it under “Trade Show” or “Agency” in your budget, no-one will ever know.
I hope you find this helpful. I certainly have found it to be so. I am currently on a beach in Barbados, though if you check in my office I think I may have just popped out for lunch.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Sell Sell Sell - It is all about Sales - Automated Nurturing #4
Sell
All this Marketing Automation and we still need to sell? How dull. Yes, it is all about revenue. Not about really cool messages, not about lead volume, not about even qualified leads, it is all about revenue. If Marketing is truly to usurp the power base of sales, the way Prosultative selling predicts, then Marketing has to understand this key point. Any marketer that tries to claim success by ever mentioning the number of leads they have created without being able to track how much revenue they delivered just handed the power back to sales. If marketing can prove what they do actually delivers revenue then the power base shifts. People don’t want to talk about this so I see the political elephant in the room getting larger and leaving its unique smell and presents there for all to enjoy.
There’s an elephant. Here it is. Someone is going to own this prosultative process. It used to be sales because the revenue was easily seen to be associated with them. If marketing is to take control of the process, they must prove the work they are doing is directly responsible for the revenue. Sales becomes a closing machine for marketing, into a lead generation department for sales. Prosultative selling becomes the future of B2B sales. Why is no-one telling you this? Well sales aren’t sharing as they don’t want to lose their power base. Marketing doesn’t have the data to prove this and so it just goes unsaid. Marketbright delivers the integration for sales and marketing to work together and see every aspect of the sales and marketing process and understand the ROI. Who wins this battle is down to you, that it is happening is irrefutable.
"S" number 3 for Automated Nurturing - Standards
Standards
What was it that used to make Marketing people insane with salespeople? OK well other than the long list we can all rattle off, let’s start with taking the creative, ripping it up and sending out what they liked. What was the problem with this? Nothing when it worked and everything when it went wrong. We didn’t know what was working or why other than who went to Club Trip. It seems that every Club Trip/President’s Club I went on it was always the same folk. Yet I never had anyone ask us what we were doing right. I can tell you we were all doing very much the same thing. We were taking the best of our messaging and positioning and we would share with each other (not while on Club Trip but I think you get the point)
If we are to be consistently successful across the organization, we have to be consistent. Consistency requires standards. Prosultative selling takes the best of what the best sales people are doing; marketing then creates personalized messaging for the prospect in a structured, standardized format. This standardization is not about restricting salespeople, it is about empowering the organization to leverage branding standards and messaging that is consistent and effective.
The 4 S's of Automated Nurturing
It was Marie Antoinette who said "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten". Everywhere I go I hear Nurturing as if it is some new concept that we have never heard of before. Sales people have been nurturing prospects for years. There is a word that is missing. Automated.
My issue is if you ask a Marketer how automated it is to target a segment,
identify a message, craft some creative and then time its delivery, especially one who is using one of our competitor’s tools and is knee deep in HTML I think they will tell you, "Yeah. Not so much". I see a lot of our competition trying to make this sound complex. I think for them it may be. If you only ever worked in Marketing, then you don’t know what sales did and vice versa. Our team is a blend of Sales and Marketing professionals and with a view from end to end we see the world somewhat differently.
If we are to maximize the returns from the multi-channel, automated nurturing that Marketbright does we have to understand what nurturing actually is. This is not new, ask any B2B sales person from the mini-computing days. Ask any poor soul who tried to manage their day and prospects with a Time Management System – anyone remember those? It is not a Black Art. There are four key attributes to Prospect Nurturing.
SegmentedIf you are selling more than one product, at more than one price point, across more than one vertical, and more than one geography, you better be targeting your message down to the most personal segment. Think about what every senior sales person has had to learn and should have a copy of in their bookmarks http://www.vitoselling.com/. Tony Parinello coined the phrase selling to the VITO – the very important top officer. What was the core element? Making the messaging targeted to that person. What is today’s equivalent when you get marketing to deliver this messaging? Segmentation. Take your products, your price points, how you plan to promote them and identify how best to promote them based upon your prospects. Email marketing is great if you have single products, single price point, single vertical products. If you want to be more personal than that you need to identify the best promotional tool to deliver your message. If you are Dior you want to get stars to wear your product. If your target is a C Level executive they are not going to respond to an impersonal generalized email.
Unless there is only one decision person influencing the choice of your product you need to build a systematic plan for Nurturing patter to the organization you are targeting and then to the people within it. Some will respond to email, some to SEO/SEM, some to direct mail, some to dimensional mailers, some to telesales, partners, analysts, etc all go to create the pattern you are going to create. Precisely the way sales people used to do this, you now automate the process using marketing, segmentation and personalized messaging. Not simply personalized emails, personalized promotions dependent on the prospect. This is at the core of prosultative selling, the transfer of tasks, activities and actions from sales to marketing and in the process their automation. Segmenting your messaging to the right person, to deliver the right content, at the right place using the right medium is a key part of Automated Nurturing.
My issue is if you ask a Marketer how automated it is to target a segment,
identify a message, craft some creative and then time its delivery, especially one who is using one of our competitor’s tools and is knee deep in HTML I think they will tell you, "Yeah. Not so much". I see a lot of our competition trying to make this sound complex. I think for them it may be. If you only ever worked in Marketing, then you don’t know what sales did and vice versa. Our team is a blend of Sales and Marketing professionals and with a view from end to end we see the world somewhat differently.
If we are to maximize the returns from the multi-channel, automated nurturing that Marketbright does we have to understand what nurturing actually is. This is not new, ask any B2B sales person from the mini-computing days. Ask any poor soul who tried to manage their day and prospects with a Time Management System – anyone remember those? It is not a Black Art. There are four key attributes to Prospect Nurturing.
SegmentedIf you are selling more than one product, at more than one price point, across more than one vertical, and more than one geography, you better be targeting your message down to the most personal segment. Think about what every senior sales person has had to learn and should have a copy of in their bookmarks http://www.vitoselling.com/. Tony Parinello coined the phrase selling to the VITO – the very important top officer. What was the core element? Making the messaging targeted to that person. What is today’s equivalent when you get marketing to deliver this messaging? Segmentation. Take your products, your price points, how you plan to promote them and identify how best to promote them based upon your prospects. Email marketing is great if you have single products, single price point, single vertical products. If you want to be more personal than that you need to identify the best promotional tool to deliver your message. If you are Dior you want to get stars to wear your product. If your target is a C Level executive they are not going to respond to an impersonal generalized email.
Unless there is only one decision person influencing the choice of your product you need to build a systematic plan for Nurturing patter to the organization you are targeting and then to the people within it. Some will respond to email, some to SEO/SEM, some to direct mail, some to dimensional mailers, some to telesales, partners, analysts, etc all go to create the pattern you are going to create. Precisely the way sales people used to do this, you now automate the process using marketing, segmentation and personalized messaging. Not simply personalized emails, personalized promotions dependent on the prospect. This is at the core of prosultative selling, the transfer of tasks, activities and actions from sales to marketing and in the process their automation. Segmenting your messaging to the right person, to deliver the right content, at the right place using the right medium is a key part of Automated Nurturing.
The Second "S" of Automated Nurturing - Systematic
Systematic
As any successful salesperson used to do every Sunday night, the optimistic ones ironing 5 shirts at the same time, they would sit and plan their week. What meetings did they have and what could they do with the rest of their time. Who could they call, who would they send a VITO letter to, which partner would they work with? When I was at Oracle one of my most successful partnerships was with the HP sales team. We were targeting a prospect base that was almost 100% IBM. IBM saw no benefit in working with me, HP wanted to break in. I would spend time understanding which salespeople to work with at HP, and doing joint account planning. We knew if we called someone last week and they told us to call them back in six months, we would touch base with them in three months. We would look out for trade shows where we knew we may meet someone. Salespeople systematically sat down and worked out how to balance their time. What was wrong with this? Good ones were good at doing this and bad ones? Yep, they were bad at it.
Now in a prosultative selling environment with marketing automating this process must be systematic and process-oriented. We will take the best practices of the best sales people and replicate them across every account. If we do this we find a way to systemically replicate best sales practices to every prospect dramatically increasing our chance of success. You need a tool like Marketbright to deliver this across all channels and all segments. However, the concept is not new and if your marketing vendor actually involved sales people in the design of their tools, you would have something useful, like Marketbright. You need Marketing to understand who to target, how to message, when to do it, you need sales to help understand what best practices have worked in the past.
As any successful salesperson used to do every Sunday night, the optimistic ones ironing 5 shirts at the same time, they would sit and plan their week. What meetings did they have and what could they do with the rest of their time. Who could they call, who would they send a VITO letter to, which partner would they work with? When I was at Oracle one of my most successful partnerships was with the HP sales team. We were targeting a prospect base that was almost 100% IBM. IBM saw no benefit in working with me, HP wanted to break in. I would spend time understanding which salespeople to work with at HP, and doing joint account planning. We knew if we called someone last week and they told us to call them back in six months, we would touch base with them in three months. We would look out for trade shows where we knew we may meet someone. Salespeople systematically sat down and worked out how to balance their time. What was wrong with this? Good ones were good at doing this and bad ones? Yep, they were bad at it.
Now in a prosultative selling environment with marketing automating this process must be systematic and process-oriented. We will take the best practices of the best sales people and replicate them across every account. If we do this we find a way to systemically replicate best sales practices to every prospect dramatically increasing our chance of success. You need a tool like Marketbright to deliver this across all channels and all segments. However, the concept is not new and if your marketing vendor actually involved sales people in the design of their tools, you would have something useful, like Marketbright. You need Marketing to understand who to target, how to message, when to do it, you need sales to help understand what best practices have worked in the past.
Prosultative versus Sales 2.0
I have been asked this a number of times what is the difference between Prosultative selling and Sales 2.0? First we need to define Sales 2.0 - you only have to visit the Sales 2.0 conference site http://www.sales20conf.com/2009/ to see it is all about sales, sales, sales, and I think I mentioned sales. Prosultative is about blending sales and marketing into one organization. The end of the never ending and pointless debate about Sales are from Mars and Marketing from Venus.
We are all here to generate revenue. With Sales 2.0 you will see lots of talk about leads. Prosultative selling is about qualified prospects. Marketing helps sales by doing much of the work sales used to do. The result is smaller, more focused sales teams and marketing teams who are discovering where buyers are, how to qualify them, how to bring those prospects to the sales team that are ready to buy, and how to keep those that will be ready to buy informed until they are ready. Finally how to identify those people who will never buy and discover if there are other products and services we can sell them.
This is not a case of tomato / tomarto - this is apples and oranges.
We are all here to generate revenue. With Sales 2.0 you will see lots of talk about leads. Prosultative selling is about qualified prospects. Marketing helps sales by doing much of the work sales used to do. The result is smaller, more focused sales teams and marketing teams who are discovering where buyers are, how to qualify them, how to bring those prospects to the sales team that are ready to buy, and how to keep those that will be ready to buy informed until they are ready. Finally how to identify those people who will never buy and discover if there are other products and services we can sell them.
This is not a case of tomato / tomarto - this is apples and oranges.
Social Technographics and Demand Discovery
I just finished reading a great blog by Laura Ramos of Forrester entitled The Social Technographics Of B2B Buyers
(http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/02/23/the-social-technographics-of-b2b-buyers/#comment-37).
It caused me to start thinking about what Laura had to say and think about the dynamics of why Social Marketing is starting to take off at such a rapid pace. The following is based on my response to Laura's posting.
We are seeing in Social Marketing a reflection in the online world of the way the offline world used to work. If you wanted to meet Stanford sports fans to watch a college basketball game, you would go to a sports bar near the Stanford campus, not Berkeley.
What we are seeing in the market is driven by the same business forces we used to see, closing more revenue, more quickly. This desire in today's world of instant expectations means we need to find those people who are ready to buy and buy today. When we can find a qualified buyer with budget, we close quickly and if we can keep new prospects flowing we close more often, ultimately driving more revenue.
This means marketing has to put itself in the place where the ready buyer is at this moment. That means finding which places these people are in and going there. Like the Stanford example, there will be many sports bars to go to watch a game, so you start with the largest one. Then you find there are some people who want to watch a game but they like a certain food, or a quiet place. You then expand the marketing reach to go to these places and spread your message.
As marketers we need to find where the people that are ready to buy are congregating and go there not wait for them to find us. We don't have the time to deliver the demand generation activities of the past, we need revenue and we need it now. The best way to deliver this is to find a well-qualified prospect who is ready to buy. Find out where they are discovering information about the problem they face, add value to their discovery and lead them toward your solution.
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