Canadian Marketing Blog

Peering Into the Marketing Crystal Ball - Part III

Here are the final two of four key areas that together will challenge b-to-b marketing leaders in the upcoming year.

Three: Expanding Influence
Ah, the arguments that emanate from the hallways of b-to-b organizations worldwide, as sales and marketing fight over who actually sourced the lead that blossomed into a huge revenue producer. When marketing sees its only influence on results as “sourced” pipeline, these arguments will not only continue, they will grow louder, meaning that marketing must expand how it defines its influence on the enterprise. We recommend a four-pronged strategy for the evaluation of marketing’s business influence, including sourced, recycled, touched and facilitated. “Recycled” influence evolves around the measurement of how many leads that are fed to sales and rejected for various reasons are deposited back into marketing for further nurturing, as well as how many leads are resubmitted and what opportunity these leads wind up driving. This puts particular attention – and definitive value – on a critical role of marketing that is often scarce in b-to-b organizations. “Touched” influence measures how marketers are impacting demand that they do not source, whether the demand is sourced within inside, field or channel sales. We continue to see many marketing functions that have the charter not only of filling the top of funnel, but helping to propagate demand within the funnel that they no longer own. By leveraging the materials they are using to create “original” demand into tools and mini-programs that can be administered by sales, marketers drive incremental spending leverage and impact. Finally, the notion of “facilitated” demand revolves around the reputation-focused activities discussed above. By targeting key categories of influencers – both “formal” and “informal” – spend on reputation can be demonstrated in terms of its ability to foster demand creation.

Four: A Technological Crossroads
Every day, technologists are building an increasing number of tools and services to assist the b-to-b marketing function in its quest to be more systematic and measurable. And while these tools and services are being purchased at rapid rates, the ability for many organizations to use more than their most basic levels of functionality has been challenged at best. This is due to the fact that in all cases – whether we are discussing lead scoring, automated lead routing, tool/collateral delivery, message measurement efficacy or any other marketing innovation – the technology must be backed by process, and leadership at an executive level. One of the greatest threats to these technologies is their own marketing efforts, promising the ability to be up and running quickly; what’s “up and running” generally isn’t the advanced functionality in these systems, due to the fact that they require significant planning and collaboration between marketing and sales to make it work. Without constant drive from a marketing leader to ensure that maximum advantage is being gained from these often expensive purchases, companies tend to drag their feet when it comes to this planning and collaboration. The technology is now available to tackle the tasks that only five years ago were nearly impossible at worst and highly manual at best. We believe the technology can work. But we also believe that we are quickly heading toward a watershed point with these technologies in terms of whether their promise will truly be realized, or only a portion of their promise as we have seen with CRM/SFA systems.

A common theme for all of these imperatives is strong marketing leadership, the kind of leadership that is required to change the way the function measures itself, collaborates with sales and organizes for success. Driving change doesn’t only require conviction, however; it requires focus. When 2009 comes, will you be able to say that you were wedded to the right changes?

Ally

Excellent overview

From past life experience - I have seen B2B Funnel management transform itself from a strict demarcation of responsibilities to a team acquisition approach where the team shares in the responsibility of managing the customer acquisition program - in much the same way that the customer is then assigned a team to manage their account. The team then marshals the appropriate resources (as you outlined in part 3) parts of which are actioned individually - others via teams/groups.

Again from past experience - when the client is ultimately engaged - they seem to appreciate the fact that a team was deployed as opposed to the more typical 'lone wolf' theory of sales.

I was wondering if you could comment on this - perhaps with some additional examples from your practice.

Season Greetings

Miro

Thanks Miro.

As an example, in the old days, demand creation was a blunt force initiative. Sales reps pounded the pavement with little or no support beyond traditional brand-based advertising. The equation was simple: The more cold calls you made, the more opportunities you uncovered.

Today, demand creation has become exponentially more complex. While effort continues to be the key ingredient, the impact of customer buying cycles, prospect access to a wide range of information and a multitude of new technologies has forced reps to adapt. Demand creation, no longer a moment in time but rather a series of events that unfold over months or quarters, has evolved into a team sport requiring the collaboration of field marketing and inside sales (both telemarketing and teleprospecting) at a minimum, and is now divided into three fundamental categories:

- Lead management. Targeted programs originated out of marketing that generate hand-raisers, and hopefully nurture these hand-raisers until they are ready for inside, field, or channel sales attention.

- Account-based marketing. The assignment of dedicated marketing resources to one or more large accounts to create and adapt demand creation programs on a company-by-company or account-by-account basis.

- Field/channel sales sourced. Ten years ago, this category would have boiled down to two words: cold calling. Today, it’s just another category where sales and marketing should be collaborating, and sales leaders should be playing a role.

While sales-led prospecting is and will continue to be the thrust of new business pipeline, there is a much more sound, more sane approach to demand creation. At the heart of this approach is making marketing a partner in strategy, tactics and metrics.

Ally