Author: scott.gillum

Scott is the Founder of Carbon Design Co and the former head of the Washington, DC office of gyro, the largest B2B agency in the world. Prior to joining gyro, he spent a dozen years at a professional services firm that specializes in B2B sales and marketing. Scott also writes a monthly column for Media Post and has contributed to three books on B2B Sales and Marketing. Follow him on Twitter @sgillum

CIO’s Are More Than Just IT Buyers

Original Post Date 9/22/11

Even if you believe in love at first sight, the likelihood of a marriage proposal on the first date is highly unlikely. Committing yourself to someone without getting to know him or her first is a ridiculous idea. Yet far too often companies are asking audiences to “commit” at the hint of an interaction despite knowing little about each other.

Why?

In the tech industry and according to author Tom Grant, Ph.D, companies desire early commitment, due to the industry’s “voracious appetite for leads.” As Grant explains in his report, Tech Marketers Pursue Antiquated Marketing Strategies, the “high-speed innovation” rate drives a hyperfocus on product marketing and lead generation compared to other industries.

In fact, only 22 percent of marketers in the technology industry said that customer relationship management was one of the two most important priorities. Contrast that with 52 percent of marketers in non-tech companies. The focus is obviously on producing a measurable outcome that drives the product P&L: leads.

Developing a relationship with an audience takes time and resources, and it can be perceived as a distraction to the task of finding “ready to marry” prospects. This inward-out view of marketing ignores audience needs and assumes that all audiences are the same, and that all searches must indicate intent.

However, the key to driving demand and lead generation in today’s economy is not being more aggressive and pushing harder, but rather, taking time to develop and nurture relationships. Audiences, like dates, can sense desperation.  Perhaps the way to go faster is to slow down and shift the focal point from the conversion to the conversation.

We have long known that relevancy drives conversion and that conversion drives revenue. Getting to relevancy requires us to engage with the audience to understand their unique needs and motivations. As a result, our role changes from dictating to facilitating and understanding that it’s now on the buyer’s time frame, not ours.

New technologies such as Bizo enable us to know who the audience is at the first interaction. We also know where they’ve been for 30 days (who they’ve been dating, so to speak) before the conversion point, via Google Analytics’ new Multichannel Funnels.

We can serve up custom content through retargeting based on audience profiles, adapt for whatever device they are using, and deepen engagement by providing specific product or brand messages that align with their journey.

95% of prospects on your website are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep.” Source: 2011 MECLABS research

We no longer have to interrupt a buyer’s journey to gauge the interest level.   We no longer have to call a prospect to qualify him or her.  When a company offers something of value (i.e., relevant and personal), buyers are more likely to share their interests, desires and needs, but only if we listen, nurture and respect the relationship. According to Forrester, this intimate information is critical to creating real opportunity (leads) for the sales force.

In the Technology Buyer Insight Study, Forrester found that although tech has done a good job of equipping its sales force to discuss company products, it had failed to provide reps with insight into the buyer’s roles and responsibilities. Only 29 percent of CIOs said that sales reps could “relate to their role”; less than a quarter (24 percent) of business leaders said that reps were “knowledgeable about their business.”

Still too touchy-feely for you? Consider Harte Hanks’ report, Mapping the Technology Buyer’s Journey, which states that the relationship with the vendor is still a top five consideration driver. The first and second most important drivers are what you’d expect: (1) Meets all needs and (2) cost.

Competitors can match your price, but they can’t necessarily match your understanding of the buyer’s need or the relationship developed through that journey.

Could Advertising Pay for Your Child’s College Education?

Years ago, a friend of mine sold his company to national telecommunication company.  With time on his hands, and being a serial entrepreneur he set out on his next project.

Watching his two children come home every night with overstuffed backpacks full of books, he decided his next venture would be to lighten their load. With a track record of technology innovations, he developed an e-reader years before the IPad and Kindle.  The reader had an interactive note pad on one side and the e-reader on the other side.  He provided much of the funding and line up production in South Korea and China.

Next, he would need the education system to play along.  And that’s where the story ends.  He preached of the value of democratizing education to school systems, locally and nationally.  The opportunity to generate new revenue streams by promoting college professors, courses and information beyond the classroom to the reach of every student with internet access.  But the old guard was too wedded to their legacy business models, and their traditional thinking of a “campus education” and as a result, they never got onboard.

That was until now.  Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs are changing the mindset of some of the most prestigious colleges in the US.  Leading universities like Harvard, MIT and Johns Hopkins are now putting some of their marque courses online, and many of them for free.

MOOC platform providers like Coursera, edX and Udacity believe higher education is a basic human right and, as a result, have seen a surge in interest.  Coursera now has more than 1.7 million registered students.   Brian Caffo, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, teaches what he calls a “math biostatistics boot camp” that usually draws a few dozen graduate students (found 15,000 students from around the world had signed up for the free online course).

Bringing higher education to the masses also comes paradigm-shifting challenges. It has the potential of redefining the value of a “campus education” and to disrupt the traditional business model.   Nick Anderson of Washington Post suggest that MOOC platforms pose a key question for universities “Are they undercutting time tested financial models that relies on students willing to pay a high price for a degree from a prestigious institution…or are they accelerating the onset of a democratized, globalized version of higher education?”

Burck Smith likens it to the challenge newspapers faced when they first launched web sites.  Smith, the CEO of StraightLine, which sells low cost online courses says, “Free content has never really been a successful business model.”

Perhaps Mr. Smith is wrong.  With two kids not far from college, I’d like to suggest that there could be a new business model built on free content – Advertising.

In this new world, Universities become, in a sense, content houses, similar to publishers.  By making the best universities, courses and professors available to the masses, the opportunity to draw huge audiences and to build brands worldwide is created.

For example, the eight courses made available by Johns Hopkins have drawn more than 170,000 students from around the world.  And where there are highly engaged and defined eyeballs, there are advertisers waiting, and wanting to gain access, especially given the fact that courses are available in multiple formats and devices.

Although this “revolution” is in its early stages, it has to the potential to redefine the college experience, education and business model.  And, as the story of my friend attests, the industry is slow to change, but with cost of an average public college education at $27,435, “free” sounds pretty good to me.

Lessons from the World’s Most Famous Press Release

Original post date July 2, 2011

It was written 235 years ago. Between 200-300 copies were printed for towns up and down the east coast, and a few made their way to Europe.

Contrary to popular belief, the original copy contained no signatures and what it promoted was completely unique, new and…flawed.

The Declaration of Independence may very well be the world’s most famous press release. That’s according the curator at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where it was written and approved in its final form (unsigned) on July 4th, 1776.

The signed copy we are familiar with was created later for ceremonial purposes.

I found it interesting to hear one of the world’s most famous and important documents being referred to as a press release during a class field trip with my son.  The curator used the analogy because he said that there is confusion regarding the purpose of the Declaration:

… the goal of the document was to only articulate “What” and “Why,” not “How … ”

This history lesson is an important best practice from the Founding Fathers.

Lesson: Focus on effectively communicating ONLY “what “and “why.”

How many times have you written and/or read a press release that tried to say too much, or that lacked clarity on its objective?

Another interesting point from our visit was the struggle to form a new federal government (the “How”). Under the Articles of Confederation, the new federal government had no revenue source (taxation), and no real authority over the states.  The states were sovereign, operating essentially as their own countries making decisions on their own currency, religion, and diplomacy with other countries.

Again the marketer in me saw the similarity to the power struggle between corporate marketing and other sales/marketing organizations (Product, Field, Region, etc.).  Would history provide another lesson for marketers?

Know Your Customer

Congress struggled with governing under the Articles.  Instead of revising the existing document, the Federal Convention decided to draft an entirely new frame of government. According to that curator, three key issues hung up the approval of the framework:

  • Religion
  • Slavery
  • The power of the federal government (which many saw coming at the expense of the states.)

Addressing the religious issue was easy; they left it out of the Constitution.  It was later covered under the Bill of Rights.  On slavery, they reached a compromise by outlawing slave trade in 1808, twenty years in the future.  But the single most important change was the shift from states to the individual in granting the federal government its power.

We the people of the United States … do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States.”

The federal government now answered to citizens, not the states.  State representatives and congressmen now represented the views and best interests of the people within their districts.  By putting citizens first, the founding fathers established a focal point that transcended state interests.

Lesson: With the rise in social media adoption, marketers now can better gauge the direct needs and desires of their customers.  Customers for their part are showing a willingness to engage like never before.  Marketers are presented with an opportunity to shift focus from solely addressing and satisfying internal “state” needs to anticipating, engaging, and serving the needs of “citizens” … customers.

Is it time for a marketing revolution?

Although I’m a proud Virginian, I’m no Patrick Henry but I say marketers, it’s time for our own declaration … marketing by the people, for the people!

Happy Birthday America.

How to Get Your “Why Us” Story Straight

If you did something 400 times you would think you would be able to get it right at least once.

Not always, as we learned after being called in to help a well-known company draft their corporate value proposition…after they had already attempted 400 versions unsuccessfully.  True story.

Outside of delivering consistent financial performance that meet expectations, creating an effective and impactful “Why Us” value proposition is the biggest challenge for most organizations.  That 30 second blurb that explains to a prospect or customer who you are, what you do, and how you are different.

Why is it so hard?  Companies are engaging with customers every day, and pitching their wares to new prospects just as often.  Then why is it so hard to come up with a compelling and agreed upon “Why Us” story?   Well, feel free to pick any one or more of the following reasons:

  1. Ownership – it’s everyone’s job…and no one’s job.  The organization debates who should create the story, and as a result, it doesn’t get done or…
  2. Versioning – the good news is the company has a story.  The bad news, there are many of them, none of them the same, and a new one is created for just about every new sales meeting.
  3. “Inward-out” – the story using internal jargon, it’s too long, reflects the company’s views, and not the needs of the customer or prospect.
  4. Non-differentiated – it focuses on the features of the product or services and not the benefits delivered to customers.  As a result, it sounds just like everyone else in the market.
  5. “Same Page Syndrome” – this is the most fascinating of all.  The folks responsible for putting together the story bring their own perspective on what the story should be.  Using their own experiences, their role, and their history with the company, they all bring a different view on what the company does and why it’s unique.  As a result, no one can get on the same page to describe the organization and its value…resulting in 400 rounds of edits and/or multiple versions.

Given this situation, how to do you get it right?

  • Ownership – this is a collaborate process but marcom/corporate communication should own it. They are in the best position to understand the brand value, audience needs, and are responsible for external communications.  Corporate starts the process and then cascades it down the organization to add more detail.  They own the final version and the governance process to lock down “version de jour.”
  • Go outside – start with doing external research looking at your target audience and industry competitors.  This will help you understand “tablestakes,” how to define value, and differentiate services.  It should also help eliminate the “internal speak.”  See below.
Evaluating the Market
  • Get on the same page – for many organizations, this is THE challenge.  Before attempting to draft anything, get ALL key stakeholders to agree to ONE of the following.  (Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema conclude in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders that exemplar companies leverage one of three value proposition types: operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy.)
    1. Operational Excellence—This value proposition type guides companies to provide products at the best price or greatest convenience. Operationally excellent companies construct a value statement that emphasizes low prices and hassle-free service.
    2. Product Leadership —This value proposition type encapsulates companies that offer consistently innovative products that push performance boundaries. Companies defined by product leadership communicate their commitment to provide customers with the best product or service.
    3. Customer Intimacy—This value proposition type directs companies to cultivate long-term relationships with members of their target audience. Customer-intimate companies specialize in satisfying the unique needs of individual customers and provide them with the best total solution.
  • Make it personal and relevant – David Akers, a marketing professor at the Haas School of Business, defines a value proposition in three parts: Functional benefits, Emotional Benefits, and Self-Expressive Benefits.   The functional benefits are related to the step above.  Emotional benefits are typically tied the role, and self-expressive benefits to the individual.  See below.

  • Test, Refine and Validate– start with the sales organization, and then with a few of your customers.  This process is not only about capturing the value of your organization through the ears and eyes of your customers, but it’s also a change management challenge.  The process can still break down unless the organization “buys-in” to adopting the final output.  Customer validation will help “lock it down.”

Lastly, be disciplined – once defined, stick to it for at least a year.  Marketing’s role is to clearly communicate the value (organization, product, etc.) to targeted audiences, sales is to convert it into revenue.  As a result, sales may take some liberties with the story.  But keep in mind, just because someone comes up with a clever new “Why Us Today” story in the heat of a pitch, doesn’t mean you change your messaging.  Stay on point, you don’t want to do this 400 times…trust me.

Why Sex Sells

Original posted on Forbes July 25, 2011

Years ago some colleagues of mine built what we thought at the time was the “holy grail” of business marketing:  A sophisticated analytical tool that could tell a marketer where to invest, why, and what the return would be in sales productivity.   It could also tell them where to cut dollars, why and what the impact would be on the business.

It was an incredible feat of analytical modeling and technology.  Built for one of the most respected and well known companies in the world, so the CMO could answer with absolute certainty the CEO’s question: “What am I getting for my marketing spend?” We thought that it was our ticket to the big time and the rocket to ride to explosive growth, but that was not the case.

It turned out to be the only one we sold.   And that always baffled me.  Anyone who saw the tool was awed by its power and insight, but they didn’t buy.

Over the years, I picked up some clues as to why others would not buy:

  • The head of a major west coast based IT company warned us that our business intelligence tool and analytic model might limit his managers’ ability to make decisions based on their experience … “gut feel.”
  • The CMO of a global software company was concerned that our meticulously designed marketing processes, with stage gates and Gantt charts might limit his team’s creativity.
  • The head of marketing finance at a major Financial Service company told me that every year they run their marketing optimization model and it tells them that they overspend on TV, and under spend in print. But at the end of the year if there was additional budget leftover the CMO puts it in TV.

I’ve now been able to put the pieces together.  I came from a marketing science world and have since learned to appreciate and understand the value of the art of marketing.

Data and analytics can tell you where customers are, what they look like, what they’re interested in, but science alone can’t make customers buy.  It can’t make customers advocate for a brand, and it can’t make the hair stand up on the back of their necks.

Insightful, creative and relevant ideas that trigger human emotions can –  and do – sell.   For as much as I wanted to believe that buyers were rational creatures behaving in predictable patterns, I now understand that they are not.

Marketing, as much as we want it to be, is not an exact science.  Technology innovation has allowed us to better understand buyers, influencers and the performance of our activities.

But at the end of the day, business is personal.  We can’t remove the human element from the buyer or seller side.  Relationships and perceptions matter, how a product and/or a brand makes a customer feel is important, and it’s not easy to model or predict.

And with that, I found the answer: Although helpful and informative, good marketers don’t need to rely on sophisticated analytical tools to make decisions. Their experience, “gut,” and sometimes the hairs on their back of their neck do just fine.

5 Ways CMO’s Lose Credibility with the C-Suite

This post was originally posted on July 8, 2011.  It also appeared on Forbes.com 

Here’s a hypothesis: Given the greater focus on ROI, marketing automation tools, and enhanced tracking of results, marketing is more of a science than ever. Therefore, marketers’ ability to defend and validate their value among peers should be easier than ever before.

So why does a recent study by Fournaise show that CMOs still lack credibility with CEOs?

The study points to several deficiencies with an emphasis on communication – are you sensing the irony?  Further, marketers tend to sabotage themselves in everyday interactions with the larger executive team, and in many cases, have no idea they are doing it.

Here are five common mistakes among marketers:

  1. Stumble explaining the value of marketing. Asked almost daily, and rarely answered properly. The key is to understand how the inquirer perceives the role of marketing. The question behind the question is “what is the value of marketing … to me?” According to the study, it most often relates to “revenue, sales, EBITA or even market valuation.”
  2. Limited product, service, and customer knowledge. Even the savviest marketer will arrive DOA in the credibility department if they fall short on this one.  And it is not about feature or functionality, but rather customer use and application that matter most and those factors vary by industry and size. Leave “speeds and feeds” to the product organization. Marketing’s job is to differentiate and develop compelling value propositions that sell. If products are built “inside-out,” then bring the “outside-in” perspective.
  3. Can’t Dance. Marketing comes with highly visible risk and things are going to go wrong. When they do, marketing needs to learn how to dance. Handling these situations will define how marketing is viewed. Keep best and worse case scenarios in mind when briefing the executive team. Truth is, if marketing isn’t making a few strategic and tactical mistakes, it’s not moving fast enough. As a former IBM client told me, “If you fail, and you will, fail fast.”
  4. Isolation. A favorite question from sales: What have you done for me lately? And the product team can be equally demanding. However, marketing has to build, nurture, and maintain strong relationships with these groups. For Sales, it is helpful to establish an integrated sales pipeline and hold weekly pipeline meetings; this will build rapport and create a common sense of purpose. It’s also an opportunity to put marketing metrics in a sales context. The key to a successful relationship with sales is about communication and performance. For the product group, marketing needs to clearly define points of integration for research, content, and value proposition development. The key to a successful relationship with the product team is about process and integration.
  5. Where to invest – or cut – an incremental dollar. This question is posed by the CFO at the end of the quarter when numbers are off, and by the CEO who wants to redirect budget.  It’s also used as a test. As a holder of discretionary dollars, marketing has to be prepared to answer “where” and “why” along with stating the business impact.  In talking about CMOs, 72% of CEOs say, “[marketers] are always asking for more money, but can rarely explain how much incremental business this money will generate.”

To call out the sense of irony, most of these issues are communication related. The same rigor brought to external communication needs to be applied internally:

  • Know the audience
  • Understand their needs
  • Communicate to them in their language.

While the Fournaise study states that executives think in terms of “revenue, sales, and EBITA,” most make judgments based on their emotions. Marketers are advised to use their creativity in delivering the message.

Friedrich Nietzsche said it: “All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”

How the 2012 Election is Driving Mobile Marketing Innovation

The 2012 Presidential election will be the most expensive in history.  According to the New York Times the candidates will raise and spend over $1 billion dollars seeking office.  For marketers, this election will yield a windfall of new ideas.  Political campaigns are to marketing innovation what big defense budgets are to technology innovation.

2012 Campaign Spend

As the result of massive advertising budgets, high adoption rates of social media and penetration of smartphones, expect to see groundbreaking innovation in mobile advertising.

Areas to watch:

  • Hyper-local targeting – the Obama campaign team has developed an app that links a Google map to the neighborhood volunteers are working.  The map contains blue flags at homes to be knocked, including scripts for approaching individual voters.

  • Mobile geo targeting – during a concert in Grant Park in Chicago the Romney team placed display ads on smartphones of those concertgoers and others in the vicinity.  In TIME magazine recent The Wireless Edition, Patrick Ruffani, the Republican digital consultant said; “We weren’t paying for the entire city.”
  • Mobile payments – the Obama team developed a new program called “Quick Donate.”  Supporters can contribute repeat donations by sending the number of dollars they want to donate via a text message.
  • Social Sharing – Romney’s With Mitt app allows supports to choose from a number of “With Mitt” templates to upload a photo from their phones and quickly share it on Twitter or Facebook.
  • Real time data – both camps have apps to enable volunteers to report real time activities and interactions with voters.  Vote Builder, the democratic voter database, ensures that no two people are sent to the same address.  If a volunteer wants to canvass an area, they can click to download a list of households in their general radius.  Phones prompt volunteers to report back their results so that future campaign communications, like DM, can be targeted.
  • Engagement – Romney’s campaign team captured valuable information from supporters who downloaded the Mitt’s VP app.  The app promised to inform supporters “first” about the vice president pick.  Unfortunately, the news media beat them to it, but it will allow Romney’s team to push notifications throughout the campaign to supporter’s smartphones.

With less than 10 weeks remaining in a tightly contested election expect more innovations to come.  With over 160 million Americans on Facebook and 53% of mobile phone owners having smartphones today, mobile digital campaigning is changing the way political strategists are engaging audiences and investing advertising dollars.

For marketers, it’s mobile marketing R&D that we could never afford, and will bear fruit for new ideas and campaigns for years to come.  Regardless of who wins the election, the real winners from this year’s campaign will be the folks without the billion dollar-marketing budget.

Social CRM – Who Gets Credit for Closing the Deal?

Originally posted on August 11, 2010

Social Relationship Management and Social CRM are terms that are now being thrown around for new technology platforms that are enabling multichannel execution.  Companies like Lithium Technologies have created platforms that allow companies to run hosted communities, listen across a variety of social media channels, and manage content to and from social networks in one integrate tool.

While marketing has steadily evolved from “one to many”, to “one to one“, Social CRM is now creating the opportunity for “many to one.”  For example, a customer tweets a question about a product (e.g. is it worth the money) on Twitter, a customer advocate brings that comment into the company’s online forum. Customers response to the question by sharing their experiences with the product, those comments (most likely only the positive ones) are then tweeted by the company to promote the product.

The promise of Web 2.0 has always been about customers selling to customers.  New Social CRM tools are now enabling that by consolidating platforms.  But this has the potential to raise issues over who gets credit for the sale.  If the true ROI on social media is revenue, which many research studies are now suggesting, then who should gets credit for a sale closed by a customer advocate?

Customer references and testimonials have always been critical for closing deals. What happens when customer advocates volunteer their support for the brand and/or endorsement of a product?  Does marketing get credit for providing platforms for enabling customer advocates?  And what about the customer/s  who’s comments help push the prospect over the goal line…do they need to be rewarded, and if so?

One thing is certain: social media is blurring the line between sales and marketing interactions and dialogues.  Given that, we may have to rethink our traditional views of customer coverage and relationship management.  Perhaps in the future, marketing will be responsible for managing customers online relationships, and sales for the offline experience.

Someone call HR and give them the heads up. Territory planning, revenue crediting, roles and responsibilities might need a refresh soon.

One Man’s Quest for a Social Media ROI

Everybody knows – or thinks they know intuitively – that social elements add value to marketing.  The question is how?

Like anything in business, it comes down to return on investment. Social media is not a strategy and it’s not an end in itself. Unless your business objective (and I’d check with your shareholders on this) is only about gaining page views and follows, marketers need to understand how social adds value to everything else in your toolkit.

So how do you find the “sweetspot” for developing an ROI for social media?  Well, start by viewing the tools at their most basic level, as vehicles for sharing and; photo’s, thoughts, content, etc.  Consider them “levers” for improving the performance of known activities that have produced a ROI.

Five years ago, we assessed the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns for a client.  Because the firm was in the hi-tech industry they had a heavily reliance on content marketing for their campaigns.  They spent months designing and building them, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in execution only to see diminishing results.

The audit revealed that their campaign effectiveness (related to lead production) lasted roughly 36 hours after launch (see below).  Meaning that the majority of the leads were being created within the first three days of launch, regardless of how long they left the campaign in the market (btw – they are not alone).

Today, social media has the potential to create a long tail, extending the life of expensive campaigns, ultimately improving ROI, and along the way creating and deepening the relationship with the audience.

I’ll use myself as an example: A blog post of entitled The End of Blogs (and Websites) as We Know Them ran recently in on Forbes. It received no special promotion; in fact, you could say the deck was stacked against it.  Posted on a Friday, the slowest traffic day of the workweek, at midnight (EST) when most of the blog readers at home or are in bed.  By prime blog viewing time (10 am) it had almost dipped below the fold.

But on the following Monday it took off, almost doubling the views of Friday, and continued to build momentum ending the week as the 3rd most popular post of the day.   The following week it was the most popular post on Wednesday.  So what happened?

Social took over. Without any additional investment to promote the post, social sharing accelerated and extended the life of the post, even as it fell off the first, second and third page of the site.  Readers engaged and went from passive viewers to active promoters.

Readers were tweeting their own thoughts and comments about their insights, not just retweeting the post title.  They placed in into Linkedin groups adding their comments on the impact of the technology (the topic of the post) to their particular area of interest or role.  They were actively engaging in sharing their “discover” with others.

 That is the power and the value of social media for content marketing.

The post no longer needed to be pushed because it was being endorsed, and in some ways validated, by readers — the most trusted source of information.

The potential of social media is intriguing, but to determine its true value companies will need to experiment.  Using social media to support your content marketing efforts is a prudent choice, but keep this in mind: It will only be effective if the audience/community finds value in the content and part of that value is defined by those who pass it along.