Here’s where we get to reflect and ruminate. Sometimes it leads to really interesting exchanges, sometimes it provides a place to vent. Whether insightful or simply IMHO, you’re invited to jump in!
Introduction by Anne Marsden: I’m thrilled to announce another great addition to Marsden & Associates: Suzanne Moore. Suzanne is our newest Principal and brings an impressive wealth of marketing accomplishments with a heavy dose of Sports Marketing and Sales Transformation. Check out her background here, enjoy her first blog (posted below) and give us a call if you would like to talk to Suzanne and learn more.
by Suzanne Moore
First impressions come once. They will either open doors or close them. So how do you transform your sales organization into a team that keeps doors open by bringing credibility and intelligence to their engagements? A team that thinks like business people and applies business acumen.
Start by throwing away the PowerPoint and brochures. Do yourself a favor, skip the presentation and listen, talk, communicate. A presentation is like a lecture. A typical presentation rarely devotes much focus on the customer and their current situation. Most of the focus, I dare say 90% of it, will be describing your company, your solutions and your products.
It’s too easy to start talking about your products and not get the information that will allow you to solve your customer’s business problem. Some customers may not make the leap to understanding how your products apply to their situation and whether they should buy them.
When you take your car into the shop, the mechanic doesn’t hand you a brochure. Nor does he go through a presentation lauding his credentials, products and solutions. He talks to you. Asks probing questions about any problems you’ve noticed. Listens to your answers. Takes your car back for diagnostic testing and then presents a solution.
Transformation starts when relevant solutions are presented that solve real problems.
So, here are 3 things to do, if you want to begin your sales transformation and be invited back to the customer’s table:
Trust me, if you go to a meeting prepared to initiate conversation, you’ll make a great first impression and pave the way to your sales transformation.
So, what’s your first impression of me?
By Becky Carr
How often do you reflect on what your personal brand is and assess whether or not you are living your life and conducting yourself at work in a way that exemplifies those attributes? In a very crude survey at a dinner party last week I found that no one regularly took the time to step back and contemplate both the characteristics associated with them or how they were manifesting themselves in their day-to-day life. New Years Day and life changing events aside, our personal brand is usually on autopilot.
Too often businesses with an established brand don’t take the time to reflect on how their brand is perceived or considered. So much emphasis is placed on increasing awareness without the benefit of understanding what their target audience and customer base thinks and what it will take to get them to buy. With the proliferation of marketing mediums, it is even more important to ensure the brand personality and attributes are resonating across all audiences.
Let’s face it. It’s easier to get marketing dollars to put toward an ad or marketing campaign than it is to conduct research and develop processes and governance. Many employees believe that they already understand their brand attributes so spending coveted marketing dollars to “tell them what they already know” is like throwing away money. Processes and governance just mean more bureaucracy and delays to market.
But then the day comes when new competition is entering the market, share is eroding and revenue and profitability are on the decline. Ad campaigns are not delivering the desired results. Loyal customer advocates are now tempted with competing offers. The brand is no longer connecting with the market the way it used to, so now you’re behind the curve scrambling to repair.
It’s a matter of simple due diligence and established processes that will yield a greater return on the awareness investment. Luckily, due diligence doesn’t mean millions of dollars and months of research thanks to technology and social media. Conduct a brand study and customer survey to get a pulse on where you stand. Establish processes like tone and writing styles, training and review processes to ensure the attributes and personality are conveyed across the board.
Don’t let your company’s brand operate in autopilot. The market is too volatile and buyers more empowered. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, step back and reflect on your business performance and whether or not your brand identity is resonating with those attributes that will drive improved perception, consideration, and more importantly, sales.
by Anne Marsden
I am so tired of hearing that phrase: Content is King. Content is simply a means to advance the conversation – to interest potential buyers into finding out more about your product, and to shape how they feel about your brand amongst all the others competing for your attention.
Maybe all the hoopla around content marketing is because the cost of distributing content has plummeted. You no longer have to take out full-page ads or spend a fortune on direct mail. The internet has made distribution practically free. But there’s the rub. With the low cost to distribute, the amount of “junk” has skyrocketed. So getting our content through the noise and actually engaging our audience is not about how deep our pockets but how strong our inbound marketing and brilliant our content. OK, so compelling, informing, and/or entertaining content that engages is essential. Relevant content strengthens your SEO, increases your on-line authority, drives lead generation and can even improve your AdWords Quality Score. But it still ain’t King.
And neither is “Conversion”. We talk and talk about how to get prospects to “convert”, to give us their precious email addresses and the right to follow-up with more content in the future. Well, I can get anyone to give me their info if I give away free iPads. And they can instantly unsubscribe the next time they get something from me. (Most people have an email account they use just for this purpose and where they expect all the junk to go to anyway.) Of course conversions of true potential prospects are the heart of a strong lead generation program: you can’t get to Home until you’ve gotten to Second Base.
But in the end, the Customer is King. Who they are, what they need, how we help them, and how they feel about the relationship on an on-going basis, is King. According to a report by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, acquiring a new customer can cost 6 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer. Existing customers are our best prospects for cross-selling additional features and other products. They are a built-in marketing research team to help with product development.
So what I’m advocating is that as marketers, we need to spend at least as much time worrying about our Customer Experience Index* (CxPi) and our Net Promoter Score (or your preferred Customer Loyalty metric) as we do our monthly conversion rates. A little more attention in this area can provide greater revenue lift, at a lower cost, than just about any of our content creation efforts.
Oh yeah, and happy customers are a constant source of good content (case studies, testimonials, videos, etc.) too.
*CxPi is Forrester’s Consumer Experience Index. It measures the revenue benefits from 3 sources, and across 13 industries:
A free summary of the report and its methodology is available here.
By Becky Carr
If you’ve had the pleasure of going behind the scenes in the kitchen of a ‘haute cuisine’ restaurant, perhaps you were struck like I was by the clarity of role everyone had and the incredible team work it took to deliver a beautiful and delicious four course meal. The head chef, like a maestro, directs the various specialists and ensures the outcome. The fry chef focuses on his station and the pastry chef creates her masterpieces. The sommelier selects the proper pairings. They work in harmony all toward the same goal of delighting their hungry patrons.
Imagine if all marketing organizations were able to achieve the same coordinated and collaborative approach to increase lead generation, brand awareness and customer loyalty. It all comes down to having a well-communicated marketing strategy and clarity of task across all functions.
Marketing organizations come is so many different forms that I daresay there isn’t a right or wrong way to organize it. To centralize or decentralized is hotly debated especially in global pursuits. Balancing sales support and true field marketing (lead generation) can be a challenge. Ensuring compliance with country regulations about whom and where data can be accessed needs to be carefully addressed. Assessing what aspects can and should be outsourced requires thoughtful consideration.
The fastest path to failure in a marketing organization is lack of clarity in roles and a breakdown in full knowledge and respect for what each person is accountable for. This is especially important where decentralized marketing organizations are empowered to create their own lead generation campaigns. Ensuring branding and messaging is consistent, leveraging existing collateral and thought leadership materials, maximizing database efficiencies and aggregating measurement tools will yield more positive outcomes and better ROI.
Imagine a scenario where each product silo is responsible for their own marketing campaigns. One product team develops a target list, pushes out materials and invitations to encourage prospects to learn more. They own the web content and set up separate social media campaigns. Their goal is to sell THEIR product. In a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company, this model works well but in the B2B world, they lose the full effect of what they could otherwise accomplish in promoting their brand and entire portfolio of solutions.
Is there such a thing as a best in class marketing organization? Absolutely, but it has less to do with what the org chart looks like and more about how the team works in harmony to deliver on the business objectives. Having governance over the brand, clarity of role and common objectives tied to the business results is what makes a best-in-class marketing organization.
By Becky Carr
We thought the paddleboat was securely tied to the dock and were enjoying an evening cocktail on the porch when a group of intelligent and worldly adults noticed the boat was adrift. Quickly surmising the situation, four discussed the strategy by which to rescue the run away boat. Two offered to swim out to save it. They put on life jackets and set off after the boat. Two more didn’t wait to participate in the strategy and took off down the closest route – a treacherous cliff – and one of them ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist. While both the swimmers and ‘acrobats’ accomplished the same goal, the ones who adhered to the well-thought out strategy avoided weeks of rehabilitation.
There are always multiple ways to accomplish the same objective but inevitably the most well thought out strategy wins out. Why is it that we sometimes take the short cut to achieve speed to market?
Today marketers are under so much pressure to deliver in seemingly unrealistic timeframes to stay ahead of the competition that they often rush into “random acts of marketing”. In order to fully maximize results, marketers must stop to develop a ‘roadmap’ for each campaign and plan for the ongoing nurturing of leads. They must leverage every medium at their disposal to captivate their audiences who have unique ways in which they consume information. Lucky for us, we have more resources at our disposal to achieve these objectives.
Gone are the days when marketers would report their results based on the number of people to attended their trade show booth, or opened a direct e-mail or clicked through on the website. We are now held accountable for defending the ROI of our marketing budget and those metrics are a radical departure from the past.
In order to deliver a true ROI on marketing campaigns, marketers can’t take the fastest route. They must step back and assess their audience and messages and proliferate their campaigns across a myriad of vehicles. Taking the time to develop that roadmap, setting specific goals and executing consistently will yield the best results.
While launching a social media/inbound marketing campaign may seem easy – just start tweeting, or post a blog, or create a Facebook page – it’s not going to be effective unless you’ve thought through the next steps. If someone reads your blog and wants to learn more, you need to have your website and resources aligned. If they react to a tweet, you need to be prepared to respond. You need to have thought through the lifecycle of interactions that eventually nurture each lead into a sale. To learn more, I encourage you to read “The 10 Step Program to Jump-Start your Inbound Marketing Machine” by Anne Marsden.
Don’t take the short cut that just allows you to ‘check the box’. Do the work and create a multi-faceted plan to maximize coverage, nurture potential clients and deliver real world marketing results.
by Anne Marsden
Many of our clients have come to us with questions about inbound marketing. They’re either new to inbound marketing or need help improving the effectiveness of specific parts of their program. To lend a hand, I decided to write a reference guide on the topic. It’s an easy to read, interactive PDF full of useful facts, figures, links and specific instructions to start up – or tune up – your inbound marketing program.
A word of encouragement and a word of caution: If you follow these steps you WILL get results. But they aren’t magically easy, nor produce overnight results. (I’m not one of those marketers that guarantees instant weight loss with no need to exercise or eat less.)
Inbound marketing isn’t an event, it’s a discipline. And as many companies know, it is one of the most cost effective ways to find, attract, and engage prospects. In this interactive E-Guide you’ll learn the statistics that show that inbound marketing isn’t just for B2C. You’ll learn why it’s becoming the cornerstone of the most effective B2B marketing organizations. And you’ll learn the steps required to get your program in shape.
These 10 steps, when practiced with dedication, will change the marketing – and sales – lives of the companies that implement it. Nothing that is life changing is easy. But these steps are do-able and when consistently applied, the results are guaranteed. More inbound traffic. More leads. More engagement with your target market. More sales. Yes, more sales.
So if you want to learn how to jump-start or re-invigorate your inbound marketing program, click here to download your free copy.
By Becky Carr
You’re trapped. The person you’ve been seated next to during a 4 course dinner has a lot to say. It’s amazing that his plates are cleared away without even a trace of a crumb because he hasn’t stopped talking since they took the order. You just met this person yet know more about him than you know about your closest friends of 20 years. Finally over coffee he says “So enough about me, what do you think of me?”
Now pretend you are a prospective client sitting in a briefing where for 3 hours straight the sales team pontificates about how great their services are. You now know so much that you could practically build the service yourself. What you really need is a solution to elevate your workforce productivity and deliver on a double-digit growth plan.
Companies who shape their value propositions around the positive impact their services will have on their customer’s business will reap the benefits including higher share of wallet and strong customer loyalty. Yes you need to describe the service you offer in detail and call out the key differentiators but most important and often missing is the link back to how it will improve their business. The more you can quantify the impact and show examples through case studies, the better off you’ll be.
From company websites to collateral to webinar topics to sales training and more, your offerings should represent themselves in the context in which they will help your customers. If your target audience is a CIO, perhaps they are looking for ways to expedite delivery of new applications to their employees. Or they have to find significant cap ex reductions before the end of the year. Cloud solutions may be what they “buy” but it’s a means to an end. If your target audience is a CMO, they are going to be drawn to a blog or webinar that will educate them on how to maximize effectiveness of a social media campaign.
In a B2B sales environment, sales teams need to be trained and provided with the context in which their services will better enable their customer’s business. Yes they need to know the technical details and differentiating attributes, but put in the framework of what it will mean to their prospect.
It all comes down to knowing your audience and what their objectives are. After all, it’s really not all about you, it’s about what you can do for them.
by Becky Carr
Just imagine what it would be like if a conductor took the podium in front of a packed house at Carnegie Hall, handed out new music to all the instrumentalists and expected them to make beautiful symphonic sounds. That’s what launching a marketing campaign without sales alignment would be like. Playing from the same sheet of music does not mean literally passing it out with instructions, rather it requires a well orchestrated and coordinated plan with the common goal of making beautiful music and delighting the audience.
B2B Marketers beware – your most important lever to accelerating share and acquiring and retaining clients is your sales force. Yes, you need to have the foundational elements in place from a solid web presence, multi-dimensional and integrated campaigns, and analyst and press support, but if sales isn’t on board, you’re wasting your time and your company’s budget.
To achieve that symbiotic relationship with sales and capitalize on productive campaigns, here are 5 essential elements:
Executing a high impact marketing campaign is like conducting a symphony. All musicians (marketing elements) working in harmony to create beautiful music (revenue).
By Anne Marsden
Google Plus is currently an invitation only beta, but judging by the excitement – and the positive reviews to date – it is definitely changing the landscape of social media.
I’m participating in the trial now and am inviting any of our readers who’d like to join in to send me your email and I’ll send you an invitation. In return, I’d ask that we share our experiences - both good and bad – with the Circles (communities) we create.
Let’s all check in …and check it out together!
Send your request to: anne@marsdenassociates.com
By Becky Carr
I just finished reading Onward by Howard Schultz and have to admit it was brand envy that drove me to learn more. Here is a company that has turned itself around despite the macroeconomic environment. How is it that a company who exemplifies luxury grows despite the turmoil around them? If Starbucks can get $5 for a cup of joe – and have customers who do so daily – why can’t other businesses demand higher prices for their wares and keep them coming back for more?
It all comes down to customer loyalty – but I would submit, it starts with employee loyalty and a brand they can be proud of. Starbucks continued to innovate and improve operational efficiencies, they remained steadfast in their focus of delivering a differentiated customer experience but more importantly they created an environment where their employees were empowered and built a brand they could be proud of.
I’ve yet to speak to a CEO who wouldn’t describe their business as customer centric. But are they really doing everything possible to differentiate the experience and creating emotional connections for their customers and employees? Are they listening to their customers and then acting on the feedback? Are they empowering their employees and making them part of the bigger business picture? Are they part of something that serves the greater good in the world?
Customer loyalty can not be a stand alone initiative with a team of people whose charge it is to measure and act on customer relationships. It truly starts top down, but then must be woven throughout the business. Employees need to be held accountable. The very heart and soul of the business needs to be grounded in providing a fulfilling customer experience to its clients – each and every time. And the most successful businesses recognize that it’s their responsibility to give back to the community and the environment in order to build pride and respect in their brand.
There has been so much written about how to improve brand and customer loyalty from marketers and analytical geniuses. The real life case study that Howard Schultz authored depicts the depth to which a company needs to go in order to fully realize the rewards of an admired brand. And the rewards speak for themselves through shareholder value, revenue growth and profitability.
Espresso anyone?
(Note: The Starbucks logo is the property of Starbucks and used for illustration only.)
