Tag Archives: Customer Marketing
“We’re Not Making Our Number”: How Marketing Can Help Close a Gap
- 18th March 2013
“We’re not making our number.” These words strike fear into the heart of business leaders, but especially those in sales and marketing. Unfortunately, marketing’s response can be a disjointed and expensive set of tactics conceived in a rush to “do something.” Sometimes these actions are helpful, but often they end up driving a wedge between sales and marketing. So what can marketing do? Plenty! So take a deep breath, grab a cup of tea and read this list. And for goodness’ sake, don’t forget to build in a way to measure whether marketing’s extra work has paid off! Here are three areas to consider.
Continue Reading....It’s Not All About Buying: In Defense of Customer Marketing
- 12th February 2013
In all this talk about the funnel (or waterfall) being dead, I’ve noticed an unsettling misunderstanding: How is it acceptable to tack on a single stage to the buying cycle, call it “the customer lifecycle,” and expect behavior to change? If the anti-funnel camp believes the buying view is too linear to reflect that process, then an over-simplified view of what happens after buying ends makes it worse. Any attempt to collapse an even more complicated relationship into a one-size-fits-all box doesn’t reflect the customer’s reality, or the seller’s for that matter. Let’s try another approach to looking at the customer lifecycle. Let’s consider that a customer relationship is just that – a relationship. There are two parties involved: customer and company.
Continue Reading....Make 2013 the Year of Realistic Thinking
- 2nd January 2013
The desire to make everything simple is lulling us into believing that great marketing execution is easy. To put it simply, that’s just not reality. Here’s my proposal: Let’s make 2013 The Year of Realistic Thinking. Why? If I’ve learned one thing over the last few years at SiriusDecisions, it’s that there’s a burning desire among marketers to simplify everything. From lead scoring and measurement to the buyer’s journey, customer lifecycle and the messages created to support it all, a common mission is to reduce the complexity. This can often be a good thing; for example, it helps us make decisions faster or prevents us from over-engineering execution. But other times, the insistence on a simple story causes marketers to lose some of the nuances that can make a big difference.
Continue Reading....Account-Based Marketers: Five Make-or-Break Skills
- 6th November 2012
Delivering impact in account-based marketing (ABM) takes a different set of skills compared with traditional, broad-based marketing. Sadly, marketers are often placed in ABM roles without tools or training to help them adapt to what is a very different model. ABM effectiveness depends largely on a change in expectation. SiriusDecisions benchmark data shows that marketers who focus on large enterprise accounts can expect to source, on average, less than 10 percent of the sales pipeline. The same data shows that they’ll influence more than 75 percent of it. Marketers must understand that ABM success comes from influencing the right contacts, in the right accounts, at the right time, to support specific objectives, not all of which will be about selling. It’s easy to end up on a less productive path that pleases sales and generates activity, but ultimately won’t deliver growth. The following are five critical capabilities that define the ABM marketer’s potential.
Continue Reading....Customer Marketing: Have We Forgotten Our Manners?
- 28th September 2012
It seems we in b-to-b may have taken the concept of making marketing accountable for revenue a little too far. It’s not that I miss the “bad old days” when it was okay for marketing to not be accountable for any revenue outcome. But I see a disturbing trend: From measurement to social media to account-based marketing programs, marketers are pushed to focus almost exclusively on creating demand, at the expense of supporting customers. Although customer marketing was named a top priority by CMOs in a recent SiriusDecisions study, there’s still a lot of work to be done. It may come down to this: We’ve forgotten our manners.
Continue Reading....Is Listening to Customers Enough?
- 18th September 2012
Many companies claim that they are customer-centric, but few are really good at it. Often the problem is with the types of listening techniques we use to develop our customer understanding. In today’s dynamic, interconnected and increasingly digital market environments, traditional customer listening approaches are not effective on their own. As customer engagement continues moving to digital platforms and the need for differentiation increases, suppliers must develop an ongoing, dynamic, customer-centric way of gathering, mining, analyzing and interpreting customer input and intelligence. As Peter Drucker once said, “The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.” Consider the following to gain a more complete view.
Continue Reading....CMOs See New and Changing B-to-B Marketing Roles
- 28th August 2012
Earlier this year SiriusDecisions tapped into its CMO and marketing leader network for a snapshot of the b-to-b marketing roles they had either created or eliminated in the past year. Social media, customer marketing and marketing technology were the newly created roles cited most often.
Continue Reading....Back to School Time: Three B-to-B Marketing Ideas
- 21st August 2012
Every year, millions of school-age children – with freshly sharpened pencils in every backpack – get the wonderful chance to start a whole new chain of ideas and learning as they go back to school after the summer break. It’s that time again, and it’s hard not to be inspired by the potential of a new school year when it comes to reinvigorating marketing efforts. Here are a few areas smart marketers can take back to work this fall. Don’t forget to bring along some new pencils, too, for inspiration.
Continue Reading....Seven Factors for Enterprise Account Success
- 9th August 2012
We’re hearing from many companies that want to engage marketing to support enterprise accounts or strategic accounts, but they’re not exactly certain what that should look like. Sure, marketing has helped with events and other sales-requested activities in the past under the label of account-based marketing, but they believe maybe there’s something else to be done. They’re right: There’s a lot more to supporting buying cycles and the customer lifecycle over a long-term relationship. The key is what the company wants its commitment to these relationships to be, and being realistic about what marketing can do, starting with sales alignment.
Continue Reading....Return of an Old Friend: Customer Lifetime Value in B-to-B
- 21st June 2012
With so much of marketing’s focus on winning new customers, it’s easy to forget a simple financial truth. Companies grow faster and more profitably if they retain more of the customers they already have and do their best to pursue cross-selling and upselling opportunities within them. So why don’t b-to-b marketers spend more time focused on doing exactly that?
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