The theme for our 2010 Summit is Measure, Align, Transform. A fitting tone for what lies ahead in 2010. While marketing and sales in b-to-b experienced a rocky road in 2009 with longer sales cycles, reduced budgets and a fickle customer base, the two functions also relied on each other more than they have in the past. Pipeline acceleration programs doubled indicated sales reliance on marketing for downstream, as well as upstream, programs. In addition, solution marketing increased with companies segmenting further and changing their messaging and approach to be more precise and relevant to their core markets. Finally, for the eighth straight year field marketing budgets increased. Yes, marketing and sales budgets changed often with big decreases, but these changes indicate the need for the relationship for marketing and sales to continue to change and evolve into a more and more strategic partnership, and not organizations competing for budget.

Summit 2010 research is currently underway and it’s an outcome we are eager to see. As we experienced in 2001 when marketing and sale investment changed, it did not go back to where it began, nor do we expect this to occur in 2010 or beyond. Instead, marketing will become more leveraged and more measurement based, and sales will transform its channels and revenue for the future, with more coming from inside and indirect while partnering more with marketing to increase sales readiness.

We believe that b-to-b sales and marketing is at an inflection point of change and look forward to do our best to draw what the outcome might look like at the upcoming Summit. 

When considering the level of social media participation your organization should have, the first question to answer is the extent to which your customers participate. It’s no longer a given that even in highly regulated industries social media is not used. Do your customers read blogs, download podcasts, use Twitter (or similar sites), and participate in other online communities? You may already know the answers to these questions based on direct feedback from customers or sales reps, or you may have to ask. It’s also important to learn the extent to which your competitors are using social media, as well as its prevalence within potential markets you may target in the future; if there’s little activity you have the opportunity to establish a thought leadership role.

Even organizations that aren’t participating widely in social media should recognize the value of monitoring the social channel from an customer engagement and support perspective. Most important, you want to respond as soon as possible any technical or support issues customers discuss in the social universe. In addition, monitoring tools are effective at managing employee social media participation to ensure sensitive data or inappropriate information isn’t shared (however inadvertent or innocuous). While free Web tools (such as Google Analytics) can give you some insight into the social channel, you should determine the extent to which your communications agency or existing media monitoring tools can capture social media activity. If neither of these can give you the depth you need, there’s a wide range of social media monitoring tools available, including Radian6, Visible Technologies, Alterian SM2 (formerly Techrigy) and Scout Labs, to name a few. And when most providers in the field offer a free trial so you can decide which solution is best for your company, it’s a good time to be a potential customer of social media monitoring tools. 

The communications organization should monitor itself to ensure its activities align with other marketing efforts. Key to maintaining this alignment is conducting a periodic reputation audit, at least on an annual basis. A reputation audit can tell us how effective we are in driving engagement and achieving results with our external audience (such as customers, prospects, analysts, media and other stakeholders) as well as with our employees and partners. It is an evaluation of where the organization is currently regarding its communications efforts and a diagnosis of where the organization needs to focus additional time and resources. At the end of the audit, we should know what’s working, what’s not, and what might work better if optimized.

The first step in a reputation audit is to define the activities you must analyze. Think of these from the perspective of higher-level functional categories within your communications organizations, such as advertising/branding, PR, AR, corporate communications (including your Website), community management/social media strategy, creative, internal communications, and public affairs. From these categories, determine the activities that are typically performed; then, you can rate your current level of effectiveness for each function based on the results they deliver. For every functional activity you should be able to identify the target audience, what you are trying to accomplish, and if these goals are being reached. Using the ratings you’ve identified for each functional activity you can begin to identify the areas that need improvement (based on their lack of alignment) and begin to develop a strategy for improving these goals.

Here’s another post in our continuing series on marketing automation platforms. We’ve already talked about how the rate at which vendors are adding functionality is increasing, even though to a certain extent the technology has become commoditized, and that services and the depth of best practices knowledge has become a more telling differentiator. One area that is also changing is that increasingly marketers understand the importance of process optimization and skills. It wasn’t too long ago that most vendors’ functionality outstripped the skills and process capabilities of marketing organizations. But concepts like lead scoring and lead nurturing that were foreign just a short time ago are now critical items for most marketers.

All of this has led to a changing tide in the vendor evaluation process. As happens in almost any technology market, customers report with increasing frequency about their inability to differentiate between vendors, particularly when it comes to functionality. Many vendors claim “we do lead scoring better than vendor x” and “our ability to enable you to do effective lead nurturing is more robust than vendor y,” but can a potential customer tell the difference? In response, many buyers are now asking for proof: “show me how your lead scoring is better than vendor x” and “demonstrate how your lead nurturing functionality is more robust than vendor y.”

The answer to these questions is a clear demonstration of functional differences, which points to better sales enablement rather than simply providing the buyer with more references. These are marketers that are being sold to and they know they will be pointed in the direction of a reference that emphasizes the positives because they use the same tactic as well.

Quota bearing inside sales has long been a staple of the sales coverage model. With expense pressures only outweighed by the pressure to perform, sales leaders are looking more closely at how to best exploit the capabilities of inside sales. Inside sales teams have proven their ability to effectively manage accounts, achieve revenue targets, and penetrate the SMB market while being less costly to support, manage and train. Customers are more accepting of an inside resource and sales technologies have improved marketing’s ability to provide leads and sales ability to close them.

Sales leaders evaluating their coverage model need to consider three inside sales realities: 

• Inside sales will grow as a percent of total revenue
• Inside sales can handle larger/ more complex accounts
• Inside sales can sell more complex products/solution with higher ASPs 
  
  

As sales leaders look beyond the missed revenue targets, headcount reductions and budget cuts that typified the sub-prime recession of 2008-9, they need to consider further expanding the role of inside sales as they adapt their organization to capitalize on the next growth cycle.

Recent client interactions reveal three categories of inside sales expansion being developed by sales leaders to meet 2010 growth objectives:

• Innovation: Organizations developing an inside sales function for the first time or moving beyond regionally assigned resources are carving out the lower end of their client base and targeting penetration into the SMB market through a lower cost, high-performance inside sales team.
• Expansion: The growth of an existing inside sales function is demanding a more sophisticated inside coverage model exploiting a tiered account structure, hunter/farmer designations or the introduction of a “hybrid” inside sales rep.
• Optimization: Organizations with mature inside sales functions are looking to optimize the performance of their inside team capitalizing on new sales technologies for prospect identification, qualification and acquisition along with the continued refinement of inside sales specific skill sets.
   

The popular phrase “go big or go home” could easily have been pitched as a marketing slogan for global channel expansion. However, when companies are looking to “go big” by expanding their channel programs into global markets, there’s small comfort to be found in terms of an existing blueprint for how to make it work. Expand a North American program outward to different geographies or develop a truly global program and make local adjustments where needed? The answer most often lies in the leadership. 

If the effort is led by a team that has lived with the shortcomings typically experienced by international channel organizations trying to align to a U.S.-based programs, chances are the executives leading the charge will have a better appreciation for the local requirements of a highly fragmented market like EMEA or one that is significantly different, both culturally and economically, as Japan. In contrast, if the effort stems from U.S. leadership, then there is a tendency to “export” North American program processes or best processes, such as deal registration or recruiting practices. There is no wrong or right course to take; however, we are finding that truly global programs start with goals that transcend a specific geography, aligning themselves with these corporate initiatives first. From there, leading channel companies look to implement those goals within a consistent channel program in each region, taking into consideration local conditions which may dictate a change in execution. One way to discover whether you’ve developed a truly global program is to put yourself in the shoes of a partner who operates across geographies. Ask yourself, does the partner have similar experiences when engaging with the vendor’s channel organization in the US as it does in Brazil? Or does it feel like they are working with a totally different company?  

Many of our clients come to us for advice on shifting some marketing resources away from the top of the funnel to support sales deeper into the buying process. This is an excellent goal as it can yield positive returns in the form of better close rates and an improved relationship between sales and marketing. Or it could be a waste of time. Which category are your efforts headed for? The best predictor is the information on which you based your selection of sales enablement projects.

Here are the three likely scenarios of where that data came from, in order from worst to best in terms of outcome: 

There’s a number of case studies available that discuss the ways that businesses (both large and small) have benefited from social media. You’ll find speakers at many conference and webcasts from companies that tout their social media successes. This all makes other organizations wonder how far behind they are with their social media efforts compared to Company X or Company Z. But often these success stories are not necessarily evident across the entire organization, but instead are confined to one business unit or functional group. This is neither good nor bad, but is an example of how a social media strategy often evolves with a company; typically, it is a smaller group that starts social media efforts. With the decentralization of an organization’s reputation due to the rise of social media, many employees are engaging with customers and prospects on a variety of sites, and organizations are seeking some control through centralized policies and procedures. But building a true enterprise-wide strategy means getting top-level buy-in and then leading a shift in the organization to accommodate these new social media tactics and applications. This doesn’t happen overnight at any company and is even slower at very large organizations, where change can often be measured in geologic time.

So you start from where you are. The benefit of a smaller group testing out social media is that the rest of the organization can learn from their experiences and build additional efforts based on these best practices. But organizations must start by defining upfront their goals from social media. Do you want to drive more loyalty and retention? Leads and opportunities? Most likely, it’s a mix of both. This requires a documented strategy that can be socialized throughout the organization and used as the basis of your social media roadmap. According to our research, although 60 percent of b-to-b organizations are doing something with social media, less than 20 percent have a consistent strategy that is in use across the company.

Does your company have a social media strategy in place across the entire organization?

We often get questions about how large a b-to-b database should be, and it’s tricky to answer beyond the consulting stand-by, “It depends.” That’s because like fingerprints, every company’s database is different. So rather than provide a range so wide it’s meaningless, let’s instead look at what database size depends on.

For a back-of-the-envelope estimate, here’s what you need to know:

• Your target markets: What are they, and how many companies are in them that you want to target?
• Your target contacts: For the companies you want to reach, what are the various roles with which you communicate as part of the buying process? Who are your influencers, users and decision makers? How many of them are likely to be in a company (this will vary by company size)?

Next, take the number of companies, and based on the size, the estimated number of contacts in them (likely you’ll have a few levels with different numbers of contacts). Multiply number of companies by number of contacts and you’ll have a rough estimate of how many names are in your addressable universe. Simple enough, but that estimate alone won’t do you much good.

Now that you have a general goal in mind for your database, assess how well your current efforts are contributing to building toward it. Look at the data you have and how well it maps to the addressable universe you want to reach. Find your gaps and look at the quality of contact records (accuracy, completeness, permission). Look at how names get added to your database (e.g., new contacts from demand creation programs, inbound marketing, sales, third-party contact sources, etc.)  and how names leave your database (e.g., opt-outs, deliverability issues, bad data, etc.). Most likely there’s room for improvement in a few areas; that’s where you go back to your initial rough estimate. By defining an overall database goal, with target markets and contact types to prioritize efforts around problem areas, you can make focused investments to build a healthier (and larger) database.

In conjunction with this month's newsletter, Jonathan Block discusses the ways that best practice b-to-b organizations are measuring the impact of their social media efforts from an activity and results perspective.

Click here to download this podcast.