by William Walsh | May 24, 2022 | 2022
As previously published on 5/17/22 in The Drum
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Fred Reicheld developed the Net Promoter Score in 2001 using a single survey question asking respondents to rate their likelihood to recommend a company, product, or service to a friend or colleague.
Since then, NPS has been adopted and widely used by corporations as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) but, there is one key piece missing from many organizations that would make this important metric an even more powerful indicator of performance.
What’s Missing
Ironically, the answer to the question, “Would you recommend the company, product or service?” is rarely tracked. Organizations place a tremendous amount of focus on developing, interpreting and reviewing the results, yet spend little to no time tracking the measurable proof the referrals.
Depending on where one sits within the organization, there are various reasons as to why this happens. If you’re in marketing, referrals just aren’t a focus. CMO’s are more concerned with tracking the results of their team’s outbound activities and the return on their spend.
In sales, inbound referrals are often coded as rep generated leads, or no source is given. Why? Because reps have a quota to hit and want credit for creating and closing self generated leads. Inbound referrals (aka, “blue birds”) are high quality and the quickest opportunities to close.
For customer service, the focus is more aligned with efficiency metrics, and/or the team receives no credit for inbound referrals, even within accounts.
Regardless of what part of the organization reps are in, like everyone else, they capture the data relevant to how they are being measured, which often doesn’t include inbound referrals. There is no close loop, and as a result, it leaves a gap in the organization’s ability to link the real impact of NPS on performance. We only get half of the story.
Why It’s Important
The genius of NPS is that it’s a simple and straightforward one question survey that measures the performance of the entire organization (from marketing to product, sales and through customer service). It encompasses the entire customer experience and journey.
It’s also a great indicator of brand health. The customer feels a connection to your organization, strong enough to put their personal reputation on the line. Think about that for a minute… they’re willing to risk their credibility for a promise that your organization will fulfill or at least that’s the theory of net promoter.
This highlights why actual referrals are a more important performance indicator than NPS – the person making the referral (and we know who they are) is one of your most valuable customers. By making the referral, the customer is validating their connection to your brand. And according to the research, that connection means more than just a referral for at least two reasons beyond the obvious.
First, they are twice as likely to pay a premium for your product/services, and second, they are more likely to advocate for your brand (which they just demonstrated with the referral). Not only are they the source of potential new customers, they are also the key people to advocate for your solution or company within the account.
Referees are key to starting and moving the internal buying process…but only, if you know who they are by capturing that information, which too many organizations fail to do.
Tracking referrals should be a corporate KPI because it cuts across the organization, and as a result, has to be driving it from the top down to eliminate the gaps I pointed out earlier.
Keep in mind, you will also have to motivate reps to capture the information and give them an incentive for asking for a referral. Assign a higher value to referring customers given their importance, and then begin to estimate the amount of inbound revenue in your annual forecast.
Creating a goal in your forecast will drive the active management of referral tracking. As mentioned, these are your most valuable leads so be proactive versus just let the “bluebirds” leads come in.
For marketers, especially if you are in the tech sector, this presents an opportunity to track word of mouth. The top four most used and credible information sources for buyers are people oriented channels (peers, influencers, consultants, etc.).
Finally, reward customers who put their reputation on the line for you. They see something in your brand that connects to them at a personal level, find out what that is, and reinforce it because not only is it the reason they’ll advocate for you, it’s also key to their loyalty…but that’s the topic for another post.
by Christina | Mar 22, 2022 | 2022, Insights
As previously published on 3/14/22 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Let’s give credit where credit is due, most B2B organizations have made the transition from leading with products to being customer or market focused. Content is now shaped first with the needs of the target audience (industry, company and buyers).
Many companies make it a regular practice to research “hot topics” in the industry, the needs of those buyers and their channel preferences . Personas are shaped around the insights, and content and messaging are created to align with needs, then carefully aligned to the buyers’ journey.
So is that personalization?
What about the customer experience on the website? This is how Forbes describes website personalization.
Website personalization is the practice of creating a custom experience for site visitors based on who they are and what they want. Rather than providing a single experience for all site visitors, website personalization allows B2B businesses to create unique experiences for visitors based on factors like location, industry and even website behavior.
Ok, got it. Let’s add location, website behavior and personalized digital experiences, and we should be good. Does anyone see the problem here? Bueller, Bueller, anyone?
There is no “person” in any of this so-called “personalization.” There are personas, but they’re most likely role based. Web behaviors, yes important, but without understanding the motivations behind those actions, you only left to guess their intentions.
How do you begin to understand behaviors, motivations and preferences? Start with understanding audience personalities.
In almost every industry, there are only 1-2 dominant personalities. If you’re in the life sciences segment, there is a good chance you’ll over-index with “skeptics” and “status quo” seekers. Selling to a marketing audience? You’re going to find an overabundance of “influencers” and “champions.”
To truly create a world class customer experience, you have to be able to align to the preferences of your audience. Those preferences are not driven by a title or a role.
And it’s not just their preference for channel and content, but more importantly, how the content is packaged, how it’s messaged, and/or how it’s created.
Understanding your dominant audience provides the insight to set your marketing, digital and engagement strategy. It provides the level of insight necessary to take your existing activities and assets to the next level.
Webinars appeal to a certain audience, but only if the topic is research or data backed, and presented by a credible speaker. Animated videos are preferred by another audience type, as long as they are sharable and short.
Don’t rest on thinking you have the right content, at the right place (in the buying process), in the right channel. It’s not enough. Not all the buyers are the same, they all don’t take the same path, consume the same content, and/or prefer the same channel.
In fact, without really knowing their personal motivation and behaviors, most of this insight is based on previous experiences that happened randomly but is assumed to be true for all, and/or based on research with buyers who will say one thing, and then do another.
Deep down inside we know that to be true, because we know that buyers are people, and people are as unique as their personalities…just as no two buyer experiences are the same.
“Personalization” as it is defined for B2B today, is more about trying to get the tools to work better, than it is about improving customer experience. Technology is an enabler, but it is not personalization. Understanding what makes buyers human is. The process has to be flipped so that it starts with the goal of understanding buyers at a deeper level, do that, and the tools will begin to work better.
by scott.gillum | Aug 6, 2021 | 2021, Business Trends
As previously published on 8/5/21 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 4 Minutes
Years ago, doctors treated gastric ulcers as a chronic disease, most likely brought on by stress or spicy foods. As a young pharma rep carrying the world’s first billion-dollar drug in my bag, I’d actively promoted how this wonder product could relieve the symptoms for their ulcer patients.
That was until the day I met a doctor who questioned why we weren’t selling a drug to cure the problem. It was a very valid point, one that would not be fully understood until a couple of years after I left that job.
Given the success of that drug, other similar products would soon follow, all for the relief of ulcer symptoms. Pharma companies followed the money, rather than investing in developing a cure.
Recently, I recalled this memory while looking at Scott Brinker’s Martech Landscape, which now includes 8,000 companies. There are companies investing millions of dollars into B2B marketing technologies that have hardly moved the needle on marketing performance – tools created to treat the symptoms of poor performance rather than fix them.
This issue has persisted for years. Performance should be improving by now, unless we’re missing something.
Here’s an example: ask a salesperson to describe their ideal buyer in detail and this is what you will likely hear. They want more buyers who are ‘risk-takers’, ‘innovators’, ‘people who are looking to make a name for themselves’ or ‘big-picture thinkers’.
What you won’t hear is prospects who are ‘technical buyers’, ‘budget holders’ or the ‘CEO’. Do you see what we are missing? Sales reps are describing personality attributes that make prospects ideal buyers, not their role, title or budget authority. The martech stack doesn’t capture those descriptors.
Still not convinced? Ask a salesperson why they lost a deal when they should have won it. You’ll probably hear “they had an existing relationship” (trust) or “they have used the solution/service in the past” (security). These are emotional decision drivers also not capturing or seen in CRM tools.
Get at the cause to find the cure
There is a buyer’s journey that is hidden. Our sales and marketing tools are not built to capture, track or provide us with insights into what to do about these ‘soft’ factors that impact deals. And it may be more important than anything we are tracking or measuring today. It’s time, like the doctor I encountered all those years ago, to ask the question of why we aren’t fixing the problem.
In 2005, a couple of Australian researchers named Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on linking the bacteria Helicobacter Pylori to the formation of gastric ulcers. They won this coveted prize after spending decades trying to convince the world of their discovery, even coming to a point where Marshall ingested H. Pylori to prove the causation to ulcers (it worked, he developed an ulcer three days later).
Marshall’s research was hugely disruptive and would eventually lead to the demise of a multi-billion-dollar therapeutic class of drugs. Their joint research in the late 80s was discredited for years, until the first drug of its type (the one I promoted) came off patent. Suddenly, gastric ulcers could be cured by prescribing a common antibiotic (which, ironically, was also manufactured by the same company).
Millions of dollars have been invested into martech tools, yet our sales and marketing performance have not improved. This industry is thriving by treating poor performance as a chronic disease – developing tools to keep the focus on extending reach and increasing scale, not on improving conversion rate or return on effort and investment.
Just as Marshall and Warren used postmortem research and forensic medicine to link the cause and effect of H. Pylori on the body, we are doing the same with breaking down deals closed, both won and lost. We are starting to get at the ‘cause’ – and to find a cure.
What we’re finding doesn’t necessarily match with the conventional wisdom of the day. Intent data may not actually show any real intent. Lead nurturing programs may be set up to nurture prospects that will never become leads. Campaigns may be targeting ‘buyers’ who are actually the exact opposite, a personality type that is more likely to kill a deal than help to close it.
It’s called personality-based marketing, and it has the promise to cure our ills… but please don’t make me ingest a lead to prove it.
by scott.gillum | Jul 7, 2021 | 2021, Marketing, Sales
As previously published on 7/7/21 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Selling something to someone is risky…for them, not you, especially if this is a first time purchase. You’re asking a buyer to take a risk making a decision with the organization’s money, on a vendor or solution they don’t know, with only the promise of a reward to come.
The first part of the buyer’s journey involves three things – collecting information (about vendors, solutions, etc.), defining/understanding the need/problem, and trying to mediate risk (see the first two).
The point; where there is risk, there is an emotional buyer. The rational driver of the decision making process takes a backseat to the emotional side of the brain. And now for the problem, the way we qualify and measure the quality of a lead or buyer is almost completely rationally driven.
Let’s take BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timing) as an example. Do they own or have access to a budget? Rational. Are they the decision maker? Rational. Do we understand their needs? Check, rational. Do we know the decision making timeframe or when the budget might be available? Check, and check.
Maybe it’s unfair to use BANT, so let’s try using Strategic Selling as a framework. Are they the economic buyer? Rational. Are they the technical buyer? Rational. Insert your own process or steps from marketing automation, ABM program, CRM platform, etc…, and you’ll come to the same conclusion.
The point is, our performance is poor and does not improve because we are not capturing half or more of the key elements of the purchasing process. We track an action or activity without understanding the reason behind it.
Downloading a white paper, attending a webinar, or requesting information may or may not indicate intent. Without understanding the reasons behind those actions, we can only use metrics based on similar actions from the past and that is why our performance is so poor. It’s also the reason why it is so difficult to improve performance.
Our metrics too often reflect rearview mirror actions, recording what happened in the past without insight into what will happen in the future. AI will begin to fill in that blank but it will be informed only by looking at what actions happened in the past as well.
We have no metrics for tracking the emotional involvement of the buyers involved in the purchase decision. And the most important of all of them is motivation.
Plenty of organizations and decision makers have needs. The question is, are they motivated to solve them. Most importantly, are they motivated to advocate for your brand or solution? The more you understand the differences in buyers’ personal preferences and motivations the more you’ll understand that the way we measure our sales and marketing activities, and performance, is incomplete.
For example, some buyers are motivated by bringing new ideas into the organization but will not advance the buying process. Others will champion ideas and drive them forward, but only if it benefits them. These behaviors ebb and flow within the corporate culture. A culture that also has its own motivations and behaviors, impacting how buyers behave within it.
And all of this is happening in real time, not in a well defined process, with rational steps neatly constructed within a linear timeline. Contributing to the challenge is the ever growing investment in the sales and marketing tech stack that chases optimization through machinery…e.g. volume. Because we can’t get better, we have to go broader.
What to Do
Sales is not just a “numbers game”, it’s also a head game, and it’s time for us to get our heads into that game. There are three steps that can help you track the “softer” side of the buying process.
- Understand that corporate culture impacts decision making – start defining the dominant corporate culture. Is it sales, product, science, engineering, etc…? Track competing initiatives inside the org that may disrupt your sales success. This will help you understand the organizational motivation and how to align your efforts. Also, as a start, see Hank Barnes insightful work on corporate culture.
- Understand that buyers have personalities which impact motivations – marketing has recognized that emotions exist in B2B and are being used to motivate audiences to take action, but this has not made its way into demand generation and sales.
- Add the right tool to the martech stack – invest in personality profiling tools like xiQ or Crystal Knows to add the emotional elements that you are currently missing.
In order to improve, we need to add “why” metrics to the “what” currently tracked. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his novel Player Piano, “If it weren’t for the people, the goddamn people always getting tangled up in the machinery…the world would be an engineer’s paradise.” For better or worse, our buyers are people, not a role or a title, and those people are rational and emotional.
The way we have constructed our measurement systems is based on an overly rationalized process driven by legacy manufacturing management practices that seek optimization through repetition. It’s not working. It’s time to rethink the machinery so we can help ourselves from getting tangled up in it.
by scott.gillum | May 21, 2021 | 2021, Business Trends
As previously published on 5/21/21 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 4 Minutes
Not the “C-Suite.” Sorry if you were hoping to hear otherwise. Despite the pleas from the sales and product organizations, unless you have a solution for a “c-suite” level issue (and few companies have that), they are most likely not your audience.
Sure, they may have to make the decision and/or sign the deal because they own the budget which makes them an important target…for your sales organization, not marketing.
There I said it feel free to forward this post to the head of sales. I can say this because the goal of marketing is to find an audience, get their attention and motivate them to take action. It’s not to sell them, which is often forgotten.
So given that, who is the audience for B2B marketers?
It’s a “director” level position.
Now before you throw the baby “c-level” out with the bathwater, let me explain why they’re important. Actually, I’ll give you three reasons which are all backed by “the numbers.”
- There are more of them
- They feel the pain
- They’re motivated to take action
Think of an organization chart: there is a pyramid with the “c-level” executive on top, vice presidents in the middle and directors near the bottom. As you cascade down the pyramid there are more and more positions. Logically, for every one c-suite executive there are possibly 10’s of director level positions. And marketing, like sales, is a numbers game. 
More important, is the role each level plays in the purchase decision process. Typically, the “c-suite” executive is the decision maker, the VP the budget holder, and the directors, well, they’re the users. And as the users of the product or services, they are also the ones who feel the pain.
Feeling the pain makes for a motivated audience and that’s who marketers need to get in front of with content. There is also another really important reason that directors are important and it also has to do with motivations.
Being a source of information and bringing new ideas, vendors, and solutions to the table is a smart way to demonstrate value to the organization. They’re motivated by career ambitions so feed them information.
Not convinced yet? Here are some numbers to back up my argument. Over the past year we’ve collected data from clients on over 10,000 prospects and leads sources from marketing activities, lead nurturing programs, and new MQL entries into CRM.
Guess how many had “director” level titles? Over 60% and that number went even higher for MQL’s. Yet for some reason when we plan marketing campaigns, the target audience is often defined as the “c-suite.”
The problem, the c-suite does not actively seek information from marketing channels. If they are looking for a new solution or vendors, they are relying on their network. Peer-to-peer is the number one source of information, and it’s not even close.
Marketers, it’s time to step up and defend your audience. You need to understand and build content for directors with the understanding that they will share it with their bosses and perhaps their bosses’ boss. They are the door openers as well as the path to decision makers.
For sales, they’ll also one day realize that they are key for them as well. Directors are at the beginning of the buyers’ journey and without motivated participants it doesn’t move.
The truth is, just like the fact that the c-suite is not a viable marketing audience, marketing doesn’t actually motivate prospects to take action. Rather it finds motivated audiences who are seeking information, and that audience is dominated by directors.
