As previously published on 4/16/21 in The Drum

by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes

How ‘false positive’ personality types disrupt B2B intent data.

There is no argument that when a B2B buyer begins their journey, they start online. All of the research and data points are right, the journey starts with a search; often times with a solution and/or vendor in mind. Do you know what else B2B buyers do? They search for information even when they’re not in a buying cycle, which is a problem because our tools don’t know the difference. Here’s what you need to keep in mind.

If your organization is in the “advisory” or information services industry, and/or considered to be a thought leader in the industry, congratulations, the majority of the people consuming your content are not buyers, they’re fans.

The expensive intent data you’re buying or retargeting campaign is going to waste because it is tracking engagement, and not real intent. To get to intent, you must first understand the audience’s motivations.

In particular, there are two segments of your audience who actively search and use content but neither doing as part of a buying journey, and if they are, they’re planning to make things difficult. Take for example these two scenarios.

1. The false positive “C-level”. Nothing will set off the bells of a lead nurturing program like a C-Level hitting your content. A senior executive “Seeker/Sharer” personality type is constantly scanning the horizons searching for new insights. The problem is they don’t own anything. They love finding new solutions, ideas, tools and vendors, but a resulting action will require someone else’s involvement. These personalities will “turtle” on you, hitting your content especially if you’re a thought leader, and then disappear only to reappear again in three to four months. It’s super frustrating for lead nurturing programs because they are not linear. They’ll hop around from topic to topic as they search for information to share with others. Unfortunately, this personality type only meets the “A” on a BANT scoring index, the budget and need, most often, will sit with someone else.

2. The entrenched “status quo seeker”. This is a tough one. Not only can this personality fool marketers, they can also trick sales into thinking there is interest. The “Neophobe” personality type seeks to reinforce their own point of view by consuming information that aligns with their own beliefs. Think of this person as someone who only watches Fox News or CNN as their source for political news and information. Your content doesn’t move them to take action, it entrenches them in their own world. Even if it was different from their POV, they will read it through their own filter that will align with how they think. As for confusing sales, this personality is friendly, in fact, it’s one of their key attributes, but they will do nothing to advance a sale, advocate for your brand and/or solution. It’s just not in their DNA.

Once you are able to filter out the false positives, you can get to real intent. “Intent” is shown through intentions…e.g. someone has to do something. Downloading a piece of content or attending a webinar doesn’t dig deep enough into motivations to satisfy that criteria.

To do that you need to understand how different personality types interact with each other in the buying group, this requires watching their online behaviors. The key is not consumption of content or engagement, it’s sharing.

The “Seeker/Sharer” whom I mentioned earlier, they are the most important audience for marketing. Stop chasing them and find out who they are sharing your information with…that’s your target. Seekers will find the “doers” inside the organization. And those people will most likely also have the need and the budget.

Now you have intent, that person intends to drive the buying process forward… because it’s their personality, they champion other people’s good ideas. Sharers need champions, champions need sharers, and you need to know them to be successful.

The post How ‘false positive’ personality types disrupt B2B intent data appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Katie Weisz
Estimated reading time: 1 minute 

Scott sat down with an old friend and senior tech executive, Stephanie Anderson, to discuss how to survive and thrive in the sales culture as a B2B marketer. With Stephanie’s substantial background in sales, service, marketing, and now as the chairman of the board of a healthcare software company, she brings a vast amount of knowledge and expertise to the conversation.

In the interview clip, Stephanie and Scott talk about sales misperceptions of marketing and what marketers can do to strengthen the relationship.

Along with the discussion on sales and marketing culture, Scott and Stephanie also dive into a conversation on CMOs, what is on their minds, advice for those new to the role, and what should be top of mind when “selling” to a CMO.

Watch the Full Interview here.

Highlights from the Full Interview:

• 2:31- The advantage of having a sales background
• 10:20- The Sales versus Marketing divide
• 20:03- What is on the minds of CMOs
• 25:20- What advice would you give new CMOs.

To hear the conversation with Stephanie, listen or download here.

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The post Surviving and Thriving in the Sales Culture as a B2B Marketer appeared first on Carbon Design.

We’ve tried surveys, but they say one thing and then do another. One on one sessions, yep, tried those as well. How do we really know what our clients want?  Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with close to fifty marketers, friends, clients and former colleagues. I didn’t have an agenda or a pitch, just a conversation about their career path and how they decided on their professions.

The conversation eventually made its way into a discussion of relationships they had with various consultants, advisors, and agencies.  Just for kicks, I built a word cloud from my notes and saw five themes emerged around what they wanted from a vendor — I call it the five “S’s”.

1. Smarts – this was a common theme — “I don’t want to have to explain my business to the vendors that I work with. They need to do their homework.” Almost every conversation had an element of the client wanting vendors to be up to speed when the engagement started. Time is money and clients don’t have the time (especially on their dime) to get you up to speed. And, for big consulting firms and agencies, don’t get comfortable with thinking you have a lock on all the brightest folks. They use plenty of very smart individual contractors. Many of them, just came from your world.
2. Skills – similar to the above comment, clients want to work with agencies and consultants that have the skill sets that they can’t find, hire or retain. This was especially important when it came to digital talent. They have made investments in MarTech but are having a hard time finding the talent to optimize, or even operate, the technology…and it is becoming more difficult.
3. Speed – “I need the vendors I hire to operate at the speed of my business,” said the CMO of a Fortune 50 hi-tech firm and others echoed her comment. There were also comments related to responsiveness. If you’re standard policy is to respond to a clients’ email within 48 hours, you’re about 40 hours off on their expectations. Being more responsive can buy you time on deliverables. Clients want to know, or at least feel, like you’re making progress on their effort. Gaps in communication create the risk of your client feeling like they are not getting the attention they deserve or pay for…and they know when you’re stretched too thin.
4. Simple – combine Smarts with Speed and you get Simple or at least that is what the client would love. They want to be able to understand your recommendations so they know exactly what decisions, or action, to immediately execute. Consultants — they are tired of the upsell, where one problem suddenly surfaces another problem, especially when they haven’t received the output of the first project. Agencies — the more complexity you add to a campaign the longer clients believe it will take to execute. Smart, valued vendors take complex problems and make them simple to understand and resolve. They know they have other issues they just need to address the problem in front of them.
5. Spirit – this one surprised me and took some time to understand. The core of this theme was rooted in marketers stating that they wanted to work with vendors who were “enthusiastic” about their business, or “passionate” about their own jobs/role. They want a partner who brings some fun and/or passion that may be lacking in their organization. If you are pitching an idea an important part of the “sell” job is how you deliver it. If you’re not excited about it, they won’t be either. The last thing you want is a client who doesn’t want to talk to you because they know it won’t be enjoyable…they have plenty of those meetings internally. Be their break in the day, the good news, the breath of fresh air they so desperately need…especially at the end of the day or week.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hear cheaper. Don’t misunderstand, they want value and recognize that to get it they have to make the investment. Now that you know what they really want that shouldn’t be a problem to deliver, be the bright spot in their day.

The post The 5 “Ss” Marketers Want from Vendors appeared first on Carbon Design.

Organizations are spending millions of dollars to “digitalize” themselves, as a way to become more agile and responsive to customer needs. As Gartner says, “Companies should be able to ‘react at Internet speed’ with real-time analytics to better understand individual buyers, and how to serve their unique needs.”

The payoff of these efforts is a more competitive and innovative organization that provides a consistent and engaging customer experience. As the organization become flatter and more transparent, it also brings a certain degree of risk. And, increasingly, that risk is falling on one group.

Yes, you guessed it: marketing.

According to HBR’s Designing a Marketing Organization for the Digital Age report, marketing is not only responsible for creating a consistent customer experience across the enterprise; perhaps even more challenging, it’s responsible for getting the organization to embrace change.

Ramping up the organization to operate at the new “Internet” speed of change is critical, according to McKinsey’s Cracking the Digital Code global survey. Forty three percent of executives surveyed said that high-performing digital companies go from idea to implementation in less than six months.

And let’s not kid ourselves about the herculean effort this may involve. Twenty five percent of executives who participated in the survey expressed concerns about their organization’s ability to keep pace, and its ability to adopt an “experimentation” mind-set required to make this transformation.

Marketing is, however, well equipped to take on the challenge; it has always advocated for customers and their experiences. Now it’s being empowered to take ownership of it across the entire enterprise. Marketing has long been the “tip of the spear” for digitalization, operating as the “hub” of digital interactions with customers for years. No other group has had to embrace and operate at the “speed of the Internet” like marketing has.

So it’s not surprising that 75 percent of marketers expect to be responsible for the customer experience, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

If marketers can successfully bring about the change needed to digitalize the organization, it should also yield additional organizational benefits that go beyond the customer experience. For example:

• Improving the culture. 89 percent of senior executives said that great companies build cultures that consistently create excellent customer experiences. Corporate culture also plays a critical role in attracting and retaining digital talent, according to McKinsey.
• Aligning customer service to the brand message. Although this has been discussed for years, companies are increasingly aligning the performance of customer service to brand health metrics, according to the HBR report. The Aberdeen Group also noted that when customer service is in sync with how marketing manages the brand, company revenues rises, as do social media mentions.
• A new organizational model. According to Frank van den Driest, author of The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, in a digital world, marketing will evolve from expertise in “things” like television, ecommerce and media, to “thinkers” who excel at understanding and using data, “feelers” who are immersed in customer behavior and interaction, and “doers” who implement campaigns, creating content and measurement.

Given the importance of this digital transformation, improving the customer experience is now the No. 1 CEO expectation of their chief marketing officer, according to Gartner. For years, marketers have been asking for a seat “at the table,” and now they have it…and it’s a hot one.

The post How Marketers Will Win (or Lose) in the Age of Digitalization appeared first on Carbon Design.

The 2015 planning season is upon us. It’s the time of year when the C-Suite is busy sharpening their elbows to ready themselves for the budget brawl. To help arm marketers for this blood bath, I’ve pulled together benchmarks and/or research needed to defend and win marketing dollars. Here are some answers, and sources, for your five toughest budget questions.

1. How much should we be spending on marketing? It’s a classic question and a favorite of CEO’s everywhere. The mere mention of it is enough to stop marketers in their tracks. Fortunately, the AMA, McKinsey and the Duke Fuqua School of Business have got your back with their 2014 CMO Survey. Section 3 of the report contains data from 350 marketers on their spending from digital to people and programs. The research even breaks spending out by size of company, type of company (B2B or B2C, and B2B products or services). The report is packed with valuable information — it’s a “must have” for any marketer this year.

2. What should the mix between people and programs? This question comes shortly, if not immediately, after the question above.  Ten years ago the general benchmark ratio was 40/60, forty percent of the budget went to staff and the remaining to program spending. Now it’s the reverse, 60/40 people to program spending, for a number of reasons. The biggest factor has been the need for specific skill sets that are in high demand relating to analytics, social media and content marketing have driven up staff cost. Need more information, here’s a useful infographic on the real cost of social media, including salary cost for staff.

3. Where should we invest? Typically, this is a teaser question, and could also be asked as; “if you had an incremental $1 (or $10K, $100K, etc.) where would you invest it?” Keep in mind that just because the CEO is asking the question doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get the incremental funding, but you better be able to answer the question. To do that see IBM’s C-Suite Priorities report entitled The Customer-activate Enterprise. The research, collected from face to face interviews with over 4000 senior executives, provides insights into the priorities of each member of the C-Suite. The top priority in the report is Digital. Including everything from increasing responsiveness to customers, to making the organization more agile and responsive. Specific priorities for CMO’s, it’s about capturing; analyzing and using customer data across touch points.

4. What’s the payoff/return/business impact of Social Media? There are a number of sources that you could tab into to help develop a response. I’ve always been a fan of HubSpot’s State-of-Inbound. Additionally, if you have downloaded the CMO Study mentioned in bullet #1, there is a whole section on Social Media (see graphic). Interestingly enough after four years “Visits” and “Followers/Friends” are still the leading social media metrics today. Personally, I’m not a fan, try using measurements related to engagement. Note the gains being made in “Conversion Rates” and “Buzz Indicators” over that last four years. This is the result of the development of better measurement tools. Here’s a great cheat sheet from SocialMediaToday on the Top 50 Tools. For digital and mobile benchmarks download Adobe Digital Index’s Best of the Best Report.

5. What return should we expect from our marketing investments? This is a loaded question. Recognize that what the executive really wants to know is: “What will marketing do for me and/or my group?” As a result, answer the question based on their area of interest, and in their language. If it’s a sales executive, talk in terms of new leads, customers and pipeline value. If it’s the CEO, talk about brand value, revenue growth or customer retention or loyalty. Rarely is this question asked on behalf of the organization as a whole. Even more rare, is the executive that believes the numbers you’ve quantitatively derived for a ROI.

Lastly, go in strong and ask for a bigger budget. Here’s a report to keep in your back pocket in case you need it, Gartner’s CMO Spend 2015: Eye on the Buyer. The report will support your request for an increase, and maybe help the “powers that be” understand that if you’re not getting a bigger budget, your key competitors probably are…now go get ‘em!

The post 5 Key Tips and Data Points to Defend Your 2015 Marketing Budget appeared first on Carbon Design.

In December, I had the opportunity to be the Keynote speaker at the Bowery Capital CMO Summit in NYC.  The event featured a number of high profile CMO’s speaking with an audience of mostly early stage startups (under 20 employees).

My presentation was based on the recent Forbes blog post Everything We Thought We Knew about B-to-B Marketing in Wrong.  The audience also included some local media, a reporter from CMO.com wrote a summary of the speech.

http://vimeo.com/82457497

The post Everything We Thought We Knew about B-to-B is Wrong Video appeared first on Carbon Design.

Do you think the senior executive team is excited about the big lead generation campaign you just launched?  Nope.  How about the number of “Likes” on your corporate Facebook page?  Think again.  Marketing doesn’t matter in many organizations, because it thinks, operates, and worst of all, reports “small.”

Executives sitting in the “C-suite” got there by thinking big, managing big, and reporting “big”.  Marketers commit hari-kari with this group by reporting tactical level activities – “minutia,” that garners no ones attention.  Do you think the head of sales is reporting the number of sales calls reps make a day?  No.  If you want to get their attention, you have to make marketing more important to them.  Here are five ways to go “Big.”

• Big Bets – if you want marketing to be valued you have to understand, and link, to what the organization values.  It’s that simple.  If it’s market share, connect marketing objectives and activities to acquisition or/and account penetration.  If it’s profit, understand the drivers and align your teams’ efforts appropriately.
• Big Strategy – once you understand how to link marketing to the business objectives your job is then to connect those big bets to day-to-day marketing activities.  Your smarts will be needed to take the marketing requirements from the product and sales organizations (which may be very tactical) and link them to the overall marketing strategy that aligns to the “big bets.”  Warning – this will require math, perhaps lots of it.
• Big Plays – to execute, organize your marketing objectives as defined by your internal stakeholders into 2 or 3 “big plays.”  If market share is a key growth objective, a big play should focus on an area that has the greatest opportunity to do that…a specific market, product and customer.  All marketing activities/campaigns should be nested around that “play.’  Messaging is critical here because it is the “big play” wrapper that creates consistency in the communication across execution –think “Smarter Planet.” IBM discovered years ago that the best performing campaigns stayed in market the longest, and had the highest level of integrated tactics.  It takes focus and discipline to do, but if you can get there it will make your life easier by allowing you to organize everything under a big play umbrella, and if things don’t fit…then maybe you don’t do it.
• Big Results – the first rule here is to understand that measurement and reporting are different.  Measure everything, but only report “process” or “results” metrics.  Executives care about “outputs,” not “inputs.” Inputs are activities, outputs are results, know the difference.
• Big Balls – ya gotta have ‘em.  You are going to have to get comfortable with, and embrace risk.  If you do this right, you will be placing bets, that at the time, you will not know how, or if, they are going to pay off.  Years ago, I worked with a CEO that committed to double the size of the business in three years.  The CMO calculating sales cycles realized to support that growth marketing needed to double the number of leads that year.  She had no idea how she was going to do it, but it caught the attention of the senior management team, focused her team, and it happened. But as she learned, you don’t try to go it alone. Reach out to others with your plan, get their buy-in and support.  Level set expectations on timing and performance, it may require a significant investment in time and money for the “big bets” to pay off.  Set big goals, but be realistic in getting there.

The time for going “big” is now.  In Forrester’s recent B2B CMO’s Must Evolve or Move On report, 97% of marketing leaders who were survey agree with the statement that “Marketing must do things that is has never done before to be successful.”

The other interesting, and important nugget from the research is that marketing is playing a bigger role in influencing corporate strategy, and other functions.  Make sure you’re capturing this opportunity at your organization by thinking, and by being — “Big”.

The post 5 “Bigs” to Make Marketing Matter appeared first on Carbon Design.

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.

The post Why Sex Sells appeared first on Carbon Design.

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.”

The post 5 Ways CMO’s Lose Credibility with the C-Suite appeared first on Carbon Design.

In 2004, I was part of research project with a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the CMO Council that sought to understand what CMO’s believed to be critical for their success.  The most common response was a seat at the table with other senior executives.

Four years ago, I was part of another research effort focused on the CMO’s top priorities, and number one on the list was to be viewed by their peers as strategic thinkers.   Finally, I believe the day has come for that to happen.

Marty Homlish, the CMO of HP believes the line between business and consumer marketing is disappearing.  Homlish states,  “ Behind every B-to-B company is a consumer.  The way you communicate to that person is as an informed consumer.”

Technology has allowed work to follow us home and our home life to the office.  It has blurred the line between our personal and business personas.  The concept of being ‘at work’ is now more a state of mind rather than a physical location or particular time of day.

If business buyers – who were once thought of only as rational decision makers – now need to be communicated with as informed and emotional consumers who no longer fit our past perception of work hours and locations, what might this mean for the future of business-to-business marketing?

To answer that question, one must first understand the difference between how business and consumer marketing operate.  According to a Booz & Co and the ANA in The New B2B Marketing Imperative study, B2B marketing has primarily taken an “inside out” approach, focused on the needs of the company and accounts rather than customers.

By contrast, 85% of B2C marketers, who take an “outside in” approach said they were involved in growth initiative decisions which are considered to be strategic such as new market entry, customer relationships and market driven product development.

Additionally, 42% of B2C marketers play a key role in building customer relationships, versus 8% of business marketers.  B2B marketers said that “Customers are rarely driving the process and their input is seldom integrated from end to end.”

If today’s business buyers really are “educated consumers” as Homlish suggests, then business marketers can no longer be left out of customer and product  conversations.  It also means that organizations that target business buyers, who has given lip service to transitioning from being “product led” (inside out) to “customer focused” (outside in) now need to act.  And the tip of the spear for driving that change – is marketing.

By better understanding and influencing the needs, desires and emotional drivers of individual business consumers, marketers will be in the strategic conversation and lead the transition.  This is the key to unlocking the executive suite.

However, the organization is not just going to give marketers a seat at the table and there is a good possibility that executives don’t get it.   As one of the marketing directors said in the study; “Marketing is just not in the DNA of senior management.”  You will have to make it happen.

The study concludes that; “Core marketing capabilities – those that directly influence customers – have the highest correlation to market share growth.”  Senior executives may not understand marketing but they do understand growth.

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