Twenty-five years ago, I was a snot-nosed kid out of college who suddenly decided that law school was not in the future. With a recession on, and needing to pay the rent, I took the first job offered and went into sales.
Having learned nothing about the profession in college, I picked up a copy of Miller Heiman’s Strategic Selling — still have a dog-eared copy on my bookshelf. I learned everything I could about the buyer types, account management, and the sales process. “Know the process work the process,” as my first sales manager used to say.
Typically, that process came down to 5-to-7 steps that generally covered the following areas below.
Over the years, I found that working the process helped give you sense of control. It came down to the numbers; calls, leads, transaction sizes or conversion rate. Call on X number of qualified prospects to get Y amount of proposals, at Z close rate, and you made bonus.
But, research from Google and CEB entitled The Digital Evolutionin B2B Marketing provides new insight into buyer behavior, and it challenges the conventional wisdom. According to the study, customers reported to being nearly 60% through the sales process before engaging a sales rep, regardless of price point. More accurately, 57% of the sales process just disappeared.
What are buyers doing if they’re not talking to sales? Well, they’re surfing corporate websites to identify and qualify vendors, instead of the sales forces qualifying them. They are engaging peers in social media to learn more about their needs, potential solutions, and providers. And they’re reading, listening to, and watching free digital content that is available to them at the click of a mouse. No longer is the sales force the sole source of information.
What does this mean for sales and marketing?
The study recommends focusing efforts in three areas; 1) improve marketing communication integration, 2) develop and activate a content strategy, and 3) strengthen multichannel analytics. Nothing new or breakthrough here, but the study provides good examples of how companies are executing against each point.
However, I found a number of other points to take from the research.
It is not all bad news – for products or services with low price points and/or margins, having customers self direct themselves through the sales process can help reduce the cost of sale and/or create leverage for the sales force. In fact, in certain situations an organization will want to encourage and/or incent this behavior. The research also found that some customers felt comfortable going through 70% of the process before making contact.
Changing buying behavior – an old manager used to say that technology changes fastest, then consumer buyer behavior, and eventually, organizations. The “57%” stated in the research makes for a good sound bite; the fact is, that number will vary, greatly by customers, transaction, industry, etc. The point is that change is a constant; the question is how far ahead or behind is your sales and marketing efforts? Are you keeping pace? The second question is, how would you know?
Content Distribution – as the study notes, the sales force is still the most effective and important communication channel. When developing the content strategy ensure that the best and/or most valuable content is not in the public domain, reserve it for the sales force.
Time to Take Social Media Seriously – with well-informed prospects, sales reps have to quickly learn what buyers know or perceive about the organization, products/services and competitors. Social media can help them better understand what is motivating buyers to take action, what buyers believe to be true, and perhaps most importantly, who they believe.
The Future
Business decision makers will continue to drive their buyer process deeper into the sales process. As a result, relevant content will continue to escalate in value, especially content related to consideration and purchase drivers, and the business application of the product or service.
Social media and monitoring has helped many marketing organizations understand this trend and to make the transition from being content “dictators” to information “facilitators.”
For sales, the research may be an epiphany. No longer can it be successful focusing solely on an inwardly directed process intended for reporting and planning purposes.
With ever-increasing knowledgeable buyers waiting longer to engage, sales has to transition from being a “product pusher” following a process, to an insight “provider” adding value to the buyers business. As the study states, sales must deliver “pointed insights and evidence that seek to challenge an entrenched point of view among potential customers.”
Finally, it is time to recognize that we’re not in control, and perhaps we never were. The traditional sales process is now obsolete; it is now time to follow the buyers’ journey.
Pinterest is likely to be the hottest social media platform for business marketers—next year.
Despite the hype and the record-breaking growth rates, Pinterest is not ready for business marketers; the demographics are wrong, the categories are too consumer focused, and there are significant copyright and measurement issues to overcome.
Still, there is ample evidence as to why Pinterest could be huge for business-to-business marketers. In many ways, Pinterest’s platform has the potential to offer far more value than Facebook and Twitter because of its ability to aggregate and naturally curate content. Here are five areas to watch:
Traffic – Much has been made about Pinterest’s ability to drive referral traffic more than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn. Traffic generated from pinning and repinning is important but most likely benefits small businesses(in particular, retailers). For larger organizations, the following areas may offer greater potential.
Scannability– Business-to-business communication tends to be content heavy. There is a great deal of written content and it keeps expanding. Much like in the consumer world, business decision makers are becoming far more accustomed to searching visually. The Pinterest platform accelerates the process by aggregating and organizing images by category or theme, making it easy to search. For example, we are redesigning a corporate website for a professional services firm. Its “knowledge center” holds a deep repository of data-rich content and is now being reshaped to look like a Pinterest page to make it more inviting and searchable.
Speed – That’s why it is essential to experiment with Infographics (visit Visual.ly for a starting point). As content becomes more crowded and competitive, audiences typically move faster. The average person reads between 200 to 300 words per minute, but visually it takes only 1/20th of a second to process an image. Mashable’s eye tracking study shows that Pinterest is also changing viewing habits from left to right, to top down the center, improving users’ ability to scan information quickly. Offering a “light visual appetizer” may stop audiences long enough for them to order the full content entrée.
Natural Content Curation – This provides marketers the opportunity to capture deeper insights into audience consumption habits. For example, business marketers tend to organize content along the “buying process,” which is typically defined by steps in the sales process. Marketers may find that business audiences within Pinterest organize and consume content by categories or by a pinboard defined as “applications,” i.e., how they intend to use the product and not how they will buy it. This insight could help define the real purchase path and key influencers (pinners) along that journey.
Affinity Data – As Scott Brave, CTO of Baynote, wrote: “Individual pinning choices are interesting, but there is even greater opportunity to analyze segments of people who express an affinity for a product or category in aggregate.” If available, this information could enable marketers to create new segmentation clusters based on common interests, which could help improve messaging and targeting.
“Clustering” could identify brand advocates, key influencers and connectors, local “hot spots” and new ideas for reaching them.
I realize that there are skeptics out there. I may even end up being one, but as we’ve learned with other social media platforms, if you don’t think there is value for the business marketing, there won’t be. Pinterest holds great potential, but that “potential” will only realized by those who seek to define or dare I say, “pin it.”
“Gangnam Style” by Psy, (aka Park Jae Sung) featuring his “ride the horse” dancing now holds the record for the most liked song ever on YouTube, with over 300 million views and 3 million likes. The question most us are asking, besides what the hell is “Gangnam Style”, is how did a Korean rap singer, singing in Korean make this happen?
The answer is, he didn’t. When asked why the video went viral in an interview with Time, Pys, a onetime Boston University dropout, said; “I think this is all about luck. They say some philosopher said, ‘when effort meets chance, then there is luck.”
The truth is, although we have our theories, most of us don’t really know what will engage audiences and get them to share. After writing a blog for over 6 years, and posts for Forbes for the last two years, I have no idea why certain content gets shared.
That said, I have been able to determine a few common trends for example:
Mondays – are the best days to post content, 10 a.m. being the peak time for views. Thursday is the most challenging day of the week, with exception of summer months — then it’s Friday.
Stumble Upon – is the most valuable sharing tool for driving views, followed by Linkedin, with Linkedin having the longest tail.
Twitter and Facebook – are very difficult to assess in terms of driving views. Social sharing may seem valuable with broad distribution of links, but it doesn’t guarantee views.
Researchers are now beginning to better understand our behavior, and how it drives our social habits. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlights the connection between our internal body clocks and our online behavior. For example, reading Twitter first thing in the morning (8a.m.-9 a.m.) can start your day on a cheery note because it’s when tweets are the most upbeat.
Other social networking is better done later in the day. According to Dan Zarrella, social-media scientist for HubSpot, if you want your tweets to be re-tweeted, post them between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., “when many people lack energy to share their own tweets and turn to relaying others”.
Mr. Zarrella also found that postings to Facebook at about 8 p.m. tend to get the most “likes” after people have come home from work or finished dinner. At that time of the day, they’re likely to turn to Facebook feeling much less stress.
Given the pressures of todays’ world perhaps it isn’t all that hard to understand why people share. They do it because something makes them smile, or laugh, or want to dance, and they’d like someone else to feel that way, as well.
Asked about the secret to his overnight success Psy commented; “These days people seem so stressed so I just want to make fun by my music. As an artist and an entertainer and a writer, I think that was my job. Anti-stress.”
Social Relationship Management and Social CRM are terms that are now being thrown around for new technology platforms that are enabling multichannel execution. Companies like Lithium Technologies have created platforms that allow companies to run hosted communities, listen across a variety of social media channels, and manage content to and from social networks in one integrate tool.
While marketing has steadily evolved from “one to many”, to “one to one“, Social CRM is now creating the opportunity for “many to one.” For example, a customer tweets a question about a product (e.g. is it worth the money) on Twitter, a customer advocate brings that comment into the company’s online forum. Customers response to the question by sharing their experiences with the product, those comments (most likely only the positive ones) are then tweeted by the company to promote the product.
The promise of Web 2.0 has always been about customers selling to customers. New Social CRM tools are now enabling that by consolidating platforms. But this has the potential to raise issues over who gets credit for the sale. If the true ROI on social media is revenue, which many research studies are now suggesting, then who should gets credit for a sale closed by a customer advocate?
Customer references and testimonials have always been critical for closing deals. What happens when customer advocates volunteer their support for the brand and/or endorsement of a product? Does marketing get credit for providing platforms for enabling customer advocates? And what about the customer/s who’s comments help push the prospect over the goal line…do they need to be rewarded, and if so?
One thing is certain: social media is blurring the line between sales and marketing interactions and dialogues. Given that, we may have to rethink our traditional views of customer coverage and relationship management. Perhaps in the future, marketing will be responsible for managing customers online relationships, and sales for the offline experience.
Someone call HR and give them the heads up. Territory planning, revenue crediting, roles and responsibilities might need a refresh soon.
Everybody knows – or thinks they know intuitively – that social elements add value to marketing. The question is how?
Like anything in business, it comes down to return on investment. Social media is not a strategy and it’s not an end in itself. Unless your business objective (and I’d check with your shareholders on this) is only about gaining page views and follows, marketers need to understand how social adds value to everything else in your toolkit.
So how do you find the “sweetspot” for developing an ROI for social media? Well, start by viewing the tools at their most basic level, as vehicles for sharing and; photo’s, thoughts, content, etc. Consider them “levers” for improving the performance of known activities that have produced a ROI.
Five years ago, we assessed the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns for a client. Because the firm was in the hi-tech industry they had a heavily reliance on content marketing for their campaigns. They spent months designing and building them, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in execution only to see diminishing results.
The audit revealed that their campaign effectiveness (related to lead production) lasted roughly 36 hours after launch (see below). Meaning that the majority of the leads were being created within the first three days of launch, regardless of how long they left the campaign in the market (btw – they are not alone).
Today, social media has the potential to create a long tail, extending the life of expensive campaigns, ultimately improving ROI, and along the way creating and deepening the relationship with the audience.
I’ll use myself as an example: A blog post of entitled The End of Blogs (and Websites) as We Know Them ran recently in on Forbes. It received no special promotion; in fact, you could say the deck was stacked against it. Posted on a Friday, the slowest traffic day of the workweek, at midnight (EST) when most of the blog readers at home or are in bed. By prime blog viewing time (10 am) it had almost dipped below the fold.
But on the following Monday it took off, almost doubling the views of Friday, and continued to build momentum ending the week as the 3rd most popular post of the day. The following week it was the most popular post on Wednesday. So what happened?
Social took over. Without any additional investment to promote the post, social sharing accelerated and extended the life of the post, even as it fell off the first, second and third page of the site. Readers engaged and went from passive viewers to active promoters.
Readers were tweeting their own thoughts and comments about their insights, not just retweeting the post title. They placed in into Linkedin groups adding their comments on the impact of the technology (the topic of the post) to their particular area of interest or role. They were actively engaging in sharing their “discover” with others.
That is the power and the value of social media for content marketing.
The post no longer needed to be pushed because it was being endorsed, and in some ways validated, by readers — the most trusted source of information.
The potential of social media is intriguing, but to determine its true value companies will need to experiment. Using social media to support your content marketing efforts is a prudent choice, but keep this in mind: It will only be effective if the audience/community finds value in the content and part of that value is defined by those who pass it along.
It’s not unusual to find companies referring to their relationship with clients as “partnerships.” It’s common to find client logos on vendor websites. But how often do you see an agency or consulting firm’s logo on client websites? If you visit www.evepark.ca – that’s exactly what you’ll see.
Carbon Design, represented side by side with, a global architecture powerhouse, a world-class designer, and the project principal: the innovative green-tech engineering firm, S2E Technologies Inc. Under S2E’s leadership, these firms are inventing a new consumer category – one that integrates bold new ideas about housing and transportation – and radically resets the carbon footprint of both at the same time.
CASE STUDY
Did you know, that until recently restaurant owners only cared about the cleanliness of the food prep area? Most customers, and owners, assumed that if someone got sick after dining out it was because of food poisoning. That was until Carbon Design and Challenger Inc. helped “challenge” the norm by showing owners that half of the outbreaks in a restaurant were caused by people to people transmissions.
Now owners know where the “hotspots” are, and as a result, restaurant are cleaner than ever. Grab your face mask and enjoy a safe night out, but you may want to avoid the raw oysters 😉.
CASE STUDY
How do you do it? By giving clients and users what they want. Using the remaining budget that was to be used to update the site with the new branding we designed and built an entirely new site on a new platform. But audience needs are constantly evolving so the work never stops. Our team continues to audit performance and make improvements.
As a result, the two-year journey has paid off with the site being named #1 in the industry. Even more importantly, their key priority areas (site search, attorney profiles, etc.) were ranked in the outstanding category. Proving that excellence is a journey not just a destination.
