How does this strike you for controversial? Marketing automation does not generate revenue. Sure, maybe can help reduce the operational cost of supporting the sales cycle, and maybe it can even help expedite a prospects journey through the funnel. Still, at the end of the day it does not create revenue.
What has a more direct impact on revenue, however, is greater understanding of customers. The more I know about who I’m trying to sell to the more effective I can be. I’ll be able to create more relevant content and be better able to convey how my solution can solve their problems.
When looking at a marketing automation platform this becomes key. Help me develop a more comprehensive view of my prospect in all the ways I engage them. Help me break out the content from the channel and focus on what is really moving the needle. Borrowing from the world of operations, it’s like applying the idea of CPM (critical path methodology) to marketing. From the moment of the sale let me work back through the sales process to the sequence of interactions that converted.
This is the true power of marketing automation. Triangulation of the voice of the customer in a digital, social, multi-channel world. And the ability to map the critical steps in a prospects conversion path.
The potential of many companies will never be realized because of the inefficiencies and conflict within their sales and marketing organizations. What makes this such a shame is that majority of problems, or at least the major ones are solvable.
At the core, the main challenges can be pegged to two things:
Sales fails as a team
Probably not a lot of argument to this one. Sales is reviled for being cowboys and shirking any “real” work. Can you blame them? More than any other part of the organization, sales is and needs to be performance driven. If a system slows them down or doesn’t help them close deals within the current quarter then they have negative incentive to comply.
For a sales system to work it needs to be built around sales and their need to close business in the current period.
Marketers are bad communicators
This may be a little harder for some people to swallow. On a personal level marketers may be great communicators. The problem, however, is that isn’t being communicated into the field where marketing has lost the voice of the customer. They’ve forgotten how to sell.
When did this happen? Not at one time. As technology over the last century has enabled the marketers’ touch to grow to more and more people it has also moved them further away. It’s become so abstract that clicks and opens are frequently misconstrued as performance.
For marketing to become a more integrated, productive part of the sales process they need to relearn how to sell to customers.
Thomas Burns, the iconic economist, originally authored the classic classification scale many use to describe market maturity. On his scale, the most complete, or evolved market he identified as a phase three and described as being focused on ”stimulat(ing) consumption (with) advertising, product development, design, consumer research, market research, and marketing promotion.” (Hatch, 1997, p. 23) The question, though, is have we actually now passed into a 4th phase, where the market self moderates and discovers needs or desires for product on its own?
If social media, indeed, does represent the 4th phase, then the impact it will have on organizations is significant. “We often hear of social media being equated with tools & platforms. But it’s really much more than that. If you’re adopting these technologies and behaviors at your company, it’s not about the shiny new toys. It’s fundamentally about culture change. And that type of transformational change – which may include updating business practices – must come from the top. But more than a top-down dictum, it’s got to be part of leadership.” (Monty, 2010)
One such case where leadership and organizational change is adapting the social advancement of the web is Ford Motor Company. Ford has embraced the social web, and has made significant changes to the way in which the firm goes to market. Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally, really gets social media. As stated on the firm’s Social Media Marketing Blog: “He promotes a culture of transparency and openness that is completely aligned with the way Ford is trying to engage with consumers online. Mulally thinks about how Ford does business. Consistency of purpose and of message is key.” (Monty, 2010)
Ford clearly understands the power of the social web, and is looking to leverage the new found paradigm as a means to reach consumers. Their open transparent approach is designed to develop an ongoing trust based relationship with consumers that establish dialogs, commitment, and engagement. They seek to extend and expand the emotional connection by providing greater access to information (hello Toyota) and facilitating the subsequent sharing or spreading of experiences amongst the Firm’s friends, family, customers and fans. Ford is demonstrating the adaptable leadership required by today’s organizations, and is demonstrating that organizations can drive change when they listen to their market, to their consumers and have committed leadership.
As organizations look to embrace the social web it is critical that leadership recognize that socialization of the web and thus their brand is a new paradigm. In this new fourth phase of industrialization organizations must look beyond their own advertising and promotion to accommodate the reality of social conversations generated by the market about their brand. The social web is vast, spanning well beyond advertising and promotion, and can spread points of view, both good and bad, like wildfire. The market can turn on a dime, or a brake pedal, and brands need to be ready to react. Brands must recognize the power of word of mouth and plan accordingly.
Look to Ford again. At the turn of the 18th century they helped usher the world into the industrial era with the famed assembly line. What could you have learned from them then? Could you have applied the assembly line to your own business? Ford, under the direction of Mulally, is doing it again. They are leading the way into the 4th phase with the socialization of their brand with consumers, their customers, their prospects, friends, family, and now fans and followers. Can you learn from them? Can you learn how to socialize your own business?
As the Super Bowl draws closer and closer Alterian continues to find rather interesting data on a number of organizations that are advertising in the big event this Sunday. To be sure there are a number of brands that are stimulating very interesting conversations, and Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring solution is listening. The real interesting data generated through this listening exercise is the competition between Coke and Pepsi. Coke is certainly ramping up in terms of mentions and conversations, and in positive sentiment, however Pepsi is still ahead of Coke in most categories at this stage. The simple reason for Pepsi’s performance is that they opted to not run any Super Bowl ads this year and upon announcing their decision in December they received quite a bit of social feedback. Instead Pepsi is opting to launch their “refresh campaign” through social media channels.
Results can be deceiving as Pepsi’s position is fueled by their early announcement, but what we have yet to learn is what happens after the Super Bowl. Does Pepsi maintain that leadership position, or does Coke take the top spot. The real question is what can Coke do to extend and expand its Super Bowl ad spots? Advertising to date generates a social and emotional attachment to brands, and while the attachment was bigger in the past, it still holds true today. Consumers still understand what it means to “leave it to the good hands people”, or “like a good neighbor” If we go back a generation or two, many consumer will identify with “Is it live or is it……?” or “When you’re out of Schlitz…..” Branding can create attachment as Coke still knows how to generate a smile. The real win for Coke would be to determine how to take the brand advertising that they ran for the Super Bowl, and extend it and expand into social channels. If Coke was to really focus on expanding the effect of their advertising they might want to consider engaging in the social conversation. For, although understanding the voice of the consumer is important, being able to better engage the consumer to develop and extend attachment, to keep the program alive, can be huge. Next week will be a telling week, the excitement will soon lead to results. Stay tuned to hear what it is that we’re hearing.
Hi all, sorry for the radio silence the past few weeks. The end of the year was quite busy with my day job. However, that busy time has helped me to distill some of the lessons learned during the trials and tribulations of 2009. Who am I kidding? Lessons learned? It should be lessons validated. While I apologize in advance for going so off topic of CRM and closed-loop marketing, I hope that some of these words printed below will resonate and help prevent similar such painful scenarios.
Arbitrary deadlines:
2009 started with the proclamation that our entire IT department would be outsourced and migrated, however rather than plan what was required for a successful migration and who would be required to assist and then create a schedule, a line in the sand was drawn and the plan was made to fit a date. Why was this date important? Very few people are really sure — and the rest were left to empty speculation – everything to saving on real estate (the building is still occupied) to executive bonuses were offered. As the process of fitting the project to the dates continued, the obvious realization that most of these dates were works of fiction were revealed. Dates slipped, knowledgeable people were let go prior to the end of their projects due to deadlines for letting staff go, and customer service suffered. As time went on budgets were frozen for projects that required additional time and resources to complete successfully. Again, quality suffered. When the new baseline dates were met, the project was declared a success from a project management standpoint. From a data quality, system integrity and customer service perspective, the outlook is grim. Months later serious migration issues are surfacing. Key resources are long gone. Legacy systems were incorrectly migrated. Archival data is missing.
If there were mathematical proofs for project management axioms, I wish there was one for the triangle of time, budget and quality. On any given project, 2 inputs can be reasonably fixed, and the remaining varies. If a project has to meet a deadline (time) and certain level of performance (quality), the budget will have to be flexible to allow for additional resources, hardware, contingencies, etc. Likewise if quality and budget are the constraints, the timeline will have to be flexible to allow for contingencies with fixed resources and quality issues. And if time and budget are fixed, unfortunately the quality runs a very high risk of suffering. No additional time or resources can be added to help with various technical issues and contingencies that invariably arise in any CRM project. Ideally quality would be one of the fixed constraints, however in most CRM projects, time and budget are the constraints and quality is the variable. And as described above, the time and budget constraints took a heavy toll on quality.
“On time and under budget” seems to be a target for most projects. Hoover Dam was on time and under budget — (and this was before Microsoft Project!) but this discounts the third point of the triangle – quality. If I look back at successful CRM projects, all points of the triangle were accounted. If time was critical, there was an adequate budget to ensure quality and timely completion. In some cases this meant a war room of senior developers fixing faulty implementations in a matter of weeks than months. It was worth bringing in the experts at a temporarily higher rate to ensure the deadlines and the quality than to continue with lower rate inexperienced resources. If the budget was an issue, the project was extended over additional months with fewer resources to ensure that the solution was built correctly rather than hastily cobbled together before the budget ran out with the resources in house. Or smaller project teams with a longer deadline were used. The successful projects shared a common characteristic – the quality of the final deployment and deliverables was as important as the timeline and the budget.
At a previous job there was a project that required completion within 3 months. The budget was mostly there – we could have used a few more developers, and the time deadline was clearly explained — a ‘C’ level executive needed to show that the reporting tool was delivered in Q1. The deadline was met, but the post-implementation changes based on the user community’s new requirements took an additional 5 months. User Acceptance Testing was sacrificed to meet the deadline, and the quality suffered.
Is an arbitrary deadline really worth the loss of quality?
A continuation of the lessons learned will continue in the next series of posts.
Again, thank you to everyone for the support and enthusiasm for the presentation. Certainly this is something that has hit a nerve and I’ve heard you loud and clear. Over the coming weeks and months I will be devoting more time documenting the approach we are deploying at Alterian and sharing insights on what is and isn’t working.
To download a copy of the presentation, please visit the Alterian site:
Recently I was blasted by someone for not having more Twitter followers. It certainly gave me pause. For sure, from a personal branding stand point “followers” and “views” can be a barometer of success in the social space. I would argue, however, there are other valid approaches. Below is in part the rebuttal I sent, but this is something I will certainly start to pickup in greater detail….
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… My perspective on social media, which is rooted in the idea’s of 1:1 and true customer centric engagement, is that it opens new avenues to deepen and broaden your customer relationships. I like to use this visual to make a point:
(actually, I usually use a slightly different one, but at any rate…)
I’d rather be engaged with the right 300 customers than 30,000 of the wrong ones. This is the focus of my forthcoming webinar. To present a framework for how you can systematically use social media as part of your greater demand generation program to weed through the chaff so you can target and pull through the right prospects.
A big component of this is transparency and traceability. I spend a lot of time covering how you can track asset performance and combine it with other channel data, particularly financial, to identify what’s working and what’s truly moving the needle. Friend Mark Wright (president of TargetBase) I think said it best, “a click is just a click if you can’t relate it to revenue.” Too much effort in the social media space I’m afraid falls in this category.
Flip the funnel. Flatten the funnel. Get rid of the funnel! These aren’t some loony, fringe ideas, but rather the thinking of some of the leading marketing minds of our time like Godin, Meerman, and Brogan. Everyone recognizes that social media is having a huge impact on successful demand generation. The problem lies in identifying how to apply it to the greatest benefit.
Some argue that you should rely entirely upon social media. That if you position things properly you can just sit back and let the customers come to you. Well… I don’t know about you, but I don’t know of any salesman that’s made his numbers by sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring. As with all good things, and social media is a good thing, when done to excess it can be bad. Like Twinkies and margaritas.
When done right, however, social media can have a profound impact on your demand generation efforts. At a time when it’s getting a lot harder to fill the funnel with email blasts, PPC campaigns, and cold calling social media offers an alternative way to engage with your prospects and customers.
In this webinar we will show you how to cost efficiently keep the top of your funnel primed using a repeatable 4 part framework that covers:
Be Interesting
How to understand your audience’s pains and crafting relevant, interesting stories
Be Accessible
How to use digital to be available at a place and time of the customers choosing
Be Findable
How to use SEO and tagging to get your message in front of high value prospects
Be Measurable
How to use asset and lead tracking to monetize the impact of your efforts
… but funny. Thanks to silicon cloud – a consulting partner of HubSpot – http://www.siliconcloud.com/blog/bid/31078/Traditional-Marketing-versus-Social-Media
Posted by tewksbum 
