13 November 2012

The most fundamental role of social media for B2B is listening


Business marketers increasingly understand the value of a content led marketing strategy.

Engaging current and potential clients through thoughtful and useful content is now more powerful than any other form of marketing for establishing and growing sustainable commercial relationships.

I have found that an effective content strategy needs a clear picture of what content to publish where and when – and that’s needs insight. 

In my recent webinar for BrightTalk I spoke about two important activities for extracting that insight from social media, reporting and analysis.

Reporting is a regular time based activity – setting out volume data what topics, users, channels are most active?

Analysis goes beyond reporting, helping you to become conscious of the conversations about your brand that your organisation is currently unconscious of. An essential part of social media for enterprises; its power is going to help organisations that master gain a real and tangible competitive advantage in the 21st century.

I hope you find this rerun of my 8th November 2012 webinar useful. I love hearing your views on how to effectively collect insight to drive a B2B content strategy, please comment here or through Linked In.

06 November 2012

Pay sales and marketing people the same to get the best results


In my last blog I introduced the importance for marketing to have meaningful metrics in order to justify its performance. In short term sales driven cultures (yes they do still exist), marketing needs metrics to justify its very existence.

Effective marketing throughout the mix has a meaningful and sustainable effect on the long term sustainability of the business. Yet the outcomes we measure seem obscure to the rest of the business, especially the two axis of power in any enterprise, finance and sales. These functions measure their success and the success of the business using currency. ‘A Mark, a Yen, a Buck or a Pound’ are a lot more universal than conversion rates, share of voice and recall. ‘Money makes the world go around.’

But just as marketing needs to move the way that it measures to reflect what the business values, so sales has to evolve to recognise business is no generated at the point of sales but over months and years beforehand. Sales start when the product concept is tested and evolved or when the brand vision is planned and introduced.

Sales people generally believe all the hard work happened at the deal close. They choose to ignore there wouldn’t have been a deal to close without credible brand positioning and competitive products.

Interestingly, I was sent a video by a consultancy called Software Advice that shares my view. You can see the video at CRMSoftware.TV



When I led a sales channel of nearly 100 people, I worked closely with the product people to ensure my incentive schemes gave larger rewards for the most profitable products, or products that generated the most customer loyalty. Not a scheme to meet my phenomenal targets that rewards the bulk sale of the easiest to sell products.

My approach led to dramatic falls in customer churn within 6 months of its introduction and although I made new friends with the product managers; I disappointed the acquisition-marketing people. They wanted to lead on discounts and promotions to drive customer volumes, and not a sustainable share of wallet approach. Had we all shared objectives and incentives I have no doubt we would have been more focused on collaborating to deliver the overall business outcome, sustainable revenue generating customers.

Ever since that time I have been a strong advocate for product managers, sales people, marketers, and indeed fulfilment (operations) teams working to the same objectives with a shared bonus pool. Everyone across business development, including the teams that have to fulfil and service goods and services should put their compensation at risk and share in the success.

I predict that businesses that fail to grasp the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration will soon grasp the fact they are failing customers, themselves and their shareholders.