Using the Buying Process to Provide Contextually Relevant Content

On December 14, 2009 Christian Maurer wrote the blog post ‘Using the Buying Process to Provide Contextually Relevant Content’ at the EnableYourSales.com blog:

“In his post “It is time to think about creating an enterprise context” Matthias Roebel clearly shows that the definition of a stable enterprise context makes information exchange and management more effective. Sharing information is only effective if the shared information can easily be found by others when needed. An enterprise context to me is thus a multidimensional information space, allowing relevant information to be found from various points of view tied to the day in a life scenario of a sales person.

For sales enablement systems, it is of particular importance that the customer view is considered when structuring this information space. As I explained in my last post on this blog (The Need to Understand the Context, B2B Sales People are Operating in) one of the key customer views to be included is the customer’s buying process.

This recommendation is based on the recognition that Buyer/Seller relationships are changing. By staying with the sales process as the structuring element, these important changes might be missed or discovered too late.

Scott Santucci from Forester research in a recent post confirmed this fact of changing relationships. He writes:

“Buyer/Seller relationships are stratifying right before our eyes into a new caste system of strategic, value-added vendors on the one end and undifferentiated, commodity-type suppliers on the other.”

He suggests a

“…new selling model of actually co-creating value with customers and focusing on helping those customers drive business outcome”.

is needed.

In this post, I want to discuss how using steps in the customer’s buying process as one dimension to structure and access content is key to this new selling model.

What are the major steps in a customer’s buying process?

Activities to be carried out by the customers in the buying process might vary according to the size and type of organization. However the fundamental decisions to be made for advancing in the buying process remain the same. Structuring content according to what decision it actually supports, seems therefore a more robust concept. On a high level, there are 3 fundamental decision points:

The buyer:

1. has to come to the insight that a status quo is no longer tolerable if the business should prosper and a more detailed investigation is needed.
2. concludes that the ‘cost of the problem’ outweighs the ‘cost of solutions’ than can be bought
3. decides to buy from the seller offering the best ‘perceived future in use value’ compared to the to be paid ‘cash value’

There are usually minor decision points in between these major milestones. But for the illustration of how to structure content along the customer’s buying process, the granularity of the 3 major milestones appears to be sufficient.

What contents will help the buyer to reach a decision?

Some people might see a deontological problem by the seller “pushing” the buyer over the first decision point. It is however legitimate for the seller to help the buyer already to come to the conclusion that the frustration with the status quo is no longer tolerable; provided it is done with the right mindset: Helping customers to get better outcomes for their business. What kind of content is then needed to help the customer in a non manipulative way to come to this conclusion?

Geoffrey James’ blog post “Neil Rackham: Sales is a Research Job” provides some guidance. In there, he cites Neil Rackham’s second rule for sales research being:

“Prospective customers do not value information about products; instead they value information about the industry and the customer’s competition, providing it is current and up-to-date”.

Standard “Corporate Literature” produced by the seller’s organization will thus hardly be what is needed to reach the first milestone in the customer’s buying process. Imagine yourself in the situation trying to assess the importance of a problem and you do not yet know whether you need a solution and if so, whether it could be bought somewhere. Now ask yourself how you would react to a salesperson rattling down a laundry list of features and if you are lucky maybe even a few benefits You would consider the seller’s pitch as being annoying because it is totally irrelevant to the decision you need to make.

Industry or analyst reports creating awareness about the problem the seller can address are a better suiting tactic. This also means that not all contents in Sales Enablement systems are produced by the seller’s organization. Making such reports available in a Sales Enablement system, linked to this early phase of the buying process, reduces the time sales people spend to research for such content and insures that the best suited content for that phase is used.

After reaching the first milestone, the co-creation of value between seller and buyer takes place. In this phase “educational” content, helping the customer to define the specific cost of the pain (e.g. if I do nothing, my sales continue to lag behind those of my strongest competitor by 1M$ per month) and showing how the seller’s solution can address the problem is to be provided (e.g. canned webinars, white papers etc.) The aim of this content is to help the customer to evaluate whether the cost of the pain outweighs the typical investment in a solution to solve the problem.

Considering this milestone is very relevant. Research shows that 20% of forecasted deals end up with ‘no decision’ (i.e. nothing at all is bought). I consider ignoring this second milestone as a root cause for this phenomenon.

This second milestone also allows for the distinction between value-added vendors and commodity type suppliers. The latter typically start their selling process only when the customer has reached the conclusion that solutions providing a positive return compared to the cost of the problem can be bought on the market.

To help the customer with the final selection of the seller with the highest impact on a business outcome, product literature sometimes helps, success stories and ROI calculations are other content to be used.

Conclusion

Using the customer’s buying process as an additional mean to structure the content to be provided within a Sales Enablement systems can be looked at as one of the “manageable projects” Scott Santucci suggests to address the strategic challenges of being successful in the “new caste system”.

References:

It is time to think about creating an enterprise context (Matthias Roebel)

The Need to Understand the Context, B2B Sales People are Operating in (Christian Maurer)

Its been a while why and what’s going on with sales enablement these days (Scott Santucci)

Neil Rackham: Sales is a Research Job (Geoffrey James)”

See the original blog post and leave your comments post here.

Harsh words about Sales 2.0

The following quotes have not been written by myself. I found these different statements regarding Sales 2.0 in discussions on LinkedIn. For now I’m leaving out the names of the people who wrote them as I didn’t ask for their permission to put them on a blog. If you have been quoted here and you do want me to add your name and a link to your website, please leave a comment or contact me via LinkedIn.

The first one actually was in response to me saying that the emergence of what is called “Sales 2.0″ (which puts the buyer in the driver’s seat) does not really help to fix the broken relationship between Marketing and Sales but maybe having both departments report to the same person would:

“I did not know what Sales 2.0 was so I read the below on some website:

Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on a repeatable, collaborative and customer-enabled process that runs through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, predictable ROI and superior performance.

OK, That does not address the relationship between sales and marketing.

As far as Sales 2.0 goes, I think I’ll stick to making friends, helping others, and providing as much value as possible. It’s simple and it WORKS.”

The following two quotes were responding to someone’s question what Sales 2.0 really is:

“Sales 2.0 is many things. It is a book written by people with big company experience who do not really understand the needs of medium size companies. It is the justification for marketers who like to say “Cold Calling is Dead” (because they don’t actually understand how it works or have never been provided with the right service). Finally, it is an umbrella under which otherwise rational marketing executives exist while they pacify senior management with apparently low-cost solutions that provide output that is far inferior to more appropriate, more expensive solutions.

Some years ago, and issue of ZD Market Intelligence contained the following quote: “Many tech marketing departments are mere arrays of disparate tasks and uncoordinated contractors. These firms ignore the basics, like positioning statements. Many of these groups deceive themselves because either they have won some award for a tiny part of the marketing mix, or, not thanks to their efforts, the company’s overall success in the market to which they sell is increasing.” Harsh words. True words.

The more things change the more things stay the same.”

Next person, same discussion:

“Sales 2.0 reflects the seachange of how today’s customer wants to be approached and sold to. Cold calling is totally dead. It is an utter waste of time. Research, social media cred, word of mouth, learning seminars, etc are way better use of mktg and sales dollar. Example… 4 months ago, I was cold calling businesses trying to get info, contact info, and then get past the screening. Hours and hours, days and days. I switched to specific strategies on LinkedIn and Facebook, and I made contact immediately — within hours, with total strangers. Sales 2.0 is becoming the de facto way to do business.”

Way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff – Context matters

On November 29, 2009, Seth Godin wrote about what we in Sales Enablement for b2b enterprises are focused on:
Context matters!

Getting meta

Wikipedia contains facts about facts. It’s a collection of facts from other places.

Facebook doesn’t have your friends. It has facts about your friends.

Google is at its best when it gives you links to links, not the information itself.

Over and over, the Internet is allowing new levels of abstraction. Information about information might be worth more than the information itself. Which posts should I read? Which elements of the project are at risk? Who is making the biggest difference to the organization?

Right now, there’s way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity.

I couldn’t agree more with Seth that this is an opportunity. Successfully using this opportunity will have to do with web 3.0 (semantic) approaches being applied to the stuff from web 1.0 and web 2.0 as well as understanding what information architecture is and how it can be set up for complex organizations.

For the approach to Sales Enablement I have been working with at a company with 4,000+ sales people you could say:
SharePoint (or similar) has your marketing assets for sales reps.

Sales Enablement – as the layer on top – has the facts about your marketing assets:

• Which assets/links/comments should a sales rep read for a specific sales situation?

• Who is the contributor of marketing assets or comments that really drive sales?

Job opening – Global Program, Sales Enablement & Communications at Avaya

Director of Global Program, Sales Enablement & Communications at Avaya

Job # 35834BR Job Title Global Program, Sales Enablement & Communications Business Group Global Sales Job Category Sales Leadership State/City (US) CO – Highlands Ranch NJ – Basking Ridge VO-Georgia Country United States Job Description Directs the development and execution of Global programs and Sales enablement tools in support of Channel Partners and Avaya’s Global Annuity Sales associates, and managers to drive increased Maintenance & Managed Services revenue. Accountable for developing, executing, evaluating, and/or managing new initiatives and programs that will involve coordination between the sales channel and other organizations, such as Marketing, Product Management, Services, and IT. Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to, the following: Offer Integration and Execution, Sales Programs, Maintenance sales training and cross team programs/communications. Develops strategic business plans and goals for a large functional unit(s). Work is performed without appreciable direction. Identifies complex business needs and develops cutting edge solutions that require full integration of the company’s strategies. A Bachelor’s degree and 10+ years of related experience is preferred. This job does have supervisory responsibility. Qualifications Bachelor’s degree and 10+ years of related experience

 

Type: Full-time

Experience: Director

Functions: Management, Marketing, Sales

Industries: Computer Hardware, Computer Software, Information Technology and Services, Telecommunications, Wireless

Posted: November 20, 2009

 

Company Description
Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communication systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness.

Job ID: 789478

This is when you know you need Sales Enablement

Sales and Marketing Management Magazine published Jeanne Hellman’s (@jeannehellman) article ‘A Sales Optimization Strategy’, on November 16, 2009. Here is the part that takes a historic look at the company where Jeanne and later myself drove the adoption of the BizSphere Sales Enablement solution:

“A Case Study

A global telecom company decided to implement a Sales Enablement strategy mid-2006 as part of a larger business transformation initiative to reduce SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses of an operating budget) and to address long-standing complaints from the sales force. It was a heavily matrixed, global organization with approximately 450 products, 30 solutions, and more than 90 different professional services, and every seller was expected to sell “everything on the truck.” Information was spread around 20-plus team sites and the corporate-sanctioned sales portal, which hosted more than 6,000 documents distributed among 185 different document types, not to mention the separate competitive and business intelligence sites; installed base sites; and the mix of ordering, pricing, proposal generation, customer relationship management (CRM), and tracking tools. In addition, there was no federated search (no common search platform).

As you can imagine, it took sellers hours to look for basic information (validating numerous studies from several industry analysts). Seller confidence in marketing was low and complaints were high, as was attested to by the yearly seller satisfaction surveys (or dissatisfaction surveys) that had been conducted.”

Be sure to see the post ‘Case Study of one of the biggest Sales Enablement application implementations’ as it gives you the detailed document on the case above. Here is a slideshow that shows how the vendor mentioned above approaches Sales Enablement:

Job opening – Sr. Web Marketing Mgr, Sales Enablement at Yahoo

Sr. Web Marketing Mgr, Sales Enablement

Job ID: 25235
Company Name: Yahoo! Inc
Job Category: Technology; Internet
Location: Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Position Type: Full-Time, Employee
Experience: 2-5 Years Experience
Date Posted: November 15, 2009 (Reposted Nov 16)

About Yahoo!

Think about impacting 1 out of every 2 people online–in innovative and imaginative ways that are uniquely Yahoo!. We do just that each and every day, and you could too. After all, it’s big thinkers like you who will create the next generation of Internet experiences for consumers and advertisers across the globe. Now’s the time to show the world what you’ve got. Put your ideas to work for over half a billion people.

About the Business Group:

The Sales Enablement team is responsible for positioning and packaging all Yahoo! advertiser products, media solutions, product launches and Search. This includes messaging strategy, customer communications and sales materials and website management. This team is a part of the B2B Marketing organization.

Position: Sr. Web Marketing Mgr, Sales Enablement

The Sr. Marcom Manager, Website Marketing will be responsible for the development, launch, and ongoing management of infrastructure of all Yahoo! trade websites. This includes ensuring the sites effectively articulate Yahoo!’s value to key audience segments, promote solutions designed to drive sales and client adoption for advertisers, agencies and small business partners. These efforts will include coordination with regional teams around the globe to ensure a unified online presence in all regions.

In this role, you will not only lead a small team in optimizing the existing trade sites and launching new sites but you will also be part of the Sales Enablement team within B2B Marketing. The ideal candidate for this position is a motivated, self-starter who understands integrated marketing and accountable, effective communications.

Job Responsibilities:

· Manage all aspects of the B2B marketing website (infrastructure, content, visual design, user experience), ensuring the website maintains rigorous quality standards and adheres to all Yahoo! legal, policy, and brand guidelines and B2B marketing best practices

· Develop a content strategy/editorial calendar for the B2B marketing website to ensure that the content is fresh, dynamic and of topical interest to key audiences

· Work closely with internal partner organizations to ensure alignment of B2B marketing website with overall brand messaging and trade marketing communications plan

· Leverage B2B marketing website for promotional campaigns, product and research study launches, and brand campaigns

· Utilize data and analytics to optimize the trade websites and increase their marketing effectiveness on an ongoing basis

· Partner with Brand Marketing and UED teams to ensure trade marketing websites represent the best user experience and most appealing visual design for key audiences

· Oversee integration of other marketing website content into the B2B marketing website, including mapping content to current template structure, making recommendations for new modules/templates, facilitating the development of content and managing the engineering release cycles and deployment to production

· Manage the globalization of the B2B marketing website, including developing a global presence and working with regions to adopt and adapt website templates and visual style guide for localized presence

· Manage the ticket process, and triage/prioritize tickets for incoming requests for updates to B2B marketing website pages; involve UED, Creative and Engineering teams as necessary to execute on necessary changes

· Monitor traffic and conversion data, and provide reports on key metrics to B2B marketing on an ongoing basis

Minimum Qualifications:

· Minimum of 3-5 years website management experience in a corporate environment, preferably in a marketing-related capacity, preferably with international experience

Strong familiarity with the digital space and knowledge of how to demonstrate the value of online to our clients as well and internal stakeholders

· Demonstrated project management skills, including planning, prioritizing, setting timelines and driving the delivery of work on multiple efforts concurrently

· Demonstrated experience managing tasks across a variety of teams, preferably including Creative and Engineering teams

· Experience managing content via a Content Management System

Excellent verbal and written communication, interpersonal, organizational, presentation and planning skills

Creative, high positive energy and an ability to execute a must

Bachelor’s degree in Marketing or related field

Yahoo! Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. For more information or to search all of our openings please visit http://careers.yahoo.com.”

B2B marketing professionals are so focused on execution – they skip the planning stage

On November 9, 2009, blog.reachforce.com had a great guest post:

“Kathryn Roy, marketing consultant and friend of The B2B Lead, has a great eBook, Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures, [...] download the entire eBook here.

There are seven problems I find so rampant in B2B companies that I suspect they are infectious – passed along as marketing people switch companies or work with contagious agencies. [...] marketing professionals are so focused on execution, they skip the planning stage – and pay the price.

All too often, a glimpse into a B2B marketing department shows a hive of activity focused on meeting deadlines for updating collateral, producing an event, or sending out the next email campaign. In these environments, it is not unusual to find marketers completing projects without having done the analysis that can determine which activities are valuable and which activities not on their list would make a larger contribution.

In some cases, it’s due to a natural tendency to replicate the process and activities from a prior company. Clearly, there is a set of deliverables, like Web sites, that are common to most companies.

However, the relative priority of activities and how they are executed should be based on the dynamics of the target market segment, including the competitive environment.

“Juicing the Orange”, a book by the advertising team that came up with United Airlines’ wildly successful advertising campaign, has a free 15-page workbook (pdf ) with 127 questions to help marketing professionals deeply understand a company’s market and challenge. This analysis is its prerequisite to prescribing messages and mediums for delivery. (Not all 127 questions will necessarily pertain to your situation.)

SYMPTOMS

Inability of marketing professionals to quickly and confidently answer questions such as these:

• What is the biggest impediment to sales growth today?
• What are the different market segments you are pursuing and how do they weigh the relative importance of different product/service capabilities?
• How does your offering compare with competitive alternatives on the key product/service characteristics listed above?
• Can you describe the buying process and buyer roles and specific concerns by role for your top segment?
• What is the target segment’s current perception of your company and your competition?

SUSPECTED CAUSES

Measuring output instead of results.

Mismatch between marketing resources and expected deliverables.

TREATMENT

Carve out time and resources to do a thorough analysis. If staff is not experienced, bring in outside help for the initial round.

Build new marketing plan based on the analysis.

About the Author
Kathryn Roy is a marketing and strategy consultant with over 20 years of experience helping some of the most successful and fastest growing B2B companies including IBM, Avid, CA, Lotus, AT&T and dozens of other technology companies. [...]“

Please read the full article and leave your comments here.

Eight Skills for Today’s Marketers

I couldn’t agree more with Kathleen Schaub’s post ‘Eight skills for tomorrows marketers’ at the GroupEffects Marketing Blog from November 9, 2009. However, I’m with Keith who commented on her blog that the title should read ‘Eight Skills for Today’s Marketers’:

“[...] Marketing’s most interesting new roles require skills from non-traditional disciplines.

For your next marketing hire, consider people experienced in the following areas:

1) Sales Skills: Now that 100% of B2B buyers repeatedly touch the web (both vendor’s sites and those of 3rd parties) throughout the buying process, marketing must stay active from “cold to close”. No more filling the top of the funnel and passing leads off to sales. Tony Jaros, VP of Research from Sirius Decisions asks a radical question – why is the web still in Corporate Marketing? No longer just a corporate brochure, the web is central to revenue generation. IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice says that some leading organizations (Intel, for example) are hiring CMO’s with sales backgrounds. With new organizational structures such as Demand Centers and with pressure for better sales enablement taking center stage, people with working knowledge of sales AND marketing are golden. All marketers should learn about selling.

2) Social Media Skills: It’s no secret that social media dramatically changes the buyer-seller-influencer dynamic. But only those actively participating in social media tangibly appreciate the differences between old-style one-way media conversations and the group interactivity.

3) Influencer Marketing Skills: Advocacy and relationship roles such as AR, PR, developer relations, customer advocacy, community managers and evangelists continue to move beyond traditional boundaries and broaden their role to more types of influencers. Influencer50 has identified 24 types (Barbara French lists them here).

4) Journalism/ Storytelling Skills: With buyers getting the majority of their information from the web and with sales enablement increasing in priority, there’s no end to the need for juicy, targeted content. David Meerman Scott suggests that wehire trained journalists. Our customer segments and our eco-systems would be their “beat” – listening for stories, mashing them with our messages and placing fresh, relevant, content within the conversation.

5) Process Design Skills: Marketing automation is just beginning to penetrate its market. Forrester says it’s less than 5% adopted. As anyone who has been part of a re-engineering effort can attest, it’s not the automation that increases productivity. It’s the process changes that automation enables and enforces. Deploying marketing automation will require skills such as process modeling, project management, the ability to train and manage change, as well as ease with technology.

6) Data/ Analytics Skills: Technology captures and makes available enormous amounts of data about buyer and seller behavior. What does it all mean? Two of the most valuable uses of data are the ability to reveal a buyer’s “digital body language“, as Eloqua’s Steven Woods’ new book discusses, as well as the ability to closely link marketing performance to business performance. Real data about customer behavior and real ties to revenue promise marketing leadership a bigger seat at the executive table.

7) Design Thinking Skills: CEO’s want to know, “how can I make my company more innovative?” In addition to R&D, marketing would be a natural place to source talent. In his new book, Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of design shop IDEO, talks about how leading companies are tapping into right-brain tricks that those schooled in the arts practice, such as brainstorming, role-playing and scenario-building (see his TED talks here).

8) Domain Expertise: Customers don’t care about our products. They care about themselves and their problems. Building a bridge between our products and the customer’s care-abouts requires knowledge of both realms.”