A Great Marketing Tool Built with Your Tax Dollars

There has been no shortage of criticism of how the federal government spends our tax dollars, in particular over the past two years.  But I found something recently that is worth every dollar, especially if you’re a marketer.  

The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) has a fantastic website that includes excellent economic and employment reports, as well as, an incredibly robust and user-friendly database.  The BLS produces some very well known economic reports including the Consumer Price Index and the National Employment/Unemployment Rate. 

 

But it also contains a wealth of information for marketers.   Some of my favorite B2B BLS reports include:

• Occupational Outlook Handbook
• Industry at a Glance
• Product Price Index

My absolute favorite section is the Database, Tables and Calculators.  You could literally spend weeks in this section running reports.  Many vendors resell this information but given how tight budgets are nowadays, do it yourself.  The BLS can help you answer a wide variety of marketing related questions such as:

• Want to understand how consumer spending varies by income?  Got it, Consumer Expenditure Survey.
• Need to know how to modify pricing to adjust for inflation?  Check out the PPI. 
• Want to evaluate which industry to target for a new product?  Go hunting in the Industries at a Glance section. 

The BLS website is a great tool for conducting research on market segments, demographic trends, and consumer habits and spending.  It also an invaluable tool for understanding the health of the economy, price forecasting, etc.

You’re paying for it so help yourself, and for once, feel good about your tax dollars at work.  

Social Media as a Sale Tool - Section 5

The following post is taken from the soon to be released white paper entitled: The Effect of the Great Recession and the Rise of Social Media on Sales & Marketing Integration 
SOCIAL MEDIA AS A SALES TOOL //
Although the use of social media is now becoming widely considered and adopted by marketing organizations, it has yet to be accepted by many salespeople. As part of Channel Marketing’s research effort, the team explored areas where social media tools could provide value in the sales process.  As featured in Figure 5, a simple two by two approach is mapped out along a common six-step sales process on one axis and the “BANT”(Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline) lead qualification process is aligned to the other axis.

Figure 5 shows opportunities in the sales process to apply social media tools to accelerate the lead management process and improve account management and support (the bottom of the funnel activities) based on what sales people and customers are trying to accomplish during those steps.

Utilizing social media at the beginning of the sales process, many B2B firms are increasingly using those tools as prospecting devices.  Studies such as David Gode’s publication in the Harvard Business Review on Better Sales Networks, suggest that to be successful at sourcing prospects, a salesperson’s network should be made up of contacts that are diverse in functional role and industry.

As a result, LinkedIn and similar platforms are helping salespeople create a more efficient marketplace network where each contact knows a more diverse array of people, creating a wider web of prospects. Identified prospects can also be used to help grow opportunities for buy-in and up-sell by allowing a salesperson to build relationships with individuals at a company beyond his or her immediate network.

Beyond opportunity identification, social media can address the problem of stalled opportunities. According to the Sales, Marketing and Communication Leadership Council, the most important front-line manager activity to drive growth is sales innovation, namely collaborating with reps to ‘unstick’ deals.  Often times, the culprit for a “stuck” or delayed deal is merely the fact that one or more identifiable ‘BANT’ lead qualification elements have not been met. 

While in many cases B2B sales and marketing teams have ready access to the necessary information regarding budget, authority and timing, Figure 5 highlights social media’s coverage and the specific tools that address customer’s “Need” applied to the sales setting.

As mapped out in Figure 5, it is clear that organizations are using social media to help better understand, anticipate and address customer and prospect needs. Allstate agents, for example, created a community portal on a Ning platform that provides agents with an online discussion area to post and answer questions, send out bulletins, blog about events, and share useful knowledge. Allstate news headlines on the site keep agents up to date and the network provides agents the chance to connect with each other and share insight with only a few keystrokes.
To read more continue to the post.   

The Shift to Social Media - Section 2 of the White Paper

The following post is taken from the soon to be released white paper entitled: The Effect of the Great Recession and the Rise of Social Media on Sales & Marketing Integration 

THE SHIFT TO SOCIAL MEDIA //

The migration towards the “connected” world can be witnessed by the millions of individuals flooding to sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This has in turn created a robust cache of potential customers for marketers to interact with and engage. Indeed widespread social media use pervades much of the B2B space as a recent Forrester Research piece outlines how B2B buyers have very high social participation and provides relevant statistics such as the fact that 88% of decision makers at business technology firms use social media for business decision-making[i].

As Figure 1 demonstrates, recent statistics reveal that marketers, in large numbers, are following prospects and customers into the digital and social media world for two primary reasons[ii]:

·       Prospects and customers have exhibited a desire to use these platforms.

·       Recent economic conditions have made this targeted and inexpensive marketing method very appealing to marketing and sales forces with declining budgets.

As evidence of the depth to which “The Great Recession” has slashed marketing budgets, in a survey in 2009, 75% of B2B marketers reported a decrease in their budgets, while 67% of marketers complained of being expected to do more with less by driving higher sales with these diminished budgets[iii]. 

Figure 2 demonstrates the degree to which average total advertising expenditure has decreased from 2007 to 2009 as a result of smaller marketing budgets. In addition, the figure reveals the shift in focus of this advertising spend away from traditional forms of marketing in favor of the internet and online media. Despite budget cuts, the recession has actually accelerated the adoption of social media marketing as companies have increasingly turned to social media as an inexpensive, measurable and direct method over traditional approaches.

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[i] Burris, Peter, Josh Bernoff, Bradford J. Holmes, and Zachary Reiss-Davis. The Social Technographics of Business Buyers. Rep. Forrester Research, February 20, 2009.

[ii]The B-to-B Marketing Leadership Study”. American Business Media, Association of National Advertisers, and Booz & Co. August 2010. 

[iii] Maddox, Katie. "Survey Finds Budget Cuts Easing." BtoB Magazine 14 Sept. 2009: 1+. Print.

The Effect of the Great Recession and the Rise of Social Media on Sales and Marketing Integration

Yes, I know it is a mouthful.   For the past three months we have been researching how those two simultaneous events have impacted sales and marketing.  The recession, and its downward pressure on marketing spend, and the increased adoption of social media both by B2B customers and organizations.
The research is now complete and is being packaged into a white paper which will be the second in our Channel Insights series.  Over the next several weeks I will post various sections of the paper.   Today I've posted the executive summary to give you a preview of what is to come.

Executives Summary 

Business-to-Business organizations have often struggled to fully integrate sales and marketing; whether it is merely speaking the same language or adequately aligning against common goals, the two groups have often operated independently of each other despite the fact that success, more often than not, is predicated on their collaboration.

Two recent events have heightened the need to align these two groups. First, the recession has caused organizations to be more precise with their investments, making it more difficult for marketers to procure and defend their budgets, and for sales, to find buyers. 

Second, the adoption and utilization of social media platforms is providing marketers with a low cost opportunity to interact directly with customers and track their success. For sales, this means a new vehicle for gaining insight into customer buying behavior and understanding the influencer network. For marketing, this has elevated their role in helping convert identified leads to customers and provided the opportunity to manage ‘back-end’ customer relationships.

The imminent question is: How should corporations respond to these recent economic and technology trends and use new competitive advantages that increase sales, build brand equity and customers’ loyalty, and reduce costs?

The key lesson? Despite social media offering the potential to deliver an insightful customer experience with meaningful business impact, failure to properly integrate sales and marketing leaves organizations at risk of being more disconnected than ever before.

Avaya Helps Partners Learn How to Market

The Business Marketing Association (BMA Colorado) is producing a book later this year entitled: “Advice From the Top – The Expert Guide to B2B Marketing.   I'm authoring a chapter on collaborative partner marketing.   As part of my research, I was fortunate to interview Patti Moran, Worldwide Channel Marketing Director at Avaya.   Patti shared with me how Avaya is helping partners improve their marketing capabilities, competencies and outcomes.   It's a good success story worth sharing.  

The Situation 

Because of their traditional focus on converting, rather than creating demand, Avaya’s partners lacked an understanding of how to effectively manage customer accounts, nurture relationships, build awareness and create new opportunity by marketing their business services and solutions.  Not only did they lack the marketing insight to generate demand but even apart from this gap in knowledge, partners also lacked the marketing tools, resources, skill sets and experiences to market, sell and deliver their solutions. 

According to Patti Moran, Senior Director of Worldwide Channel Marketing at Avaya, 90% of their channel partners lacked a dedicated marketing support individual in-house.  Noting this dire situation, Moran contends that ultimately “It’s not enough to just be a sales organization.  To be successful at growing and adapting to the market condition partners have to have a marketing functions."

The Solution 

Recognizing the need to educate, train, and then arm their partners with the necessary materials and resources to remain competitive, Avaya created a series of global workshops titled Marketing Masterclass with distributors to educate and provide resources and tools to enable mid sized and small partners.   During the workshops, Avaya helped partners evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to better understand how to position and differentiate themselves in competitive markets.

To continue the momentum generated by these workshops, Avaya created an education curriculum called provided partners with “How to Guides,” covering marketing topics ranging from delineating how to write marketing plans to delineating how to build websites or leveraging social media.   Finally, Avaya developed a spectrum of shared services to support their partners’ marketing efforts, both full and self service. 

Avaya providing access to supporting services, databases, events, content, and preexisting templates and pre-built product pages, either for free or at highly discounted costs. Avaya, for example, created a self-service “Partner Marketing Central” portal that provides free and easy to use email blast technology, seminars and whitepapers, and access to over 200 customizable marketing materials with a full range of media. 

Avaya also created “MarketLeaders" a full service campaign program that delivers integrated campaigns with end-to-end support in order to achieve a range of goals from relationship management, demand generation to customer engagement, enabling partners to use MDF or BDF funds to drive leads, nurture relationships, and build awareness.

Financially, Avaya even sought to ease their partners’ cash flow concerns by invoicing and debiting against their funds rather than insisting partners pay up front, thereby increasing partners’ speed to market by providing more current resources.

The Results

The success of Avaya’s efforts, characterized by full classes, newly engaged partners, and efficient MDF and BDF spending, has been met by requests from partners for even more education.  Furthermore, the global breadth and overall extent of participation speak volumes to Avaya’s success—and because of this success, components have been provided in multiple languages, and offerings such as the self-service Partner Central have been utilized across country borders by over 2,500 worldwide members to create over 33,000 highly customized and targeted marketing materials to date. In addition, in the Americas alone over 1,200 partner companies have taken advantage of MarketLeaders Campaigns to generate over 1,950 of their own strategic campaigns.