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Great interview!

I'm pleased to bring you a series of interviews with thought leaders in B2B Sales and Marketing. This time we interviewed a great marketing expert, Brian Kardon, Chief Marketing Officer of Eloqua. I wish to thank Brian for his contributions to Fearless Competitor. Many more thought leaders are coming soon, so stay tuned. We're on a mission to bring our readers the very best. CSO Insights recently found that quota achievement was at its lowest rat … Read More

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I’m pleased to bring you a series of interviews with thought leaders in B2B Sales and Marketing. This time we interviewed a great marketing expert, Eric Goldman, Managing Partner of Gossamar — an expert in inbound marketing.

I wish to thank Eric for his contributions to Fearless Competitor.

Many more thought leaders are coming soon, so stay tuned. We’re on a mission to bring our readers the very best.

CSO Insights recently found that quota achievement was at its lowest rate ever, lead generation budgets were flat or cut, and quotas were being raised.  Jim Dickie sees this as the Perfect Storm. Jim Dickey said it is like raising the high jump bar, when we could not clear the last height.  As a marketing expert, Eric, what are you observing in B2B sales?

Sales-cycles are longer, involve more people and require stricter ROI justifications – but these factors always emerge during recessions and when money is tight. What makes this recession’s impact on B2B sales different is the advent of Marketing 2.0, or Inbound Marketing, and the vast amount of information available on the web. Together they represent the biggest single factor influencing the way B2B sales unfold these days: the shift in power from seller to buyer.

Today, more than 90% of B2B buyers begin their search for a solution online and they thus begin their education process far earlier in the buying cycle than they used to. In the old model, when we still called it a sales-cycle, prospects were mostly educated by sales people in person. But with websites providing all the needed information and prospects being able to find it easily, the process begins with the prospect’s first visit to your site. By the time your sales people get involved in this new process (assuming that it is being handled and run correctly), the prospect has already learned much of what your technology is, how it works, how it differs from your competitors and, again, if your approach was designed correctly, is now ready for the sales call to help him or her edit the shortlist down to one vendor; negotiating price, delivery and support, etc.

There is also a growing awareness of the decreasing effectiveness of traditional marketing methods such as cold calling or unsolicited emails: What is now known as Interruption Marketing. People just don’t return calls or open these emails much anymore. Because the Inbound Approach is based on gaining a person’s trust (they explore your website until they volunteer their name and email address in return for some of your valuable content) you are in essence only marketing to people who have given you their permission to do so.

It’s not a cake walk – you need a lot of visitors to produce one sale: some companies tell us it takes 1,000 visitors to make a sale; some say it’s closer to 2,000. But if you use Inbound Marketing Automation to both produce the right volume of traffic and then manage the sales leads effectively, the sales do rack up.

The economic challenges of today are a major problem for B2B sellers.  Blogs and content sharing are critical elements like websites and Inbound Marketing is a very popular blog. How can a robust online presence help generate leads? Can you share the lessons you’ve learned with our readers?

Firstly, I would stress the need for a solid marketing strategy. Yes, online marketing techniques are more “instant” and more measurable, and it does appear relatively easy to develop a “robust online presence”, but there’s no point doing anything online unless you know the answers to the same old strategy questions regarding your target audience, product or service positioning, pitch, etc.

Secondly, when you design this strategy, I suggest that you forget about “selling” per se, and concentrate instead on making your solution the easiest to acquire and use. This is not as easy as it sounds: Make your website the easiest one to find (and the easiest one is surely the one at the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Page). Make it easy to understand (clear, concise descriptions – no hyperbole, no blatant sales pitches) – just the facts and explanations all contained in industry-leading and thought-provoking content.

Easy to buy (if you can, structure payments in small steps around deliverables, provide a money back guarantee, anything which reduces the risk). Easy to learn to use and keep using (this process begins on the design bench and cannot be added in after the fact, and it continues with tutorials, help desks, etc.) Easy to maintain (Field Service anywhere and anytime if that’s appropriate, easy routines to change parts, easy way to get those parts, diagnose problems, etc.)

We like to suggest that companies adopt a Holistic Website approach – a website which is designed around all of the above “Easy” concepts, one which tightly reflects your chosen Keyword Strategy (in both its copy and content), and includes all of the Inbound Marketing Automation components to make it attract (SEO, Social Media Marketing, PPC), engage (with your content) and convert the right people (for even more valuable content), and then manage (automatically, according to your best practices encased in your Automation Rules), qualify (grading and scoring) and nurture them around their buying-cycles (via drip email campaigns) until they become clients.

Changing of the status quo is a major impediment to progress.  How can marketing and sales leaders implement change without incurring undue risk?

We encourage people to think of change as a process. A process which can and should be designed to suit the company (it’s resources, philosophy and culture, its state-of-need (urgent or long-term), and its budgets). In addition, the process should be designed to suit the people involved (their state-of-need, their readiness to change, their perception of the benefits), and the change itself (the actual change needed dictates what is changed and how).

For example, far too often we find that a company has embarked on automating its Marketing and Sales operations, allocated resources to the project, acquired software tools like a demand generator and CRM, and then find, when they switch them on, that they are not receiving enough visitors to the site because they did not get the Attract portion of the Process operating correctly first. And unless they start again and think about the whole thing holistically, despite threats, bribes, rewards and the best of intentions, they will never achieve their objectives. Instead, they throw out the software tools, malign them as useless, and try new ones which will also fail because the process is not set up to succeed. It’s thus critical to design both the change process and the process by which the tools will be used carefully, before you begin, and then to change the processes as needed as you go along. To reduce the risks associated with making the changes, make sure that the process consists of small manageable steps, each with a clear objective and measurable result. Finally, it’s better to motivate people with rewards than with fear and a huge impediment to change is fear (fear of not only how to accomplish the change, but what will the new regime bring, what will it mean to me as an individual, what will my new job entail, how will I earn rewards or know when I am doing well?). Only when these questions are answered through education and change management techniques, will people embrace a change more enthusiastically. And only then will the risks diminish.

Today it’s more critical than ever that marketers can measure the impact of options.  They need to know what’s working, what’s not, and what to change.  What do you recommend they do, Eric?

One way to know what’s working is to use what we call “Priceless Market Insight for Free” which uses the digital footprint data accumulated from your visitors, to learn more and more about what motivates and interests them and thus how you can fine-tune your offerings and campaigns. You can use Inbound Marketing Automation, for example, to run A/B tests to actually measure which landing pages convert more visitors. You can use digital footsteps’ real-time insight into the ways your prospects interact with your website to measure their engagement quickly, without having to wait for reports to be produced at infrequent intervals. This allows you to take action immediately, reducing the risk that poorly performing campaigns, ads or landing pages will be left to under-perform and drive up costs.

I would also recommend that people use analytics and software tools to help them calculate the real ROI of their efforts – the actual ROI of each campaign. It used to be so difficult to do this that most marketers wryly lamented that 50% of their marketing budgets are wasted, if only they knew which half!

What makes it possible now is the combination of all that marketing analytical data, plus the ability to tie marketing campaigns to actual sales results via a bi-directional link between the Marketing Automation system and your Customer Relationship Management system. Campaigns can be directly measured in terms of numbers of leads generated and conversion rates, and final sales opportunity values can be fed back to round out the calculation of ROI.

We wrote a series of posts on this facet of Inbound Marketing and judging by their popularity, they hit a nerve. If it’s okay to give a link in my answer, the posts are: 1) How to measure the ROI of your website as a whole. 2) The 10 best free ROI calculators on the Web and 3), How to build your own ROI calculator so that you can measure the ROI of your Social Media Marketing, for example.

Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/cEc0ln)

Content is more important than ever.  Buyers look for content at every stage of the buying process.  What do marketers need to know about content and what actions do you recommend they take?

The first part of this process is to think about what aspects of your company and its technology, products or services is worthy of being called Industry Leading, or displays Thought-Leadership. It’s these qualities which make your content stand out from your competitor’s. Now that you know what you want to showcase in general terms, you need to ensure that you match the content to the type of information your visitors want. But as their wants change over time, it helps to think of the problem in two stages:

i)             The first step begins with clearly defining the phases your prospects go through as they progress around the classic “Marketing Life Cycle.” They usually begin with Awareness (the person is aware of the technology behind the solution), moves to Interest or Consideration, via Research Mode, (the person now knows of your specific technology or solution and is comparing it to your competitors), and then begins to narrow down the field by developing a Preference for your solution (pruning the short-list down to one), and then Ordering and then Re-ordering.

ii)            Once you understand these phases (and not all of them apply to all companies and their prospects), you map your content to each phase. You essentially design a piece of content with the persona of your ideal prospect in mind, to provide the information which that person needs, at this precise moment in their buying-cycle. So, for example, the first piece of content should be designed to cultivate Awareness. It must not contain a single sales pitch – not one comparison between your solution and others: Educational, purely and solely. Education aimed at convincing the reader that a solution to his or her problem does exist, a description of what it is and how it works and what its benefits are (but again, without specific references to your own). At the other end of the cycle, when the person is in the Preference phase, the content would be pure sales information right down to pricing and the benefits of your approach versus others.

Lastly, you must make some conscious design decisions regarding the use of Registration Forms, or Gates. Some people insist that requiring people to register to get some content is not a good idea as they simply leave, reluctant to identify themselves. We advise clients to view Registration Forms in the same way they would approach getting someone’s business card at a trade show or conference. You don’t ask for it right away, you talk for a while to gain some trust and then you exchange cards. So do the same with your website. Provide valuable content for free – to educate your prospects while displaying your thought-leadership. And then tempt the person with even more valuable information in the form of a take away (white paper, downloadable tools or videos), but for which the person is going to pay by giving his or her name or email address. In the same way you discount a person at a trade show who won’t hand over his business card after a conversation, people who won’t sign up on your site are not real prospects. Yet. That’s the beauty of Inbound, though. They are still in the funnel and they do come back to sign up when they can’t find what they’re looking for anywhere else.

If a CMO were to ask you today – What are the 3 most important takeaways that I need to know? What would they be?

1)            Think buying, not selling. It dictates a shift in focus which affects all aspects of your marketing.

2)            Think Process. Don’t fall for the next magic bullet – there are none. Tools and Automation only work if you include the needed process design upfront to make sure you derive real productivity. Without proper process, Inbound Marketing Automation is a set of disjointed tools and silo’d data.

3)            Think big but design and take small steps. The big part is your strategy and overall objectives. The small parts are the measurable steps you take to implement the strategy.

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