We love naptime...

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Scoring the Stages of a Buying Process

When we talk about lead scoring, the goal that comes to mind most often is determining which leads are ready for handoff to sales. This, however, is only part of the picture. Some of us are able to map out a full buying process that is common to many or most of our buyers. If this is possible, as it was for Terracotta, then we can use lead scoring in a different way to provide a much more meaningful way to connect with potential buyers.



If there are specific stages in the buying process to look for, then you can apply the same methodology of lead scoring to determine which phase of the buying proces each buyer is in.



Each buying process is unique, so there is no universal process that all prospective buyers go through (see the example from the Terracotta case study to the right). However, there are three general phases that are common; awareness, solution discovery, and solution validation. Within these phases, prospective buyers of your solution may go through individual steps that you can map out.



Exploring free trials, learning about increasingly detailed aspects of solution capabilities, design, or implementation, reviewing case studies, viewing help documentation, and doing topic-specific searches can all be signs that a prospective buyer is at a specific stage of the buying process



Mapping the stage of the buying process allows some unique approaches to marketing:

• Offers or communications can be targeted at specific stages of the buying process in what is essentially buying process specific psychographic segmentation
• The size and shape of the lead funnel can be understood and shared with a broader team providing insights into marketing effectiveness
• Conversion gaps in the lead funnel can be identified allowing refocusing on specific points at which buyers are not moving forward in the buying process

If your prospects' buying process is one that can be effectively understood through observation of their digital body language, and application of lead scoring techniques to the overall buying process, the benefits of doing so are tremendous.

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I never did finish up...

...those last few days in Utah and the trip home. It is now almost 3AM and its one of those nights I just can't sleep. So, you'll have to bear with me through this long travel log, but I've included many fine photos of the bambina to help it pass quickly...

Lets start off with our last days in Utah...my cousin brought over some dress up clothes and I just couldn't resist. I know...its the kind of thing you promise yourself you'll never do to your own child, but seriously...isn't she just the cutest fairy/angel...







That wouldn't stop eating the flowers?



And the most happy...



er...grumpy princess?



After we left Utah we went back to Las Vegas and stayed with my friend Ilaria...I won't post pictures of her and her family because I don't know how they feel about that, but her daughter was so intrigued by Bella. She saw Bella gumming my finger and asked what it felt like. I had her wash her hands so she could try it. Bella started to suck on her little finger then promptly burped on her hand. It was quite amusing.

We ended up in Tucson the next day at the hotel with Mr. Chucklehead.



It was so good to be almost home and especially good to be with him. He and Bella bonded over bathtime...



And tv time...



And a walk around town...



And a sushi dinner...



And while mama colored her hair...



Before we headed back we all had to go see the "coolest plane ever" on the Airforce base.



And finally, at 6AM I headed out with this glorious sunrise to greet me...



And TAAAAAADUM! I'm done! No more travel log...I'm back to the day to day grind now... Read More...

Bella passed a major milestone...

For some reason when I look at the title it reads like, "Bella passed a kidney stone!" but, I promise that what happened last night was much more exciting and much less painful than that!

While playing with daddy last night...or should I say while daddy was practicing his fine art of torture training on our little squeaker...



He plopped her down on the ground and watched her get into what he called "roll-over" position. She scootched her body forward and tucked her arm under her and of course she was whining the whole time as she isn't a big fan of tummy time...and then this happened...



He was too excited about what was happening and didn't stop to think about what a milestone this is or that I should drop what I'm doing and come rushing immediately so at the end you hear me coming out from finishing the dishes up asking, "What's she doing?" And then of course I had to just shed a tear or two at my little girl passing this milestone. And I'm so lucky its all on video.

Yeah Bella Bambina! Read More...

My Spy School Graduate

Well! He's done! He's actually been done since Monday, but I just got around to finding the attachment for the camera that would allow me to download the photos. Mr. C has made it through spy school. I'm so proud of him.

Bella and I went to see him graduate. We wondered if we'd be the only ones there, but luckily our friend came with her little 9 month old too. So, two mamas with two babies were the graduating class sendoff.

And since I can't really tell you what actually happened in spy school...oh yes...not even I got to know all the top secret stuff...or if I did...I'd never admit it...I decided I'd commemorate this momentous graduation with a bunch of photos.

And on we go with the next steps in this Army career...







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We ALL Use Twitter - Short Term Memory, Long Term Memory, and the Consciousness of the Internet

We all use Twitter. So do all our prospects and customers.

I made that argument to our CFO and CEO the other day and was met with a rousing chorus of guffaws and comments about teenagers and people with too much time on their hands.

But it turns out, that is the critical importance of Twitter, we are all users, just not in the way you might think.

First, let’s look at how Twitter is used by those who use it directly. To be honest, the main users (in my limited sampling) seem to be lots of journalists, PR people, Twitteratti, and bloggers. Ideas are discussed and commented on, links are shared and re-tweeted, and relationships are built. Anything that is more than a day old is extremely outdated news on Twitter.

Twitter functions, in many ways, as the short term memory of the Internet.

However, what happens on Twitter does not stay on Twitter. A significant segment of the audience on Twitter is in the segment that Nielson identifies as the heaviest content contributors. Based on their 90/9/1 rule, only 1% of the audience are heavy content contributors, responsible for around 90% of the content.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

This contribution of content is not limited to Twitter, much of it is contributions of content on blogs, journals, and discussions. The relationships, links, topics, and opinions that were formed and shared on Twitter are written down in longer form and discussed on these blogs and other online sites, which remain relevant for many months, or even years in some cases.

Blogs, and similar forums, form the long term memory of the Internet, and due to Participation Inequality, much of the input to this long
term memory comes from the short term memory of Twitter.

Then, as any of us involved in SEO are familiar with, Google indexes and ranks all of this content, pushing to the top the ideas and discussions that are most popular with, and linked by, the rest of the audience. This is where the vast majority of internet users interact with Twitter; through their Google search box. They are not aware that behind the scenes, the ideas shared on Twitter, and blogged about by the 1% who are active content contributors have formed a major factor in the selection of results they see, but it is nonetheless critical.

Google, as the consciousness of the Internet, indexes the long term memory, and ranks results based on their popularity in that forum. This is where the largest audience becomes exposed to those ideas.

If, as execs, we discount Twitter as unimportant because its direct users are not our peers, or our prospects, we are missing the point. We are all users of Twitter, either directly or indirectly, and if our marketing strategies discount that fact we do so at our own peril. Read More...

Its official...

...we're off to Germany. John has to report by April 13th. I am SO EXCITED.

So, here'is a little bit of information about our new home...

Vilseck, a major training center, has been described as the "school house" for the US Army, Europe. Transition training and fielding of new equipment is its most visible mission. It is located about 30 miles west of the Czech Republic border.

Vilseck is located in the state of Bavaria (Bayern) approximately 60 miles from Nuernberg. Vilseck is one of the most charming military installations in Germany.
Families assigned to Vilseck enjoy this peaceful, rural farming community of gently sloping hills and meadows, surrounded by 35 small villages/hamlets built on lands cleared hundreds of years ago. The area abounds with many lakes suitable for great fishing.

Vilseck derived its name from the once alone standing fortress (Burg) Dagestein on the Vils river. This castle is probably one of the oldest in the whole Oberpfalz.

Quick tidbits...
1. Population is about 6,500.
2. Population of Army base is 10,000
3. 4,500 of Army population live in Vilseck villages, but aren't counted in the population so actual size of city is about 10,000.
3. There is a train station and bus station
4. I found a list of restaurants - 1 Chinese, 3 Greek, 3 Italian and 15 German eating establishments
5. I also found a list of amenities in the city - 3 grocery stores, 3 bakeries, 5 butcher, 1 hardware store, 2 flower stores, an office supply store, 2 souvenir shops with household ware, 3 shoe stores, 3 beauty/barber shops and 2 cosmotolegists, a German post office, 4 banks and two night clubs
6. You can find out more and meet the 1st mayor of Viseck here... http://www.vilseck.de/english/index1.htm



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Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

The merits of lead nurturing are hard to underestimate. Especially in challenging economic times, it is extremely wasteful to have a leaky funnel that you spend great effort and resources on getting potential buyers into the top of, only to have them leak out the side. More often than not, this is due to mismatches between buyer timing and the handoff to your sales team.

In writing Digital Body Language I had the pleasure of speaking with Hollis Chin and the team at Voxify who had one of the best examples I had seen of using lead nurturing to generate tremendous value from a set of leads that had been discarded as dead leads.

Enjoy the case study:

Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

Voxify is a provider of powerful speech applications for contact centers in retail, travel, hospitality, entertainment, financial services, and healthcare. Its complex sales cycle can often stretch 12-18 months, which makes it a challenge to align sales resources with leads. At one point, more than 3,000 leads sat idle – leads that could potentially buy Voxify’s software.

Without a structured follow-up system, Voxify was wasting opportunity. If a lead was not ready to buy at the time of initial contact, the lead was recycled; however there was not a process to ensure further communication. Given the length of the sales cycle, and the type of internal project that would drive the need for Voxify’s solutions, this meant that many valid – but early – leads were leaking out of the funnel.

The breadth of Voxify’s target markets, combined with the range of possible solutions, meant the company employed a broad matrix of messaging to ensure relevance with the prospect. A matrix of 26 separate industry and education topics was created with each topic adding value to each unique buyer type and stage in the buying process. An automated nurture campaign kept this messaging in front of the “cooler” leads to maintain their interest level and watch for signs of changes to buying behavior as the messaging evolved from “why speech applications” through to “why Voxify”.

Within six months, the so-called “cooler” leads became the largest source of conversion for new sales opportunities. The campaign created 1,500 responses and enabled more than 400 companies to re-engage with the sales force. The nurture campaign also allowed the sales team to better understand whether the prospect was more interested in a specific vertical application such as a flight check-in system, or in a horizontal application such as a generic routing agent, and cater their conversation accordingly. By keeping relevant, topical messaging in front of prospective buyers, without overtly selling, Voxify identified and acted on buying interest when it arose.

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Don't waste a minute.

I drove for a long time yesterday to make it all the way to Tucson where Mr. Chucklehead is at. We missed our 3-year anniversary on Wednesday together and I just couldn't wait one more day in Phoenix being only 90 miles away from him and not try and just make the drive... So we drove and drove and drove and drove...it was a 10 hour day in the car (and please knock me over the head with a 2X4 if I ever think doing that again with an infant is a good idea.)

However, the tradeoff was that of seeing Mr. C and I think I can safely say that both Bella and I were unbelievably tearfully happy to be back in his arms.

So this morning when he heads out the door of the hotel room to get his Army work done for the day I had grand plans to take a walk around Tucson, go see some of the city, maybe do a little shopping...visit a friend or two if they are around...and then it happened...

Bella fell asleep. She went down at 10AM. Its now 3:48PM and she is still sleeping. The poor little girl must be absolutely exhausted. At first I was antsy...TV was on, TV was off, I pulled out my crafts, I put them away, I played on the computer, I cleaned up my clothes, I sorted the dirty ones for laundry, I debated on the ethics of leaving a baby in a hotel room to get a load of wash done (I decided that was a bad idea) and I was actually feeling irritated that I had to be cooped up all day in this hotel room with "nothing" to do. Not irritated with Bella...just irritated at the situation. So I sat down and started to think...then I started daydreaming a little...and I started remembering...

I remember being 10 and dressed up in leotards with my sisters and doing gymnastics in our living room. We had so much fun together with the music blasting and all of us in tights with giant runs up the legs, but we thought we were beautiful and talented. We have a great photograph of all of us lined up. Even my brother is there in his manly shorts and t-shirt set...oh yes, the great Ray loved doing gymnastics with his sisters.

I remember being 12 and sitting on the front of the riding lawnmower with the little red wagon tied to the back and my dad driving us around the neighborhood...me on the hood of it and my little sisters or neighbor kids in the back of the wagon. We loved that riding lawnmower...and as funny as we eastern Oregon hicks must have looked to the sophisticated city folk we sure did laugh a lot...We have a photo of this too...I can't believe I wore those shorts and thought it was a good idea to pair them with tube socks.

I remembered canoe trips down the clackamas river with my family and Christmas pixieing at the Harris', and girls camp, and playing the guess the song game in the middle of the night with Sarah while we'd pluck out the tune on the elastic waistband of our undies. I remember wearing pink curlers in my hair so it would be curly before church on Sunday and the big pillows we'd call "Place Back Period" for when we had to get up and do something so noone could take our spot on the them. I remember car trips to my grandparents and whoever saw their house first was the "weiner" and picking asparagus along the ditchbanks and skating on the frozen ditch with my siblings and...and...and...

BAM! **Ton of brick falling on my head at this moment**

I had to go pick up Bella and just hold her in her deep sleep and I vowed not to waste a minute more being irritated...I held my little girl in my arms and promised that I would not waste any more of this day worrying about things I couldn't do...this day was mine to just hold her, rub her back, touch each of those little tiny fingers and toes, memorize that cute little button nose and the way her hair curls away from her face...I didn't have to worry about anything. I had food, clothing and shelter. I was safe and warm. I had no work to do or chores to finish or house to clean. If I wanted I could just hold her in my arms all day long and not feel bad one bit. So I sat there with her in my arms and I've been trying so hard to memorize what my baby girl looks like at 3 months old because she won't stay this way for long. She'll grow up and get bigger and yes, we'll make many new memories that someday she'll smile about as I did today.

But we won't ever have today back again.

Don't waste another minute. Read More...

Social Media and B2B Marketing - 6 Things You Can Do

The conversations are happening, and as marketers we do not have control of them. That much we know, and for anyone who doubts it, David Meerman Scott's discussions on the topic are excellent - http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451f23a69e2010536ba07b6970c.

But, what does that mean for us as B2B marketers? What do we do to help prospective customers discover what we offer, learn about it, evaluate it against other options, and come to a buying decision?

The most important learning that we can take from the rise of social media is that we need to think in terms of a buying cycle not a selling cycle. When we use the term “sales process”, or anything similar, we are subconsciously acting as if we are in control. We have to re-orient our thinking to a buying process, controlled by the prospect, guided by their social conversations, and on their timeframes.

Okay, but what does that mean exactly:

1) The prospect knows what information they need: social media provides an excellent source of context, awareness, and discussion. If a prospect’s interest is piqued, they may end up on your web site, through things they have discovered in social media, or guided through search. However, when they do, they are coming with a specific question in mind. It may be high level (what is this company all about) or highly detailed (exact product specs on a certain model), but they are coming to your website with a specific question in mind.

2) The prospect is operating on their own timeframe: whether they are doing research, looking for a demo, or making a comparison among possible solutions, the prospect’s timeframe is governed by events that are happening in their business. You can make information and resources available that assist them to move from one stage of the buying cycle to the next, but you cannot control this timeline. It is also not linear; they may move from general awareness and light research to a deeper evaluation or demo, and then return back to merely doing light research for a few months.

3) The prospect does not want to be “sold” to. They do want assistance in understanding whether to buy, how to buy, and what is available to them, but they do not want a sales pitch. Aggressively selling to someone who is just educating themselves on what is available from your organization will push them away.

So, if this is reality, how does this appear to a marketer? Instead of inquiries and leads coming to you in predictable “buckets”, governed by your schedule of outbound campaigns, the flow reverses. It is governed by the world of the buyer, not the schedule of your campaigns. The inquiries and leads will come in a continual flow; each unique in terms of what stage of their buying process they are at, what they are looking for, who they are, and when they appear.

To succeed in this environment, you need to shift your marketing organization’s posture from outbound to inbound. The following 6 areas of focus are important for that shift:

1. Set your information free. Make all of the resources a buyer will need to educate themselves readily available. You can ask for some information in return if the information is valuable enough, but make sure it is readily available. If you provide great, non-salesy, information, you will be one of the sources passed about in the world of social media.
2. Focus on being credible. The transparency and availability of information in the social media world means your audience will know more about you than they ever have before. If the information you provide on your web site is entirely mis-matched with what your prospects have learned, you will lose credibility. Use the opportunity to broaden their perspective, show them ideas they may not have been exposed to, and provide ways of framing issues that they may not have thought of.
3. Understand their buying process. Use your interaction with the prospect to gain an understanding of where they might be in their buying process. What they search for, what they look at, and what they respond to gives you great insights into where they are in their buying process and where they are not. Work to understand whether they are educating themselves on your space, comparing you against a competitor, or evaluating one of your products against a very specific need. Terracotta did a great job of this as seen in this case study.
4. Match your marketing to their buying process. Match how you communicate with your prospects to both their timeframe and their interests. If they are in an education and awareness phase, high level nurturing on the main concepts in the market area are often best. If they are mainly interested in customer case studies, ensure they are aware of any upcoming customer webinars. When they are ready to discuss how to purchase and negotiate contracts, help put them in touch with the appropriate salesperson.
5. Keep interest high through nurturing. Buyers obtain a variety of views and opinions through their exploration of social media resources. However, if you have identified their interests, and understand where they are in their buying process, you can add value to them by sharing ideas, insights, and resources. By doing this, you'll be able to keep the prospect funnel from leaking.
6. Only sell when they are ready to buy. Only connect salespeople with buyers who are ready to be connected to a salesperson. If you connect them too early, you will offend the prospect and waste the time of the salesperson. Lead scoring, based on the prospect's interest level, is necessary to understand who is ready for engagement with sales.

As B2B marketers, we don't control the conversation. However by adjusting our marketing approach to the new realities of how buyers gather information, we can help influence those buying processes. In doing so, we can add tremendous value to the organizations we serve.

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The Gambler and the Perfect Path; Retrospective Determinism in Marketing Analysis

Let’s say that your organization gets one of those “ideal” client wins – great logo, fair price, smooth sales process. If you’re like most, one of the things that you’ll probably ask is “how did we market to that organization such that the sales process went so well”. I think that’s one of the more dangerous questions that is being asked today. The reason I think it’s so dangerous is that it can lead to the slippery slope of thinking that the success can be replicated like a prescription. It can’t.

Taking a single, ideal, outcome, and then looking for a “perfect path” through a very chaotic, chance-driven process is what Nassim Taleb, in his book The Black Swan calls “retrospective determinism”. The problem with it, is that it ignores the vast number of data points from people who started the process, but did not end up as the ideal client win. Those who did not end up as an ideal client win do not make a story that is at all interesting, so their story does not get told with the same enthusiasm as the story of the ideal client win.

It’s a lot like the gambler who writes a book on his or her gambling strategy. The only gambler who would write such a book, by definition, is the gambler who was able to achieve success. Those who did not succeed at gambling are highly unlikely to become authors on the subject. The gambler will write about the successful strategy, and the proof is in the winnings. The problem is that because only a winning gambler would write the book, there is no way to tease apart the effects of strategy and blind luck.

B2B marketing is in a similar situation when looking for the “perfect path”. It is an amalgamation of 100s if not 1000s of influences that cause a client to buy a product of any reasonable size. We can analyze individual efforts in the chain, and look at certain measurable aspects to see how well they performed (on those measurements) compared to similar efforts. However, when we attempt to look for the “perfect path”, we are fooling ourselves into thinking that we have more control of a process than we really do.

In each marketing interaction that you have with a prospective buyer, many factors are well outside of your control or knowledge. What is happening in their organization, their mood, whether they are distracted by another thought at that moment. At a high level we can see one campaign performing better or worse than another in general, but predicting whether a given individual will respond to a campaign in a certain way is not possible.

So, the advice I always give to people who are looking for the “perfect path” in B2B marketing – don’t. Optimize individual tactics, look for which campaigns were the best contributors in general to results, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there is one perfect path through your marketing messaging that is waiting to be found. The world is too random for that. Read More...

Blessings...

While here at my mom's house she pulled out the dress that I was blessed in as a baby. Not only me, but my sister's Sarah, Becca, Eliza and Emma...and my nieces, Margie and Alana. We are going to use it for Bella when she gets blessed one of these next Sundays by my brother, Ray.

Mom wanted photos of her in it...She was just too beautiful in this simple little dress...the bonnett was what I wore. We made the headband with the centerpiece (the green stone) that was a button from my Great Grandma Dot.

I love my family...So many blessings...


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Happy Valentine's Day

It's Snookum's day...

Roses are red, Violets are blue
Tu-lips are for kissing...
Woooooohoooooo!



Happy Valentine's Day!

Bella and her "biggest fan" - cousin Ammon.


Thanks to daddy for the kissing bandit bear. We LOVED it and it was such a nice surprise!


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Celebrations everywhere!

Today, Friday, February 13th is...

**Alana's 7th Birthday
**Grandma Annie's 1/2 birthday
**Grandma Annie and Pagah's 1/2 Anniversary
**Bella's 3 month birthday

What a great time we had!

Alana's big party!


Bella and Pagah just hangin' out...


Birda telling Bella happy 3 months today!


Hello! I'm 3 months old today!
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As smart as I consider myself...

I sure am dumb.

I've been agonizing over this dumb universal charger I purchased for use in the car during my travels and for the past 24 hours I've been trying to get my battery charged...but I couldn't figure out the way it was supposed to go.

I was just about to take it back to Target and give them a talking to and rail on the company and the broken charger when I realized...duh, Anna...TURN THE BATTERY OVER to match the positive/negative icons on the charger...

I know this doesn't make sense to most readers out there, but I was just supremely humbled by the nitwit fairies.

Doh! Read More...

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

The buyers are in control, we all realize that. But it's significantly more difficult to market when we acknowledge that it's a buying process not a selling process, as it is very difficult to know where the buyer is in their buying process at any moment in time. Without that knowledge, it's very difficult to deliver the right message to that buyer.

Jeff Hartley and the team at Terracotta faced that exact challenge, and used a very interesting approach to lead scoring in order to categorize their buyers based on where they were in their buying journey. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with Jeff while writing Digital Body Language, and hopefully you'll enjoy this case study as much:

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

As a leading open-source software company, Terracotta has a challenge that most marketers would gladly choose to manage: too many leads. However, that wealth can create problems when you only have a few direct sales professionals. Those leads were generated from interest in a very strong, full-featured, open-source
version of its software – but which were ideal prospects to target for commercial service offerings?

The Terracotta marketing team turned to lead scoring to allow them to understand the process their buyers went through in understanding and evaluating their products. First, they categorized the buyer’s journey into a path called RESITD – Recognize, Evaluate, Sample, Integrate, Test, Deploy. Lead scoring was used to categorize each buyer in this buying path. The key metrics of each phase differed, depending on the likely approach a buyer would have:

• Recognition: Awareness metrics such as the number of visits


• Evaluate: Reading of introductory documents on Terracotta benefits


• Sample: Downloading of the Terracotta open source product


• Integrate: Forum activity, application-specific integration documents, or
  downloading of pre-packaged integration modules


• Test: Reading of detailed tuning guides, sample test plans


• Deploy: Reading deployment guides, reading about enterprise subscription or deployment services, and “phone-home” capabilities in the software itself

This framework allowed Terracotta to map and guide the buyer’s journey, even in an environment where direct interaction with the end purchaser was quite rare. Sales professionals at Terracotta were provided with deep insights into the buyer stage for each of their accounts, and were sent real-time notifications as buyers progressed from one stage to another.

Over 6 iterations, the Terracotta team continually refined their algorithms for understanding their audience. Insights such as a tight focus on recency and frequency as factors in evaluating any sign of interest came from this iterative refinement process. Evidence of a need for the high scale clustering software that Terracotta provides could be deemed out of date if it was more than a few months old, due to the changing nature of buyer needs. This detailed, automatically-created map of a buyer’s journey allowed their sales team to focus on the key prospects who were ready to move forward with a purchase, and allow marketing to guide the evolution of the others.

Understanding the buying process is a critical thing to focus on in B2B marketing, and Jeff and the team at Terracotta have done a great job of mapping it out and scoring prospects to understand their stage. Read More...

Interview with The Funnelholic

I had a great chat the other day with Craig Rosenberg, better known as "The Funnelholic", based on his popular blog The Funnelholic (and of course to all of us on Twitter as @funnelholic). Craig is a great guy, fun to chat with, and smart as a whip when it comes to the challenges of managing the top of the funnel.

Our conversation ranged across a number of topics, from the evolution of social media and its B2B marketing applicability, to measurement and the challenges of today's CMO. I got a lot out of our conversation, and I hope you will too.

From my conversation with Craig Rosenberg, the Funnelholic:

Steve: Will social media scale? As it increases in popularity, the 1 to 1 conversations become increasingly more difficult to maintain, and the top names in social media are evolving towards a bit more of a 1 to Many communication model (although many are exerting great effort to maintain as many relationships as they can). Where do you see this evolving to?

Funnelholic: This is a complex question not only for me but for everyone. As I mentioned in my post, Fear of a Twitter Planet (http://www.funnelholic.com/2009/02/04/fear-of-a-twitter-planet-the-11-things-i-know-about-the-twitter-phenomenon/), if I could give the state of the union on social media, I could achieve “internet fabulous” status. I am not there yet.

But your question has a number of interesting elements to it. First of all, is the 1-to-many model bad? Yes, platforms like Twitter are becoming 1-to-many, but that is the whole point. I never thought of a Twitter as a place to house my 1-to-1 connections, although as a result I have had a number of them. To me Twitter is a new broadcast platform. Let me put this in perspective, I spent a year getting hundreds of readers to my Funnelholic blog (http://www.funnelholic.com/), 5 years getting 600 connections on LinkedIn, and a year getting 600 members to my LinkedIn group “Friends of the Funnelholic.” It took me 1 month to get 1,000 followers on Twitter and growing. My buddies in audience development are saying that blogging is dead and sites like Twitter is where it is at. From a promotional aspect, the 1-to-many benefits are great.

Whatever 1-to-1 communication that is lost will be picked up by someone. The Internet runs like a free market -- if there is demand someone will fill it. Facebook continues to have great 1-to-1 relationship capabilities, and LinkedIn has a ton of potential in this area.

As far as b2b marketing and social media, there is the promotional aspect I mentioned above. I can see marketing automation software watching b2b buyers’ social media behavior and incorporating this into scoring and sending customized, relevant tweets or messages.

Steve: Many B2B organizations are getting involved in social media, but as they do, the media shifts and becomes much more commercialized. There have even been recent reports of teens leaving Facebook. Do you think that there will be a clear distinction between purely “social” social media sites and sites where there is more commercialization as we evolve? Or will these lines remain blurred?

Funnelholic: First of all, I haven’t seen reports of kids leaving Facebook. All I see are kids (and by kids, I mean from preteens to 20s) using Facebook and using it ALL the time. I watch the twentysomethings in my office and they live in Facebook -- that is, message their friends, trade links and videos, sign for events, etc. In many ways, for that generation, Facebook is more important than Google.

Commercialization is the biggest problem for social media. For all the traffic and frequent visits, Facebook and LinkedIn should be making billions of dollars but they aren’t. And Twitter hasn’t even shown the market that they have any plan for making money (except probably by getting bought). In your first question, you asked about scale. To me, the ability to commercialize is the biggest impediment to scale. If these organizations can’t figure out how to make money, then social media can’t scale. So, the lines have to blur, but visitors will resist if their social media platform is ALL commercial. If anything, LinkedIn and Facebook have risen quickly for a lot of reasons, but one of them may be their ability to keep the spammers out. The trick: make money without intruding on user experience.


Steve: As marketers continue to refine their ways of measuring their success at the top of the funnel, will we see more standard CMO reporting on their successes (similar to the standard reporting that sales, finance, and operations usually does)? What do you think those CMO metrics will be?

Funnelholic: For the record, I believe marketing will always have fuzzy math. No one can argue that brand and thought leadership isn’t vital to corporate sales success, yet it will and always remain difficult to quantify. And furthermore, the fact that today’s buyer takes 29 touches before they buy means marketing will have to continue to perform a lot of activities that aren’t specifically recorded in ROI. An example: you “buy” a whitepaper lead from an online media source, you begin your marketing automation processes and after watching 2 webinars, talking to a sales rep, reading your blog, etc., it ends up becoming part of the pipeline. As sales is selling, marketing is still working in providing sales tools, pushing the latest article about the CEO, and so on. These are critical elements to one’s marketing department and not easily quantifiable.

That being said, I think the key metrics are:

1. Cost-per-opportunity. Opportunity means pipeline opportunity.
2. Total pipeline dollars created by marketing programs

By focusing on these two metrics, marketing has essentially done “their” job. If sales isn’t doing theirs (closing business), marketing should not be punished. Also, by focusing on cost-per-opportunity and pipeline dollars, it gives marketing flexibility to spend on important, but less-quantifiable, activities that are critical to the marketing funnel.

We can’t ignore ROI. By ROI I mean, marketing spend that turns into real revenue for the organization. The problem with is ROI is that marketers are at the mercy of the sales team. It’s one of the metrics that aggravates the “Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus” dichotomy (http://www.funnelholic.com/2008/11/18/sales-is-still-from-mars-and-marketing-is-still-from-venus/). But I realize it is a reality, so if you must, keep one thing in mind: Time. If ROI is measured too early, than marketing will fail. This is the reason we put marketing automation into place in the first place is that buyers take a LONG time. (especially now). Nurturing has to be factored into ROI, so if you are watching ROI, make sure you watch it over time because it will grow.

What is most important is that marketers have moved away from the “look what I made” marketing strategy of judging oneself by beautiful design, copy, cool booth design at trade shows, etc. Those days are not over (as long as they convert), but aren’t the way to prove your value. The numbers are.

Steve: People still buy emotionally. As we push towards ever-increasing measurability of our marketing efforts, how do we avoid not investing in some of the marketing programs that are less measurable, but might generate the emotional hooks that motivate buyers.

Funnelholic: Well since the theme is social media, I will give this question a “LOL” -- laugh out loud, for the uninitiated. I talk about this above. Everyone assumes as a demand-generation guy, I don’t see the benefits of the entire non-quantifiable marketing mix. Well I do, and this why in the above I believe in creating metrics that can incorporate these types of elements. Here is what I believe every marketing department should have in place in 2009:

1. An optimized lead-management process: This includes humans AND marketing automation. None of your marketing elements will work as well as they should without both. So to recap, these are the elements:
a. A lead-qualification team: In place to convert and qualify leads before reaching sales
b. A marketing automation system: Designed to support the lead-qualification process with a coordinated nurturing program. (Nurturing in my mind begins the minute a lead enters your lead-management system.)
2. An aggressive lead-generation process: This is designed to feed the lead-management process and should include a diverse portfolio of lead sources. You should buy from a variety of different sources to feed your marketing funnel. Your ultimate gauge should be conversion and whether lead sources help you achieve your cost-per-opportunity goals not just CPL. These sources include online media sites, Google Adwords, and so on.
3. A diverse offer set: Offers support all of the processes above, and they include whitepapers, webinars, online video, etc. All of your prospects have different preferences for “how” they like their marketing, so make sure you have something for them
4. Branding and thought leadership support: Marketing departments should include blogging, social media, speaking engagements, and PR. By the way, there are marketing vehicles that incorporate a number of your marketing goals. For example, webinars are a great way to achieve all four goals above: quantifiable lead generation, nurturing, thought leadership, and branding.

I think trade shows should come out of the sales budget. They don’t drive leads and cost a lot of money. They are really good for face-to-face contact with current customers and to create business development deals. Print is dead, too, and shouldn’t be part of one’s mix anymore.

Steve: As marketers focus on responding to buyer interest at the top of the funnel rather than large outbound campaigns, the need for different skillsets in marketing is growing. Where do you see the biggest change in marketing skills/roles in the next 5 years?

Funnelholic: Metrics has changed every business in the organization and marketing is the big one. I have already seen marketing departments start to have more “geeks” in the organization. There are essentially three kinds of “geeks”:

1. SEO/SEM geek – Everyone has one now, and I don’t blame them.
2. Lead management geek – As the marketing automation revolution continues on, it has created a new role in the organization to manage these processes
3. Metrics geek – A lot of times, the person who does No. 1 or No. 2 above also does overall metrics, but the point is, a lot of organizations have a metrics and optimization functions now.

I’m using “geek” as a term of endearment here, by the way, not as derogatory. All in all, every marketer will have to be metrics-centric to survive. I am seeing more and more, consumer-focused Internet marketing folks getting jobs in b2b organizations because they can bring the type of rigor that is needed to be compete.

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In Utah...days four, five and six!

We've had so much fun so far in Utah. Mom and Marlowe have been rockstar hosts and gave us lots of room, warm blankets, our own bathroom, a playpen for the baby and basically the run of the house. :)

Its snowed almost every day and is really cold outside, but its still been nice to just get away.



That first night Eliza and Alana came to visit us. Ammon was home with daddy and Marrick...poor little Marrick is sick so he can't come play with Baby Bella.



Alana fell in love with her new little cousin. Eliza said it was the first time she'd seen her "play" with a baby...





Ammon came over the next day in his very cool superman outfit. He had to show us how he could fly. Grandma Annie looks like she is getting the fright of her life. Ha ha ha...





And, as for him and Bella...while he was shy with her he told his mom, "Hey mom, I think *Abella* is cute." He eventually warmed up to her from just touching her toe, to a hug on day two and an actual KISS today. Its adorable to watch him...and now he just doesn't want to leave her side.





Auntie Eliza brought over her crafty stuff and we made about 15 new headbands for Bella. They are sooooo cute and are big enough to grow with her little head.



So far...even though we really miss Daddy...as if you can't tell...we're having a GREAT time.




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