Mapping the Buying Process - A Framework

One of the recurring themes in this discussion has been the concept of thinking in terms of a buying process not a selling process. Many times when I speak about this topic publicly, there is general agreement in the audience, but the question of how to map a buying process often comes up. In some industries, it is significantly easier than in others, but some common techniques can be used across all industries to best understand how buyers ultimately arrive at a buying decision.

Mapping this process is more art than science in most cases, but the following question framework can help analyze how your buyers buy and if there are opportunities for better facilitating their buying processes. In each main stage of the buying process, one set of questions (below) looks at understanding whether there is a problem at all in this stage of the buying process, a second set looks at understanding how current buyers make it through that stage, and a third set looks at how your overall marketing performance could be improved in that stage.


Awareness and Education

Is there a problem: Are prospective buyers generally aware of your solution category and what it can do for their business?
- Ask industry analysts their opinion on the general knowledge of the market among likely buyers
- Survey your sales team on their experiences with initial calls
- Perform some first-hand survey research with likely buyers

What currently happens: How do existing prospects become educated about your category?
- Survey existing customers and prospects on where they read about topics in the general area of business you are in
- Analyze the traffic sources to any of your educational or thought leadership content
- Become an avid reader of industry newsletters and sites to understand their content topics and whether messages about your solution area are included

What are the options: How would prospects become aware of your category if they were not already aware?
- Look at the search results that are returned for searches on some of the terms related to pains that you solve (not terms that describe your category)
- Survey your marketing team on what events, tradeshows, and publications are well attended/read by key buyers in your industry
- Discover which industry sites discuss you and/or your competitors frequently
- Analyze which sites are referring web traffic to your site



Vendor Discovery

Is there a problem: If prospective buyers are going to find vendors to look into more deeply, are you on their list?
- Review competitor wins to understand whether you had been in consideration
- Look at the percentage of search phrases driving traffic to your site that already contain your brand or product names
- Poll your sales team on the frequency with which they were added as a last minute option, based on a cold call or chance encounter
- Analyze the percentage of leads that are originally sourced by marketing or arrived as inbound leads vs being generated by a cold call

What currently happens: How have prospects typically found you?
- Analyze the non-branded search terms that drive traffic to your website
- Poll your inside sales team on how their inbound leads heard of you
- Report on the breakdown of inquiries by source to understand what is driving early-stage inquiries
- Understand the percentage of leads in your marketing database that have been nurtured prior to becoming a qualified lead

What are the options: How would prospective buyers likely build their list of potential vendors?
- Determine whether the key industry comparison charts and analysts list your company
- Search for terms related to your category to see if your content is featured in the results
- Listen to webcasts, videos, or talks from key industry influencers to see if you are mentioned
- Act as a potential buyer and do your own "research" into solutions for the problems you solve to see if you are findable


Solution Validation

Is there a problem: When a buyer evaluates your solution, do they select you?
- Look at win/loss ratios for deals over the past few months or quarters
- Compare growth rates of your business vs competitors
- Build a discipline of analyzing losses with the sales team to understand buyer reasons
- Determine if you are ranked poorly in industry comparison charts

What happens now: How are buyers currently making their selection of a vendor?
- Analyze competitors positioning of your organization and your solutions
- Conduct third party win/loss surveys to obtain deeper information on buyer decision criteria
- Scan search phrases that include your brand or product names to look for objections or decision criteria
- Look at the marketing resources (whitepapers, case studies, free trials) currently being actively used by buyers to understand their current experience

What are the options: How can buyers’ decision process and decision criteria be better influenced?
- Identify key analysts and influencers who guide the market on how to think about key decision factors
- Map buyer objections to changes in buying criteria or positioning that can be inserted into nurture marketing efforts
- Audit common objections against current marketing assets to determine if gaps exists that would be better filled with a different marketing asset such as a free trial


This is, of course, just a framework for thinking about the problem. Every organization, and every industry, deals with a slightly different set of buying challenges. However, this framework can be quite useful for identifying gaps, challenges, or opportunities in the way your audience currently buys.

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Renewal Marketing and Social CRM

Much of our discussion to date on this blog has focused around the new purchase scenario. However, in today’s world, the focus on existing business is often equally or more important. I’m not even referring specifically to the economic climate, although that enhances the focus. I’m referring to the general shift towards both a market-controlled reputation through social media, and a shift towards recurring revenue models in many industries.

As social media gives everyone in the market a voice, brand reputation becomes more and more in the control of the market. This reputation guides future purchase decisions of your prospective buyers, as it is usually both more prevalent and more trusted than the messages that your own marketing department can communicate.

As I’ve worked with clients in many industries, there is an increasing emphasis placed on marketing communications that target existing customers. The motivators vary from industry to industry, but regardless of whether it is an information subscription in the publishing industry, or a software purchase from a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor, the general reasons are as follows:

- Initial Engagement: Get the customer initially engaged in the product, and up the deployment/first use curve as quickly as possible in order to maintain the momentum of their initial purchase and ensure that successful usage of the service takes place.

- Success/Depth: Engage the customer in progressively deeper and more advanced capabilities or usage patterns in order to ensure they are receiving (and recognizing) maximum value from the service.

- Stickiness: Drive adoption patterns within an organization, or integration points within a set of corporate systems that both add value and increase “stickiness” on renewal by making the solution a more integral part of the business.

- Community: Introduce the customer to other customers in the community to share experiences, ideas, and best practices, both with each other, and also back to the vendor in order to enhance understanding of where the solution needs to evolve towards.

The marketing communications to drive customers through these phases of success are one element, but likewise, so is the Social CRM platforms that allow the customer community to interact with each other, and with you.

Next week (Tuesday, September 15th, 1 EST), I’m honored to be on a panel to discuss the evolution of Social CRM with none other than Geoffrey Moore from the Chasm Group. In a panel put together by Helpstream, I’ll discuss the evolution of Social CRM, and whether it has crossed the chasm to the mainstream with Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, and Brent Potts, Vice President of Hewlett-Packard:

http://info.helpstream.biz/Crossing-the-Chasm-to-Social-CRM.html

I hope you can join me as it should prove to be a very interesting discussion. Read More...

Relationship Sales and Today's New Buyer

For years, the prevailing thinking in sales has been oriented around relationship sales. The idea was that by being a friendly person, a good listener, and a decent golfer, you could gain the opportunity to build trust with potential buyers. In initial conversations, sales would ask a lot of questions, learn about the prospect’s business, delve deep into areas of pain or business challenge, and finally wrap things up with a solution that was oriented to curing these pains and solving these challenges.

However in today’s world, there is often not an opportunity to have that conversation in the first place. Unless you have information of value to offer first, the chance of a prospective buyer wanting to spend an hour with you to describe their business while you ask questions is plummeting . The access to information, which was once mainly managed by sales, is now open to all. This has forever changed the dynamics of relationship selling, as the early conversations, upon which the “trusted advisor” relationship were built, are now being diligently avoided by most prospective buyers.

Now, that trust is built by educating prospective buyers early in their buying process, providing information of value to them, and establishing the credibility of knowing enough about the space to be able to solve their problems. Rather than relying on large sales teams with good golf skills, this now relies on marketing and sales teams who are able to work together closely to understand prospective buyers and educate them on topics of interest to them so they remain engaged throughout a lengthy buying cycle.

So where does that leave the discipline of Sales?

The discipline of sales is changing fundamentally, as there is a shift away from the upfront concepts of relationship building social functions and the discovery call. Sales is shifting towards being a discipline that builds trusted relationships based on providing real business value based on prospective buyers true needs and discovery based on guiding, and observing, buyers own education processes.

For those in the Atlanta area, I’m excited to be joining Rick Page, author of Hope is Not a Strategy, and Debbie Qaqish, Principal Partner at the Pedowitz Group in a luncheon and panel discussion on these exact topics. The event is on Friday, September 25th, and more information is available here:

http://success.eloqua.com/?elqPURLPage=2557

For those unable to attend this event in Atlanta, I will definitely share the ideas, thoughts, and discussions that come out of the event with the audience here.

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Best Practices for Webinars and Online Events

Online events, such as webinars, are one of the top techniques used by B2B marketers focused on demand generation. The reasons are clear:

• they are effective at generating interest and attendance
• they are not expensive, compared to in-person events or tradeshows
• a recorded webinar can be re-used as a content asset for many months
• thought leadership can be established through events that feature in-house or industry experts
• prospects appreciate the ability to attend from their desk and drop off if the content is not of interest

However, there is a difference between doing online events, and doing them well. In this video, Rhonda Wunderlin discusses the best practices for promoting the event, minimizing the registrant/attendee drop-off rate, and maximizing the effectiveness through great follow-up.




(if this does not load, please click here for the best practices for webinars and online events video)

Online events and webinars are great for lead nurturing, as they are generally non-salesy, and thus more appropriate in the early stages of a buying process. Registration and attendance also for key indicators of interest and are often used as components of lead scoring programs. Read More...

Marketing Automation: Facilitating the Conversation

I was at a conference recently where a guy was talking about Marketing Automation with a cocktail party analogy. His idea was that in a cocktail party, you don’t know what stories you’re going to tell in advance, you just get a sense of people and then tell the appropriate stories. He then jumped to a conclusion that, therefore, you could not automate your marketing as that would be like pre-scripting which stories you were going to tell at the cocktail party.

Having worked with a lot of marketers in implementing marketing automation for lead nurturing, I can say that he’s partly right and partly wrong.

If you automate a one-sided conversation, you are just alienating your audience more efficiently.

A conversation only works if your stories are of interest to your listeners. When we’re in the room, we quickly get a sense of what the people we’re talking with are interested in and tell stories accordingly. With some people at the cocktail party, we’ll talk about sports, and who’s doing well in the playoffs. With some groups, we’ll talk shop, and with some groups, we’ll entertain with tales of travel disasters we’ve experienced. All groups are not the same. We read their interest through looking at their body language and adjust our stories accordingly.

One on one, this works very well. However as marketers, we are faced with two challenges when it comes to replicating this approach in marketing.

The first challenge, we’ve dealt with quite a bit on this blog. We need to read our buyer’s digital body language to see what they are interested in. We do this through observing their response to marketing and their areas of interest. From there we leverage those observations to understand what their main area of interest is likely to be, or what role they play in a buying process. It is our way of determining what stories are most of interest to them.

Once this has been accomplished, the next challenge comes down to logistics.

That challenge is how to facilitate not just one conversation, but thousands or tens of thousands of conversations. Each person is interested in a different conversation, and will likely be turned off by stories that aren’t of interest. Compounding the challenge is the fact that we need to deliver these stories when the audience is interested, not when it makes sense for our own campaign schedule.

This is where marketing automation comes in. Without marketing automation, it’s hard to imagine being able to carry on more than a few conversations at one time, let alone thousands or tens of thousands of individual conversations.

However here’s where there is some truth to the idea that marketing automation and conversations don’t mix. If you are hoping to automatically deliver the same story to each person without any awareness of their interests, you will fail. Marketing automation that forces your audience down a single track just automates a one-sided conversation. This alienates your audience as it does not alter the conversation based on their interests.

The marketers who succeed are focused on listening first, talking second. By understanding, through their audience’s digital body language, the topics of interest to their audience, successful marketers cater the conversation accordingly. Through the understanding gained by looking at digital body language to understand interest, each person can receive stories of interest to them.

A list of stories, told in sequence regardless of audience interest, will fail just as surely at a cocktail party as it will in marketing automation. Read More...

Metaphors, Mental Models, and Nurture Marketing

Neil Davidson from the Business of Software blog had an interesting article recently on how your choice of metaphor guides how people think about a problem (http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2490288/36910714). This reminded me of a conversation I was just in with Mike Zavershnik, where we were thinking through what the right metaphor is for nurture marketing.


If you look at a very simple case, like a 30/60/90 day communications program, it seems like the right metaphor is a "timeline". At the 30, 60, and 90 day "points on the timeline", communications are sent out. But, the more robust it gets, and the more you have different nurture paths, rules, and loops, the more the metaphor changes. Now marketers tend to think about it as more of a "machine" or a "structure", ie, I have a "nurture marketing campaign" that I "add people into" - like putting quarters in a vending machine.


This presents an interesting challenge in software product design because it's all about matching the software to the way that a marketer thinks about the task. From our conversations with Eloqua clients so far, it almost seems like the mental model "flips" at a certain point as the nurturing campaign gets more robust. Very simple nurturing is thought of as a "timeline", more complex nurturing is thought of as a "machine".


It's an interesting challenge, and there isn't any definitive right answer.


Still, it's what makes building software for marketers fun, interesting, and challenging. Mike and I ended our lively discussion on the right metaphor without coming to a conclusion, interrupted - as many good discussions are - by the start of the next meeting.


I would love to hear any marketers thoughts on how they think of nurture marketing - "timeline" or "machine", and how complex the nurturing campaigns they are running are. Read More...

Enabling Sales to Thrive - 6 Things B2B Marketers Can Do

In looking at a lot of blog posts and comments from luminaries around the space, there seems to be a lot of agreement on a few of the current trends in B2B marketing. I would summarize one of the main themes as

"The buyers are in control, and the best way to connect with them is to provide
great content, relevant at any key part of the buying process, make this
content discoverable, use it to nurture their interest over time, and then
understand who is ready to buy by understanding their activity."

But that leaves an interesting question. How do you best enable your sales team in this environment, given that their historical control over a "sales process" has disappeared, and they must now shift to a role of guiding a "buying process". Especially for target accounts, or high-value prospects, your sales team will want to be involved throughout the entire process to ensure they are maximally effective.

Many successful B2B salespeople in today's environment act almost as "mini-marketers", and may engage with the right prospect over an extended (many quarters) period in order to build trust, establish a relationship, and educate their prospect until they see that there is an opportunity to engage in a selling relationship.

As marketers, we are in a unique position to enable this by understanding that salesperson's world and enabling them to do their job even more effectively.

1. Great Content: by providing ready access to the right type of messaging and content, we provide the salesperson with valuable information they can send to their prospects at each stage of their buying process. This is good, insightful, value-add content though, not filled with corporate-speak or highly promotional in nature. Make it available to them where they live - in their desktop email environment - or they likely won't bother with it.


2. Email Intros For Great Content: the marketing assets that share the valuable thought leadership are necessary, but they are often more valuable if they are passed to the prospect from their sales rep saying "I saw this and thought you might find it interesting based on our last conversation about X". As a marketing team, if you can craft a generic, authentic, email that introduces each marketing asset, and allow your sales team to personalize them to each high-value prospect, you enable your sales team to leverage the marketing assets more effectively.


3. Digital Body Language: give your sales team a way to see the inbound activity of each prospect so they can understand what their interests are, what stage in their buying process they are at, and how they might want to follow-up. Sales intuition, backed up by marketing data, is more powerful than either alone. Show this data to them in their CRM system; right where they are working.


4. Notifications: for high-value prospects, notify your sales team when activity is shown; a web visit, a signup for a webinar, a view of a whitepaper, etc. Often this will trigger an opportunity to engage with them to continue developing the relationship.


5. Scoring: When you have developed both explicit (who they are) and implicit (how interested they are) scoring processes, make this score visible to your sales team so they can understand, at a glance, how receptive the prospect will be to messaging appropriate to the next phase of a buying cycle.


6. Nurturing: Provide a way for your sales team to add their prospects to automated nurturing programs that keep them warm over time. I wrote more about Giving Sales an "Out" here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/giving-sales-out.html

For your sales team to thrive in today's buyer-controlled environment, they need to do many of the same things you do as a marketer. Providing great content, to the right person, relevant to where that person is in their buying process, and then understanding when they are ready for a deeper level of engagement is a challenge shared by marketers and sales people alike. Only the breadth and depth of the challenge differs. By repurposing your content, nurturing, and scoring systems for the narrower, yet deeper, relationships of a sales person, you enable them to thrive in today's environment. Read More...

Future Likelies and the Leaky Funnel

Ian Michiels at Aberdeen recently posted a great report on B2B marketing going into 2009:
http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/Is-the-Ship-Really-Sinking-B2B-Budgeting-for-Post-Slump-Growth-65547.html. In it, there's a stat that very few of us in B2B marketing will find surprising:

"Aberdeen research that suggested that upwards of 60 percent to 70 percent of
leads are never followed up by sales."

This is a horrific number when you consider the investments being made in order to generate these leads. Sales is commission-driven, so if they are not following up with your leads, it's likely because the leads are not turning into revenue for them.


In most cases, the problem is not that the leads being passed over to sales are inherently bad leads, in many cases they may be executives, in the right role, at companies of the right size in the right industries. The problem is that they are not currently in a buying process, and therefore are not interested in interacting with your sales team at the moment. If you've been sending this type of lead to sales for a while, it won't be a surprise to see that they don't follow up with the leads they receive.


The solution to this problem is in differentiating between a "good prospect" and a "good prospect who's interested". This comes down to looking at inbound interest level and web activity to determine whether it appears that they are the right executive in a buying cycle, or just the right executive.


It is often the case that a large number of your leads, fall into the category of "future likelies". They are the right executive, in the right role, at the right company, but you don't see the activity patterns that indicate buying interest. Nobody benefits by sending future likelies over to sales. Both your sales team and the prospect will be frustrated by a sales call where there is no buying process happening.

Instead, future likelies need to be nurtured (see post on Nurturing here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/nurture-marketing-vs-pachinko.html). Provide them with education on the market, your solutions, things that educate them and add value to their day. When a buying event happens (and with good lead scoring, you will see the signs of that buying event), you will be top of mind with them and can then get your sales team involved. Read More...

6 Ways to Get Sales to Adopt CRM Systems

As refined as today's CRM systems are, they suffer from an age-old problem; sales rep adoption. They have come a long way in terms of usability, configurability, and universal access, but the problem still remains. The good news is that we as marketers can help to tackle that problem, and in doing so, gain a lot of goodwill with the folks over in sales management.

The thing that we as marketers bring to the table is on the "carrot" rather than "stick" side of the equation. Rather than enforcing adoption through techniques such as commision hold-backs or managerial review, we have the unique opportunity to encourage adoption by making a CRM system (whether Siebel On Demand, Salesforce.com, or Dynamics CRM) into a place where sales people receive enough value to want to adopt it.

How can you do that?

1. All lead flow should be directly into your CRM system. If you have done your work on scoring and qualifying leads to the point that they are truly sales ready, then sales will be eager to receive these leads. See comments on lead scoring here for more: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html


2. Show how you're marketing to them. Sales wants to know what messages their prospects have received in order to prepare for conversations with them. Ensure your outbound communications are logged against the recipient record in your CRM system


3. Show what each prospect is interested in. What emails did they read? What did they see on the website? What searches did they do? What forms did they submit? Sales can be more prepared for a call if they know what prospect hot buttons are.


4. Show both the explicit (who they are) and implicit (how interested are they) score in the prospect's record in your CRM system. It gives a good quick perspective as to whether they are worth putting in a call to.
   
   
5. Show them their Territory visually. For each rep, show them their accounts, rolled up by Activities and Implicit Score over the past few weeks in order to give them a prioritized calling list in Red/Yellow/Green highlights.


6. Give them an out - expose one or two nurture marketing programs or lead-rewarming programs to them that allow them to drop cold leads in and have them kept warm by your marketing programs until they are ready to buy. More on that here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/giving-sales-out.html

Getting sales to successful and eagerly adopt your CRM system is a good thing for more than just the sales team. If you are looking to better understand your marketing campaigns through to pipeline and revenue, you need strong sales adoption of CRM throughout the pipeline. By giving them reasons to adopt you not only strengthen your relationship with sales management, but you help out your own ability to analyze marketing efforts.

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Nurture Marketing vs Pachinko

I had a great chat with a client the other week, and he had a very simple model for nurture marketing. It's a topic that a lot of people seem to over-think, when it comes to managing the who-has-received-what-message, and how-do-I-add-more-content issues that come up as soon as you want to make sure that everyone is nurtured BUT people aren't hit with similar messaging multiple times.

The model for this one was very simple - he called it Pachinko - the Japanese game that's half pin-ball, half slot machine, and I think I'll steal that term from him. The concept is to keep a very simple set of independant messages - the high level, educational, value add messages that you need to use in nurture marketing - and cycle prospects through the set continously like the marbles in a Pachinko machine.

The trick is that you need to manage the messaging within each box to make sure, at that level, that the person has not received the same message before. To do this, he had a simple two bucket control mechanism; people who had received the message and people who had read the message (by clicking through the email to read the full article).

Each "attempt message" breaks out into a quick routine, as pictured, and puts everyone flowing through the nurture program into "has been sent" and "has read" groups. Messages are never resent if the person has received it before (from this nurturing program, or from any other source).

The beauty of this approach though is that it is completely self-contained. You can add contacts to the program at any time, and at any place, and they will only receive the messages they have not received before. Similarly, you can add new messages to the nurture program at any time, and it will intelligently deliver them only to the right people.

The fact that this system cycles people back to the start continually means that any new content will be immediately picked up and delivered, while if they have received the content before they will receive nothing. Great for staying top-of-mind without overcommunicating, and any new connections can be added to this nurture program automatically.

Nurture marketing is a great way to stay in touch with prospects who have great potential, but are not ready to buy yet... borrowing a few ideas from Pachinko gives us an easy way to nurture without the headache of trying to manage who has seen what message.

If you're an Eloqua user, there is a more detailed view of how to build this here: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/building-pachinko-machine.html

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