From SXSW to ISBM: Where Tech is Leading Us

Last week I had the opportunity to attend two conferences that spanned the horizon of marketing. I went from “hoodies” at SXSW to “blue blazers” at the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) Winter Member Meeting

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Attendees at SXSW Interactive were young digital marketers, at the early stage of their careers. The ISBM crowd was comprised of mostly senior-level executives with 20 to 30 years of experience working for established companies.

Below are some insights from both of the events:

  • Marketing is a tech wonderland. I had the chance to wander the event floor at SXSW, marvel at all of the new technologies, play with new apps, as well as attend a couple ofsessions by new tech vendors. The theme of the ISBM event was Analytics & Analysis, and I got more than my fair share of data analytics, business intelligence, econometric modeling … you name it. If you still think that half of your marketing budget is wasting away, but you don’t know which half, you’re behind the times.
  • Analytics and dashboards are foundational. I saw a great presentation by Dell, which showed how the company has now mapped buyers across the buying process, complete with understanding their needs, time spent at each stage and how to optimize the experience. Likewise, Wesco and Teradata shared a wonderful journey of how Wesco put into place the tools needed to become a data-driven marketing group, enabling the company to tie its activities to business outcomes, or in this case, revenue. From what I heard and saw, companies have built the foundation to pull, analyze and report marketing performance data. Some have even made the leap into forecasting and predictive modeling.
  • Investment is still a challenge. A thread ran through the ISBM event concerning the challenge of securing the funding to buy new marketing tools and/or staffing teams. Despite several speakers presenting solid case studies with clear ROIs, they were still challenged with getting the support and funding needed to continue making progress.

After having time to digest the week’s sessions, I still had a few lingering questions in my mind concerning what I heard and saw. For example:

  • Is there a lack of organizational acceptance and/or appreciation of marketing insight and activities? The question that popped into my head regarding the funding challenge was, “Are marketers able to make the business case in a way that makes executives want to fund their request?” The other issue was marketing’s ability to communicate effectively across the organization based on itScreen Shot 2015-03-23 at 11.13.16 AMs culture. One speaker, Bill Rozier from Ciena, provided insight into how to do it effectively. Bill created a lead generation report in an easy to understand PowerPoint slide. As Bill said, “The sales team has to be able to get all the information they need in 30 seconds or less, or we’ve lost them.” Since Bill’s new report launched less than two months ago, lead reconciliation rates have gone from 13 percent to over 70 percent.
  • Is there, or will there be, a communication gap between the “Hoodies” and “Blue Blazers”? It’s not necessarily a generational one, although there is that. Rather, it’s one based on what they view to be important and valuable. I saw some great social media tools at SXSW that provided deep insights into audience engagement and buyer intent. But close to half the marketing executives at the ISBM meeting had revenue targets, and almost all had lead targets. It made me think that there may be, or may soon be, a potential communication issue between the digital-savvy “engagement and intent” crowd and the “lead and revenue” veterans. From what I saw, there is still work to be done to close the gap between social media results and the connection to key performance metrics valued by marketing executives.
  • Will marketing overplay analytics? Perhaps my biggest concern reflecting on the week is twofold. In business-to-business companies with strong product (and engineering) cultures that are empirically driven, will the utilization and reliance on new marketing tools and data limit an organization’s creativity, and/or innovation? The second concern has to do with organizations where marketing feels like they are under attack. Will marketers use their new reporting capabilities as a defense mechanism, hiding behind the data, instead of using it proactively to provide the organization with new insights and opportunities?

Despite these and other questions still weighing heavily on my mind, I did reach two solid conclusions. The first, Austin is by far the best food-truck town in the United States, and the second is that Tampa’s weather is the salve for the burn of the harsh Northeast winter — a point brought home to me as I returned from Tampa just in time for our first-day-of-spring snowstorm.

The Top 5 Posts of 2014

It’s the time of the year to look back over the last 12 months and create a “best of” list. This year I’ve pulled the most popular posts from five different sites; Adage, Business2Community, Forbes, Fortune and LinkedIn. In addition, I’ve thrown in a few other noteworthy nuggets from the year at the end of the post.

Adage Why Apple Pay Could be Huge, And It’s Not What You Think explored the potential upside of Apple Pay as an advertising platform.  It sparked the most conversation, and debate, on Twitter. Time will tell if they this strategy will come to fruition.

Business2Community5 Key Tips and DaScreen Shot 2015-01-02 at 12.45.03 PMta Points to Defend You 2015 Marketing Budget. The last post of the year required the most man hours, and it was the most reposted story of the year. It offers marketers help with their 2015 planning activities in the form of free research and benchmark data.

Forbes -the most popular and shared post of the year, Could Falling Test Scores Be a Good Thing for the US?  explores the link between test scores and success in business. It also highlights the risk associated with over emphasizing left brain analytic skill development, outlined by Sir Ken Robinson in his Ted Talk video Do Schools Kill Creativity? The endorsement of Marc Andreessen certainly played a big role in the popularity of the post.

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Fortune Are Marketers Measuring the Right Things was the first post I wrote for our new partnership with Fortune. It profiles the efforts of Ciena, a networking company, to elevate marketings role, and importance, within the organization. The post highlights an unique survey tool used to gather feedback from the sales organization on the performance of marketing (see the dashboard below).

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LInkedIn – 2014 marked my first year publishing on LinkedIn. Based on my experience so far, I’m not convince it will viable platform for content unless it becomes better policed. Too much promotional material seems is making its way on to it. At this point, I’m not sure I’ll continue to post.

That said, the most popular post on LinkedIn was also one of the most popular on Adage. The Keys to Differentiating Your Company From Others provides tips on how marketers can humanize their corporate brand to better resonate with audiences. It also identifies one of the common flaws of B2B communication – thinking that what you sell…is who you are.  Hopefully, it also helped generated a new client for a follower.

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Bonus Stuff

A couple of other noteworthy happenings from the year.

Moving on up.  

The Next Generation of Apps Will Be All About You post that ran on Advertising Age was reprinted in the Sept/Oct version of The Portal magazine, a bi-monthly publication produced by the International Association of Movers.

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Karen Walker, SVP at Cisco, highlighted my post Everything We Thought We Knew About B2B Marketing is Wrong in her presentation at this year BMA member meeting in Chicago. The post now has close to 70,000 views.

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Happy New Year!  Here’s to an exciting year to come.

Are Marketers Measuring the Right Things?

Tell me if you have heard this before; “we need more, and/or better leads.” The chances are, if you’re in hi-tech marketing you may hear it on daily, weekly and monthly basis. Why?   According to Forrester consultant Tom Grant, it’s because of the need to feed the funnel.

In his report Tech Marketers Pursue Antiquated Marketing Strategies Grant compared hi-tech firms to other industries “B2B technology companies treat marketing as an opportunity to sell new products and services to new customers.” As he stated “the product is the axis around which marketing efforts turn,” and as a result, the primary objective of marketing is to produce leads.

Similarly, marketers have long held the belief that because of sales short-term focus on making quarterly objectives, it either lacks the appreciation of, and/or the sophistication to understand anything other than lead gen, for example longer-term brand building and awareness activities.

But what if both of these viewpoints were actually wrong. What would happen if you asked sales what they valued, rather than assumed you knew the answer? How might it change how marketing thinks about its impact on the organization?

For one B2B Tech Company, feedback from the sales force is helping them refine their value to the organization. “When it comes to enabling the sales force, we’ve previously relied on what I call “measurement-by-anecdote.” Our goal with this study was to quantify what sales values from marketing so we can focus on the things that make a difference.” said Rick Dodd, SVP Marketing of Ciena, a $2 billion global optical and packet networking company.

To gain that insight the company surveyed its global sales force, including five types of sales reps covering five different account types. Over 400 sales reps provided feedback on their priorities for marketing and marketing’s performance.

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According to sales, the highest ranked marketing activities were at the top of the funnel, 92% of sales said that increasing the awareness of solutions was very or extremely important, increasing consideration was close behind at 91%, only 65% mentioned lead generation.

“Our sales force is very experienced; they understand that technology and industries change quickly. We’ve obviously been successful positioning ourselves for today’s market, and now we want to take best advantage of the big shifts in our landscape. The survey showed us that for sales to be successful, marketing has to be able to change customers and prospect perceptions,” according to Dodd.

Perhaps the most interesting insight to come out of the research, is how Ciena is now thinking about measuring and reporting marketing’s impact on the organization. “Measuring pipeline value is a struggle in our business”, said Bill Rozier, VP of Marketing. “We have long, complex sales cycles that make it difficult to isolate marketing’s impact.”And they are not alone it in that challenge. The Aberdeen Group’s recent Demand Generation study found that 77% of respondents rated visibility into lead performance across stages as very valuable, but only 43% indicated they can do thi effectively.

Instead of spending a lot of time and energy in trying to perfect an imperfect process, thecompany is focusing efforts on measuring marketing performance at the macro level. “At the end of the day, our performance is ultimately measured in sales success, so that’s what we are focusing on measuring”, said Rozier.

To do that, the company has created a quarterly dashboard from the survey. Two regional sales organizations each quarter will be asked to evaluate marketing’s performance in three areas: 1) Marketing’s contribution to sales success; 2) Marketing’s performance compared to competitors; and 3) Marketing’s contribution to the success of the organization.

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It’s a unique approach, and perhaps one that should be considered by others, because the challenge in performance management is often in defining the right metrics to drive the intended behaviors.

Ciena’s approach, as Dodd concludes, is to put the focus on the right conversation; “As we learned through the research, contributing to the success of the sales force isn’t just about one thing, it isn’t just lead gen. I appreciate that they give us credit for doing a good job when compared to competitors, but what we’re most interested in understanding is how well are we doing in enabling them to win. If the sales team rates our contributions as being valuable to their personal success, then we know we’re doing the right things.”