The B2B buying process is now social, trust-based, transparent and self-directed with the buyer in full control. If companies want to grow in 2012 and beyond, they have will have to redefine how they engage, enable and build enduring relationships with their target markets.

The Six Laws of Social Business Transformation guide companies in understanding and aligning to their customers’ new social-based processes:

1.  Discover the Invisible.  Companies must have an in-depth understanding of the ten steps of the Buyers’ Social Framework™ for each of their target markets.
2. There are No Customers, Only Buyers.  Change the internal dialog around ‘customer’; a purchase doesn’t mean they will keep buying. Treat everyone like you need to earn their business every day.
3. Forget Value Propositions.  Ditch product feature-based messaging and change all company communications to be outcome-oriented; these will resonate with buyers.
4. Align Outward.  Instead of worrying about organization charts and zero-sum budgets, redefine roles in terms of how to engage and enable buyers and deliver value .
5. Abolish Marketing and Sales.  Buyer expectations should dictate the sales model. By combining Sales and Marketing into a single team with shared buyer-centric metrics companies can achieve greater ROI, faster.
6. Value is a Stream, Not an Event. Understand how buyers now define value throughout the relationship and align processes to fulfill those expectations; the result is an army of evangelists.

To accelerate sales cycles, B2B vendors must embrace a more socially engaged business model that includes new ways to enable prospects to achieve their goals.  Successful social businesses tightly align with their target markets’ expectations and deliver relevant value at each step in their Buyers’ Social Framework.

“Social business is more than just adopting social media and collaboration tools. Aligning the company to meet buyer expectations is the key to growth,” shares Susan Lucas-Conwell, chief executive officer of Great Places To Work Institute. “New Business Strategies’ Buyers’ Social Framework is a unique methodology to guide us through the social business transformation and more effectively enable, engage and establish, enduring relationships with our customers.”

The biggest challenge companies face is understanding what it means to be a social business. Most executives believe it is either a marketing tactic or an additional channel through which to serve customers. They view social business as a tactical ‘add-on’ versus a strategic ‘instead’.  Applying the Buyers’ Social Framework methodology enables companies to map the information buyers seek and where they go for those answers with a vendor’s marketing, sales and customer service processes.

The Buyers’ Social Framework drives faster revenue cycles because it helps vendors learn how to view themselves through the eyes of their buyers.  Companies that transform into social businesses uniquely align outward to their prospects’ and customers’ self-directed processes and expectations. The business case is an easy one – shorter sales cycles, increased pipeline velocity, and decreased cost of sales.

Find out where you are in your social business transformation by taking a free 5 minute assessment.  It will give you a score and send you a report of all your response.

Walking to dinner after flying in from Austin, TX and being up since 2am, I thought this could be a great experience or one very long night if the room was full of people talking about social marketing tactics. I was hoping for the former as I wanted to share my experiences around the Buyers’ Journey with others.

Meeting Michael Wu was a real treat because he is super smart and super nice.  The private dining room was packed with 40 other social Big Thinkers:  Deloitte, Ant’s Eye View, Altimeter Group, Alcatel-Lucent, Paul Greenberg, Edelman Digital, Tom Foremski, Gartner, to name a few because I can’t remember the rest.  See Pics here.  It was a dinner of social leaders; who carries business cards when you only need to remember everyone’s Twitter handle?  Fortunately Lithium created a Twitter list because after the wine the memory of all the Twitter handles faded rapidly.

What hasn’t faded is the memory of the astonishing conversations.  What’s been on my mind for the past several months is the growing hype around transforming into a social business.  Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon of becoming social. I hear CEOs and CMOs talk about ‘going social’ and having a relationship with their customers to serve them better.  Yet when I dig into those claims, the investments being made don’t match up.   To many the mindset of ‘going social’ is to add a few social media channels (the infamous three), start a community and have customer service/support respond to Tweets about product issues.   That view is one of social being an ‘add-on’ to existing daily workloads versus an ‘instead-of’.

My conversations around the cultural and business model changes that social transformation forces on companies was met with silence.  I had been quietly thinking I had 3 heads and 2 were on fire and people were just being polite about it, afraid to point out the oddity.  It was puzzling how companies could possibly imagine their operating model and principles unchanged by the effects of social technology.  With the buyer in control of everything from how they buy to the terms of the ‘customer relationship’ and a brand’s reputation, how could business models not change.   Why was the need for social change management, I call it “Social Change”, apparent only to me?

Or so I thought until the Lithium Big Thinkers dinner.   Every discussion, all night long, was around Social Change.    The need for business leaders to embrace the far-reaching changes that social will trigger was on everyone’s mind.  And it had this room of luminaries worried for they saw the same resistance as I do; an enamourment with the technology and a deaf ear to the accompanying change it naturally forces in culture, values, collaboration, communication, business processes and models.  I was thrilled to meet consultants and bloggers who specialized in social culture, social business change management, and redefining customer engagement.  In the midst of all these ideas and methods, the Buyers’ Journey was at home and fit nicely into the broader puzzle of transformation.

It was reassuring to hear others share the concern around Social Change. I can’t say we solved the problem on how to quickly enlighten business leaders on what lies ahead of them.  There is , thankfully, a growing chorus of credible voices drawing attention to the fact that – social business is a transformation that will touch every molecule in your organization.   Be wise and be prepared.  Or said another way, if you thought SOX compliance was transformative, “honey you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.

BTW, the book is titled “The Science of Social” and a must read.

These marketing principles are much like sales training, another artifact of yesteryear.  Do more of what ‘appears’ to work without really understanding the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’.  The Buyers’ Journey came out of trying to understand, from the prospects’ and customers’ perspective, how their approach to buying a piece of software, equipment or technology service had changed and why.

The ‘ah-ha’ came when it became apparent that what vendors thought was the beginning of a sales cycle was actually, from the buyers’ perspective, the middle-end of the buy cycle. And that the buy cycle from the buyer’s perspective was actually not a discrete step but part of a larger open-loop experience.  The expectations, definitions and mental models held by vendors and buyers couldn’t be further apart.  No wonder, lead scoring and various marketing approaches don’t significantly move the needle. A mindset change within a company about how they should engage, enable and relate to buyers will do more than any amount of technology.   That’s not to discount technology but let’s clarify it’s role – it makes the new mindset, processes, and approaches sticky.

As with anything new, understanding the ‘how’ of the Buyers’ Journey methodology takes education.  What sounds obvious and simple on the surface isn’t when someone tries to do it alone.  There a several companies that can attest to that.  To realize the promise of the Buyers’ Journey – faster revenue cycles, lower cost of sales, less churn – marketers and sales teams need to understand the methodology.

To that end, I’m doing a number of webinars to help people understand how to implement the Buyers’ Journey.  Come join me.

January 10, 2012 - ”Capitalizing on Digital Body Language”, BrightTalk Demand Generation Virtual Conference.  This session is at 8am Pacific Time. (Registration at: http://www.brighttalk.com/r/tHP)

January 17, 2012 -“How to align your marketing mix to your Buyers Journey: Solution Search Stage”, Optify ON24 webinar. This webcast will give you the how-to’s to balance your marketing mix through one of the most important parts of the buyers journey.  This session is at 10am PST. (Registration at: http://event.on24.com/r.htme=390492&s=1&k=06326016A9DAA294DCA3A1627C413667&partnerref=NB)

Driving demand that results in customers is Marketing’s primary mission. Yet Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) struggle to deliver predictable pipelines which has hurt its credibility in the Board room.  Every year, they embark on a quest to solve the same riddle with programs based on what industry analysts/experts say are effective; past experience of what yielded quality results; and a dose of new ideas to try.  In other words, there is a good amount of educated guessing going on. 

The riddle is rooted in social media’s affect on how buyers purchase.  In today’s socially engaged world, over seventy percent of the buyer’s purchase process is completed before a sales person is every contacted. The process is self-directed and leverages the transparency of markets as buyers research their problem, potential solutions and the efficacy of those solutions without needing, or wanting, to talk with a sales person. By the time the buyer engages with a sales person, they have a preferred solution, a list of open questions and a price in mind. Sales, in turn, find they have limited influence on the buyer’s process.  What most B2B marketers overlook is that the experience the Buyer wants as a customer is as important in the purchase decision as the capabilities of the product or service. If CMOs want to drive growth, they need to engage with the Buyer on their terms.

Solving the riddle requires a new mindset, one that is rooted in aligning to the Buyers Journey.  A core principle of the Buyers Journey is that everyone is a buyer all the time, even customers.  A set of organizing principles, the Buyers Journey aligns company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers.

By adopting the Buyers Journey, there is a clear opportunity for B2B CMOs to achieve two significant goals: Proactively shape the buyer’s experience and, by doing so, accelerate revenue growth.  Since the buyer self-defines their journey, it is Marketing’s responsibility to intimately understand and enable the buyer by offering the right content and calls to action through the information channels the buyer prefers at each step in the Journey.  Done correctly, vendors can achieve the twin goals as well as build the trust and credibility needed to earn preference when the buyer enters the Purchase stage.

How can marketers align to the Buyers Journey when it is largely invisible to marketers?

There are four major steps that buyers typically go through: Enablement stage: Problem Definition, Solution Search, Evaluation and Validation.

(c) 2011 NBS Consulting Group, Inc.

Buyers begin their Journey not by looking for a vendor but by understanding the issue’s root cause, exploring best practices, and learning how peers have addressed the need.  In the Problem Definition stage, buyers are doing the homework necessary to decide if and how they might want to approach solving their problem.  In the Solution Search step the organization agrees on target outcomes and success metrics, the desired approach, and any particular constraints that need to be addressed.  It isn’t until the Evaluation step that buyers being researching vendors.  Requirements have been agreed on, selection criteria are finalized, and discussions begin around the type of customer experience and lifetime value streams the organization wants.  Through social media they connect with peers and learn what it is like being a customer, if the product performs as promised, and the actual outcomes others have realized.   At the end of this step, the buyer has a short list of vendors and a preference along with a list of open questions.

Up to this point the Buyers Journey has been self-directed by choice with limited vendor involvement. At the same time the buyer’s experience has been shaped by their interaction with vendor content, social media, customers and others. As far as the buyer is concerned their experience to date defines their expectations of what it will be like as a customer.  That perceived experience may or may not reflect what it actually is like be a customer nor may it match the experience the buyer is looking for.

How can marketers align to the Buyers Journey?

The key to revenue growth is to enable the buyers by directly aligning marketing programs to the actions of buyers at each stage in the Journey. The first step is to leverage the enormous amount of data that companies have in their marketing automation, CRM and sales automation systems. Analyze the data in a data mart and look at it longitudinally.  By looking at how buyers have engaging with the company over time, a pattern emerges.  Fine tune the patterns by separating the data by industry and role/persona.  Second, augment these insights with market research. Interview customers, new accounts, and lost sales opportunities to uncover their steps in the Problem Definition and Solution Search stages.  The end result is a detailed Buyers Journey timeline map for your target markets and personas that outlines, beginning with the trigger event, the actions they took, where they went, what were they looking for, whom they ‘spoke’ with, and how they evaluated the information they found.

Next, map current marketing activities directly to the Buyers Journey map.  If marketing is currently conducting an activity that is not identified on the Buyers Journey; stop investing there.  Likewise, if buyers are looking for specific content or interactions that marketing currently does not provide; fund that activity.   There should be a one-to-one relationship between the Buyers Journey map and marketing activities.  However, alignment to the Buyers Journey is an ongoing process and the map should be updated quarterly.

The answer to the riddle of demand generation lies in aligning to buyer expectations. Only by being where buyers go and enabling their self-directed journey with value-generating interactions will companies succeed and grow.  The pay-off is well worth it:  Three to five times velocity of sales cycles and reduced cost of sales by thirty percent or more.

Location is at the Biltmore Hotel & Suites, 2151 Laurelwood Road, Santa Clara, CA 95054.

Growth in this economic rebound has a different set of rules: Markets are transparent, buying is social, products and services must be sticky, buyers place more importance on the lifetime experience than on the purchase, and they expect to realize value long before they purchase your solution.

To grow in this new economy demands that companies adjust not only how they market and sell but drive faster revenue cycles.

During this speech, learn:

• How to rev up your revenue engine by aligning marketing and sales to the Buyer’s Journey.
• Why lead generation is more important than sales capacity.
• Three key metrics for managing your lead-to-revenue cycle
• Why Service/Support has a new strategic seat at the table.

His rallying cry was for enterprises to start their own business “Arab Spring”.

Companies that do not become Social Enterprises will not survive this economic cycle.   Becoming a Social Enterprise is, however, more than just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account.  It is a transformation in how your business thinks, decides, works and collaborates.    Brought into the enterprise by the Gen Y generation, social media has since redefined relationships within, between and among enterprises from the bottom up.

It was, however, the Millenniums who forced enterprises on the path of change.  As they entered the workforce en masse, their refusal to use non-Googlesque technology and blindly follow processes dictated by corporate systems was the spark of the revolution.  The rise of mobile as the new computing platform fueled the transformation to the Social Enterprise.

Successful transformations need roadmaps otherwise how do you know how to get from here to there.  A roadmap for transforming to social selling is the Buyers Journey; a set of organizing principles for aligning company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers and market constituents.  Through an ‘outside-in’ redefinition of how a company interacts with its markets, the Buyers Journey embraces and turns to an advantage the fact that over 70% of B2B purchase cycles are self-directed, trust-based, social and invisible to vendors and suppliers.  Companies that embrace the Buyers Journey experience significantly faster revenue cycles, lower cost of sales and churn rates.

Like all transformations, the one for Social Enterprise is part people, process and technology. Changing people’s perspectives, beliefs, and attitudes about social technology is critical to the transformation.  Frankly, that is Marc Benioff’s calling and one he performs very well.

My quest at Dreamforce was to discover if the technology was there to support Salesforce’s vision.   Who were the technology vendors that help companies operationalize the Buyers Journey?  While I didn’t find any paradigm shifters, I did discover some innovative solutions.

For a review of the vendors discovered, read on at http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecrandell/2011/09/18/how-to-start-your-own-arab-spring/

The Cloud Expo exhibit floor housed over 375 exhibitors ranging from innovative start-ups like Optify to behemoths like Accenture and IBM.   With an attendee to exhibitor ratio of 120 to 1, exhibitors varied in their creativity to get you to stop and hear their pitch.  IBM offered sparkly balls and nifty Watson t-shirts, someone was giving out lighted red-rimmed “sunglasses”, chocolate (my primary food group) abounded, and enough pens where handed out to ensure there will be no shortage of writing instruments for the next millennium.  All was for the taking if you agreed to have your badge scanned.  Based on the constant crowd in the exhibit hall, the takers abound.

Dreamforce attendees were from the business/corporate crowd with one-third to half being women.  Therefore, it seemed out of place to see a number of lovely young ladies suggestively dressed – A.K.A booth babes.

Pardot, a marketing automation vendor, had them dressed as flight attendants to promote a trip giveaway to drive booth traffic. Neolane, also a marketing automation vendor, had them roaming the exhibit floor dressed in boy shorts with the company’s booth number on their t-shirts (at least it wasn’t on their rears) and some other vendor had them passing out chocolate bonbons.  When asked what the company they were promoting did, the stares were blank followed by “Can I scan your badge?”

The most senseless Booth Babe encounter was on the morning of the third day as I was threading my way to the Starbucks next to Moscone West to jump-start my brain.  There on the corner of 3^rd and Howard were three lovely young ladies dressed in skimpy ‘French maid’ outfits that had to have come from Fredrick’s of Hollywood.   I’m not sure what caused more cognitive dissonance – that some VP of Marketing thought this was a good investment or that said VP allowed these ladies to stand in the fog visibly shaking from the cold.  No one paid attention to them as people streamed past.

What is the return on investment on booth babes?   The responses to an impromptu poll varied from increased badge scans, even though these may not be legitimate leads, to an increase in mindshare as evidenced by me writing about them.  Touché on the last point but I’m not sure that’s the kind of mindshare the marketing teams had in mind.

Marketing’s challenge is credibility and relevance at a time when the discipline is expected to demonstrate how it delivers financial results in a market where the traditional B2B buy cycle has been radically redefined by social technologies.   B2B buying is largely a self-directed journey outside of the control of vendors and Sales.

What are Buyers looking for?  They want an experience and realize value that is indicative of what it’ll be like as a customer.  Instead of titillating the buyer with something they can’t have (or may not want), educate them by placing meaningful content at the places, real and virtual, that buyers frequent.

Offer them easy to use free products through which the buyer can realize value as they learn how to use the solution.  Build a deep social database of your target buyers and prospects so that, as marketers, you can better understand what is important to them while providing Sales meaningful context so their conversations are relevant, impactful and worthwhile. Teach Sales to talk about outcomes versus features and functions.  Partner with Service/Support to purposefully craft the experience buyers will have over their lifetime as a customer. Lastly, partner with your CEO to help them reshape the company culture and processes to align all roles outward to the Buyer instead of inward to each other.

Tradeshows are a step in the Buyers Journey. Buyers are looking to experience the product and gauge the knowledge of company representatives.  More importantly, Buyers see these types of events as an opportunity to understand the values and culture of a vendor. At Dreamforce, the best lead generation was done by Hubspot, an inbound marketing software vendor.  Booth staff dressed in day glow orange running suits and invited attendees to an “unbooth” comprised of a series of tables to compete in a quiz based on their product.  In a short amount of time the Buyer experienced the product, its ease of use, and met some smart people.

If you had any follow-on questions, a Hubspot employee was easy to find, just look for the orange running suit – low sex appeal but high on the ROI scale.

The atmosphere in the convention center before each morning’s keynote reminds me of the energy you feel before a rock concert or a San Francisco Giants game. Pre-show entertainment included roving interviews with customers like Autodesk, Nissan, NBC Universal, and celebrities like Neil Young against a backdrop of heavy bass music from a DJ mix. You know the music; the kind you hear at a baseball or football game. Folks lined up hours early to get a seat in front to be that much closer to Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO and Chairman. The pre-game tailgate party was donuts and coffee in the brisk fog of San Francisco. The energy was palpable. Bloggers in the ‘Pound’ flexed their fingers warming up in order to tweet and blog as fast as they could in order to be the first one with the quote, announcement or insight.

It’s well known that Marc Benioff’s role model is Steve Jobs and his goal is to create a cult following – for him and the company. With 45,000 record-breaking attendees, over 300 partners exhibiting, and 475 breakout sessions this event is evidence that he’s achieved that. Salesforce’s success is impressive with $2.1 billion in revenue and over 100,000 customers processing over 36 billion transactions per quarter. This is the poster child in the SaaS industry as the company to model.

The keynote hall throbbed with anticipation and every attendee’s secret hope was that Benioff would stop and shake their hand as he customarily does during his roving keynotes. Finally the room goes black and the crowd erupts into a roar; the King is coming.

This year the message was the Social Enterprise and the need for a social revolution.

Read the rest of this post on Forbes at http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecrandell/2011/09/03/salesforce-com-ceo-calls-for-a-business-arab-spring/

Mark and I spent a lot of time talking about the Buyers Journey. His experience in aligning to the Buyer proved that the methodology not only demonstrable accelerates revenue cycles but also reduces Cost of Sales. But that is a topic for a different post. What initially interested me in talking with Mark was their new Cloud Extend product.

Mark positioned it as a product that is “the best use case for Active Endpoints’ technology”. In Mark’s words, Cloud Extend solves two problems: Enabling Sales to effectively help prospects through the Buyers Journey, and help keep all that data in any Salesforce instance current and complete. That is probably very true but I saw a very innovative solution to a pesky old problem.

Every had the challenge of getting your sales teams to actually use Salesforce.com or keep all their data current? Or hear the complaint that they won’t use different systems to do a variety of tasks such as contract management or check on a trouble ticket? Onboarding new sales reps and getting them to be revenue productive in a short amount of time is another real challenge for most companies, especially those selling complex products. These are some of the problems that Active Endpoints addresses with Cloud Extend.

Cloud Extend is a Salesforce.com application that enables users to create role-based, workflow driven Guides that are embedded in Salesforce.com. What is interesting is that the Guides are easy to setup, use, requires no training and has applications across the company from Sales to Human Resources. The Guides prompt users through their tasks with questions along with offering best practices and helpful tips. Answers to the questions automatically populate Salesforce.com.

There are countless ways to use Cloud Extend to streamline operations and to align organizations. One application is to take your sales methodology and sales tools and embed them into Guides. Another is to embed outbound or inbound call scripts in Guides. Users follow the work flow driven questions, automatically populate Salesforce with data, and learn best practices along the way. Cloud Extend has one capability that I think is pretty cool, it auto populates a new Salesforce contact with any public data that is available from LinkedIn, Facebook, Jigsaw, etc. including pictures.

The uses of Cloud Extend Guides are limited only by your imagination and number of documented business processes. Cloud Extend (www.cloudextend.com) is priced at $50/user/month and is marketed to Sales Operations, Product Marketing, Marketing, Inside Sales and Sales Management.

If you’re at DreamForce, Active Endpoints is booth 8; well worth checking out.

The Quest is to understand how IT vendors help companies discover and align to their Buyers Journey. Do vendors understand this transformation and what products support sales and marketing in understanding their target markets’ Buyers Journeys?

How B2B buyers buy today mirrors B2C; the buying process is self-directed, social, transparent and trust based. This change in the B2B Buyers Journey has resulted in a crisis for many companies. With 75% of the buy cycle completed before the buyer ‘raises their hand’, vendors no longer wield the influence they once had. Marketing’s role has changed from Sales’ advocate to Buyer enabler; a role it does not fully understand. The result is revenue cycles are challenged and customer churn is on the rise as buyer expectations frequently differ from their actual experience.

To prepare for this massive show, I researched every exhibitor (desperately) wishing there was an automated way of doing this.  There are hundreds of exhibitors spanning everything from security vendors to marketing automation, presentation tools, API connectors, to integration consulting firms, contract management, and sourcing/procurement vendors.   DreamForce has morphed from a vendor conference into a something akin to Comdex, in its hay day.

The result is that out of hundreds of exhibitors I identified 34 vendors I wanted to talk to, each either addressed some part of or espoused the principles of the Buyers Journey.   Out of the 34, I booked interviews with 17 vendors:

• Eloqua
• Hubspot
• Pardo
• Silverpop
• TeamSupport
• Optify
• Active Endpoints/Cloud Extend
• 360Vantage
• Seesmic
• Merced Systems
• Lattice Engines
• Genius
• eTrigue
• BranchIt
• Reachable/7Degrees/Peoplemap (one of these is the company name)
• Manticore Technology
• Angel

Marketo is not on the list because I’m already talking to them.

Interestingly, I booked these interviews not through Salesforce’s DreamForce Chatter tool but either through Twitter or LinkedIn.   I found that most exhibitors and company representatives are not logged on to Chatter which is too bad as they missed an real opportunity to engage with attendees and people looking to network.

The result of my Quest for the Buyers Journey will be posts here and at Forbes.   I’m hoping to find vendors that understand how B2B buying has changed and have real solutions focused on engaging, influencing and enabling buyers throughout the Journey.

Armed with comfortable shoes, my digital recorder, and Evernote on my iPad I’m ready to face 42,000 attendees.