Buyer 3.0 (a.k.a. What Social Tells You About Buyers)

Posted by Christine on April 22, 2012 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

The klaxons are ringing in corporate halls. To use an old praise, someone “moved the cheese”.  Marketing programs are struggling to consistently produce qualified leads that convert; prospect conversations are more challenging; customer co-creation expectations are wreaking havoc on product roadmaps; and customer service has lost control as customers turn to social media and peer-groups for help.   What’s happening?  The adoption of social technologies moved the “cheese” and heralded in the arrival of Buyer 3.0.

The Definition of Buyer 3.0

Buyer 3.0 is a contextual, buyer initiated and driven relationship between the buyer and seller.  Like a four legged stool, Buyer 3.0 relationships are characterized by a consistent experience, value streams, outcome-oriented dialog, and highly relevant content.   Buyer 3.0 principles combine social science with the art of customer enablement and engagement.  You can spot a Buyer 3.0 by their six characteristics:

-          View the buying experience is a precursor of their customer experience.

-          Outcome-driven and expect to receive meaningful value at every step.

-          Thoroughly research potential purchases and alternatives long before contacting sellers.

-          Consider any inconsistencies in their buying “experience” as a warning sign that future expectations will not be met.

-          Use multiple social channels to interact with and expect sellers to be able to follow the conversation across channels.

-          Proactively share their product and seller experiences with their social graph.

Embracing Buyer 3.0

Embracing this new buyer requires organizations to go through a mind-shift in how they approach their prospect and customer relationships.  Contrary to traditional product or company centric organizations; the buyer becomes the central organizing foci of the organization.  This outward alignment to the buyer and their self-directed Buyers’ Journey, forces Marketing and Customer Service/Support to take a leadership role in delivering a consistent buyer experience. Sales, in turn, evolve from a ‘closer’ into an internal advocate for the buyer.  Success is still measured in financial terms but the focus is on the quality of the revenue.  Revenue quality is measured by how well the organization engages buyers, builds enduring relationships, buyer word-of-mouth evangelism, and frequency of repeat sales.

Buyer 3.0 practices include a combination of cultural change, new processes, and technology.

The cultural change comes in the form of new values and forms of “working” opening employees to freely collaborate with customers and the company’s ecosystem.  Collaboration is vital to integrated market constituents into product strategy, planning and measuring company and employee performance along new lines: Value, consistency, accuracy, relevance and buyer engagement, enablement and evangelism. The cultural change comes in accepting that and turning to an advantage the new shape of ‘work’ and new models of leadership.

Technology elements include support for multiple devices including mobile; big data tools to understand buyer expectations that guide contextual interaction strategies across all channels of communication to achieve meaningful conversations; unified CRM/ERP/Customer Service solutions that deliver complete 360 degree views through of buyers that is available to everyone; collaboration platforms and social communities that enable porous company boundaries; co-creation systems integrated with product management systems to integrate customers into rapid innovation processes; and social customer care platforms that identify the interactions that warrant a response and rapidly, successfully address the concern, at scale.

Buyer 3.0 is part of a larger economic transformation that is empowering the edges of organizations through the democratization of information. The technology is the easy part of this transformation; the biggest challenge is the cultural change that is required.  Cultural stumbling blocks come from perceptions that Buyer 3.0 is a marketing owned social media activity and/or a lack of understanding (mostly willingness) by company leaders to align organizations outward to their buyers’ journeys.   Like it or not, everyone has access to virtually all the same information.

Embracing Buyer 3.0 principles and tackling the transformation head-on pays off.  Lower cost of sales, accelerated sales cycles, more predictable sales, and more frequent repeat sales.   Buyer 3.0 is the competitive differentiation for the social economy.

How CMOs can use Social Tactics to Outsell Sales

Posted by Christine on March 3, 2012 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

I’m presenting a session about embracing Buyers’ Journey during DemandCon, taking place in San Francisco during March 5-7, 2012.

Big Thinkers, Wine, Lithium and the Perils of Social Change

Posted by Christine on January 17, 2012 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

The catalyst was a book launch of Lithium’s  chief scientist Dr. Michael Wu.   The location was the Prospect Restaurant in San Francisco’s trendy south of Market.  Invited was a veritable ‘whos who’ of social media bloggers and big thinkers.

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.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Posted by Christine on January 6, 2012 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

The Buyers’ Journey methodology we developed and help companies implement was born from my days as a serial CMO.   There just had to be a better way to drive Marketing ROI and pipeline.  The principles of customer centric marketing, integrated marketing and so on do little to dramatically ‘move the needle’ on understanding how B2B buyers purchase in the social era.

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)

How to Start Your Own “Arab Spring” ;)

Posted by Christine on September 18, 2011 under Uncategorized | 2 Comments to Read

The need for change is in the air; it comes up in every conversation.  Marc Benioff, Salesforce’sChairman and CEO passionately espoused change at Dreamforce.  His call to the world was that companies need to change or be left behind.   He went one step further and gave a dire warning to CEOs – change thyself or fall from grace.

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/

Mi6 and I talk Alignment

Posted by Christine on July 1, 2011 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

In this episode of the the B2B Specialists podcast Chris Herbert of Mi6 interviews me.   Get yourself a cup of coffee, tea or something stronger and enjoy the interview.

NOTE: There may be a 30-60 second commercial that precedes the interview

00:01 We learn a bit about Christine’s experience, background and her research and successes on sales and marketing alignment. Christine believes that B2B marketing is at a key junction in its evolution within companies.

02:40 Christine identifies key symptoms and causes of misalignment. They include: lack of understanding of how customers buy and want to be marketed to, obsession with internal alignment of functional groups and internal conflict caused by zero sum game budgets.

6:45 We turn the conversation to the role CEOs have to play to ensure sales and marketing alignment can be achieved. It’s a combination of past experience, culture and accountability. (For a post on this topic see below)

10:45 Christine describes the three stages companies go through in the journey to marketing and sales alignment. Knowing what stage a company is in helps determine what they need to do in order to move the needle to alignment. She uses “all hands meetings” as an example activity and when it’s best used in the alignment process. (For a post on this topic see below)

16:46 We move the conversation metrics. This was very interesting because Christine talks about what an aligned organization should be measuring. She talks about measuring end-to-end conversions, revenue diversity and outcome profitability (versus product profitability). Marketing needs to promote, communicate and position brands and solutions to specific outcomes. I’d like to explore this with Christine in another podcast because it’s very interesting. Marketing is at an important crossroad in today’s B2B organizations.

22:25 We talk about what Christine has planned next for her sales and marketing alignment research and how’s she is helping companies achieve alignment.

Related Posts:
Why CEOs Can’t Blame Marketing or Sales for Lack of Alignment
The 3 steps to marketing and sales alignment
Three Metrics to Measure Sales and Marketing Alignment
Marketing, Lead Generation and Selling to CIOs
Inside the Mind of the B2B Tech Buyer

Chris Herbert is the founder of Mi6. Mi6 is a B2B (Business to Business) marketing and business development agency dedicated to helping companies build their brands and develop commercial relationships. He is the founder of ProductCamp Toronto and the Hi-tech community Silicon Halton. He tweets under the handle @B2Bspecialist.