Posted by Christine on April 22, 2012 under Uncategorized | 
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.
Tags: alignment, b2b, B2B buying, B2B marketing, buyer 3.0, buyers journey, CEO, CMO, collaboration, Crandell, customer experience, demand generation, leadership, managing, marketing, marketing campaign, marketing rules, marketing strategies, new economy, revenue, sales, sales & marketing alignment, sales enablement, social business, social media, social revolution, social selling, social technology, strategy
Posted by Christine on March 3, 2012 under Uncategorized |
I’m presenting a session about embracing Buyers’ Journey during DemandCon, taking place in San Francisco during March 5-7, 2012.
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| San Francisco (I-Newswire) March 3, 2012 – WHAT: Christine Crandell, president of New Business Strategies and co-founder of NBS Consulting Group will be the presenting a session about embracing Buyers’ Journey during DemandCon, taking place in San Francisco during March 5-7, 2012.
The Buyers’ Journey is a set of organizing principles for aligning company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers.
The session will discuss about how in today’s socially engaged world, more than 70 percent of the buyer’s purchase process is completed before a sales person is even involved. By the time the buyer chooses to engage with a sales person, they have a preference, a list of open questions and a price in mind.
The 45 minute session will cover New Business Strategies’ unique methodology, the Sellers’ Compass™ Approach, that shows marketers a step by step approach to turning social media into sales by:
• Overcoming growth obstacles in a socially engaged world
• How CMOs can increase their Revenue Cycle
• How to aligning Sales and Marketing Teams according to their Buyers’ actions
With more than 25 years of marketing and leadership experience, Christine Crandell, President at New Business Strategies, is a recognized thought leader, practitioner, and author regarding social business, marketing and corporate strategy. Christine’s Forbes blog, “Outside the Box” focuses on the issues and best practices that CEOs and CMOs use to drive faster revenue growth in the social economy.
Christine Crandell has more than 25 years of executive management, marketing and business development experience in technology. As President of New Business Strategies, an international B2B market strategy consultancy, she leads client services team serving clients including Good Technology, Oracle, DotNetNukeand McKesson. Christine sits on several advisory boards including Coupa Software and Social Dynamx.
Her career included serving as Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Accept Corporation and as Executive Vice President of Marketing, Business Development and Alliances at Egenera, where Christine was responsible transitioning the company from a hardware model into a pure-play Software company. Prior to that, she served as chief marketing officer at Ariba where she led the transition from an on-premise to a leading SaaS software vendor. Christine has also held management positions with SAP, Oracle and PriceWaterhouse.
WHEN: Tuesday, March 6th at 11:30am to 12:15
WHERE: 55 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. For reservations please call: 1-800-228-9290 Register at www.demandcon.com |
Tags: B2B marketing, buyers journey, CEO, CMO, conference, Crandell, customer experience, demand generation, Demandcon, expert, marketing, marketing campaign, marketing council, marketing operations, marketing rules, marketing strategies, marketo, new economy, revenue, sales, sales & marketing alignment, sales enablement, social media, strategy, tradeshow
Posted by Christine on January 17, 2012 under Uncategorized |
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.
Tags: @bcarroll7, @brianblau, @brianvellmure, @britopian, @ccarfi, @charlieisaacs, @ekolsky, @markfidelman, @prgreenbe, @sameerpatel, @setlinger, @steveology, altimeter group, ant's eye view, B2B marketing, buyers journey, CEO, CMO, collaboration, Crandell, customer experience, demand generation, Edelman digital, Forrester, Lithium, marketing, marketing campaign, marketing operations, marketing rules, marketing strategies, new economy, paul greenberg, revenue, sales, salesforce.com, social media, strategy
Posted by Christine on January 6, 2012 under Uncategorized |
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)
Tags: B2B marketing, buyers journey, CEO, CMO, collaboration, Crandell, customer experience, demand generation, marketing, marketing campaign, marketing council, marketing operations, marketing rules, revenue, sales, sales & marketing alignment, social media, strategy, webinar
Posted by Christine on October 6, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Come join me on November 15th for dinner and a talk at 6pm to the NAWBO Expo about the Buyers Journey.
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.
Tags: alignment, buyers journey, CEO, CMO, collaboration, Crandell, customer experience, demand generation, economy, keynote, leadership, marketing, marketing council, marketing operations, marketing rules, marketing strategies, NAWBO, new economy, presentation, public speaker, revenue, revenue management, social media, speaker
Posted by Christine on September 18, 2011 under Uncategorized |
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/
Tags: b2b, B2B marketing, benioff, buyers journey, CMO, Crandell, demand generation, DF11, Dreamforce, etrigue, marketing, marketing automation, marketing rules, marketing strategies, optify, reachable, sales, sales operations, salesforce.com, seesmic, social enterprise, social media, social selling, strategy, tradeshow
Posted by Christine on September 8, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Last week’s Dreamforce conference was one of those ‘must be there’ events. Boasting a recording breaking audience, it was a who’s who of speakers, celebrities, attendees, and exhibitors. The thrill of seeing MC Hammer and Will.i.am up close and personal was only trumpeted by Neil Young’s live interview about how his new company is using Saleforce.com’s software to bring innovative new music products to market.
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 3rd 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.
Tags: buyers journey, CMO, DF11, Dreamforce, event, event marketing, hubspot, marketing, marketing campaign, marketing strategies, moscone, neolane, optify, pardot, sales, salesforce.com, san francisco, social media, tradeshow
Posted by Christine on September 3, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Salesforce.com’s DreamForce conference lived up to its reputation. It was bigger, better, and the place to be this week. This wasn’t a conference, it was a cult convention.
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/
Tags: arab spring, b2b, benioff, CEO, CMO, Crandell, customer experience, DF11, Dreamforce, facebook, manuel castells, marketing, marketing strategies, oracle crm, revenue, saas, sales & marketing alignment, Salesforce, salesforce.com, social enterprise, social media, social revolution, social technology, strategy
Posted by Christine on August 30, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Arriving at DreamForce the check-in was smooth either because most of the 42,000 attendees hadn’t arrived yet or were off doing something cool. Based on the Twitter feed for #DF11, my guess is that the sessions are excellent. I grabbed my badge and the obligatory logoed backpack (which actually is pretty cool) before racing off to meet Mark Taber, CEO of Active Endpoints.
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.
Tags: Active Endpoints, ActiveVOS, alignment, business process automation, buyers journey, CMO, customer experience, DF11, Dreamforce, Mark Taber, marketing, marketing operations, revenue, sale automation, sales, sales & marketing alignment, sales enablement, sales methodology, sales operations, Salesforce, Software
Posted by Christine on August 28, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Salesforce’s DreamForce event is being held in San Francisco this week and I’m going. Equipped with a much sought after Press Pass, I’m attending, for the first time, as a blogger for Forbes. I’m on a Quest.
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:
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.
Tags: 360vantage, 7degrees, angel, automated lead management, branchit, CMO, demand generation, DF11, Dreamforce, Eloqua, etrigue, genius, hubspot, lattice engines, manticore technolgy, marketing, marketing automation, marketing operations, marketing strategies, marketo, merced Systems, optify, Pardo, reachable, revenue, revenue management, revenue performance management, sales & marketing alignment, sales force, sales support, Salesforce, seesmic, sliverpop, teamsupport, tradeshow
