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)

Speaking about Buyers Journey at NAWBO Silicon Valley

Posted by Christine on October 6, 2011 under Uncategorized | Read the First Comment

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.

Join me for a Free Webinar on Alignment

Posted by Christine on August 15, 2011 under Uncategorized | Read the First Comment

BrightTalk has invited me to shared best practices, real life case examples and a road map for how to align Sales and Marketing.  This free webinar will be held on October 19th at 10:00am pacific time. 

From the prospect to up-sell stages, organizations have a great opportunity to accelerate their revenue cycles by enabling marketing and sales to function as a unified team.  Aligned Sales and Marketing teams are more efficient, close more sales and have happier customers. Attend this webinar to find out the seven steps you can take to accomplish this, complete with supporting case studies. 

 Topics Covered:

·         Understanding why aligning to the Buyers Journey drives faster revenue

·         Determining the stage of Alignment your company is in

.         Deriving best practices from case study examples

.         Starting the Alignment discussion with Sales and Marketing

This is a free webinar – I hope you and your colleagues will participate.  To register just click on the BrightTalk link below. 

Tipping Business (and our Economy) toward Growth

Posted by Christine on August 10, 2011 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Tipping Point

The market’s response to the S&P downgrade of American debt was panic.  The ‘Great American Downgrade’ is what I’m hearing it being referred to.  While the pundits argue over whether it was a ‘crash’ or a ‘correction’, the Senate, ironically, debates opening an investigation into S&P’s “irresponsible” act.  The looming question of whether this will trigger a double dip recession depends on how we look at the future.

A glass can be either half full or half empty; it all depends on your perspective.  In the frenetic world of 7×24 news, social media, always-connected jobs and maxi-multi-tasking lives we often lose perspective.   It is as if we’re racing through a forest as fast as we can, seeing only the blur of the trees and believing we’re on the right trail.

Our economic situation is a sum total of all the activities and perspectives of businesses, citizens, investors, and governments.   What plagues our economy is the same thing that hampers growth in our companies – doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results.   Marshal Goldsmith said it well in his quote “What got you to here won’t get you there” and it is rather appropriate for our current situation.  It would do us, and the economy, well if we gained some perspective for we are at a tipping point.

The USA economy can tip into a pattern that resembles Japanese style stagnation or it can redefine and reinvent itself.  The same goes for businesses; they can hunker down and experience limited growth in their traditional markets with current products or they can re-evaluate and redefine their value in light of global trends and offshore markets that are growing.  We all need to look at growth from a different perspective; one that is rooted in thinking outside the box about how to deliver meaningful value.

For most companies that means tackling the lack of confidence in their Sales and Marketing organizations.  We all know Sales and Marketing are broken and it’s time to publicly admit it.  The ‘broken-ness’ is evidenced by B2B Marketing struggling to demonstrate its value in terms it has historically never had to.  B2B Sales is increasingly becoming marginalized and struggling to meet revenue targets in a world where no one “really” wants to talk to them.   One reason we’re in the current situation is because companies (and governments) have been inwardly focused for too long.  The quest for great efficiency, effectiveness and productivity has been sought within and between departments; not at the organization’s boundaries between it and its markets and constituents.  Protracted inward alignment results in myopia and the general drinking of one’s own whiskey.

Fixing Sales and Marketing begins with dropping the classic definitions of what Sales and Marketing are suppose to do along with the internal tug-of-war associated the zero-sum game mentality. Replace that with a culture and roles obsessed with aligning to the expectations of your prospects, lost accounts, current customers, and target markets. In other words, align to your Buyer.

Begin the alignment process by intimately understanding where Buyers go and what they do on their purchase journey.  It takes some elbow grease and tenacity but every company can achieve understand the Journey by  interviewing the economic buyer, influencers, evaluators and users of every won and lost account to understand the ‘who, what, where, how and why’ of their Buyers Journey.  While the B2B Buyers Journey has three overall stages comprised of ten steps, each role (or persona) follows a slightly different journey path.   To align to your Buyer, organizations need to know all the various paths and the destinations along the way, in detail.  A high level or generic view of the Buyer’s Journey obscures the actionable information; the data that enables you to deliver a valuable experience made up of meaningful content presented to the right persona at key junctures on their buying paths.

Next align organizational roles to enable, engage and deliver value to the Buyer.  The experience a Buyer wants as a customer is often more important in the purchase decision than the actual product they are buying.  Structure your organization’s roles into value chains (instead of departments and organization charts) from initial market sensing, Buyer experience crafting, and product development/manufacturing through to market listening, Customer/Buyer success and service.  Measure how the Buyer rates their experience along the Journey and set role-based metrics.

The key to growth is two-fold: Accelerate revenue cycles by delivering the experience buyers value and have a company culture focused on continually earn your customers’ business every single day.  The bottom-line is we need a fresh perspective on how to do business differently if our economy is to ‘tip’ in the right direction.

Lessons From The Aligned

Posted by Christine on July 4, 2010 under Uncategorized | 5 Comments to Read

In the quest to find companies that know how to keep sales and marketing aligned, I interviewed a handful for truly remarkable CEOs.  They aren’t gracing the cover of business publications, keynoting conferences or running for government office.  They are remarkable in their achievements and their perspectives are a breath of fresh air. From them I found a consistent pattern in how they kept alignment in place – a clear company strategy, open collaboration and a company-wide implemented (and honored) accountability process.   Interestingly, for them alignment wasn’t just about sales and marketing, it was about aligning all the corners of the business into one cohesive fabric.

The size of the company didn’t matter; what separated this group from the non-aligned companies was the background of the CEO.  They had careers in both marketing and sales, coming up through the ranks in large companies before taking leadership positions with smaller organizations.  They had learned the value of strategy the hard way along with the value of being very disciplined in their roles.   My conversations with them were déjà vue and reminiscent of my days as a strategy consultant.

A few lessons I learned from this handful of unique CEOs are:

• Alignment is like marriage.   Any relationship needs to be constantly invested in and managed.  For it to work you should strive to ‘get back’ what you put into the relationship.  The CEOs had a goal that marketing and sales have a 50/50 relationship.  Give 50 percent into the relationship and get that much back; a persistent imbalance will ultimately lead to non-alignment.
• Attack the process; not the people. Alignment is a process that rapidly acts on the measuring of what you manage.  Each CEO had a sound, complete and proven process for evergreening executable company strategy, clearly defining critical success factors, instituting measurable and time-bound objectives for every role, and acting on monthly metrics-driven dashboards.
• The CMO is a different breed. These CEOs hire a different type of CMO; a keeper of the company’s Intellectual Property, trusted strategy advisor, and germinator of new ideas.  They hire that rare CMO who knows how to balance strategy with execution and understands all the variables of a running a business, and isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty; very dirty.
• Measureable objectives must cascade. It’s all about purposeful execution to a plan that is realistic given the circumstances of the company and environment.  Each objective is clearly defined on a quarterly basis in measurable terms and cascaded fully down the organization.  All these MBOs not only add up to the top-level objectives BUT are publicly shared; as are the monthly results. Transparency drives not only alignment but accountability.
• Communication is beginning of understanding. Marketing’s internal customer is sales and sales have an obligation to tell marketing what it needs, in specifics.  Open lines of communication around resources, priorities, results (good and bad) and desires help to build understanding of what is possible relative to the strategy. Only then can everyone reach a common consensus on what resources to dedicate to which action plans.

For these CEOs, strategy was not lip-service or a consulting project with a head-liner consultant.  It was a roadmap from ‘here to there’ that removes ambiguity but keeps the essence of agility and creativity. Getting everyone on the same page was hard, mostly because the art of strategy has been lost over the years and today’s organizations are commitment-phobic.  Once there, however, each organization gave a sigh of relief – the game, the rules, the prize and the road was clear. And they realized that they actually had more control than before – and the results proved that out.

Defining Sales & Marketing Optimization

Posted by Christine on January 31, 2010 under Uncategorized | 4 Comments to Read

The need to do more with less, faster has brought sales and marketing to figure out how to work better together.   There is antidotal evidence that over one-third of all B2B companies starting talking about improving their sales and marketing alignment in the middle of last year.  Most of the talk is around lead management - how to get more leads and sales to follow them up.  And there are the inevitable side conversations about marketing or sales leadership and if it is time for a change. These are all good conversations as it means people are open-minded to change on some level.

Much has been written about the signs of misalignment but little on what sales and marketing alignment really means. We all bandy about the term, sales & marketing alignment, assuming a widely accepted definition exists that all understand and subscribe to.  I haven’t found one, have you?  What I have found is that ‘alignment’ means different things to different people based on their orientation to the problem.  For many sales leaders (not all) and technology solution vendors it means anything from automated lead management, sales force automation to marketing delivering higher quality leads.  Some CEOs think sales & marketing alignment means they’ve stopped bickering, marketing is delivering more leads or that sales is finally following up on the leads that marketing gave them.  Consultants lump into ‘alignment’ anything from developing outbound campaigns, improving product marketing to sales operations and leadership coaching.  And to most marketers, it means whatever it takes to get Sales off their backs and to regain some level of credibility and clout within the organization.     

If we’re going to improve sales & marketing alignment through best practices, we need a comprehensive definition that we all can work with.   I’ve scanned a large number of sales, marketing and leadership books and have yet to find a succint, comprehensive and balanced definition.  Most take the position that misalignment is marketing’s fault. In eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, Ardath says “marketing stands to reap huge benefits….by aligning with sales.” (page 175). Ardath’s book is an excellent for a long list of other reasons.   However, we need a definition that reflects alignment as the mutual responsibility of marketing and sales.  Christopher Ryan gets closer to that in his book How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing & Sales Machine where he defines it as ”synchronizing the marketing and sales functions …with a service level agreement (that) outlines the duties and objectives of each department.”  

 I’ve put a stake in the ground and defined sales & marketing alignment at a higher, more strategic level:

 “Sales and marketing collaboratively working toward the common goal of profitably increasing revenue and customer excellence through shared processes, resources and metrics.”

What does this definition say? Alignment is more than just leads.  At the heart of alignment the two teams are working toward the same goal with a common understanding of resources.  Companies achieve this through a three stage journey that integrates activities, processes and team structures and reinforce alignment with a culture that emphasizes shared accountability and institutionalizes it with common technology platforms.  

What do you think? Do you agree and how would you improve my definition?

Doing Double Time

Posted by Christine on November 6, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Aligning Sales and Marketing is on the top of every CEO’s list.  The state of the economy demands it, competitiveness requires it, and employees expect a healthy, collaborative company culture.   Alignment is achieved through culture, process and technology.  Much progress has been made in the last area – technology – with automated lead management and marketing automation systems.  Yet technology is not the cure all, you still need to transform your culture and processes.

There is a way to do double time on the road to alignment.  The heart of sales and marketing strife is this: of all the leads that Marketing brings into the pipeline, not that many actually result in booked revenue.  Collaborative Sales/Marketing councils which create and implement marketing campaigns can yield huge benefits. The councils change behavior through new processes and improve the top line at the same time.  

Read more about it in my latest article “Getting Sales to Improve Marketing’s Leads” published by Product Strategy Network. http://www.productstrategynetwork.com/content/view/511/1