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)

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.

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/

Salesforce.com CEO Calls for a Business ‘Arab Spring’

Posted by Christine on September 3, 2011 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

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/

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.

Time to Pull Up Our Socks

Posted by Christine on July 17, 2011 under Uncategorized | 2 Comments to Read

Like most people, I have one eye on the debt ceiling and unemployment debate.  Sorting reality from spin and the juvenile drama reminds me of decades ago university student government meetings.  It’s also reminiscent of some management team meetings where one spends enormous energy sorting the facts from all the hooey.

What strikes me as troublesome is the colossal disconnect between the perspectives of government, companies and the general public. Their focus is telling of the disconnect: The next election cycle, next financial earnings report, and when the next set of bills are due.  The lack of common ground or shared goals between these three perspectives is undermining our future.

Admittedly I’m not an economist, and am wise enough to not play one on TV, but nowhere in all these discussions is an acknowledgement that the collective “we” are in new territory.   Old rules don’t apply – this is not Paul Volker’s 1980s crisis nor is it like post-Great Recession.  While the raging debate about Keynes vs. Friedman is always interesting; it doesn’t apply.

Instead of trying to hold on to the ‘normal’ of yesteryear while singing,  teary eyed, Barbara Streisand’s  ’The Way We Were’, we should let go and embrace what can be.  That doesn’t mean I’m advocating not increasing the debt ceiling.  The potential I see, and am focused on, is a unique opportunity we have to shape a new global economy that leverages our collective strengths in new ways.

The strengths as I see them are:

1. A highly skilled workforce with fresh thinking on how to deliver value.  The generation entering the workforce hold radically different ideas on what defines value and the relationship businesses should have with the environment and society. Partner these workers with baby boomers who are not retiring and you have a marriage of fresh thinking with wisdom.
2. Entrepreneurial employment models.  The model of hiring scores of full-time employees has proven to hamper company agility and growth. The examples are everywhere – Nokia, RIM, HP.  It is like putting blinders on a prize race horse that knows how to run one course – a loop. Companies that hire only key employees in strategic core competencies and employ teams of contract, part-time, consultants, contingent workers for other roles and activities find they are better able to be market-responsive, nimble, and stay on top of emerging trends; the blinders come off.
3. Building value based on the community level needs.  Whether its social entrepreneur-ism, green energy, water management, new models of agribusiness, travel or healthcare there is tremendous opportunity (and profit) in meeting the needs of the global community.  Granted these aren’t easy problems to solve but neither was the invention of the light bulb or the telephone; therein lies the opportunity to innovate and invent the next economic cycle.
4. Global communities and tribes.   We are as intricately interwoven in the economies of other countries as they are interwoven with us.  Customers with needs are everywhere and it doesn’t matter whether they are in Brazil, Russia or in Des Moines.  Social media has made the world smaller, more intimate, and customers more accessible.  Understand the global customer and deliver meaningful value by serving them with the best resources, regardless of where they are located.  There is a lot of opportunity for growth in markets around the world, if we just look at them through different lens.
5. Renaissance of leadership and self actualization.   The Dark Ages of leadership has led to a Renaissance of the Aware Leader.  The rise in coaching – both leadership and life – points to the realization that emotional intelligence and compassionate leadership results in stronger, more profitable companies. Employees, be they permanent and contingent, who are following their bliss are more productive, innovative and efficient.  And a new level of leadership is a core requirement to creatively building companies that leverage new business models rooted in new forms of value delivery.

The opportunity I see to drive economic growth is tremendous.  Granted it’s scary but the alternative is even more frightful.  As my dad used to say, “time to pull up your socks and get moving.”