Sep 10, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
As we saw in part 1 of this series, B2B Technology marketers are dealing with a new reality. Information is abundant, Alternatives are Many and in response, Buyers are now fiercely independent and highly networked.
Proving ROI means nothing except a check box, if you aren’t strategic then nobody notices and if they notice they just don’t care. Yet, as we saw in part 2, many organizations are still clinging to Feature->Benefit marketing and solution and diagnostic based selling. This worked well in a world of tightly controlled information, high barriers to entry and sales led selling cycles. But in today’s reality, if you cling to those ways, you will be forever in the weeds of priority and importance.
Yet some vendors manage to rise above the rest, get noticed, grow and win way more than their fair share. I’ve previously described how companies as widely varying as FireEye, Zuora, Virgin Atlantic and Salesforce.com have leveraged context to win. They do this re-inventing their messaging and positioning to be top down, viewpoint driven and challenging and by doing so, they not only educate and engage, but they influence the way their customers see the world AND how they solutions deliver meaningful, strategic value. I call this Impact, and it is the first and most important milestone to reach in the Velocity Marketing framework. Add a heavy dose of Experience marketing into the mix, and you reach Breakthrough Velocity. You win, plain and simple!
So, let’s take a quick look at how our two Axis come together to graphically display what is described above.
Today’s Markets Require A Top Down, Viewpoint and Challenging Messaging Approach
As we can see, the usual and expected approach to messaging worked just fine in the Old B2B World. But if you try it today, buyers won’t notice or if they do notice they won’t care enough to spend time and money with you! But when we re-imagine how we message and position ourselves, and adopt a top down, viewpoint and experiential messaging, we match our approach precisely to the new reality of the buyer. We achieve Velocity.
Now, this shows our Viewpoint framework in action, applied to you the B2B Marketer as the target! I have argued that your world has changed, that your old approach will no longer work, and then proposed that if you follow my re-invented approach, you will achieve breakthrough velocity, a brave new world we all want to occupy. So, what’s your first step to Velocity? Building your Viewpoint. It just so happens, I’d love to help you out. And you can start right here with my series of blogs called, “AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint”.
Aug 28, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
The second dimension of my Viewpoint is the articulation of a re-invented solution, which is covered in depth in this blog. To quickly recap, this blog argued that you can re-invent your solution along 3 dimensions, Approach, Innovation and Mindset or AIM; show diagrammatically here:
So when B2B Marketers look at their messaging methodology, to succeed in today’s Info Overloaded, Buyer Centric, Crowded Market they need to re-imagine their approach like so:
- The Approach –from bottom up to Top down
- The Innovation – from value to Viewpoint
- The Mindset – that we must challenge and engage on the customer’s terms
Let’s briefly take a look at each of these.
- From bottom up to top down – Rather than start with features, function and benefit, start with STEEP, the customer’s reality and world.
- From Value to Viewpoint – We must start with a well articulated Viewpoint, before we have the right to discuss our Value.
- Challenge and Engage – Our job is to challenge the customers assumptions and comfort. We have to move from Diagnostic Selling to Authority Driven Selling.
As we will see in part 3 of this series, if we shift our messaging approach as above, we set the baseline to achieve Marketing Impact and Velocity.
Aug 27, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
In this short series of blogs, I’ll be applying my Viewpoint framework to explain why I think context, yes what I call Viewpoint, is so critical to Breakthrough, High Velocity B2B Marketing. With deference to my friend and mentor Matt Church, who taught me not be afraid of “nested context”, here we go!
First, let’s define who I am talking to in this column and target the discussion firmly at B2B Technology Marketers. With that context, let’s take a look at the vertical axis of the Viewpoint framework, the B2B Tech Marketers world, and contrast the “old world” to the “new world”. Three fundamental shifts have occurred in the marketing and selling of B2B products and services; 1) information overload 2) the rise of the independent buyer and 3) the abundance of alternative investments. Let’s take a quick look at each of these.
1) Information overload – In the old world, information was tightly held and doled out by vendors based on the “qualification” of the prospect. Due to this stinginess of sharing, very expensive intermediaries arose in these markets, such as Gartner, Forrester and others. Today, vendors rush to share information, Google and social networks have become the new information intermediaries, and the analyst are just one source of many. Buyers have gone from SEARCHING or paying for scarce information to SORTING and triaging abundant information, from scarcity of supply to overload of supply.
2) The rise of the independent buyer – The Corporate Executive Board has published research that says 57% of the typical B2B sales cycle is over before the first sales contact with the vendor. In response to the great availability of information, buyers are becoming fiercely independent. They do research on their own, they network on social networks such as LinkedIn and easily find knowledgeable peers, and they pick and choose what content to read, and what to pay attention to. In short, we are now in the era of the “Buying Cycle” and NOT the “Sales Cycle”.
3) Alternative Abundance – Fundamental shifts in cost of solution creation and delivery, and the relentless drive down the cost curve, means that B2B marketers compete with many more competitors AND alternative solutions. In the old world ROI ruled the world. It was a land of feature, function, benefit. Today, ROI is table stakes. The real battle is strategic importance, first at a category level and then at a provider level. As Forrester has pointed out in their research, buyers want to be taught something, they want strategic insight into THEIR business from vendors. In a world off choice, Return on Strategy is real hurdle to jump.
These three shift can be summarized in the following table:
Three Shifts in the World of B2B Sales and Marketing
|
Old World |
New World |
Implication |
| Information |
Scare |
Abundant |
From Search to Triage |
| Buyers |
Dependent |
Independent |
From Sales Cycle to Buying Cycle |
| Alternatives |
Few |
Many |
From ROI Hurdle to RO-Strategy Hurdle |
This new world is can be a daunting one for B2B Sales and Marketing executives. It can create havoc with traditional communication and selling strategies and techniques. In the next blog, we will focus on how messaging strategy must be re-invented in order to win in this new world of information abundance, independent buyers and many alternative solutions.
Aug 23, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
Why do some companies, like FireEye, Zuora, and others raise their stories above the crowd, and get listened to and even obsessed over by prospects and customers alike? I think it comes down to these simple, yet powerful three “cies”:
- Consistency
- Veracity
- Ferocity
Let’s take a look at why these are so important…
Consistency – Relevant Definition: Reliability or uniformity of successive results or events – Telling a story once isn’t enough, telling it over and over again is what creates breakthrough and notice. How many years and times did Marc Benioff of Salesforce show up with the No More Software Logo. The first time it caught the eye, the second time it became interesting, and the 100th time it was compelling because every thing he said was a RIFF on this theme. You were a believer, and you came along for the ride.
Veracity – Relevant Definition – correctness or accuracy – Every time they tell the story, they back it up with supporting and compelling facts, data and figures! FireEye cranks out a ton of research to support their Next Generation Threat protection story. They are the experts, and they back it up by sharing that expertise, all the time!
Ferocity – Relevant Definition – The state or quality of being ferocious; marked by unrelenting intensity – To be believed, you have to be a true believer yourself. You can’t fake ferocity, and if you don’t have it, then your story will never have the impact of those that do.
So be ferocious and consistent, and back it up with real facts, and you too can create an impactful, breakthrough corporate story. What story can you tell, well I’d start with your Viewpoint.
Jul 23, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
I was in a client meeting yesterday, and a very interesting thing happened. As we were reviewing website, the UE Web guy pulled up the Basecamp website. After reviewing this site, which is pretty unique in its streamlined direct marketing approach, he said, “In many ways this site is designed like an app, not a website”. He said this because the site eschews classic website navigation for a more structured progression through screens, like navigating a mobile app. The user is led through a series of intuitive steps all leading the user to sign up for a trial.
Now, there’s a lot to like and quite a bit I could criticize about the Basecamp site, and their approach is not right for everyone. But that simple statement, “…this site is designed like an app” got me to thinking differently about website design.
What if our corporate sites were finally able to shed the brochure-ware legacy of the last nearly 20 years. Move past the destination site mantra of 10 years ago and beyond the “content marketing” hub idea in vogue today and start to think like this. “My website is an App that goal is to guide the visitor through the buying process, it’s not for everyone, but if you come because you are a possible customer, it will hum beyond belief”
What if instead of hiring a web designer, you hired an app designer and said, “My prospects go through a process of Discovery, Exploration, Evaluation/Trial and Purchase” build me an app that helps them do that quickly, efficiently and effectively. My goals and to educate, engage and covert them through the phases.” The entire website becomes a “Buying experience”, immersive, focused and powerful.
If you started there, how different would your website be? What would the implications of this be on some of the “Marquee pages” we focus on today, like “Company” and “Customers”…how would this change our lead capture and nurturing strategies?
Just thinking about this for a bit, this seems to be a transformative idea and I’m pretty excited about exploring it more. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this approach, anyone you know who has taken it, and whether it’s exciting to you too…
Apr 19, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
A quick Google of”Chief Content Officer” finds millions of entries, a wikipedia page and links to passionate blogs about the need for enterprises to have a CCO who can be the “corporate executive responsible for the digital media creation and multi-channel publication of the organization’s content (text, video, audio, animation, etc.)” . Of course, these results pale in comparison to the results for “Content Marketing”, which along with it’s first cousin “Inbound Marketing” is the strategy of the decade among today’s marketing cognoscenti. And while I have no beef with the jobs or the value of Content Marketing, there is one big challenge.
In EVERY market, content has become a commodity. The best content management systems, marketing automation systems and processes, and multi-channel leverage can’t change that fact. Internet search, social media, and real-time news have moved us from a world of content scarcity and editorial to a world of content overload and abundance. This has put everyone from Dads to analysts to sales reps under pressure to continue to be valuable. “Go ask Dad” and “Go ask Gartner” has been replaced in large by “Go ask Google”. Sales cycles have morphed into self directed processes, versus managed one.
My pre-teen girls have a politically incorrect saying they taunt their brother with which is, “Girls Rule, Boys Drool”. Winners in today’s markets not only produce great context, but they OWN and DRIVE the context of the market conversation. He who controls context, wins. So with credit to the schoolyard, “Context Rules, Content Drools”. I’ve built a whole Viewpoint framework around this idea.
Traditionally, the CEO or other C-level executives are the ones who are articulate and captivate listener when opining about industry, customer and market context, they have to be. But capturing and integrating that context into the marketing and positioning of the company, brand and product value proposition and ALL OF THE CONTENT you create needs to be job one of any content marketing strategy and organization. That’s why I say forget the Chief Content Officer, who’s your Chief Context Officer?
