Cats and dogs. Flames and Oilers. Sales and marketing. Why can’t we all just get along?
According to Jeff Lowe, VP of Marketing Communications at TELUS Business Solutions, it is possible. Well, at least for sales and marketing. The secret is in negotiating a new, mutually agreed-upon, type of marketing and lead management. Lowe tackled this thorny issue at a recent Canadian Marketing Association event in Calgary with the sobering title “B2B Marketing; Avoiding Obsolescence”.
“In the old way marketing would generate hundreds, or thousands, of leads, and dump them on sales,” said Lowe. “In reality only a small percentage of them were ready to buy or were fully ‘qualified’ so sales reps would only pursue those ones; the rest would languish and be wasted.”
In most organizations this would spark fruitless finger pointing and accusations.
“Marketing would say ‘You didn’t close enough business’ and Sales would reply ‘You sent us lousy leads’”.
In that all-too-common scenario, no one wins.
Lowe pointed out that many have pronounced business to business (B2B) marketing dead, the suggested salvation (by pundits) being to convert to business to consumer (B2C) strategies and tactics.
“Blindly following B2C methods is not the answer,” asserted Lowe.
Instead, he suggested the attentive crowd follow guidance from Forrester Research, which recommends the following five best practices:
- Adopt new media
- Use demand management
- Use loyalty management
- Integrate campaigns and tools
- Measure
Adopt new media
Lowe displayed Forrester research that clearly showed buying decisions being made on word of mouth, web sites, blogs, webinars, and various other “pull” mechanisms. New media can be ideal for such pull marketing, generating a dialog or interaction with the buyer instead of pushing ad messages. He did, however, caution against blindly leaping into new media without a strategy, citing data from the recent Leger Marketing/CNW Group study showing most companies do not have a plan for social media and just dive in, often with poor results (for example the recent “Motrin Moms” backlash).
“The tools exist to really measure new media,” commented Lowe, “making it quite easy to monitor your ‘share of voice’ on any particular product, service or category. Of course, you can monitor your competitors too.”
Lowe recommends listening first in social media to become familiar with the culture before jumping in.
Demand management
The problem with classic demand management, as alluded to above, is its susceptibility to the “leaky funnel” syndrome wherein leads languish and grow cold because they are not managed properly or nurtured.
TELUS adopted a system from Sirius Decisions using technology from marketbright that rates incoming inquiries, calling them “hand-raisers” rather than “leads”. The hand-raisers are scored and divided into categories; Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), and Sales Accepted Leads (SAL).
Only those that are deemed “hot” enough by their score are handed off to sales, the rest require more interaction or treatment before they hit the threshold. That might involve sending them a white paper, inviting them to a seminar or webinar, or making an online product demonstration available.
The net effect of this method is sales chases hot leads (which they see as “real” leads) and marketing nurtures the rest until they heat up sufficiently for sales. The beauty of the system is all parties agree in advance to what constitutes “hot” or “not” – so there’s minimal squabbling over close rates and responsibility with fewer leaks in the funnel.
“The real takeaway for us,” said Lowe “is not all leads are created equal.”
Loyalty management
TELUS tested customer loyalty using a variety of research instruments. They found a few surprises in the data.
“Some things that you think would have impacted upon loyalty, like prompt service, did not,” said Lowe. “That showed us some things are just table-stakes, the price of being in the game, you have to go beyond that to create loyalty.”
One of the key findings was how critical the relationship between the sales rep and the client was to loyalty. Clients told TELUS they wanted their rep to teach them something, not sell them something. That shone the light on the fact the purchase experience was the key loyalty driver, beyond all else.
Integrate campaigns and tools
New media needs to be folded into a media mix, not viewed as a silver bullet on its own, and must fit into an overall strategy. Lowe suggested thinking about each marketing communications tool and assessing how it fits into the AIDA model of advertising/consumer behavior (attention, interest, desire, action). The best way to fit the tools into the strategy is to work back from the objectives – if 500 sales are required, how many Sales Accepted Leads does that take? How many hand-raisers does that take? Calculate the ratios and work backwards.
Measure
Rolling your new media measurement, sales force automation, demand and loyalty management results into a dashboard that provides visuals against benchmarks is the best way to see trends in a sea of data.
“TELUS Business Solutions has a marketing dashboard for our executives with a red-light, green-light indicator for our four key objectives,” noted Lowe. “That gives us actionable information on our key performance indicators – a ‘brand health’ dashboard.”
It appears that cats and dogs, or sales and marketing, can get along (but never Flames and Oilers). It just takes a little negotiation and agreement to keep B2B marketing functional and efficient. With this kind of rigor B2B marketing is not dead, it may just be sleeping in your organization.
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Notes from this session were recorded on Twitter and can be found here. (note: in reverse chronological order)
Jeff Lowe’s slides from this presentation are also available for download here.
Doug Lacombe, MBA is a Calgary-based blogger and communicator with over 20 years experience in media, marketing, and communications. More info on Doug can be found on DougLacombe.com.
