The Demand Gen Report Blog

Billy Beane, Moneyball & Modern B2B Marketing

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:10:00 -0400

Earlier today, I sat through a surprisingly relevant keynote speech by Billy Beane. Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, spoke to the marketers gathered for Silverpop’s event in Atlanta.

If you’re a baseball fan, you know who Billy Beane is and why he’s important to the history of the game. If you’re not a fan (and haven’t read Michal Lewis’ Moneyball or seen the movie) then you probably don’t know him.

Here’s the short version of Beane’s story: He came into the Oakland A’s, a team with a losing record and a much smaller bankroll than its competitors. Baseball is a sport where talent scouting was always — ALWAYS — based on tradition, gut instinct and conventional wisdom.

Most baseball teams threw vast sums of money into a black box. Sometimes they got results — the players they drafted paid off. Sometimes they didn’t. Nobody really knew for sure.

Beane couldn’t spend the money to play this game, so he changed the rules. Instead of gut instinct, he used quantitative analysis to find under-valued players — players that didn’t fit the conventional baseball mold, even though the numbers told a different story about their abilities.

The A’s found the talent nobody else noticed — and they got that talent for bottom dollar. They started to win…..and win, and win, and win some more.

If you’ve read this far, you already see where this is going. Marketing, like baseball, was traditionally a profession where you threw money into a black box and (sometimes) got results. You didn’t know exactly what worked, and you certainly didn’t always know why things worked, but hey — neither did anyone else.

That’s changing. Your CEO and CFO want to know what they’re buying with their marketing budgets. They want to know how campaigns deliver leads. The CMO, in turn, wants to know whether one campaign delivers better results than another — and she wants to know why.

Gut instinct and conventional wisdom don’t cut it in this world. But some marketers still do it. Why?

That’s where Beane earned his speaker fee. He likened Moneyball to card counting in a casino: You don’t win every hand, but you DO win enough hands in the long run to make money. But the strategy only works when you stay with it for the long haul.

I think there’s some extremely valuable advice there for marketers trying to stick with a rational, objective, quantitative strategy. The tools take time to set up, and they take time to understand. It takes time and patience to track campaigns, develop lead scoring models and get visibility into your funnel.

The numbers you see won’t always jibe with gut instinct or “tradition.” Your emotions — and your colleagues’ emotions — will tell you to go a different direction. You’ll want to quit counting cards and run off with Lady Luck.

Just remember, your competitors are all playing Moneyball today — and they want to win.

-Matthew McKenzie

A (Hellish?) Vision Of The Future For B2B Marketing Teams

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:50:26 -0400

Earlier today at the SiriusDecisions Summit, Jonathan Block and Ross Graber offered a look at what they see as the future for the sales and marketing technology ecosystem. The presentation included a chart that I’ll do my best to reproduce here (forgive the low-rent photography job):

What you’re looking at is an ecosystem that includes more than two dozen technology components. Some are familiar, and you probably use them today (marketing automation, sales force automation). Some are less familiar but on the radar. Others, perhaps many, are unexplored territory for you and your colleagues.

The presenters made a couple of important points here:

First, as Jonathan Block put it, “there is no rest for the tech-weary…new technologies and new approaches must be considered and evaluated.” These are the tools that will deliver a competitive advantage — and if you’re not using them, your competitors will.

Second, the tools aren’t worth very much unless they’re tied to the right business processes, data governance and integration models. If you implement 27 point solutions, each with its own data silo and tied to ad hoc business processes, you’re not on the bleeding edge — you’re just screwed.

This is a vision of the future that some CMOs will find exciting. It’s also a vision that will drive other CMOs to start drinking. Either way, while SiriusDecisions might be pushing the limits with its technology vision, I wouldn’t count on it being too far off the mark.

-Matthew McKenzie

Quality Content: Helping Your Sales Team Help Themselves

Wed, 08 May 2013 18:50:00 -0400

I’m in San Diego right now, catching the action at this year’s SiriusDecisions Summit. One of the big advantages of this event is the perspective it gives on sales and marketing alignment issues, and that’s exactly where SiriusDecisions Managing Director John Neeson took today’s first session.

Neeson presented some interesting research data on the needs and concerns of B2B sales reps. The top three inhibitors to sales effectiveness, in order of importance, are:

An inability to communicate a value message;
A lack of subject matter expertise around a specific industry or solution;
Insufficient leads.

“Five years ago, leads would always come up number one [in this kind of survey],” Neeson told the audience. “Today they’re saying that’s not the case — they want help being more efficient and effective.”

Neeson tied this in with another important point: Sales reps find it so challenging to engage with prospects in the early stages of their journey — the education and awareness stage — that many of them no longer try. Instead, they wait to engage with prospects later. Inevitably, they miss some important opportunities when they do so.

This is why it’s vital that marketing teams deliver the right content — targeted, persona-based content — at the right time to enable their sales partners. Content is the lever that allows a sales team to pry open the door to those early-stage encounters and to establish the kind of thought leadership that B2B prospects now expect to see.

I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more on this topic over the next couple of days, but it’s a good way to set the stage what are sure to be some interesting discussions.

-Matthew McKenzie

Email Is Dead? I Don't Think So

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:15:31 -0400

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been sharing the results of our 2013 B2B Content Preferences Survey. Along the way, I’ve been pointing out some survey data that strikes me as particularly interesting.

This week, I want to use our data to address the notion that email is dead. It’s something you’re as likely to hear from grumpy get-off-my-lawn types like John Dvorak as from billionaire social media moguls like Mark Zuckerberg.

The B2B buyers we polled, however, beg to differ. When we asked them which channels they most frequently use to share content with their colleagues, they gave us a very clear answer:

I’m making what I think is a reasonable assumption here: People who share content with colleagues know how best to communicate with them. Email beats every social media platform on this count, although LinkedIn and Twitter also cross the 50% threshold.

Maybe the kids use email these days. Maybe they don’t. Who cares? The people you’re trying to reach as B2B marketers definitely do use it, and you’ll want to make email sharing as easy as possible for the content you create and distribute.

-Matthew McKenzie

Consistency: Your Content Marketing Secret Weapon

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:46:05 -0400

During his Content2Conversion session, Joe Pulizzi packed a lot of good ideas into the space of 15 minutes. But one particular point stuck out, because it’s something almost every content marketer can relate to.

Here’s the relevant data point Joe cited: 85% of all corporate blogs have published five posts or less.

Think about that. These companies spend thousands of dollars on content strategies, development and management. They’re on board the content marketing train, and they expect great things from their investments. Yet they’re surprisingly quick to surrender one of their most visible — and potentially valuable — content channels to crickets and tumbleweeds.

We’ve all been there. Like Joe said, most of us are better at starting things than we are at staying with them. It’s an occupational hazard in a field where there’s so much to do and things move so quickly.

That’s why I think it’s worth repeating a fairly obvious point: You’re better off executing a basic corporate blogging plan consistently than you are running a hit-or-miss plan with all of the bells and whistles. Posting to your corporate blog once a week, week in and week out, will build a much stronger online presence than a blog that publishes three times in one week and then goes dark for a month at a time.

If you can’t post consistently, think carefully about whether you want to publish a blog at all. A neglected site makes a statement about your business, and it’s not the kind you want to make.

There’s a corollary to this rule. A simple, 200 word blog post that hits one or two major points can be just as effective as a 900 word post that takes hours to research and write. Honestly, in a content environment where busy people are looking for a quick payoff, that short but sweet post might be a lot more effective.

Here’s the best news of all: Consistency can be your company’s secret content marketing weapon. It will make your content stand out, it will build your reputation and it will bring your readers back for more. Those are big benefits for such a modest investment.

-Matthew McKenzie

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Email Benchmarks: Data-Quality Metrics Tell An Interesting Story

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:25:00 -0400

Silverpop recently released its 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Survey. It’s a good resource for two reasons: The sample size (email sent from more than 2,700 brands in 40 countries) and its usefulness as a benchmarking tool.

My favorite part of the study has to be the comparison of what I call “fail-stats.” These are the numbers that tell you just how bad the consequences can be when a marketing team does something really dumb.

First, look at this summary of hard bounce rates. (I’m just looking at the top-level regional averages here, rather than industry-vertical breakdowns, for the sake of simplicity.)

Check that out: The U.S. brands in the bottom quartile, based on performance, had bounce rates nearly 70 times higher than those in the top quartile.

Next, a look at unsubscribe rates:

Finally, and perhaps most telling, a comparison of spam complaint rates:

What do these three metrics have in common? They’re all fundamental indicators of a marketing team’s competence — or lack thereof.

These are problems that can be addressed using accepted data quality best practices. Yet in spite of the fact that this is the equivalent of Email Marketing 101, there’s a tremendous gap between the most successful brands and the least successful ones.

For most companies, these problems should be easy to fix. Even if they aren’t, you definitely don’t want your CMO looking at these benchmark numbers and discovering that your email campaigns line up with that bottom-quartile group.

-Matthew McKenzie

Why Embed Marketing Automation With CRM? One Answer Is Productivity

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:03:00 -0400

A few announcements about marketing automation systems being embedded in CRM systems have landed in my inbox recently, including one from INBOX25 about designing its marketing automation solution to operate within SugarCRM. And, of course, the jury is still out on how independent Eloqua will remain from Oracle’s CRM.

A chat with Ellen Valentine of Silverpop and Rhett Thompson of CoreMotives shed some light on the benefits to both marketing and sales of configuring marketing automation to work within CRM. As Thompson explained, it allows marketers to develop and execute their marketing efforts from within the interface of the CRM —Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the case of CoreMotives — they are already comfortable using.

That, I think, goes to the heart of the matter. Face it, a harried sales rep or marketer is probably going to resist if they have to become fluent in two technologies — a marketing automation system and a CRM.

Since there is already enough going on to hamper sales productivity, it makes sense to put as few obstacles in the way of the sales reps as possible. But if marketing automation gets gobbled up into CRMs, will marketers lose some of the nuances and features they need to keep the sales pipeline full? It is up to the marketing technologists to maintain the important aspects of marketing automation, not matter where it resides.

In commenting on the Marketo IPO announcement, Demand Gen Report Contributor David Raab recently argued that it may be difficult for marketing automation vendors to remain independent, but that doesn’t mean there will be less of a need to continually enhance and automate the unique functions of marketing.

Stay tuned. —Kim Zimmermann

The Salesforce Marketing Automation Dilemma: Buy, Build Or Beg

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:40:30 -0400

Earlier this week, Marketo’s IPO announcement set off a round of intense speculation. But most of the talk isn’t about the company’s stock price or financial performance – it’s about Marketo’s prospects as an acquisition target.

Would SAP or Adobe be interested in buying Marketo once it’s public? How about SAS or Infor? Those are possibilities, but Salesforce.com remains the odds-on favorite.

Right now, four out of five Marketo customers integrate with Salesforce CRM. That’s actually not so different from the situation at Eloqua, where more customers use Salesforce than any other CRM platform.

Or is it different this time?

Eloqua executives insist that nothing has changed for Salesforce users since the Oracle acquisition. I’m willing to accept that at face value, but it’s not the whole story. While Oracle may support existing Eloqua-Salesforce users, the company will also push very, very hard to sell new users on its own CRM platform. It will do this through aggressive pricing, and it will also do it through tight data integration.

The same would be true if, say, SAP snatched up Marketo. SAP will do its best to keep existing Salesforce users happy and content. But it will also bend over backwards to ensure that a growing user base steadily drives down the percentage of Marketo users on the Salesforce platform.

This is not a sustainable path for Salesforce – a company whose current “marketing cloud” is heavy on social media marketing and very light on everything else.

Last week, our colleague David Raab pointed out that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff came right out and told analysts that Salesforce needs to “buy more marketing companies.” David also pointed out that marketing automation is an inherently limited product that becomes far more valuable when it’s delivered as part of an integrated customer relationship solution.

That leaves Salesforce with three choices: buy, build or rely on the kindness of its competitors. Which one of those options would you pick?

Can Software Really Change Your Life?

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:08:28 -0400

After covering retail technology for a number of years and now marketing automation, I can’t recall anyone ever telling me that software had significantly changed their life for the better. I can recollect plenty of people telling me it changed their lives for the worse. And, sure, I’ve interviewed a number of users who were happy with some new features or functions in a new release. But I had never heard anyone describe them as life altering.

But I heard the phrase over and over this past week at InfusionCon, the users’ group meeting for Infusionsoft customers. The phrase came up in presentation after presentation and in conversations over lunch, dinner and cocktails. I almost felt as if I were being initiated into a cult — and I mean that in the best possible way.

After meeting Clate Mask, CEO and Co-Founder, Richard Tripp, Chief Product Officer, and other members of the executive team I came to appreciate that they were indeed extremely passionate about developing software to make the lives of small business owners easier “so that they can live the lives that they want.”

Many of the people who work at Infusionsoft were small business owners themselves, and some even continue to run their own businesses. So they understand the technological challenges facing marketers who are also owners, accountants, HR and every other hat that you can think of.

But they also looked beyond their own personal experiences as business owners. In developing the latest release of their software, they conducted extensive interviews with 256 customers. Not just quick five-minute calls to tick off a few questions on a survey. They spent an hour to an hour and a half talking to each of them about their most pressing needs and most desired features. That’s quite a commitment.

How many of your customers would be willing to spend an hour to help you improve your product? An even better question: Have you called them to ask?

—Kim Zimmermann

Provide Prospects With More Than A Sales Pitch

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:01:15 -0400

When someone downloads a white paper or attends a webinar, the knee jerk reaction can be to bombard them with every piece of product-related content you have in your arsenal. They like you! They really like you! You want them to buy!

But if that’s all you do, you’re sure to turn them off. In a Q&A earlier this week, Michael Brenner, VP of Global Marketing and Content Strategy for SAP and speaker at the upcoming B2B Content2Conversion Conference, talked about how marketers need to be a trusted source of content, with the keyword here being trusted. It is advice worth repeating.

B2B buyers know they are going to get a product pitch. That is part of the deal they make when they give up their email address to download an E-book, video or whatever piece of content that caught their eye. It is also why so many are setting up alternative email addresses so that they can keep their “real” inboxes free of sales pitches.

Why not give them something unexpected? Share the occasional blog post or article that did not originate from your company but provides them with some valuable insights into their areas of interest. In other words, be a bit of a news feed for your prospects and not just a steady stream of product hype.

I don’t think any B2B buyer is expecting a marketer to be completely vendor neutral, but sharing some relevant, unbiased content with your database of prospects can’t hurt. Will it take more of an effort? Absolutely. But the return on the investment could pay dividends.

— Kim Zimmermann

Will Firefox’s Tracking Block Thwart B2B Marketers?

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:37:56 -0400

My guess is that B2B marketers aren’t giving a lot of thought to Firefox’s tracking block, but maybe they should.

It may seem inconsequential, since Firefox only has 11% of global market share, as John Gaffney noted in his story about the company’s decision to no longer allow third-party tracking cookies. But as Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo pointed out in the article, it could reduce Firefox resolution by 20%.

The real concern is if other web browsers follow suit with ultra-privacy settings. Then things could get more serious.

B2B marketers are already facing challenges, as B2B buyers adopt the mindset of B2C buyers and are looking to keep the salespeople at a distance until much further along in the process. This is just one more way for B2B buyers to keep salespeople at bay.

- Kim Zimmermann

Last week the Demand Gen Report team received a package from...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:45:11 -0400

Last week the Demand Gen Report team received a package from NetProspex that included a letter and a new friend, Patrick “Patty” Prospector.

According to the note, Patty has spent years guarding the most valuable asset for B2B organizations—the pot of gold that is their sales and marketing database. But too much work and not enough play made Patty a sad leprechaun.

To help honor NetProspex’s latest solution, Workbench, a do-it-yourself tool for B2B data management, that enables marketers to assess and improve data via a cloud-based secure environment, NetProspex asked industry experts to help Patty take a break and see the world!

Using Social Channels to Fuel Successful SEO

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:01:00 -0500

By Paul Taylor, CEO of Webmarketing123

Most companies do a great job of engaging users via a rich tapestry of social channels. And most companies also have comprehensive SEO programs. What’s surprising, however, is how often the two aren’t connected. Using social to feed SEO is a no-brainer, and it can be done successfully by following a few simple community management techniques.

Engage Customers with Sharable Content

It doesn’t matter if your business is B2C or B2B – you MUST sell in a manner that is appealing to your target customers. Command attention by presenting your product in a way that is interesting, relevant, thought provoking and even humorous under the right circumstances. Social media is the perfect avenue for employing creative, more informal calls-to-action and conversations outside of your corporate site. Make the content easy to share for quick pass-along and increased exposure. Content should be sharable with one or two simple mouse clicks. Anything more involved will result in a precipitous drop-off of engagement and sharing.

Create Content to Engage Customers

It’s always most effective to stimulate visitor engagement by provoking genuine action and reaction. Experiment with surveys, polls or quizzes, crowdsourcing, and maybe even throw in a game element that is relevant to your product or business solution. Invite your target demographic to share experiences and information that will naturally create a compelling foundation for your social presence.

Keep Website and Newsletter Content Fresh and Topical

People don’t enjoy stale content, and neither do Google’s spiders! So do your company a favor and constantly update content on your website, newsletter, and any other outward-facing communication vehicle you employ. When refreshing your marketing content, create stories and incentives that are relevant to your audience and that will place your business at the forefront of their mind. You’ll be forgettable if you don’t expose the right kind of targeted, timely content.

Never Miss an Opportunity to Cross-promote

Always create multiple touch-points for potential customers to reach you. If you pave only one road to your business, you will greatly limit your exposure. Cross-promote your content and headline teasers across all media outlets in a methodical way. Create a web that linksyour YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to your blog, website, articles, webcasts and more. This cross-pollination is imperative to integrate your messaging into a strong, cohesive SEO machine. Search engine rankings are improved and strengthened with this approach. Your customers will certainly take notice, too.

In closing, keep your content fresh and solid — and implement the right strategies to share, influence, and impact your industry and customer base. Social media and SEO go hand in hand, and it’s up to you to firm-up that handshake and position your company for success.

B2B Marketers Get A Fatter Share Of Their Companies’ Budgets – Along With High Expectations

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:59:29 -0500

B2B companies aren’t just showing their marketing teams the love; they’re also showing them the money. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a very big responsibility.

I’ve been looking at the preliminary results of our 2013 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey. It’s probably not surprising that 86% of the B2B marketers surveyed to date told us that demand generation became a higher priority for their organizations during 2012.

At the same time, the overwhelming majority – nearly 77% — had bigger budgets to work with, and more than 38% saw their budgets increase by 20% or more.

Doing More With More

The budget outlook for 2013 is even more impressive. More than 81% of the B2B marketers we surveyed said their budgets would increase this year, and more than 51% said they will increase by 20% or more.

It’s interesting to note that during 2012, demand gen budget increases for our respondents lined up with their companies’ overall marketing budget growth. This year, however, it looks like even some companies that plan to level off their overall marketing budgets will still devote more funds to demand gen activities.

Here’s one more interesting data point: As a group, our respondents represent very fast-growing companies. Almost one in three of them expect their revenue to grow by more than 30% this year. These companies are accustomed to exceptional growth, and presumably their marketing organizations have little room for error when it comes to sustaining that growth.

Lessons From The Best

I draw a couple of conclusions from this data. First, it indicates that firms with a cutting-edge approach to demand gen, content marketing and marketing automation – the core of the DGR readership — are still characterized by aggressive growth and high expectations. This is a best-in-class group of marketing organizations; their tools and tactics deserve closer study.

Second, there’s no doubt that these marketers will feel the pressure to justify their companies’ investments. Fortunately, the vast majority of them are staying on top of this problem; more than 87% of the companies we surveyed said they were able to track the revenue attributable to marketing-sourced leads.

We’re sharing these and other findings from the survey this week in Demand Gen Report, and we’ll have even more to say about the study during the weeks to come. In the meantime, feel free to let us know how it feels to be asked to more with more, rather than doing more with less.

-Matthew McKenzie

Dirty Data

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 14:42:55 -0500

I’ve thought a lot – some friends say too much – about data integrity lately. They’re a little tired of the topic as dinner conversation.

I’ve asked them if they have ever used a phony email to sign up for coupons or promotions or other offers from retailers. A unanimous “yes” – no shocker there.

A little more surprising was that some of my friends who are responsible for making purchasing decisions at their companies have used phony emails there as well to avoid the dreaded sales follow up. One explained: “If they see a real email address and figure out which company you’re with, you just get hammered.”

Perhaps I should have taken that advice when I first started at Demand Gen Report. I was trying to get up to speed on marketing automation and downloading a bunch of white papers to help school myself on a new industry. After downloading one white paper, I immediately received several calls in one day from a polite but extremely eager salesperson. I felt guilty as this person was chasing after me when there were legitimate prospects out there.

Bad data can be costly and frustrating for the sales team, which then blames the marketing team for sending them bad leads.

But there is perhaps an even bigger price to pay for bad data. In researching recent stories on data integrity and marketing ROI, it is clear that bad data can make it harder for the marketing team to get credit for bringing in a lead. If someone signs up for a webinar, for example, with a fake email and then actually becomes a customer, that was a marketing-qualified lead, but the bad data cost marketing the credit.

Michael Bird, President of NetProspex, suggested that marketers keep registration forms simple and not ask for a prospect’s life history at the first engagement. Maybe – just maybe – that will make some people feel more comfortable about using a real email and maybe becoming a real customer down the road.

- Kim Zimmermann

Is The Fortune 500 Dropping The Ball On Marketing Automation?

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:39:00 -0500

Pardot marketing evangelist Mathew Sweezey recently did some research on marketing practices at Fortune 500 B2B companies. The results are fascinating.

You can read Mathew’s blog post here – it’s well worth your time.

He focused on Fortune 500 companies with a clear B2B focus and excluded firms with highly specialized marketing niches (e.g. aerospace and financial services). This narrowed his sample to 38 companies.

Here are the three things that surprised me about his findings, and a few thoughts on what they mean:

25% of these firms have adopted marketing automation. Mathew assumed he would find very low adoption rates in this group, which consists of very large companies with (presumably) very conservative attitudes towards new technology. As a result, he concluded that 25% was a surprisingly high adoption rate.

For what it’s worth, however, 25% is very low compared to many other estimates of marketing automation usage in the broader B2B market. Earlier this week, David Raab cited a LoopFuse survey that reported 42% of respondents had marketing automation in place, a Forrester report stating that 45% of “B2B enterprise marketers” had marketing automation, and a Lenskold Group study that reported 70% market penetration.

(All of those numbers, by the way, were from studies reported during 2012.)

How can one explain this discrepancy in adoption rates? It’s possible, as Mathew argues, that Fortune 500 organizations are far more conservative about adopting new technology. It’s also possible that these organizations – like so many other large companies – tend to use marketing automation within some business units or regional groups but not in others.

As a result, it’s often hard to know whether a very large company has adopted marketing automation, since it’s rarely an enterprise-wide rollout at this point.

Finally, there might be issues with different organizations using different definitions of “marketing automation.”

28% of these firms are using less than 10 questions on each form. In fact, Mathew found one example of a company asking 28 questions on a single form. This doesn’t just ignore the state of the art for B2B marketing, it ignores common sense. Either these organizations are so large that they can’t maintain acceptable quality control over their lead-gen practices, or they’re laboring under the illusion that these practices are acceptable. Either way, it’s appalling.

55% of these firms responded within 48 hours of filling out a form. There’s not much to say about this except to note that it’s even more surprising than the use of big, clumsy, intrusive forms. Best-in-class organizations routinely respond to inquiries within minutes of a form submission, yet nearly half of these companies take days. Why bother replying at all?

UPDATE: Mathew was kind enough to reply to a couple of questions I had about his research.In particular, he noted that the forms he filled out were always lead-gen related; he never included PR, investor relations or similar forms.

If anything, this reinforces the fact that the response times he reported are shockingly slow.

-Matthew McKenzie

Is The Funnel Outdated?

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:21:53 -0500

Having spent many years covering retail, I’m now acquainting myself with the marketing automation space. As I learn a new industry, I have been reading a lot about the “funnel” that represents the progression of leads into revenue. Makes sense.

Along the way I’ve discovered that some marketers and other industry insiders are declaring the funnel passé. Some, like Lori Wizdo at Forrester, are telling people to forget the funnel.

Among her arguments against the funnel is that this iconic symbol of marketing lumps all leads together and, as any good marketer knows, all leads are not created equal.

Having spent some time in the marketing department of a software company, I learned as I worked the booth at my first trade show that while we collected a card or a badge scan from everyone who came by the booth, we didn’t follow up on them all with the same level of vigor. A veteran salesperson stood behind me and had me drop the cards into “hot” and “not” piles. A manual system, but it worked.

But if not the tunnel, what will the new symbol of marketing look like? Wizdo suggests an escalator.

It is hard to predict what, if anything, will replace the funnel, but there is no doubt that there needs to be a way represent the growing sources of B2B leads – including social media channels – and the fact that some leads are more likely to turn into sales than others. -Kim Zimmermann

Nasim Nicholas Taleb's 'Antifragile': Challenging Analytics At The Extremes

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:37:07 -0500

It is a time of global extremes. The weather is extreme, politics are increasingly extremist (judgment withheld), economies are in extreme trouble in many areas, and many areas of business are facing markets and bottom lines that strain their margins.

You could argue that predictive analytics have been humbled by global events and demographic shifts. You could also argue, to paraphrase Pat Riley, predictive analytics don’t guarantee success, but without them you don’t stand a chance.

Somewhere in the middle is a guy named Nasim Nicholas Taleb. If you haven’t heard of him, you need to. His thinking is challenging the very notion of business intelligence.

Taleb came to prominence in 2007 with “The Black Swan.” Unlike most business books, it is compelling on every page, detailing his theory that the only things that matter in business are the things you can’t predict. Those things are what he calls “black swans.” As he presented them, they are most often harbingers of financial and societal insecurity.

The ultimate black swan was 9/11. The black swan that knocked Taleb off his gilded Aeron chair was the stock market crash in 1988. He was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street at the time. He was one of those people who thought the financial world was an ordered series of equations.

He was wrong.

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history,” he wrote.

Now he’s back. His new book “Antifragile” puts a different spin on black swans. They can be positive (the rise of the Internet), and there are businesses that thrive on disorder (medicine). But the quandary that Taleb poses for the business intelligence and marketing data business is this: How can you rely on predictive analytics when predictive data is so hard to rely on?

“Taleb advocates what he calls “nonpredictive decision making” focused on the ability of the unit in question (whether that be an individual, institution, industry or society) to withstand unexpected change,” said a review in Wharton@Knowledge. “Taleb is interested in things that actually thrive on uncertainty. To merely avoid harm is, in his terms, to be robust — and at times this is an acceptable result. Robustness falls in the middle of a continuum he calls The Triad. At the far left is fragility — that which requires tranquility, certainty and predictability — and at the far right, in the absence of a better word for it, is antifragility.”

Taleb is in some ways the anti-Tom Davenport, who wrote “Competing On Analytics.” Between the two poles of thinking here is a strategy that has been challenged and therefore strengthened. The Taleb approach is not one that can be executed outside of a classroom. Businesses of all shapes and sizes need to collect and analyze customer data, with the goal of improving efficiency.

If you’re a retailer, you may not be able to exactly predict customer behavior and value in the summer of this year. But you need to take your best shot in order to compete effectively. If you’re a bank you may well be off the mark when you try to gauge customer needs in the mortgage market. But you need to prepare for the potential market currents and the variations in customer value. If you don’t try to predict via analytics you run the risk of looking back with regret, a little anger, and a tough sell to the board of directors.

Nick Taleb is a great provocateur. There’s nothing wrong with challenging the need for predictive analytics. But there’s also no call to back off them. Predictive analytics very simply give businesses the opportunity to stay a step ahead of the customer. And regardless of the argument, there’s no other conclusion that matters.

-John Gaffney

Small Firms Love Content Marketing. They Just Don't Want To Pay For It.

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:08:04 -0500

Most small businesses now use content marketing, and most say they’re getting good results from it. Yet there’s also evidence that some of these firms aren’t setting themselves up for long-term success with content.

A new survey from BusinessBolts found that 74% of the small businesses surveyed said they use content marketing to promote their businesses. (The survey included a definition of the concept to keep everybody on the same page.) In addition:

77% of the respondents said content marketing has increased their web site traffic.
71% said it helped improve their search engine rankings.
59% said it has helped them increase their sales.
48% said it has helped them generate leads and grow their email lists.

Sounds wonderful, right? Not so fast. There are ants on the way to this picnic.

More than 60% of the respondents said they spend less than $100 a month on content creation. Even among firms reporting more than $10,000 a month in revenue, 36% spent less than $100 a month on content.

When asked how much they typically pay for a 1,000 word piece of content, about 60% responded “I never outsource.” Fair enough.

As for the rest, however, just 3% said they pay more than $50 for such content.

That’s five cents a word.

These numbers reflect a major disconnect. Small businesses are sure they’re getting results from their content, yet many of them invest so little that they can’t even afford content-mill garbage – never mind getting truly useful and original content.

We know Google is increasingly optimized to penalize bad content, and we also know that nobody buys good content for a nickel a word. So what’s happening?

My best guess is that many of these businesses are working from a baseline where they did no content marketing at all, and now they’re at least doing something. As a result, they’re getting marginal benefits for a minimal investment.

That won’t last.

Some of these firms will step up their games, make smart investments and learn how to use content marketing to drive long-term growth. The rest will decide it’s a fad, or they’re simply too cash-strapped to make such investments.

I hope BusinessBolts repeats its survey next year, because I think the results will be very interesting – and probably very different.

Email And Mobile: The Glass Is Still Half Empty

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:21:00 -0500

More than 50% of email marketers now optimize or plan to optimize their email offers for mobile viewers. That’s a key result from a recent Experian Marketing Services study, and it raises one big question: Is that number encouraging or exasperating?

I think it’s more the latter. Maybe I’m a pessimist, but this is a case where the glass is half empty rather than half full. There’s no excuse at this point for treating mobile platforms as a secondary concern.

Consider another data point: A June, 2012 Experian study that showed 44% of email opens happened on mobile devices. (Another 28% of opens happened via webmail.) Even that figure probably understates the impact of mobile technology on email; according to a 2011 Google study, for example, 84% of smartphone users were already checking and sending email with their devices.

B2B marketers face special challenges in this area. If you’re not optimizing your email for mobile delivery, there’s a good chance that prospects will associate your brand with lousy looking, badly formatted content. That’s especially true when buyers spend more time considering B2B purchases and nurturing campaigns require a growing number of touchpoints.

If your organization is part of the 50% that aren’t yet optimizing email for mobile devices, are you ready to make this a top priority for 2013?

-Matthew McKenzie

The Demand Gen Report Blog

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Quality Content: Helping Your Sales Team Help Themselves

Email Is Dead? I Don't Think So

Consistency: Your Content Marketing Secret Weapon

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