The Invisible Marketing Blog » segmentation

Relationships vs. Markets: 5 differences between sales and marketing

Christie Turner — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:53:38 +0000

At one time, the demarcation between sales and marketing was simpler.

Relationships were what sales needed:

One to one, person to person,
company by target account company,
highly situational, mano a mano.

That’s the world of selling.

Markets are what marketing tried to influence.

Given enough time and money, you could drive statistically measurable movements of trends and beliefs through populations, groups, industries.
As measurement tools & processes got better, revenue was attributed to the process as a whole, but most of the activities tended to lack accountability.

Well, if Marketing is on the hook to help drive this year’s revenue, it’s not quite so tidy as this. The problem is that moving trends and beliefs through populations is expensive to measure and takes a long time. It can’t be tracked very well to this year’s revenue at most companies.

Marketing increasingly gets involved in relationships. We identify prospective customers who may one day enter a buying process. We nurture early relationships with those prospects. We score prospects’ behaviors to determine who’s getting closer to that buying process. We look for ways to influence individual prospect relationships.

These activities do not make marketing more useful or accountable. To sales and marketing alike, this increasing convergence of focus can feel like a fight for data, control, and ownership. It may get harder to assign credit for results.

What makes the difference? Getting marketing people out of their ivory towers. Building internal relationships. And learning how to talk with customers.

Lead nature vs lead nurture: which is it?

Christie Turner — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:36:34 +0000

Is lead nature — who the prospect is — that matters in B2B marketing?

Or what I do to keep in touch and build a relationship — lead nurture — that predicts lead value and conversion to sales opportunity?

Well, it’s both.

Most companies fail to define lead Nature in any but the most basic terms, rendering their efforts at connection stilted at best. Without an ability to carry on an intelligent conversation with your prospects through the various media of your outreach, it doesn’t matter how often you call on them. Your buyers will avoid, reject, and resent your intrusion if you talk at them like you don’t know (or listen to) them.

Many of us also do a perfunctory job (at best) in reaching out to these leads — lead nurture. And with nurture, compelling value helps but even simple consistency (just showing up) makes a notable difference.

This means more homework for marketing projects and plans upfront. And more detailed follow through.

Add these distractions to Marketing’s not-to-do list

Christie Turner — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:47:17 +0000

In a world of limited time, finite means, and pressure for results, what not to do?

When marketing is under-resourced, it tends to stop listening to the customer (if it ever did), because listening requires a cessation of action. What happens next? Recycling whatever you said and did in the last campaign. Talking to all customers as if they’re all the same.

Four marketing temptations that are common in a down economy (and ways to avoid them):

Not to do: Try anything once.
Try instead: When results are off (or direct marketing is new to the organization) it can be tempting to churn through new tactics, media, messaging, target industries. Revisit your plan, fine, but spend the energy to first analyze what’s there today. It’s easier, faster, and potentially less risky to incrementally improve an existing program than to chuck everything and start over.

Not to do: Get something out there NOW.
Try instead: Urgency and timeliness are important in marketing. Make the most of them by talking to each of your customers (and prospects) as if their current goals and worries are important to you. Start with the customers you know best and who are most valuable to you. Think about whom you’re trying to reach and what’s important in their world. Just making noise isn’t enough.

Not to do: The Unfunded Mandate.
Try instead: Ruthlessly cut what doesn’t have a budgeted spend, allocated time/project plan, and a revenue stream it’s directly intended to influence. Say no to everything else, regardless of who’s asking. Create a backburner list for nice ideas that need some more time to bake.

Not to do: Abandon everything.
Try instead: Don’t simply stop doing marketing. Establish an ROI objective linked to how your program or tactic will help a salesperson and/or a prospect. Test with a fraction of your sales force and prospects before investing big.

For the concept of the not-to-do list, thanks to @gerhard20 for the post 15 Things Salespeople And Sales Managers Should Put On Their Not-To-Do List.

I bet you don’t know your customer this well.

Christie Turner — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:01:40 +0000

The real beauty of Kevin’s article When will CMO heads roll? isn’t the observation that corporate marketing budgets are broken and that change is amazingly slow in coming.

That’s an easy target.

What I like is his description of who is changing.

He describes an actual target market that a marketer can begin to get to know and flush out through sales-related communications as well as corporate positioning.

Why?

It isn’t “people in [Department] with [Job title] at companies with revenue between $[X] and $[Y] million, whose [CMO] is [40] or younger, headquartered in [US].” That is how 90% of business people think of their target markets. In B2B especially, it’s really not true.

Your customer is someone who has a reason to buy from you. That’s not intrinsic to size, location or any other easy demographic or firmographic marker.

Check out Kevin’s article and see what I mean.

How to think like a customer: step #3

Christie Turner — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:02:29 +0000

This is the part where we admit that your customers can’t predict their own behavior.

What people tell you they like or think or want to do is different from what they’re actually going to do.

Especially if your business objective involves parting customers from their money for any reason.

The answer?

Test.

Create a situation where a couple of customers buy and use what you’re selling.

See what they do with it.

Experiment, tweak, and retest on a few other customers. Ask customers to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing (especially if their actions don’t favor you). Don’t take their first answer at face value.

See if the idea finds a workable niche.

This is the spirit of software beta testing, product demos, customer advisory committees, putting movies into limited release or straight to DVD, direct response marketing, and many other tactics.

How to think like a customer: step #2

Christie Turner — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:55:49 +0000

Now that we’ve admitted that we aren’t customers, we can progress to step 2: actually talking to a customer.

Ironically, the closest many marketing people come to the sales cycle is the 2-way glass in the focus group facility.

Which is nice. But you’ll learn the most, and fastest, about your customers (in the B2B complex sale) by riding along with your sales people.

Chatting with customers at events is also helpful. But the customer in the wild is the customer who’s trying to buy something. That’s who you want to hear from.

How to think like a customer: step #1

Christie Turner — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:32:59 +0000

Step #1: Stop assuming that your perspective is an effective surrogate for the perspectives of real customers.

That’s right. The first step toward customer centricity is to admit you’re not a customer.

This is still true if you : (1) used to be a customer, (2) sell every day to customers, (3) take customer service/tech support calls all day from your customers, (4) stand in front of customers every day handling service delivery.

Why is your view tainted?

1. Economic incentives. Your current employer pays your salary, determines your bonus plan, sets day-to-day priorities. Very few companies pay you to put your customers’ interests ahead of the company’s interests. Seeking a win-win with your customers is not the same.

2. Recency. To function in your current company, you can’t think like a customer. You have to think like an employee. You can remember how it used to be, but to survive now you must act within the jargon and organization structure and management goals and financial incentives of the company that’s paying your mortgage. Your former perspective when at other companies is blurred by the recency effect: what I need to care about now.

Even the most highly skilled, Method-trained actor is only guessing. A real hit man, alcoholic, abused wife, terrorist, or executive decision maker isn’t going to act like anyone else thinks. Economic incentives and day to day realities shape their thinking like nothing else.

This means I must speak with my customers in order to gauge how a product design or new pricing strategy or anything else customer-facing is really going to fly.

Why should marketing be invisible?

Christie Turner — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:48:01 +0000

People ask this all the time. (Which is fantastic, by the way!)

“Why Invisible Marketing? Isn’t marketing about getting visibility?”

Well, here’s how I think about it.

I have enjoyed, talked about, and experienced deep emotional connections with super-cool Superbowl ads for products I’ve never bought and companies with whom I won’t do business.

But I earn a living because I’m known and trusted by a really small group of professionals and executives, for whom I treat the cancer they’re struggling to manage.

Do I want someone to say to my client, “My, what a memorable campaign your company ran”?

My goal is to expose something valuable to people who will value it. To facilitate the development particular kinds of relationships, which eventually result in durable revenue generation.

It’s comparatively easy to design marketing that the marketer thinks is effective. But it’s terribly expensive to do that. Such marketing typically takes place in an echo chamber, absent the customer, the sales people trying to reach the customer, and the people who are serving the customer after the sale.

It’s hard to design marketing that does its job, which is to contribute to positive Prospect Lifetime Value.

Here’s a non-advertising example. When developing a website, most people are tempted to start with the graphics and colors. The disciplined and productive place to start, however, is with the business case: what problem am I trying to solve? For whom? What do they want from me? What do I want from them? What should we accomplish together through our conversations?

I promise, the color scheme is much easier to define and matters far less than a clear, shared definition of the business problem the site is solving. From the business case flow the message, the functionality, the design standards, and the common ground for making decisions throughout the process.

In everything I do, I try very hard not to begin with branding or design or pretty words or Fun Marketing Stuff or putting together a webinar by Tuesday. (Though all those things have to get done, too.)

When I work with companies, we begin by asking and answering hard questions. And then we test those answers to find out if they are true. Over and over. Iteratively, over time.

I’m not a designer. But I think there’s a beauty to this process. As the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said in his landmark book Sculpting in Time, “The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth.”

Who are we talking with, anyway?

Christie Turner — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:42:05 +0000

I like to base my calculation of conversions on % of my total list [target universe] who converted. Now, % of clickthrough is the usual denominator. But I think that sets the bar too low. I want to keep the focus on relevance to the total known target universe.

Why?

In my world, there are no points for visibility without relevance.

I prefer microtargeting: saying very very relevant things only to the people who care about them.

If the total universe is unresponsive, I’m blathering at too many people without enough relevance. (Setting aside email spam filters, “not working at this company any more”, and similar mechanics.)

This isn’t how consumer marketers think, and I’m not really sure how they could.

If I’m building executive relationships in a finite market space with comparatively few buyers and influencers (vs mass consumer marketing), then every contact is important.

And if relationships are the goal, and if every prospect is important, then my conversations and messages should have really high relevance to the people they engage.

That’s the holy grail, anyway.

To know us is to love us – right?

Christie Turner — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:04:33 +0000

Awareness is a common goal of marketing.

The assumption, of course, is to know me is to buy from me. Image advertising. Being funny, memorable, businesslike, serious, whatever we think will help the customer remember us.

You know the textbook example of great awareness/brand marketing? Movie marketing for Snakes on a Plane. It went viral months before opening day. It had incredible word of mouth. Heck, half the movie was designed by the target audience. Prelaunch estimates projected box office earnings in excess of $100M.

The problem, of course, is that awareness did not translate into sales. Actual U.S. box office? $34M. If you account for both production budget and marketing expenses, the franchise broke even at best. A spectacularly successful failure.

That leap of faith between awareness and sales doesn’t play well for marketing teams in tough times, either. How does marketing show me the money?

First, here are my assumptions:
- Your company doesn’t already have a century-old storied brand.
- You don’t have money or time to build one.
- You are under the gun to drive sales this fiscal year.
- You understand your customers well enough to talk to them in a manner they will consider directly and actionably relevant, or if you don’t you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and figure it you.

If those are your parameters, then the marketing answer, in my view, is two things.

Thing One: Strategic coordination between operations, marketing, and sales.
Someone is driving the conversation internally and externally so that your company is able to make promises it can keep and live up to the promises it does make. This isn’t about perfection or even operational excellence. It’s about understanding the reality of your operations, having some clue of your customers’ mindset and needs, and being able to put your company in a relevant position between the two. If your marketing message makes either your operational delivery team or your customer facing sales people cringe (let alone complain openly), do some more work before you take it to market.

Thing Two: Direct marketing.
Direct marketing teaches us to question anything that (1) can’t be measured, and (2) doesn’t lead to revenue.

Run campaigns which intend to get a carefully identified set of persons to take specific actions to move through their buying processes. Measure what actually happens. Then tweak your approach based on prospects’ behavior and feedback from sales people.

Awareness building tactics that help you gain credibility with your target buyers and influencers can help. But you should be able to draw a line from those awareness tactics to a step in your demand generation process or in your sales cycle, and identify some evidence of lift. Even if it’s anecdotal.

The meat of your marketing budget should go into getting buyers and influencers to take concrete, measurable steps toward you, which lead to other measurable steps, which lead eventually to a sale.