Where did all the marketing talent go?

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece recently around the pending IPO of social media juggernaut Facebook and whether or not its 27-year-old CEO is up for the job of becoming the youngest CEO in history to lead a Fortune 1000 company. The same “youth vs. experience” debate seems to be playing out among the ranks of B2B marketing organizations – creating a serious challenge for CMOs and Senior Marketing execs.

If you look at the ads being placed by technology organizations, it appears organizations are placing higher value on enthusiasm, passion and understanding of latest marketing trends than overall years of experience.  And they seem willing to trade a title for less experience –and the lower compensation demands that often accompany less experienced candidates.  For example, I came across a recruiting ad from a small technology company that is becoming all too common in recruiting circles. Looking for a Director of Marketing (a “second in command” type position from the description) to drive a large part of the company’s demand generation and web strategy efforts, the company outlined a long list of attributes including enthusiasm, passion for marketing, high energy, etc.  The experience required for this Director level job: just three years.

While I’m willing to concede that youth brings fresh ideas, enthusiasm and a generational perspective that those of us in the grey-hair camp might struggle with from time to time, I can’t help wondering if this technology organization might be better served looking for a more seasoned executive to lead such an important part of their operation.  And if B2B marketing organizations overall wouldn’t be better off placing a higher value on seasoned staff.  Especially as marketers are being asked to do more with less and make every activity count in a measurable way, does it not make sense to seek out the “been there, done that” base?

Consider the following recent research items:

• From a UK-based Fournaise Group study — 73% of CEO’s stated that “marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be.”
• From Sirius Decisions research — less than $1,000 is spent annually on training of marketing personnel
• From the same study — only 1.1% of Marketing execs responded with a yes when asked if their marketing organization had the right skill set to succeed.

There’s no doubt skill requirements have changed and ongoing training investment must increase if we expect to keep our seat at the executive table.  But maybe it makes sense to look for a few more seasoned marketing professionals and help them sharpen their skills with some of those training dollars rather than default to a younger candidate. It may cost a bit more up front and you may have to hear a few war stories about how it was “back in the day”, but you may find that creating bench strength by adding a few veterans that are willing to add to their skills portfolio leaves you better prepared for the challenges ahead.

A recent article from BtoB Magazine on Marketing Automation sparked a somewhat interesting debate among members of the Marketing Automation Association LinkedIn Group, and I thought it worth revisiting. The article’s main point was to imply, somewhat strongly, that the marketing automation and business intelligence tools available to today’s BtoB marketers have essentially changed marketing from a right brain to a left brain profession. (Slight detour for those, like me, who sometimes have trouble telling our right brain from our left – right brain dominant individuals tend to be more creative while their left brain dominant counterparts tend toward the analytic.)

It’s true that today’s automation and analytic engines are offering marketers tools and capabilities that we could only wish for a decade or two ago. However, I think it would be a mistake, and would set BtoB marketing back significantly, if these new tools resulted in anything less than a strong and equally deployed mix of right brain and left brain skills.

I would say that most successful marketers realize that, to be effective, marketing requires both creative and analytic thinking. Certainly, killer creative can at times overcome flaws in mix or deployment strategy. And ending up on the right side of a killer opt-in list built from relentless analysis of personas and prospect actions can make up for a bit of pedestrian creative. But when a strong, relevant creative message is paired with a well thought out campaign strategy built on solid analytic models, true magic can occur.

As point of fact, two of the more successful and creative campaigns I’ve been associated with recently had to do with an Indiana Jones type multimedia campaign and a zombie-based video and trade show support plan. Both leveraged analytic tools to validate results and both required a lot of left brain thinking. But I’d say it was the combination of both the pre and post campaign analysis and strong creative that made the efforts a success.

It is true that today’s comprehensive business intelligence and marketing automation solutions have made delivery against performance metrics a regular part of a marketers success criteria. And this goes well beyond the time-worn ROI numbers we’ve all used for decades.  Today, lifetime value, lead to revenue and pipeline conversion results rule. And marketers are more than ever held accountable for their decisions.

In addition to post-campaign analytics, today’s BtoB marketers can take advantage of a myriad of testing tools that enable A/B and multivariate testing of every conceivable campaign element before hitting a “Go” button. But I still believe that the best marketers are leveraging those tests to find the best of a series of strong creative elements pulled from the deep resources of their right brain.

Hopefully we don’t ever lose that.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 e-mail Benchmark report, delivering relevant content in emails was identified as a top challenge by nearly 70% of B2B Marketers.  Anyone who has embarked of execution of a long-term lead nurturing effort understands the pain.  Delivering content that addresses more than high level issues or pain points is critical to having an impact in today’s email heavy Marketing environments. While content volume and diversity are important considerations, relevance is clearly the most important factor.  If prospects don’t immediately see themselves benefiting from the content provided, your efforts (and resource dollars) are wasted.

So, what’s the secret of relevant content? Maybe it’s time to take a step back and really ask the tough question: Do we really know as much about our prospects as we need to in order to create a steady stream of relevant content that will get them to take action?  How much more do you know about the individual buying habits and motivations of your prospects than the baseline demographics of company size, industry vertical and job title?

If the answer is “not much,” maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and start digging deeper into your prospects’ psyche.  Make a commitment to building the true persona of potential buyers that can take you well past the demographic data and give you real insight –on a one on one basis – into what your prospects really care about, what causes them angst and why, for example, they see the need to buy from an industry leader as more important than innovation in the product or service.

One way to help with that deeper dive is through implementation of a consistent win-loss survey program. Sales and Marketing organizations have historically used win/loss analysis to uncover deficiencies in the Sales process and identify product shortcomings. But interviewing prospects shortly after the final buy decision is made can also produce critical information that takes you well past the often superficial information collected on online surveys.  Face to face or telephone interviews with recent buyers (or non-buyers) also provides fresh information about the buy decision process that isn’t colored by long-term interaction with sales and support teams.

Persona experts talk about the need to capture deep information through use of an unscripted interview, conducted by someone outside the Sales process, allowing for discovery of information that goes beyond what the Marketing team expects to hear.

A series of solid win/loss interviews can provide the objective and detailed information to help content developers uncover the issues and needs that will have prospects clicking to download content and subscribing to newsletters and updates.

I’ve been monitoring a really valuable website recently and wanted to first pass along the url to other B2B marketers.  It’s Ann Holland’s Which Test Won (www.whichtestwon.com). As founder of Marketing Sherpa, Ann’s work is well-known to B2B marketers.  And her team has done a great job with this site providing insight in a simple format. The site is all about A/B testing, each week showcasing a new A/B test, presenting an opportunity for those of us who claim expertise in building killer emails, landing pages, web pages etc., to view the results of which of two versions of an email, web or landing page produced higher results.

In addition to being an ongoing resource for best practices in email and web-marketing (the site maintains its weekly tests and currently has nearly 140 different A/B tests in its database), it can also be a very humbling experience. Since the viewer has to vote on which option tested higher before seeing the actual test results, you get immediate feedback on how well your instincts match other site viewers and the market at large.

One thing regular viewing of this site has made me very aware of is the need for continual email and web testing.  As the test results presented on Which Test Won show, conventional wisdom and traditional best practice advice doesn’t always produce the best results.  And subtle changes can make a huge difference in generating results.  All of which validates the need to test components of our marketing activities before hitting the “go” button on the latest web or email effort.

With the new automation tools available, testing is a relatively simple and inexpensive process – if we have the right list and are willing to spend a little more time to get it right.  It reminds me of what we used to say “Back in the Day” regarding customer and prospect research:  If you want to know what your customers really want to see, just ask them. Interesting how some things don’t seem to change.

Micky Long, vice president of Arketi Group (http://www.arketi.com), a high-tech BtoB PR and digital marketing firm, explains a strategic marketing approach that considers all aspects of delivering your message to a relevant audience in an ongoing and impactful way. At Arketi we call it 3D Content Mapping.

To learn more about 3D Content Mapping visit: http://arketi.com/newsletter/newslett…

Let’s be clear upfront.  As a marketing firm that has embraced automated lead nurturing and has experienced the results firsthand, we’re not having a change of heart.  But based on our experiences helping clients navigate through this new and still somewhat murky world, we present a few quick thoughts below on what should be done before jumping into the pool.

1. Your list isn’t clean. No automated program or lead nurturing strategy will be effective if you don’t have a clean list of prospects to address.  Install the discipline to maintain database hygiene before installing your new automation solution.
2. You lack content. There’s no getting around it; nurture marketing programs require content and a lot of it. Don’t underestimate this requirement or you’ll end up falling back into the “batch and blast” marketing approach.
3. Low lead count. There’s a reason it’s called lead nurturing vs. lead generation.  Automated lead nurturing is great at transforming cold leads into warm leads and warm leads into opportunities.  But it won’t by itself create a large demand funnel.
4. Sales and Marketing just can’t get along. A basic requirement before beginning any type of automated long-term nurturing strategy is an agreement from both Marketing and Sales on the basic definitions of a “qualified” lead, how leads are transferred to Sales and when Marketing gets them back if Sales is unable to engage.  Without agreement from both organizations on these basic but critical elements, no lead nurturing program can achieve success.
5. You aren’t ready to make the long-term commitment. Automated lead nurturing requires a long-term commitment to be successful.  And a good dose of change management.  You need to look at every aspect of your marketing operation and adjust the approach to adopt a nurturing program that works.

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Micky Long, vice president of Arketi Group ( http://www.arketi.com ) , a high-tech B2B PR and marketing firm, expounds on his experience as an Aberdeen Group analyst and provides a handful of best practices to employ when conducting an analyst briefing.

Let’s be clear – I’m not asking you to confess whether or not you floss daily – that’s between you and your dentist.  But we are seeing an alarming trend among B2B marketers in an area equally as troubling as bad dental habits – poor data hygiene.

As more and more of us look to personalized marketing, segmentation and longer term nurturing activities to feed the sales funnel, the need for more accurate prospect data becomes critical.  Knowing who your prospect is by name and email address is obviously no longer good enough.  The big question, however, is:  How many of us have the processes in place to ensure that prospect data is accurate? And relevant.  And actionable. And accessible. From recent, albeit informal, conversations with B2B marketers, it seems we have a long way to go. 

Regular data scrubbing, coupled with processes that limit the chance for ambiguous data entry while basic, seem lacking in today’s get it done yesterday environment. For example, do you REALLY need your CRM Prospect title field to be free form to capture every possible title or are you better off restricting it to a five option drop-down that will enable segmentation later.  And just like a little extra time spent in front of the sink can help avoid costly and painful tooth decay, practicing solid data hygiene can help avoid the long term pain of irrelevant messaging, high email bounce rates and an ineffective sales funnel.

The excitement around marketing automation systems and the extended lead nurturing activities they enable shows no sign of abating within the B2B community.  And that’s a great thing. These multi-faceted tools are enabling Marketers to delivering more relevant, timely and – ultimately – more impactful information to their prospect base, monitor prospect’s every electronic “footstep”, score and grade prospects every characteristic, etc..

And if you read the collateral from Automation vendors, it’s clear that today’s tools will do everything the B2B marketer needs – including delivering the late-night caffeine shot and monitoring the marketing team’s fashion sense. 

What many seem to lose sight of during the euphoria of launching the first drip campaign is answering the question “Why did I start down this path in the first place?”

Was it to offset staff reductions in the Marketing department that make email campaign execution more difficult? 

Was it to avoid the constant nagging from the Sales team that Marketing leads are worthless? 

Was it to stop the “How much revenue have you generated for me lately?” hallway conversations with the CEO? 

We like to think of automation as the next frontier that will revolutionize marketing from ground up.  It no doubt will over time.  But as a first step in this grand transformation, maybe it would make sense to step back and identify the top 3-5 immediate things you want your shiny new tool to do for you as you build the internal business case.

If you are part of the fortunate that have their execs convinced that a complete marketing retooling with the long-term ROI this type of change entails makes sense, great.  For the rest of us, dealing with shorter-term requirements, setting the stage with more modest, immediate and measurable objectives – which, by the way, automation tools provide as well —  just might offer a better path for success.

As a former research director of the Strategic Service Management Practice at the Aberdeen Group I wanted to share with our blog followers some insight for companies interested in building a successful industry analyst relations program.

It’s interesting that that so many place such a high value on influencing this group of influencers but get many of the basics wrong. These may seem basic but in fact, of the hundred or so of these that I participated in at Aberdeen, probably less than 10% stood out as effective.

When correctly engaged analysts can play a major role in the course of bringing a product or solution to the market. Analysts can help technology companies better understand complex markets, avoid costly mistakes, pinpoint competitive threats and evolve offerings to better match buyer’s requirements. In myexperience these are five “must consider” components for the all-important analyst briefing:

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1. Understand the importance: Treat the briefing like a million-dollar sales call. Act as if you’re dealing with your biggest prospect throughout every phase of the briefing.

2. Over-prepare: In addition to a polished, on-point presentation, it vital to ensure the right people are present for the briefing. The presentation should deliver a specific, tailored message to the analyst. Testing the proper technology, especially if conducting a remote briefing, is highly suggested. Web conferences are great but it never hurts to have a packaged version of the presentation available to email, just in case.

3. Be interactive: Build in question breaks, so you allow opportunities to engage the analyst in discussion. This also prevents analysts from multi-tasking and forces them to focus on your presentation.

4. Be honest: Most analysts are trained to see past the vendor pitch. Genuine dialogue is appreciated by the analyst. Installations that do not go as planned are okay; analysts understand that no installation is perfect.

5. Follow-up: Ensure action items resulting from the briefing are handled in a timely and effective manner. Provide a list of customer references to the analyst, because they will ask for them. But don’t stop there. Analysts appreciate hearing about new product launches, significant customer wins, or if a product or solution is gaining traction. Providing analysts with a steady stream of news releases on relevant topics can help your company keep this important group of influencers in the know, and can spark valuable conversations.

Analysts have much to offer technology companies, but it is up to the company to have a presentation that is rehearsed, researched and anchored with customer experience if they want to capture analyst mindshare.

To view this video and more at from Arketi on Arketi’s YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/arketi