Mobile devices are everywhere. How many of us remain glued to our respective screens – phone, tablet or laptop – regardless of where we are? As I went into the elevator yesterday leaving the office, I noticed three of four of us were glued to our small screens, rather than talking to each other. Sadly, I was one of them.

Device overload has affected us, with one result being our manners having become worse. One place where this is prevalent is in our signature lines. I received a happy belated 50^th birthday the other day from “Sent from iPad.”

What does that communicate? It screams, “I don’t have the time to even sign your Happy Birthday note because I’m too busy.” Doesn’t that defeat the point of sending it in the first place – to make someone feel special?

As marketers, the signature line should be sacrosanct. Imagine if you have 100 employees a day and they each send out 30 emails a day… that is 3,000 messages associated with your brand or organization. What do they say? Is your name or branding treated correctly? Are you using that opportunity to market something, like an upcoming conference? Do you have a link to a landing page for feedback or other connection to your company?

For many companies, the email signature has become the wild-wild west of marketing. IT may setup each computer, but sadly employees tailor it and not for the better. Even worse, employees tailor their mobile devices’ email signatures with something silly, or don’t tailor them and “Sent from iPad” becomes the signature line. Most importantly, employees rarely update Outlook or mobile signatures to reflect the latest important item we need to market.

The signature says a lot about the person, which is important even for business emails, because people do business with people. For example, a friend of mine signs his emails (even business ones) with the word “Love,” relating to his Christian faith and his belief in the (agape) love we show for each other. I sign mine, “At your service,” to let clients and employees know I am at their service, and to remind me to act as a servant leader. Because the word, serve, comes from the Greek word, diakonia, (“deacon”), the signature line is meant to drive home a significant meaning to me (a Deacon at church) and my recipients.

The signature line also says a great deal about one’s company. Are your email signatures filled with two paragraphs of legal disclaimers for every email you send? Are you promoting your company? Is your email signature friendly and legible? All of it communicates something.

Luckily, there are organizations that provide a tool to manage email signatures centrally. One such company, aptly named eMailSignature (www.emailsignature.com), provides a solution to update hundreds or thousands of email signatures of employees by employee role, etc. And, they can be changed throughout the year, enabling marketing to update them centrally to improve brand and engage customers.

eMailSignature asks on their website, “What does your email signature say about your brand?”  They’re dead-on, but I would also add, “What does it say about you?” Nobody cares if it was sent from an iPad or Droid – but most likely, they definitely care about you!

With more than 50 marketing and PR executives, the sixth annual Technology CMO Roundtable revealed best practices, learnings, questions and – most importantly – actionable insights. Attendees completed a survey about their marketing plans for 2013, and were asked, “When did you start your planning process for 2013?”

The findings show that 27 percent begin in October (the highest percentage), but 11 percent start as early as June. See the infographic below for more, and for all the results, download your free copy of The Outlook for Business-to-Business Technology in 2013.

In Marketing (or PR or Advertising) 101, we hear the adage of what makes for a great marketing message: you must tell a great story. Yet, as marketers, we too often fall in the trap of feature speak, making the conversation all about us and our products.  Even when we talk benefits, we often fail to engage the buyers. All a salesperson has to do to ensure the prospect does not become interested is open their 40-slide PowerPoint deck and start reading the bullets. It does not matter if you are selling the greatest invention known to mankind, the buyer will become disinterested and tune out.

Marketers should use some of techniques from the best storytellers: salespeople. Here are three storytelling and engagement ideas that smart salespeople use: 

1.  Imagine if you… It is always better in your messaging to talk about the customer and their needs, than it is to talk about yourself. To do this, use “you phrasing.” Some examples of “you phrasing” include “imagine if you could…” or “what if you could do this.” In this type of communication, the buyers are asked to become part of the story, which instantly makes it more interesting to them. As a result, they can imagine themselves using your solution and enjoying its benefits.
2. The good ole number play: A number play provides a series of numbers to the prospect that seem random, yet are related. For example, if you told your prospect in a presentation that they really need to understand how the numbers 87, 422 and 17 are related, it will peak their interest. Their brain will immediately engage to try to figure out the riddle. Of course, you must have a great story about these numbers that link to an important point you are trying to make in your presentation.
3. Words in common: Another successful communication strategy to keep prospects engaged is to provide them with three things that on the surface seem to have nothing in common. You ask, “What do X, Y, and Z have in common?” Again, the buyer will immediately engage to figure out what you are talking about.  Then, proceed to share a story about each of these three things, with all of them linking to your solution or value proposition. To use this technique, you must first figure out your message, and then work backwards to which words you can use that will make the word association succeed.

The goal in all of these strategies is to keep the user engaged before s/he drifts off. A nice side benefit is that their retention of your message will increase. Buyers may not remember the endless list of features and benefits, but they will most certainly remember a good story or number play. When it comes time for the buyer to decide who to go with, having your story fresh in their mind may be the very difference in your progressing to the next round in the sales cycle. As they say, everyone loves a good story.

[Ideas for this blog were used with permission from Master Messaging (www.mastermessaging.com) and David Kurkjian.]

Coming in at number six, Arketi Group’s B2B Marketing News made BuyerZone’s list of the 12 best blogs of 2012. Blogs were selected and ranked based on their content freshness, social media presence and engagement with readers. In the article, Arketi reflected on trends in 2012 and offered 2013 predictions.

In 2012, Arketi noticed an important trend of business-to-business organizations really embracing buyer-driven marketing. This is a way of thinking that places buyers at the center of all marketing priorities. If a program, strategy or tactic does not clearly impact the buying decision, then it’s not relevant, and not deserving of execution.

Business-to-business marketers focused on meeting buyer needs by building personas, matching content with both the buying cycle and the sales cycle, and eliminating the old batch-and-blast mentality. By understanding what buyers care about, how they make their decisions, and how they want to receive information, marketers can develop a more personal relationship with buyers which will ultimately lead to more sales.

In 2013, Arketi predicts business-to-business organizations will seek to truly leverage the full potential of the marketing automation solutions they invested in during 2012. This is a make or break year for marketing automation within many mid-size B2B companies. Organizations will either start to use the full power of marketing automation or they will cancel these services. It’s going to be all in or all out for a lot of companies.

Also in 2012, B2B Marketing News was named the third best B2B blog of 2012 in The Best of BuyerZone series for its dynamic content and expert contributors.  To read the “The 12 Best Blogs of 2012″ article, visit here.

This blog entry was highly plagiarized (with permission, of course!) from my good friend Gary Brooks, CMO for Cortera. Cortera has built the first ever B2B purchasing data database. For the first time, companies can now have critical sales intelligence about who actually purchases the product they are selling!

The old way isn’t good enough…

Since 1937, we’ve used Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes to determine what companies do, but unfortunately, these classifications can be inaccurate, misleading or lack the granularity needed to truly determine which business a company is in.

We typically associate a company’s size with revenue, which is relatively easy to find on the 15,000 U.S. public companies, but near impossible to find on the 5,985,000 companies that are privately held.  To compensate for the lack of data on private companies, we make assumptions and build sophisticated models to estimate revenue which is also fraught with inaccuracies.

But, does this traditional data actually improve your sales and marketing efficiency? As you process this waterfall of inaccurate data on customers, prospects and suppliers, how much more do you really know—even about companies with whom you have frequent business transactions?  Does this information—which is costly to acquire and manage—significantly improve your sales and marketing efficiency, boost your revenues, or reduce your risks?

The answer is almost certainly “NO”. Conventional business information tools provide too much information, irrelevant information or simply lack the key information needed–especially on private companies.  The image of our customers and prospects that emerge are incomplete and reveals very little about a company’s true financial value to you– now, or in the future.

It is time to take a page from the B2C marketing playbook!

With the use of credit and debit card data, retailers have employed increasingly sophisticated methods for capturing and analyzing consumer purchasing habits.  Through data mining, pattern detection, “market basket” analysis and other techniques, they have dramatically improved their ability to identify premium customers, improve cross-selling opportunities, predict future purchasing behavior and enhance overall sales and marketing effectiveness.

For instance, marketing and sales professionals can correlate a customer’s purchase of a minivan with the purchase of diapers, car seats, and a constellation of other child-centric products and services.

Imagine the same advantage in the B2B world

As with consumers, the manner in which companies spend their money speaks volumes about their priorities and direction.  If you had a view into that behavior you would ideally see purchasing data for raw materials, shipping services, and an array of business supplies and services.

The details and trends revealed in these spending areas can tell you if a company is experiencing growth or decline… if it is expanding and adding personnel, or contracting and treading water financially.

Such spending data simply hasn’t been available until now.  Fortunately, Cortera has opened this treasure trove and made it accessible to growth-minded companies for the first time.  To learn more about the power of B2B purchase insights, visit our good friends at Cortera, www.cortera.com.

October is here and it is time for marketers to start sharpening our pencils as we begin the 2013 budgeting season. The key to bulletproofing a budget is to let metrics drive the conversation, to build a true Return on Marketing Investment model for your organization’s marketing spend. Three critical aspects of building this ROI model should be centered on your pipeline, spend saturation and program attribution.

1. Know your pipeline. The key to demonstrating the return on your marketing investments is to understand how marketing has affected the sales pipeline. Start with what revenue has been generated in the past year, and determine how many of these sales, in dollar value, resulted from marketing’s lead generation activities. Then, look at the current active pipeline and determine how much of what’s in there is due to marketing efforts. Is marketing responsible for 30 percent of active deals? A half? Three-quarters?

2. Saturation – when is enough, enough? A second – and oft-forgotten – key to building marketing ROI is understanding when a specific program has reached its saturation point. This is the point at which additional investment will have no additional impact on revenue. Make sure you know what that point is and build your budget accordingly.

3. Attribution – can a marketing program get some respect? Perhaps the hardest part of demonstrating return on marketing investments is correctly attributing where a lead came from. A prospect may read about you in a trade pub, or see you at a trade show, and later does a Google search to find you. SEO gets the credit, rather than your successful PR and tradeshow programs. Your model must try to attribute these inquiries (and leads) across a number of programs.

With metrics in hand, the conversation can shift from projections created by finance to what investment in marketing will be required to achieve those projections. If the ROI model is strong enough, it will not only protect your marketing budget, but even increase it.

To read more about bulletproofing your marketing budget, download the latest issue of Arketi Insights, available for free at www.arketi.com/2012budgetinginsights.

The Tech CMO Roundtable is an annual invitation-only event that brings together leading BtoB marketers and PR executives from the technology sector for rich, candid conversations on current and future marketing challenges, opportunities and best practices.

Requests for invitations to the sixth annual Tech CMO Roundtable are now being accepted. This breakfast roundtable event is complimentary for qualified attendees and is produced by Arketi Group and our media partner PRNews.

We invite you to request your seat today by visiting http://techcmoroundtable.com.

Topics to be discussed include:

• What’s new in the mix
• Customer listening strategies
• Must-have social and lead gen technologies
• 2013 planning and budgeting
• PR and marketing talent requirements

Last year’s events included senior marketing and PR executives from Acculynk, Bronto, Cbeyond, CDC Software, Clinipace, ControlScan, CorFire, Ebix, Fiserv, Geomagic, Global Knowledge, iContact, Knowlagent, Lancope, LexisNexis, MailVU, Mi-corporation, Nexidia, Optricity, Qualcomm, Red Hat, SAS, Servigistics and Surgical Information Systems, to name a few.

The changes in an organization to handle the shift from marketing traditional software to cloud-based solutions runs to the core of what makes an organization tick. It is not about changing the customer. Customers have always only cared about adoption and use of software for business gain – marketers are just catching up.

Previously, sales and marketing efforts were entirely focused on getting the deal. In the cloud model, getting the deal is a just a step in the process, not the end game. The entire organization must become focused on the one thing the customer cares about most – actually using the software for business gain. And, if the customer does not achieve this, he will not use the solution and no revenue will change hands.

Arketi Insights is a regular thought-leadership series of publications that examines top and emerging BtoB marketing topics, and what they mean for high-tech BtoB marketers. The third issue focuses on marketing cloud solutions in the BtoB space.

Titled Marketing the Cloud: Transitioning from Marketing Traditional Software to Cloud-based Software, this publication covers key considerations when marketing cloud-based software, such as:

• Building programs and communications that target those involved in the adoption of the solution
• Developing messaging that addresses security and integration concerns
• Enhancing customer communications programs
• Engaging with customers so they can more rapidly adopt the cloud solution

Marketing the Cloud: Transitioning from Marketing Traditional Software to Cloud-based Software is available for free download at www.arketi.com/2012cloudinsights.

To view a social media news release, visit here.

In today’s information-rich environment, buyers are in control of the sales process – so understanding what makes them tick is essential. Buying-cycle changes brought about by the Internet and social engagement are forcing marketers and executives to retrench and place the buyer at the center of their world.

Savvy organizations win by initiating conversations with customers – would-be and current – then using that intelligence to craft campaigns and communications that speak to buyers in their terms, answer their questions, and meet their specific information needs. The time has truly come to stop selling and start listening.

At last month’s Technology Executives Roundtable (TER) meeting, Arketi Principal Mike Neumeier, APR moderated a discussion that centered on answering the question: Have we (as marketers) lost the customer amid all our efforts to market to them?

In this expert panel, participants explain how their organizations are putting an emphasis on listening to customers and marketing to their wants and needs while addressing their fears and concerns.

Panelists included:

• Mary Ford, Vice President of Sales Operations – Cbeyond
• Don Turner, President & CEO – Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc.
• Neil van Helden, Director of Marketing – Ebix, Inc.
• Emmy Weber, Vice President of Marketing – Surgical Information Systems
• Mark Wilson, CEO – eVerifile

To view the engaging dialogue that unfolded, view the video below.

Old school marketers remember well the Four P’s of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Of course, they still apply today, but all of the P’s have become so much more involved and complicated than they once were.

As BtoB marketers, we spend a lot of time defining our product, price, promotional strategy and the channels we will sell through… but I have realized, that we spend too few cycles on how we are going to package our whole solution to the client.

For many, we think of packaging as the physical box something comes in, and yes, this is packaging. And, we know that certain companies such as Apple take great care in building a great package for their products. In fact, it is part of the product. Many might argue that most of Apple’s great products are the result of a brilliant packaging exercise of various technologies.

Regardless, I don’t believe most companies take the packaging exercise as seriously as it needs to be taken. They build product, they determine pricing, they create a promotional plan, and then they start selling. But, packaging itself is often the glue that holds these “P’s” together. How one goes to market is intricately tied to the “package” it will be delivered in, or for non-physical products, how it is delivered.

Software products are an excellent example where packaging is critical. For example, which features belong in which solution at which price point? Defining this is a packaging exercise. Oftentimes, we have found that not thinking about how the customer wants to buy your solution will greatly limit your flexibility in how you can price it and the channels you sell it through.

Rather than waiting until you are building a go-to-market strategy before considering packaging issues, I would argue packaging needs to be thought through early in the product development cycle and be fed by 1-on-1 customer research. By digging into the customer mindset, we can start to understand what features are considered the basics and which are advanced – we also may start to understand how we can better package and price our solutions to where clients see the value. This will not only increase the sales kill-ratio, but will extract greater revenue from customers. It will also help us architect our products better to serve more customers.

When our product is packaged appropriately, we can segment our market better and tailor specific packages to different needs of different target groups or segments. That can only lead to greater customer acceptance, which should be music to any marketer’s ears.

So don’t forget to think through the packaging of your BtoB solutions early in your product and marketing planning. I am off to lunch now… time for me to go eat some dead, cold fish. Ok, I mean Sushi in a nice restaurant, but it goes to show that packaging does make a difference… I would never buy a package of dead, cold fish!