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!

BtoB marketers know that strong marketing starts with understanding your target market very well. As such, we take great steps towards understanding our target markets.

We perform market research to dissect our target market into different groups of companies that share similarities or buy alike (the fancy name for this is segmentation). We slice our markets into as many ways we can think of to create the ideal prospect. We want to understand size of company, location, verticals/industries, SIC code, and more. Armed with this data, we build savvier and better targeted go-to-market strategies.

While all of this is good and well, it can miss out on perhaps one of the most important segmentations that a BtoB marketer can do… segmenting your buyers into individual groups of people within the target organizations. This segmentation at the buyer level is called personas (or buyer personas).

Like corporate level segmentation which identifies like organizations so you can better market to them, segmentation at the buyer level (or personas) helps you identify like buyers (or group of buyers) who think, act, and respond similarly.

Within BtoB circles, you may need to create a persona for your technology evaluator, your financial decision maker and the business unit (or functional) buyer that drives the purchase. There may be more. You need to understand each of these personas specific needs and what makes them tick. According to The Marketing High Ground, a complete persona would include the following information about the buyer:

• Who they are (name/gender/age/education/title/responsibility/role in purchase/attitude/reputation)
• Where they work (ideal company profile)
• Why they are a good target for your product (values, fear, pet peeves, information sources)

Your first question might be, “How do I get this information?” Of course, nothing beats good old fashioned research where you get on the phone with 10-20 such people in each group and learn what makes each buyer persona tick. Don’t worry about getting it perfect at first. Put down what you know. Interview the sales people. Talk to a few customers. Start somewhere. You can do full-fledged offline and electronic research later.

The beauty of having personas is it ensures you are talking to specific buyers with the messages they care about using the communication mediums they prefer. Once you have buyer personas, you will find it drives your go-to-market strategy including positioning, content development, lead generation/nurturing campaigns, PR strategy and more.

Ultimately, knowing your buyer personas will improve marketing results including more leads and more revenue… sounds like a great tradeoff for some upfront work to understand your buyers. It’s time to get persona(l) with your buyers.

We’ve come to that time of year again when budgeting is in full season, and it made me think about how organizations approach budgeting differently, particularly as it relates to marketing.
I was talking with a CMO recently, and he said, “I have the ‘CFO cut’ built into my budget, so we should be good.” You see, this CMO has figured out that come the mid-Q3 timeframe, the CFO is going to get nervous and ask for money back from the budget. So, he has learned to put that money in ahead of time, so he could ‘give it back.’ Sounds like a game, doesn’t it?

Oftentimes, we are asked by our clients to think outside the budget, to plan as if there was no budget in place. Rather, they want us to build a plan that will execute at a level that ensures the goal is reached. Having gone through this exercise a number of times, the outcomes tend to fall into one of two scenarios:

1.  The budget is truly fixed, and the thinking and strategy to determine what was really necessary to make the objective happen was a theoretical exercise and a waste of time, or
2. The exercise was strategic and sincere. The CEO takes the feedback and goes to the board for approval to expand the marketing budget and take the market by force.

It might not surprise you to know that scenario #1 plays out much more often than scenario #2… maybe this is why so many marketers look upon the budgeting process with disdain, thinking it is “fixed” or a game in of itself.

Maybe it is time that marketers challenged the process and asked the strategic question, “What are we truly trying to achieve this year, and will we invest appropriately to make it happen?” For example, if we want to double sales, but will only increase the marketing budget by 5%, is that truly realistic?

Perhaps marketers should worry less about following the budgeting process and more about leading the strategic discussion.  Maybe then, the budgeting process will become strategic.

This post was also featured on TAG Think.

Sometimes I wonder whether marketers truly get pricing, its strategic importance and the impact it can have on the demand for their product.

Recently in Atlanta, new toll-based lanes were introduced on a stretch of highway that had been free since the road was created decades ago. Now, drivers would have the option to use the toll lane (at a fee) to whiz by all of the other drivers. It was marketed as a convenient time saver.  The new toll lane was launched with great fanfare and marketing communications – we heard about it through direct mail, e-mail, radio and television.

The big day came, and a 9-10 mile stretch of highway was priced at more than $5 to use the toll lane. Can you guess what happened? If you said, “No one used it and the entire traffic pattern changed to a deathly crawl.“ you would be correct. Drivers were in an uproar. The governor had to get involved and cut the price in half.  Next week, same result. So, they decreased the price again by 40%. Right now, it sits at about $1.50 for that same stretch – still too expensive for most people, but some are using it.

Is the Peach Pass priced right?

This type of pricing debacle is not limited to our government. Netflix has recently gone through its own PR nightmare dealing with its packaging and pricing changes.

Marketers need to understand the true pricing dynamics of their marketplace and what they are trying to achieve. Is the goal market share? Is it customer adoption? For Microsoft, price has often been used quite strategically to gain tremendous share in a number of markets. For Apple, market share has never been a consideration, as they are happy to have the elite, differentiated position, and that means their products are more expensive.

We have encountered numerous examples where price could have been used as a strategic tool to gain adoption, and then price could be raised later (albeit slowly) for profitability. Oftentimes, organizations start out too high and are forced to lower it only after upsetting customers or having an unfavorable win-loss ratio. Clearly, these scenarios are losing pricing strategies.

Unfortunately for those of us in Atlanta, many of us still have to drive home on the same stretch of highway. Unfortunately for Netflix, there are many alternatives, and it is easy for customers to switch.

Don’t be like these organizations. Get it right the first time – take your pricing seriously!

Sami Jajeh, principal at Arketi Group (http://www.arketi.com), a high-tech BtoB PR and digital marketing firm, explains the importance of building lasting lead nurturing programs as part of strategic marketing. Here are a few best practices to generating revenue:

• Measure heavily
• Analyze frequently
• Acting to refine and improve close ratio

A recent discussion of Arketians (that’s what we call folks that work at Arketi Group) brought up the discussion regarding what is a drip campaign versus a lead nurturing campaign. Turns out, our clients often use these terms interchangeably… it got me thinking, “Are they really the same thing?”

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Drip Marketing… Drip Marketing is a communication strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. These messages often take the form of email marketing, although other media can also be used.

Here’s the definition of Lead Nurturing according to an analyst with Forester Research… Lead nurturing is a process by which leads are tracked and developed into sales-qualified leads.

Same thing? Not exactly, although they are highly interrelated. To me, drip campaigns have been around long before the Internet or marketing automation solutions.  In the old days (circa early 1990s), one would drip a target database with letter campaigns, postcard campaigns, newsletter, and other vehicles. The idea was to stay in front of the prospective customer on a regular basis with some type of information. Today, we most often drip with e-mail marketing.

With the advent of marketing automation solutions, this process became much more sophisticated. While one could use a marketing automation solution to execute a basic drip campaign, they are typically used for much more sophisticated lead nurturing campaigns that have a very sophisticated workflow process based on prospect behavior and demographics. Lead nurturing takes a simple drip campaign and uses data and logic to provide a much more sophisticated decision process about what to send (“drip”) to each person based on their specific needs and place in the sales cycle.

And, while one could claim this is just a drip campaign by another name… it sure is a much more effective and sophisticated one that will deliver better tailored information to the prospect and a much higher conversion rate. Now, that’s a difference you can believe in.

Arketi ( http://www.arketi.com ) Principal Sami Jajeh details key tenets and steps for successfully positioning BtoB technology companies. He will also showcase how savvy companies are uniting the messaging and segmentation exercises to develop an over-arching message that resonates on both the corporate level and for individual vertical and product lines.

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Sami Jajeh, principal of Arketi Group ( www.arketi.com ), a high tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, discusses the importance of customer research in the positioning and messaging process.

We often are asked by clients, how often is “too often” when it comes to e-mailing prospects and clients. Can I e-mail them once a week? Twice a month? Just once a month?

One client just relayed a story regarding one of their sales reps who wanted to run his own campaigns… seems that the marketing department was not running them frequently enough for his taste, so he concocted his own campaign using SalesForce and away he went. There were many issues with this including the format of the e-mail and the timing, not to mention, exactly why is sales doing marketing’s job rather than spending time with customers selling (or helping them to buy).

Most importantly, it got me thinking… when does a drip campaign become a water-boarding campaign, where you are now torturing your prospects with too many e-mails?Here are some simple parameters or thoughts to help you answer the question:

1 – Ask yourself the Golden Rule question.. would I like to receive as many e-mails if I were in the buyer’s shoes, as I am now sending out. Would I be annoyed? What do I do when I receive this many e-mails from someone trying to sell me something? Chances are if you thought to yourself, “I’d be annoyed” or “I’d opt out,” then chances are your prospect is likely to do the same thing.

2 – Ask yourself whether you truly have something relevant, unique and interesting to say every week. If not, then just hold onto the e-mail and wait until you do. There is no harm in combining a few topics or other call-to-actions (e.g. links to blogs) into one e-mail newsletter.

3 – Look at the relevant metrics (opt-outs, opens, etc.) and see how or whether the additional frequency is hurting these metrics. If you have moved from dripping to water-boarding, you will see it in the data.

There is no one single answer for everyone, but there are good marketing tenets to follow to ensure that you are building a strong lead nurturing program that will last and work – that is, after all, what good marketing does.

Clients often ask us numerous metric-related questions regarding the lead-to-sales pipeline. They sound like this: What percentage of leads will become qualified? How many leads do I need to generate to get an opportunity into the pipeline? What should my close rate be? What should my cost per lead be?

All of these are great questions, yet difficult to answer as an outside consultant with limited information. The reason is that while it is easy to provide generic ratios and metrics, based on experience or surveys completed by leading marketing sites, I question the value in them.  For example, if I were to tell you that it should cost you $150/lead, and that you will need 20 leads to have 5 be qualified, 2 to hit the pipeline and 1 to close, are you any closer to understand the true dynamics of how your lead-to-sales pipeline will operate. I argue not.

In our experience, every product/service, sales cycle, and lead-to-sales process is somewhat different. Some organizations struggle to get leads, others to move them through the pipeline, and others to close. Hence, while one may use an average or generic ratio for planning purposes, it will do very little to understand or help the situation your organization is facing.

So, what should organizations do? First, they should start by measuring every stage of the sales process, from lead-to-revenue, so they understand the metrics at each stage. Only once they have and understand these metrics can they focus their marketing efforts at the parts of the sales process which will net them the biggest improvement in overall effectiveness. For example, if you have enough leads, but very few hit the pipeline, you are probably facing one of two issues. Either the message that generates the leads are not in sync with your offering/capabilities generating initial interest, but no follow through, or your sales reps are inappropriately or over-qualifying them. Now, you have narrowed down the specific components in the process you can work on to improve the overall hit ratio.

Yes, the lead-to-sales pipeline is truly a numbers game… do you know yours? Companies using the best practices are measuring heavily, analyzing frequently and acting to refine and improve their close ratio. Now, that’s a path to generating revenue.