I’ve been actively speaking over the past few weeks about a new strategic mindset I believe B2B marketers should adopt today — a ‘mass one-to-one’ strategy.  This is a posture where marketing manages scale, targeted, engaged and two-way dialogue with prospects, upstream from sales-team interaction and ultimately with the purpose of paving the way for a sales close.  This is much more than mere lead generation; moreover, the growing need for such a strategy really is the natural extension of my recent observations about how the nature of the B2B buyer is changing and the permanent shift this is affecting in the roles of both sales and marketing team members.

The intent of a mass one-to-one strategy is to close an emerging sales-cycle gap — where the buyer is seeking information and having dialogue about a purchase, but is doing so on his/her own terms, mostly online (including via social media) and prior to ever engaging a sales team member.  The strategy thus attempts to fill this gap by having marketing replicate and replace some of the engaged, ‘customer-centered selling’ interaction a sales team member might have pursued before the nature of the buyer began changing.  The strategy focuses more on initially responding to ‘pull’ and initial ‘inbound’ activity and on conforming to the buyer’s cycle than on driving interruptive ‘push’ tactics.  This means knowing the buyer better than ever before.  It also means marketing has a more strategic … and complex … role than ever before.

Source: iStockphoto

The good news is that the same Internet that brought this change also is fostering new tools to respond to it.  By embracing a holistic lead management strategy and by deploying a robust marketing automation platform, marketers can get start to get some control.  In fact, mass one-to-one sounds great and is more achievable once you have technology like this in place.  Yet most marketers will admit that the idea of building an endless number of dynamic, anticipatory, customer-triggered campaigns for some infinite number of customer types and scenarios is daunting.  Where do you stop?  How do you get any economies of scale?  Such a commitment of time and resources — without limits — can result in a declining return that does not match the investment. 

So how do we get our arms around this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing and get going with mass one-to-one without blowing a gasket?  In particular, how do we focus our marketing automation campaigns to get the most bang for our buck? 

I believe the answer — the ’secret sauce’ — more than ever is personas. 

Yes, personas.  Let me explain …

… first some background, though.  I was asked, in the Q&A portion of a session at B2B Marketing University in Palo Alto a few weeks ago, what I thought was the best way to focus campaign and content development, given a changing buyer and given the related challenges we face today as B2B marketers.  Without fully thinking, I said, “Personas.”  Just blurted it out.  But then I thought about it for a second. 

Yes, personas.

Personas at their core are a marketing approach to identifying prospective customer segments and better understanding the dynamics and situations that define interactions with these segments.  They help us put buckets around bigger populations and develop products and go-to-market strategies that are appropriate to their needs and buying patterns.  They also help take planning steps such as basic market segmentation to a much more useful level by putting them into context.  And in a world where the buyer has more power than ever, they help us get closer to wrapping our marketing around that buyer.

Yet even after saying this, I have concerns about my comment.  Personas are one of the most misunderstood tactics in the marketing world.  It seems that everyone has an opinion about or a reaction to personas — often from either really good or really bad experiences.  Personas also seem to come and go as a trendy marketing concept.  In fact, the topic currently is finding a resurgence among the current ‘New Marketing’/Inbound Marketing in-crowd, propelled by guys like David Meerman Scott.

I wanted to dispel some mythology and focus in on what personas really are, and what are they not.  Moreover, I wanted to address why are they such a good fit for the new challenges we face today as B2B marketers?  I also admit that while I understand and have used personas before, I was not exactly 100% up on the ’state of the art’ in personas when I proffered my answer onstage in Palo Alto. 

So, as I often do, I spent some time digging into this topic, updating my own knowledge and ‘getting smart.’  In particular, I spent time reading posts written by a number of persona luminaries, including:  Steve Mulder, a principal consultant at Molecular and author of The User Is Always Right (which I’m also now reading); Laura Patterson, president of VisionEdge Marketing; Angela Quail and Tony Zambito with Goal Centric; Adele Revella, founder of the Pragmatic Marketing seminars; and Todd Wilkens with Adaptive Path.

Here’s my synthesis …

What are personas, and what are they not?

You’ve probably heard about personas before, and more than likely it was related to product marketing.  I’ve actually (soft of) talked about personas here before — referring to research and writings by Patricia Seybold around the concept of ‘customer scenarios’ in a past blog post on this site.  Product marketers have been successfully deploying personas for some time — particularly in the consumer products arena — as a catalyst for new product and service development (NPSD).  This may skew your perspective of personas, though, so let’s be clear that the thinking around personas and their broader marketing applicability is constantly evolving and widening.  (And our focus here is meant to embrace this widening.)

Personas are increasingly being applied to the complete range of marketing activities, not just NPSD — meaning that personas are helping to define not only the product or service a buyer may want but also the channels and dialogue that will be the most effective in engaging with a prospect and closing a deal.  And in the B2B marketing arena, persons are increasingly being used as a tool for modeling your buyer segments and the buying cycle they go through.

“Understanding not only who your buyer personas are but also how they engage in the buying cycle (and how the buying process is defined) is a ‘new rule’ for the creation of buyer personas,” comments Tony Zambito, president and CEO of Goal Centric, in a post on his Buyer Persona Insights blog.

This is a critical evolution.  As I indicated above, an increasing amount of time and energy of B2B marketers is being spent on understanding, responding to and supporting engagement with buyers in the context of the changing nature of the buying cycle.  Personas thus represent both a rallying point and a catalyst for more buyer-centric B2B marketing at a time when buyers have more power than ever before — which is why I included this concept in my recent “Seven Principles for Building More Buyer-centric B2B Marketing Programs” post on the Demand Generation blog.

So at a most basic level, what is a persona and what is it not?  Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing, tackled this in a great post on MarketingProfs:

Personas are archetypal users that represent the needs of larger groups of customers, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. Think of them as “stand-ins” for real customers. A persona seeks to zero-in on customer behavior and characteristics. A persona is a concise description of a specific customer type.

It’s important not to confuse personas with profiles. Personas are narrative descriptions that bring user profiles to life. Personas present an alternative representation of user profile data that is easily understandable and is designed to communicate customer details that are easy for team members to keep in mind during the buying process.

This helps us better wrap our heads around personas.  Building on this — and based on the research I’ve seen — there seem to be a two key characteristics that define effective personas:

> They are insight-based and focused on defining the common core of buyer segments.  Effective personas are rooted in research, and they help us understand opportunities for better engaging with B2B buyers.  What is an insight?  “An insight is a focused observation about a gap between your customers’ actual experience and a possible experience that would either relieve a point of pain or actually take them all the way to enjoyment,” explains Angela Quail, a colleague of Tony Zambito at Goal Centric, in a different post on MarketingProfs.  Taking this further, Patterson explains in her article above, “The purpose of a persona is to identify a customer’s motivations, expectations, and goals. Even though personas … are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real customers. A well-crafted persona enables you to stand in your customer’s shoes and take a more customer-centric view.”

> They combine a descriptive profile with a contextual situation.  Effective personas are more than just a profile, as Patterson explained above.  They start with a description of a buyer, but they seek to understand the context through which a company might interact with a given buyer — either in the context of a buying cycle or in the context of using the product or service.  This is why personas are such a critical tool for B2B marketers.  Increasingly marketing has more touch points with a buyer than any other part of the organization, and the marriage of profile with context is critical to modeling effective interactions and to designing marketing programs that will result in higher sales conversion rates.  Personas thus become a valuable lens both for analyzing marketing investments and for mapping them to successful programs and tactics.

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original); click to enlarge graphic

What are the key elements of an effective B2B persona today?

There are some fundamental differences between B2C and B2B marketing.  No question.  What makes B2B marketing different?  B2B marketers tend to support direct sales forces; theirs is a high-involvement sales process in which a great deal of information is exchanged and a number of stakeholders are involved; products tend to be lower volume, higher price; and the buying process tends to be rational, versus emotional.

B2B is a complex dance with high-involvement by both buyers and marketing/sales team members.  This complexity has led many to shy away from personas — viewing them as an oversimplification.  “One of the most pressing issues that have surfaced in the last few years with the evolution of personas and with buyer personas in particular is how to address the complexity often found in B2B markets,” explains Zambito in his post above.  “In fact, I believe it is the underlying issue that has prevented buyer personas from being more widely adapted.”

B2B personas don’t have to be complex, though, to be effective.  In fact, there are just a few key elements that are critical to developing effective B2B personas (building on the two key characteristics defined above):

> Buying cycle definition and alignment:  We touched on this a bit above, but it’s critical to re-iterate this point.  A successful and useful set of B2B personas must identify and encompass the discrete and addressable set of ‘critical paths’ commonly followed by groups of buyers, and then segment by grouping common ‘like’ paths.

Zambito further explains, “To fully realize the potential of buyer personas today, they need to be part of an overall effort to integrate them with buying process scenarios and a view of the ‘ecosystem’ that is relevant to a specific B2B market.  These views are essential to understanding … how as well as why buying decisions are made.”

> Identification of both explicit and implicit ‘critical factors’ in the buying cycle:  What are the common traits and actions that lead to sales conversions and that define the ‘critical paths’ customers take?  Given this, what are the discrete and definable buckets of these common traits and actions?  That’s what we want to find out, but we need a complete picture.  This means analyzing and identifying both explicit/demographic factors of these personas and also implicit/behavioral factors.  One without the other skews the picture; that’s why we need both.

“Personas can’t make a credible impact on sales and marketing strategies if their description is limited to information about demographics and pain points,” explains Adele Revella, developer of the acclaimed Pragmatic Marketing seminars, in a recent post on her blog.

> Linkage to lead score models and lead management processes:  There is no element of B2B marketing planning that lives in isolation.  Everything is integrated as savvy sales leaders have always known, and as increasingly-savvy B2B marketers are finding.  The same explicit and implicit critical factors that must be identified for the persona are also the factors that should be driving your lead score model, and consequently your lead routing and nurturing processes.  Not only should the two be fully aligned and integrated, but the development of the persona can prove to be an opportunity to put ‘flesh’ and real-life understanding back into a lead score model.

Similarly, the scope of the insights driving your personas should take into account the entire lead management process and the entire critical path buyers follow, rather than merely focusing on activity at the earliest stages of the buying process. 

Revella addresses these points in her post above.  She also highlights how personas can contribute to greater sales and marketing alignment by driving common understanding of the critical path buyers follow:

I suspect the problem with much of the discussion on the blogosphere is that personas are a popular topic for web designers and others that focus on the early stages of the buying and awareness process. Perhaps the simple information they describe is enough for marketers who only focus on the top of the funnel. But this focus is dangerous in business-to-business marketing.  While many people believe that marketing is all about lead generation, even highly qualified leads won’t result in revenue until the sales people have the training and tools to overcome the resistance they’re going to face later in the sales process.

Marketers complain that sales people don’t follow-up on their leads, even those that are highly qualified. But who can blame sales people who have various ways to make quota for choosing to sell products where they can anticipate the buyer’s reaction at each step in the sales process. Marketing needs to step up its game, using buyer personas to deliver the training and tools that drive sales funnel conversions.

> Capturing the diverse nature of the modern, savvy B2B ‘buying unit’:  One of the stark realities that B2B marketers face today is that there is no single buyer.  I noted in my recent blog piece on how the nature of the B2B buyer is changing that buyers are “… operating in a more sophisticated fashion than ever. A big-ticket purchase will be evaluated by a team of people, ranging from the initial recommender, to someone making the business case, to a purchasing agent, to legal/finance/etc. It’s a complex process to navigate.”

Zambito echoes this in his blog post above:  “One thing that I am sure any person in the B2B markets will tell you is that there is never just one ‘buyer’ in these markets.”  He further offers, “[T]his misunderstanding and common pitfall of attempting to create a ’single’ user or buyer persona can be costly and result in little value.”

Steve Mulder, a principal consultant at Molecular, talks about this in his book, The User Is Always Right, which provides great insights into using personas to drive more effective Web content interactions.  “It’s too easy to think and talk about ‘the user’ as if everyone who visits the site has the same goals, acts the same way, and thinks the same way,” says Mulder.  “Intellectually, I know my users are very different, but it’s tempting to create a single abstract, idealized user to design [content] for, because it simplifies my decision-making.”

Why do B2B marketers need personas to find success with marketing automation campaigns and with adopting a mass one-to-one strategy ?

This brings us back to the original issue — and the title of this post.  This is where the rubber meets the road.  Let me say that I strongly believe personas are the secret sauce for effective marketing automation campaigns and the key to achieving a ‘mass one-to-one’ strategy.

Patterson does a great job in her post above of summarizing the top line argument for why personas make sense in B2B:  “Personas provide valuable insight into the motivations and personalities of specific buyers and users. While they are simple in form and structure, the information they contain is powerful; it can be applied to decisions throughout the sales-enablement process. Personas can help with understanding specific requirements, facilitating alignment, and expediting the sales cycle.”

Taking this further, I believe there are four specific reasons why personas are critical to helping us respond to the ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing and find success with marketing automation campaigns.  I believe personas:

> Focus company attention and resources on what matters — the buyer and his/her/its needs:  I feel somewhat ridiculous calling this out, but I’ve been around the product-centric/sales-led world of B2B for too long and I know this gets forgotten.  So this is my first supporting point for ‘why personas.’

“Successful companies recognize that putting users at the center of decision-making is almost always a good idea,” argues Steve Mulder in an interview with Liz Danzico on her Boxes and Arrows blog.  And Todd Wilkens agrees in a defense of personas on his own blog:  “[P]ersonas have always improved an organizations understanding of their customers because, if nothing else, they become a tangible and explicit artifact for focusing and catalyzing discussion about customers. While this may not always be inspiring, it moves things forward.”

> Focus the development of go-to-market strategy and the design of marketing campaigns:  Even for organizations that have a reasonably-enlightened sense of who their customers are, there seems to be tons of go-to-market strategy and specific design of marketing campaigns that remains un-inspired, un-focused and basically just a shot in the dark:  ‘Someone buy my product … pretty please.’  Come on, B2B folks, you know this is true.  The good news is that having a discrete sense of personas, along with their insights into the critical paths buyers follow in their buying cycles, is a quantum leap.  This totally (re-) focuses the development of your go-to-market strategy and gives you rationale for how you should design your campaigns.  This is particularly helpful when it comes to the issue of which channels and in what sequence.  If you know your buyer personas, this stuff is easy.

> Rationalize content development in terms of buyer dialogue:  Content development is consistently one of the greatest challenges B2B marketers find themselves wrestling with.  Too much content gets developed in a vacuum.  Personas change everything.  If you know your buyers and their personas, then it’s a breeze to develop content that aligns to the buying cycle and that propels forward a coherent dialogue — something I touched on in a recent Demand Generation blog piece.

Personas also give insight into aspects of the content you probably aren’t really even focused on today.  Steve Mulder in his book above comments, “In any medium, effective communication can make or break a relationship between a business and a user.  The content is important, but so are the style and tone in which it is delivered, which is why it needs to be tailored to the users you’re serving.  And by ‘content,’ I don’t just mean text, because imagery and multimedia also contribute to the messages you communicate.”

> Are critical to efficiently scaling your marketing automation campaigns:  This closes the loop.  We all want mass one-to-one, but we can’t develop infinite numbers of campaigns, tracks and content.  Personas keep us focused and allow us to know when to stop.  If we’ve identified 5 major clusters that we can describe in terms of personas, we can ‘go deep’ with these and knock the content and dynamic tracks for these campaigns out of the park.  This is a lot harder to do if you try to design an individual track for every possible buyer you might come in contact with.  Truth is that while we truly want to get to mass one-to-one, we still need to get some economies of scale.  Personas enable us to intelligently access economies of scale as marketers without losing sight of buyers’ needs and/or missing opportunities for real engagement.

So what are the best practices for designing and implementing B2B buyer personas, and how can a B2B marketer get going with personas?  I’ll cover this in a follow-up post early next week on the Silverpop Demand Generation blog.  Stay tuned …

I’ve been actively writing and presenting over the last few months on the changing B2B marketing landscape. And I’ll be talking more about this subject throughout the Fall at the B2B Marketing University series that I’m hosting together with my colleagues at Silverpop (please join us).

A great deal of the focus of my dialogue so far has been on the evolution of marketing technology, but it’s impossible to talk about a changing environment for marketing technology without talking about how the nature of the B2B buyer also is rapidly changing. The two are inextricably intertwined in a new reality that is both a cause and effect of the digital age we live in.

Source: iStockphoto

But where is the hard data that this evolution is really occurring? We’re changing how we go to market — and there is plenty of data pointing to shifting spending by marketers — but how do we know that our shifted spending will better align with B2B buyers’ shifting needs and preferences?

There are quite a few data points that support this evolution; however, they’re often difficult to unearth. Often they are buried or confused within consumer-focused studies on buying trends, and sometimes the consumer data even contradicts the B2B reality. Marketing technology analyst and author David Raab hit on this in a recent round-up of many of these ‘mixed’ consumer/B2B surveys on his Customer Experience Matrix blog. And a major call-out from his piece was just this discrepancy: “Many [data points] are contradictory …,” commented Raab.

So how do we better articulate the unique and changing nature of the B2B buyer — separate from the broader consumer perspective? How do we nail down (real) evidence that the nature of the B2B buyer has changed?

Given the importance of these data and insights to my work, I spent some time updating my perspective to make sure that as B2B marketers we’re on the firmest ground possible. It’s critical that we really understand in an accurate and granular way how best to address the ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing that I believe is emerging. The good news is that in the process I ran across some very interesting studies and insights, which I’m happy to share.

So first I’ll tackle a definition of how B2B buying behavior has changed, and then I’ll present data points from cutting edge research on the topic I believe illustrates this new reality.

What exactly is the change that has occurred in B2B buying behavior?

As a starting point, let me say that I believe the fundamental buying cycle — i.e., the stages buyers typically go through to make a decision — has not changed. I talked a bit about this in a recent blog post on the Silverpop Demand Generation Blog via the concept of ‘Customer Centered Selling’ that former (and legendary) XEROX sales trainer Robert Jolles has written about.

I still believe this cycle exists, in perpetuity; however, as I outlined in the Demand-Gen blog piece, when and where buyers engage with in-house sales and marketing resources versus external resources is what has fundamentally changed.

In fact, the last decade has brought a rapid (r)evolution in the alignment of resources and power — something I detailed in a recent guest piece on the ReachForce blog:

There are many challenges facing B2B marketers today, but they are almost all traceable to one inflection point — a fundamental, Internet-age shift in power that has taken place. Today, the B2B ‘buying unit’ has immense information-based resources at its disposal. Couple this with a corporate accountability and transparency mindset, and the result is a B2B buyer that is now calling the shots … not the B2B vendor.

The implication is a new B2B marketing dynamic that demands responding to customer ‘pull’ over a traditional marketing ‘push’ mentality. …

Buyers increasingly set the ground rules on when and where they will engage. Buyers also increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education, not sales people … whom they engage as an almost final stage in their process. This means B2B marketers must focus heavily on ‘getting found,’ nurturing prospects and managing pre-sales buyer dialogue.

This is a critical re-framing of the B2B buyer/seller relationship. Much has been written about how sales and marketing strategy is evolving — becoming more sophisticated via CRM and marketing automation. Yet this is not an asynchronous evolution, and buyers are setting the pace … and getting ahead of sales and marketing organizations.

This is something that SiriusDecisions — an analyst firm that covers innovation in sales and marketing strategies — further clarified in a recent post on their corporate blog:

Buying 2.0 is a better metaphor for the buying/selling interactions of today’s selling environment as the hunter has become the hunted. Buyers are more informed and seek information independent of sales. Buyers have access to overwhelming amounts of information, but seek intelligence they can trust to support their decision making process. How sales people want to sell has little impact on how buyers are choosing to buy.

What is the evidence that the nature of the B2B buyer is changing?

To answer this question, I spent some time reviewing recent research and reports by a number of firms that cover B2B marketing. Below is my major synthesis of the dynamics that define this re-shaped B2B buyer nature, backed up by studies I think help us better believe in these dynamics.

> B2B buyers are increasingly turning to online sources, earlier in their process, to research purchases before ever calling a ‘live’ sales rep: There’s a lot of evidence that the B2B buyer is using a variety of channels to access industry peers’ insights — insights that will ultimately shape their buying decision — via Internet-based/virtual mechanisms. This speaks not only to the rise of social media, but also to that of other forums, such as virtual trade shows.

“[T]he poor economy has forced a shift away from face-to-face events and trade shows, and toward their virtual or online counterparts,” explains Bill Gadless in a post on the B2B Web Strategy blog that summarized a recent research report by MarketingSherpa.

This “2009-10 B2B Marketing: Benchmark Report” by MarketingSherpa, which interviewed technology buyers who make purchases greater than $25,000 (i.e., large, consultative purchases), highlights the significant and increasing usage of online mediums by B2B buyers versus traditional media and/or face-to-face events. The chart below (used with permission) points to this trend:

Source: MarketingSherpa; click to enlarge

The MarketingSherpa data speak to a new preference for online. Additional research from Enquiro highlights how early in the B2B buying process online sources are now consulted — shaping early perceptions.

Enquiro recently launched a project it is calling The Buyersphere Project, which is focused on capturing the changing nature of the B2B buyer. As part of this project, Enquiro published a white paper, titled “Integrated Persuasion: Online and Offline,” that further supports this point:

It seems that it’s common to take to partially defined need and flesh it out through online research. Therefore, online can be a powerful influence at these early stages. The result of the research is fundamental in determining potential candidates, defining comparison criteria and formalizing the purchase plan. It’s important to understand that although this research happens early, there is typically already at least one vendor that’s embedded the consideration set, a seed planted there either by past experience, approved vendor status or marketing. This existing vendor mindshare can influence the online resources consulted, the words used in web searches and the vendor websites visited. Online research confirms their position and adds other candidates.

The Enquiro white paper illustrated this reality via the following graph (used with permission), which captures the ongoing role of online — especially at the earlier stages:

Source: Enquiro; click to enlarge

> B2B buyers are increasingly leveraging social media — especially peer communication, such as Twitter, blogs, etc. — in the information collection phase of the buying process: Not only are B2B buyers increasingly turning to online sources, but they are seeking via the online world the same types of peer references and word-of-mouth they have always relied upon. This is where social media is playing an increasing role in the B2B buying process.

David Raab recently noted on his Customer Experience Matrix blog, “[S]ocial media have grown from virtually nothing to nearly 20% of online time over the past few years. This matters because social media are an alternative gateway to finding Web content: Instead of doing a search, I can ask my online community for information or recommendations.”

A 2007 Forrester / Erickson Barnett white paper noted of B2B buyers, “[W]e found this group to be 1.3 times more likely to engage in social media activities for business purposes than for personal.” The paper also reported that “[w]hile 44% of adults, according to Forrester, have no participation in social media, only 9% of the B2B marketers who responded [to the survey] were inactive.”

More recently, Laura Ramos and Oliver Young with Forrester’s Technology Industry/B2B group, published a very interesting report titled “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers.” (See Forrester-posted SlideShare presentation below.) They interviewed “more than 1,200 technology buyers in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. with 100 employees or more in seven major industries,” according to Ramos in a BtoB Magazine write-up of the top-level research findings.

Josh Bernoff commented on these report findings via Forrester’s Groundswell blog: “91% of … technology decision-makers [are] Spectators — the highest number I’ve ever seen in a Social Technographics Profile. This means you can count on the fact that your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. Note that 69% of them said they were using this technology for business purposes.”

> B2B buyers are pursuing their buying process more ‘massively multi-channel’ than ever before; however, channel weightings and their sequence vary by the phase of the buying process: “Unlike consumers who tend to lean more strongly one way or the other, the B2B buyer tends to now converge channels into an integrated buying cycle and process. And, I bet confusing the heck out of many marketing departments,” commented Tony Zambito in a post on his Buyer Persona Insights blog earlier this year.

This is absolutely the new reality of B2B buying, and it is both multi-channel online, as well as a blend of online and offline data gathering.

Enquiro released research in 2007 that points to some of this pattern. The chart below (used with permission) captures shifting emphasis on different mediums over the life of the B2B buying cycle, but what is noteworthy is that all mediums are consulted in parallel at all stages.

Source: Enquiro; click to enlarge

The Enquiro chart also hints at the sequencing of channels in the buying process — something Akin Arikan covers in his book, Multichannel Marketing. He makes some great points about maintaining focus and control in a multi-channel marketing environment. “[I]t is one thing to interact through multiple channels in parallel,” comments Arikan. “It is quite another to fuse those activities together in an intelligent way to maximize response and conversion rates.” Akin goes on to point out that today “[b]uyers are multichannel beings. Buying cycles are cross-channel.”

> B2B buyers manifest themselves more than ever as a complex, savvy ‘buying unit,’ rather than simply as a single decision-maker: Not only are B2B buyers integrating multiple online and offline channels and opinion sources, but they also are operating in a more sophisticated fashion than ever. A big-ticket purchase will be evaluated by a team of people, ranging from the initial recommender, to someone making the business case, to a purchasing agent, to legal/finance/etc. It’s a complex process to navigate.

“Relationship marketing is the key here and different levels of the organization participate in the buying/selling process especially if the sale is a big ticket sale,” commented Lowell D’Souza in a recent post on his Marketing Bones blog site.

Enquiro highlighted this in another white paper, ” Maximizing Online: Leveraging Your Online Touch Points,” that further supports this point. Enquiro points to differential involvement of end users — who may have made the initial business case for a purchase — versus those in the procurement group — who are responsible for assessing and negotiating a purchase. This can be seen in the chart below (used with permission).

Source: Enquiro; click to enlarge

So what is the impact of all of this change in the nature of the B2B buyer on B2B marketing and on sales and marketing alignment? The most significant impact is the death of the traditional sales funnel and a new approach that must be embraced by B2B marketers — an approach I’ll cover in a post on the Silverpop Demand Generation blog later this week.

The prevailing wisdom in marketing today is that achieving the greatest levels of performance requires true, closed-loop, customer-level insight into the effectiveness of marketing programs.  If you can see a detailed, causal chain through the complete demand-generation process and correlate steps and interactions in that chain to account-level customer spending, you can then analyze how various marketing activities contribute to final results.  Further, if you can analyze your marketing at such a granular level, you can tie spending to specific outcomes and can continuously tune your overall marketing formula at all levels.

I’ve touched on this imperative in past blog posts.  So no argument here.  In fact, as a tenured marketer (and now as a team member at a marketing technology company), it’s exciting to look around and witness the rapid evolution in marketing technology that is moving us closer to this reality.

It also goes without saying that in this environment, plenty is written about the drive for marketing accountability. 

Yet there is something subtle that gets missed and that I would argue should be the greater focus in the accountability dialogue.  It is the inherent and holistic upside for marketers of having an accountability mindset – i.e., the positive transformation that results from embracing a new approach to marketing.

I call it the ‘halo effect’ of marketing accountability.

And I believe it’s increasingly critical that we as marketers both understand and embrace it.

What is this halo effect?

Let me explain. 

Michael Dunn, who with co-author Chris Halsall recently wrote The Marketing Accountability Imperative, helps us to understand the halo effect via an April post on BrandChannel.com. 

Dunn wrote:

Senior management continues to push marketers to demonstrate a strong return on investment, demanding more accountability and evidence that marketing investment is driving business growth.

It requires marketers to demonstrate disciplined planning, rigorous tracking and evaluation and, above all, continuous improvement in performance. They must also show cause and effect, quickly diagnose the root causes of any spending performance issues and make timely, fact-driven decisions to improve returns.

Call it accountable marketing performance …

Dunn’s comments give a sense of how subtle the halo effect is.  He starts out by commenting on the reactive need to defend marketing investments, but he switches to the importance of marketers proactively taking their game to the next level.  As I said, it’s a subtle point, but the same transformation in this brief passage is what seems to result from the pressure of external accountability.

In fact, I’ve run across an increasing body of evidence indicating that when marketers take the time do this they not only improve through the tuning of their marketing formula, per se, but they also become more proactive and aggressive as marketers.  They take their game to the next level.

This is what I think of as the halo effect of marketing accountability. 

The pressure to be more accountable causes marketers to look inwardly at how they approach their work and ultimately transforms their entire approach.  This means that for marketers – as painful as accountability may seem – it’s really the key to becoming a marketing rock star.

What is the evidence of this halo effect of marketing accountability?

As I indicated, I’ve run across an increasing body of evidence pointing to this halo effect – albeit sometimes not where you’d expect to find the evidence. 

Here are a few data points:

> Correlation between aggressive adoption of strategic marketing technology and budgetary source (via my own research):  I got an initial sense of this effect as I was analyzing data from some of my recent graduate research at Wisconsin, prior to my current role at Silverpop.  I deployed a quantitative survey of marketers with 131 complete response records, broken down into 64% corporate-side marketers, 28% agency-side marketers and 8% non-agency contractors. 

One very-clear result, which I noted in a previous piece on marketing measurement and ROI analysis, was that when the group was “… asked to rate the overall ‘aggressiveness’ of their organizations’ marketing technology investments, … [c]orporate-side marketers overwhelmingly believe their organizations are not aggressive.”  This certainly speaks to the malaise inside marketing organizations when it comes to investing in and building systems for measuring the impact of marketing programs and spending.  Yet there was an interesting result when I analyzed the research in a slightly different fashion. 

When responses were correlated to where marketing technology budgets lie within an organization, a new story emerged.  When marketers are directly responsible for their spending on marketing technology, they tend to skew toward being ‘not aggressive’; however, when the budget shifts to IT or to a business unit P&L – i.e., with external accountability on this investment – the organization becomes more aggressive in its use of marketing technology.

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original); click to enlarge graphic

The initial conclusion I took from this result was that marketers are more aggressive in leveraging technology when they are externally accountable to profitability.  But I was interested in getting more data points, and so I dug in further …

> Correlation between the traits of ‘highly effective and efficient’ marketing organizations and the calculation of marketing return on investment (via Lenskold Group / Marketsphere research):  I saw further evidence of the halo effect in the results of the recent “2009 Marketing ROI & Measurements Study,” which was led by marketing ROI guru and Marketing ROI author Jim Lenskold (and who I also cited in my previous marketing measurement and ROI analysis piece).

The study highlighted a strong correlation between organizations that measure dollar-level, net present value (NPV) accountability of marketing spending and that take on what Lenskold identifies as the traits of ‘highly effective and efficient’ marketing organizations:

[F]irms reporting that they calculate ROI metrics are almost three times as likely to report their marketing to be both “highly effective and efficient” compared to firms using only financial or traditional marketing metrics (19% vs. 7% and 4%, respectively).  As noted in the 2008 research report, the use of marketing ROI makes a huge difference in the ability to manage efficiency in addition to effectiveness. While firms using other financial metrics or traditional metrics may describe their marketing as “somewhat effective but not efficient,” the firms using marketing ROI metrics scored much higher on the combination of highly or somewhat effective and efficient (a combined 73% vs. 40% of those using traditional metrics).

The study also highlighted the gap between accountability practices of both highly effective and efficient firms and firms ‘expecting to outgrow their competitors’, versus laggards in both cases:

Looking at the analysis from another perspective, we find that adoption of marketing ROI to calculate marketing effectiveness among the top tier “highly effective and efficient” firms is much deeper at 54% compared to 23% of all other firms. Among companies expecting to outgrow their competitors, adoption is running at 30% compared to 20% use by companies expecting to grow slower than competitors.

> Correlation between the use of holistic ‘lead scoring’ and the ability to be successful in linking marketing activities to sales outcomes in the demand-generation process (via Silverpop internal research):  I used a chart in a recent presentation I gave to B2B marketers at the Online Marketing Summit in Portland and Seattle.  (BTW – I also did a blog post on this presentation on the Silverpop Demand Generation blog, if you’re interested in reading more about this.)  It provides even more evidence of this halo effect.

Silverpop did an internal survey of B2B marketers within the past year.  The questions included a focus both on whether or not marketers use lead scoring and also on their priorities as a marketer.  My colleagues’ analysis of this survey correlates the two with some interesting results. 

Of the various areas of focus, the response ‘Ensuring leads convert to opportunities’ was more likely to be selected by marketers that score leads.  This aligns with marketers that are thinking more holistically about the demand chain and focusing not as a marketer only on intermediate goals (such as leads) but also on the ultimate outcome of marketing activities … sales.  Meanwhile, more intermediate goals or further upstream goals (or not-well-defined goals) – i.e., goals that make marketers less accountable to the bottom line – correlated more directly to not scoring leads.

Source: Silverpop; click to enlarge graphic

As with earlier data points, in this case the ‘best practice’ of scoring – which requires sales accountability and collaboration between sales and marketing organization – seems to be associated with marketers that are focused on and being successful in the ‘bigger’ picture. 

Lead scoring accountability results in another halo effect.

So what are the implications of this halo effect for marketers?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue lately, and I’ve tried to present some proof points here that I find compelling.  But I guess the greatest reason why I find this halo effect most compelling is that I’ve witnessed it in my own career.  When I and my colleagues at various organizations have embraced this proactive accountability mindset, we’ve found our programs and activities take on new levels of success.

And so I’ve come to the simple conclusion that we as marketers must embrace accountability.  It makes us better marketers, and it benefits the organizations that employ us.  Realizing this is a huge step, but the payoff is tremendous.

What do you think about this idea of a halo effect?  Have you seen evidence of this in recent research or in your own career?  I’d love to get your feedback.

Things have been a little quiet on this blog over the past month – too quiet.  It’s not intentional, and I wanted to explain. 

Some of you may have seen an announcement today that I have Joined B2B marketing automation/demand generation firm Silverpop.  Not only have I started in a new role, but I also have moved from Madison, WI, to Atlanta, GA – a busy/chaotic last few weeks for me and for my wife.  I posted the “Marketing Measurement and ROI” piece right before the move, but I’ve been hard-pressed to do any substantial posts since then.

Fear not, though … more new Propelling Brands content is on the way.

First let me tell you a bit about my new role, and then I’ll explain where I plan to go with future content on this blog.

What is my new role?

I’ll take a page from the intro I did for a blog post on the Silverpop Demand Generation blog today to explain my new role and why I have chosen to go to work for Silverpop:

You … know I’m passionate about my mission, both in writing [this] blog and also via my ongoing work in this space, to be a resource for marketers on issues of marketing strategy and also to provide marketers with insights into innovation and technology that have the potential to help them change their game.

I’ve had the good fortune throughout my career to connect with the best and brightest thinkers and leaders in the marketing technology space, and it has truly inspired me.  In fact, I’ve been searching recently for a ‘platform’ that would enable me to better accomplish my mission, to be an advocate for marketers and to stay on top of the state of marketing innovation and technology.  So I was excited by the opportunity to join Silverpop.  What I’ve found is an organization with goals, aspirations and beliefs that align with my own.  It is an online marketing solutions company with a clear vision of its goal to empower marketers through intelligent solutions and strategies that ultimately help marketers be more successful.  I like that.

The company has asked me to take on a role where I will be able to work closely with front-line marketers – as a listener and as a coach – talking to marketers, relaying their insights back to the people who develop the company’s B2B marketing platform and also delivering cutting-edge insights into new strategies, innovation and best practices back to the marketing community.

So I am now the Director of Field Marketing for Silverpop’s B2B demand generation and marketing automation platform – branded ‘Silverpop Engage B2B’ – which for those of you keeping score is formerly the Vtrenz platform (which Silverpop acquired in May 2007).

What is next for Propelling Brands and for my book?

One of the encouraging aspects of my new role is the support Silverpop’s leadership has voiced for my continuing the Propelling Brands blog and my book.  Through the blog and my upcoming book, I will continue to focus on helping marketers address key opportunities and challenges in leveraging technology more strategically.

It’s worth noting, as well, that I will work through the blog and my book to avoid any conflicts of interest, and I will differentiate between these two activities and my formal activities on behalf of Silverpop.  One departure is that – moving forward – I will no longer provide direct mention or evaluation of vendor companies in the demand generation and marketing automation arena on this blog or in my book.  (I will, however, leave past content – written in a totally unbiased context – up on the site; moreover, I will not be making any changes to that content.) 

I will focus via the blog on examining strategic issues marketers are facing (as you saw in my recent marketing ROI piece) and/or providing assessments of adjacent, but non-competitive, technology segments.  The point is to stay vendor neutral when it comes to any discussion on this site or in my book of platforms that may compete with Silverpop, and in doing so, I hope to avoid any potential claims of bias.

I started this blog for marketers, and I will continue to make this blog about marketers.  So in many ways, this is an opportunity to stay true to my roots.

Also, as a note, I anticipate that my book may be delayed a bit as I am getting ramped up here at Silverpop, but I hope it will not be delayed too much.

So those are the details. 

Stay tuned for some new content shortly; meanwhile, let me say how much I appreciate the engagement and support I’ve gotten from the community that reads this blog over the past year.  I look forward to continuing our dialogue!

I’ve been pretty heads-down over the past few weeks, analyzing the data and results from my graduate research and also working on my upcoming book.  As I’ve dug into the data, there clearly are some self-evident themes emerging around marketers’ opportunities and challenges with adopting strategic marketing systems and technologies (which I will be covering on this blog in more depth over the coming weeks).  One of the clearest themes is the great chasm that exists between aspiration and reality for marketers when it comes to marketing measurement and the analysis of marketing return on investment (ROI).

My research found that these topics are top of mind for marketers, and many state their organizations are already beginning to engage with analytics software.  When asked about tactical/operational objectives for new technology deployments, measurement and ROI analysis are at the top.  This is consistent with a new Lenskold Group / MarketSphere report, released this week.  “Current economic conditions are putting pressures on marketers to better understand their marketing effectiveness as 8 in 10 marketers (79%) report that the need to measure, analyze and report marketing effectiveness is greater in 2009,” according to the press release for the report.

Yet my research found that the same marketers give their organizations low marks on analyzing performance and overwhelmingly comment that their organizations are ‘not aggressive’ when it comes to marketing technology investments.  Aspirations are high, but the reality of investment in systems and technologies to deliver on the aspiration is low.  This also was echoed by Lenskold/MarketSphere, which further commented in their release, “[B]udget pressures are evident with 6 out of 10 (59%) indicating that this higher demand for measuring marketing effectiveness is not budgeted for … .”

The reality is that marketers cannot get enough of systems and technology to tackle measurement and ROI analysis; they have barely scratched the surface.  Far from solved, this is an issue that has only become more important and yet more complicated over time.  Customer channels are exploding in number, and yet marketers are incapable of delivering measurement and ROI analysis that takes this new reality into consideration.  “Buyers are multichannel beings.  Buying cycles are cross-channel,” comments Akin Arikan in his recent book, Multichannel Marketing.  “Yet online and offline marketers still perform their measurements of success in isolation.”

So what are marketers’ aspirations; where is the disconnect; what are their challenges; and what are potential strategies for overcoming these challenges?

To examine this issue, I’ll present some in-progress findings from my own research and compare/contrast this with recent research findings and advice by others who study the topic.

What are marketers’ aspirations for marketing measurement and ROI analysis, and what is the disconnect with reality?

Marketers’ current challenges with measurement and ROI analysis is a story that really requires some digging, because at a surface level, it appears that many marketing organizations have these bases already covered.

As part of my recent graduate research, I deployed a quantitative survey of marketers with 131 complete response records.  Within this group, 64% were corporate-side marketers, 28% were agency-side marketers and 8% were non-agency contractors – a good mix.

Among the corporate-side marketers, I asked them to rate their current level of deployment with a variety of types of key marketing technology platforms.  Cursory inspection indicates a skew in deployment of ‘analytics software’ (see dashed line, below) toward ‘high’/'very-high’ levels, only surpassed by deployment levels for ‘traditional Internet marketing platforms.’  This would seem to be a strong statement that marketers are at an advanced state of deployment, right?

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original); click to enlarge graphic

This also seems to hold true when corporate-side marketers are asked what tactical/operational objectives are driving their current marketing technology deployments.  ‘Measure marketing results’ and ‘provide insight into marketing ROI’ bubbles to the top of the list of top objectives.

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original); click to enlarge graphic

These responses, above, are consistent with another survey, conducted by the CMO Council, which noted, “More than half of the executives surveyed (55.1%) identified tracking performance, effectiveness and efficiency across the marketing organization as a primary benefit of [marketing automation] solution implementation … .”

This does not speak, though, to the current levels of marketers’ investments in the underlying platforms and infrastructure to tackle measurement and ROI analysis.  In fact, when marketers are asked to rate the overall ‘aggressiveness’ of their organizations’ marketing technology investments, the true reality starts to manifest itself.  Corporate-side marketers overwhelmingly believe their organizations are not aggressive.

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original); click to enlarge graphic

What does this have to do with measurement and ROI analysis?  The first two charts identify platforms and objectives where marketers currently have committed resources; however, this tells nothing about the total level of commitment of these resources.  The third chart points to what is certainly an underwhelming investment overall and, presumably, in measurement and ROI analysis.

I dug deeper in qualitative phone interviews with marketers, and the comments were very telling.  Some of the comments by marketers, explaining the reality of their situation, included:

• “Having a closed loop reporting system on leads that come in from multiple sources would be great, but we don’t have this.”
• “To be able to look at referral sources, and the value of those referral sources based on actual customer spending would be great.”
• “Our ability to track or even approximate marketing ROI is the biggest hole we struggle with today.”

The ultimate goal of measurement and ROI analysis should get to the root of whether and to what extent marketing investments are leading to revenue and profit growth for the company.  Yet this is where the chasm between aspiration and reality is the greatest. 

A 2008 Lenskold Group / MarketingProfs special report, “B-to-B Lead Generation:  Marketing ROI & Performance Evaluation study,” showed that only 27% of general marketers and 26% of B2B marketers calculate profitability metrics, including net present value (NPV), for marketing campaigns and/or investments.

What challenges are contributing to the chasm between marketers’ aspirations and their realities for measurement and ROI analysis?

Neither systems nor technology seem to be the culprits when it comes to the chasm between aspiration and reality – i.e., marketers do not lament that these capabilities are not currently available to them.  The larger issues seem to be budget to invest in systems and technologies, as well as organizational dynamics and the relationship between marketing and other functional areas within companies.

> Budgeting for systems and technologies:  The ultimate bottleneck in delivering measurement and ROI analysis clearly seems to be funding.  Despite being asked to deliver more transparency than ever before, marketers are not being provided with sufficient budget to invest in the systems and technologies to deliver continuous measurement and ROI analysis.  This was a key finding of the Lenskold/MarketSphere report, cited above. 

A related finding from my own research is that marketers struggle with making the case for ROI for the underlying systems and technology that might deliver marketing measurement and marketing ROI analysis.  Ironic, but true.  When asked what prevented marketers’ organizations from being more aggressive with investments in marketing technology, some of the responses included:

• “The biggest barrier is cost.”
• “It’s difficult to show the ROI and payback period for implementing such systems.”
• “Not enough foreseeable benefit or ROI to legitimize purchase to CFO for future marketing automation needs.”

> Making ROI tangible; linking measurement to goals and objectives:  There is no question that budget is a key challenge; however, in many ways budget may be the red herring.  Perhaps one reason for seemingly inadequate funding – which may be linked to the comments about not knowing how to prove ROI on investment in these systems and technologies – is marketers not really knowing where to begin.

David Raab talks about this challenge and also helps to tackle this issue in his recent book, The Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit, in which he argues for a simplification of ROI analysis.  “Many marketing measurement applications simply produce reports for managers to review.  But others feed directly into ongoing business processes, such as media purchases or offer selection,” observes Raab.  “Knowing exactly how participants will process the data gives a concrete understanding of what data they need.”

What is the real objective of your measurement and ROI analysis efforts?  How will the output of such analytics be used, and how will you subsequently tune your marketing investments?  This should guide the approach.  In fact, an outcomes-based posture may even help narrow the scope … and, thus, the cost … of marketing systems and technology investments related to measurement and ROI analysis.

> Making marketing metrics organizational metrics:  Some of the fight over marketing measurement and ROI analysis is really the age-old struggle of the functional company versus the process/customer-oriented company (with the latter being the more enlightened view, I’ll add).  Let’s be clear, marketing metrics are business metrics; they are not separate; and initiatives for measurement and ROI analysis should be an integral part of efforts to build a balanced scorecard for the company.

“A balanced scorecard and strategy map … provide excellent reference points for measurement projects intended to show that marketing is aligned with company strategy,” points out Raab in his book, cited above. 

It’s also worth pointing out that ROI analysis – especially if it is a complete, NPV calculation – is inherently a holistic measurement.  NPV looks at all of the inputs and outcomes of a given marketing activity and discounts them according to the time horizon, and this involves data and inputs from functional areas outside of just marketing. 

Thus, a major barrier to measurement and ROI analysis, as well as an opportunity, is linked to the functional silos of information and activities inside a company.  Tackling this problem holistically – i.e., breaking down the barriers between functional areas within companies and taking a cross-organizational approach to performance metrics – offers benefits beyond merely improving analytics and, in fact, leads to broader transformation of (and synchronization within) the business.

What are strategies for jump-starting measurement and ROI analysis initiatives?

Here are some initial thoughts to get you going …

> Focusing on increasing revenue and profitability versus merely decreasing cost:  Marketing is the combination of activities that ideally increases the overall opportunity for companies … finding new markets, new customers and new opportunities for income and margin.  Yet too much of measurement and ROI analysis seems to focus on taking the cost out of marketing – treating it as though marketing is the problem, not the answer. 

The 2008 Lenskold/MarketingProfs study, cited earlier, speaks to this reality.  Nearly three-quarters of marketers in the study were not focusing on the profitability/NPV of marketing investments, instead they were focusing on cost containment and/or non-financial metrics. 

All the systems and technology in the universe cannot improve measurement and ROI analysis if your underlying impetus and perspective is off.  If a measurement/ROI analysis exercise inside a company is focused merely on cost containment or on non-financial metrics, without any grounding in resultant NPV, there is a bigger issue to tackle.  And getting alignment around the NPV of marketing investment is a crucial first step.

> Securing agreement across the company on marketing measurement and ROI analysis objectives:  Agreeing across the entire management team, not only on the analytical processes, calculations and data to be used, but also on what constitutes a win versus a loss on marketing investments, is critical to successful measurement and ROI analysis.  What NPV is expected from marketing investments, and how does this compare to other potential activities by a company?

Pat LaPointe talked about this in a post on his Marketing Measurement Today blog back in January.  He had spoken with a number of CMOs from major companies and said one of the top four measurement challenges marketers are facing in 2009 is “Lack of clarity – not having a specific definition of what they’re trying to measure, and getting lost in the ambiguity of the process.”  He echoes that it is important to “… define and prioritize the key questions you’re trying to answer BEFORE you set out to measure them.”  And he also advocates these objectives being a company decision, not merely objectives of the marketing organization.

That is why it is critical, as a first step, to secure agreement across the company – most importantly, across the key functional representatives on the management team – before investing in systems and technology to deliver marketing measurements and ROI analysis.

> Baking measurement and ROI analysis into all stages of the marketing process:  Measurement and ROI should not be one-time activities, and they shouldn’t only occur only at the front or the rear end of a marketing program.  They should be continuous; they should constantly be ‘in-process.’  The whole point is to steer the ship and to tune the outcome of marketing activities and investments.

This is why IBM executive Sandy Carter, who published a marketing book profiled in a Q&A on this blog earlier this year, advocates for  a more holistic approach.  “Build a marketing dashboard,” argues Carter in her book, “not a single ROI calculation.”

Also, this stable of analytics should provide visibility into the hierarchy of marketing activities and should analyze not only the entire marketing investment but also the stages of conversion – e.g., going from number of e-mail opens in a campaign to click-throughs on an offer.  These conversion metrics are a critical part of an overall closed-loop analysis system and enable marketers to pinpoint defects in the process. 

> Dedicating systems, technology, staff and other resources to measurement and ROI analysis:  This final recommendation is in fact more than really a recommendation, it is the next step in jump starting your measurement/ROI analysis programs.  Once you have the right mind set, organizational buy-in and thinking about closed-loop analysis, you’re now ready to take your program to the next stage.  And that requires dedicating systems, technology, staff and other resources. 

If you are dedicated to measurement and ROI analysis, it should be a dedicated line item on your overall list of marketing activities – either as a portion of someone’s role or as a dedicated activity, unto itself.  Research shows that organizations that dedicate resources and staff to measurement and ROI analysis ultimately are more successful.

“Firms with marketing operations [teams/functions] tend to have greater adoption of marketing ROI measurements and strengths in ‘using customer analytics to improve marketing effectiveness,’ ‘having data, facts and insight to better guide marketing spending decisions’ and understanding profit drivers to prioritize current budget,’” observed Lenskold/MarketSphere in the press release on their new study (cited above).

In fact, this final topic probably deserves its own post.  So, for now, we’ll say that this topic is to be continued …

My recent blog post on the inbound marketing / marketing content management crowd has gotten me thinking quite a bit about the holistic lifecycle of leads and of the role of marketers in this process.  The rapid ‘death’ of the consultative sale means that marketing organizations increasingly are playing a more-pervasive role in the lifecycle of leads – blurring the traditional lines between marketing and sales organizations.  “Who builds a [target] list, is it a sales person or a marketing person?” posed Rand Schulman, CMO of InsideView, in a meeting with me in his office in San Francisco a little over a week ago.  Good question.  Also, how should this list be built?

The new marketplace reality requires marketing organizations and their technology systems to be more engaged than ever before in all aspects of lead generation and of lead nurturing.  Thus, an emerging key partner for marketing organizations is the growing roster of what I refer to as the ‘online compiled lead sourcing providers.’  The roots of this category are grounded in the world of opt-in target list builders, prospect data miners and syndicated lead directory/database vendors – this traditionally included firms such as Dunn & Bradstreet (D&B), as well as media organizations and the credit bureaus.  This industry has evolved, though, and it increasingly looks more different than it once did, with an explosion of new market entrants and of new techniques for sourcing and aggregating prospect insight.  Today this emerging group includes firms such as Demandbase, idExec, Jigsaw, Lead411, NetProspex, OneSource, SalesGenie, Selectory (a D&B company), Zapdata (also a D&B company) and ZoomInfo.

It’s a pretty exciting time for this segment, but it’s worth tempering the excitement a bit – making sure we’re analyzing these providers in the context of where they fit into the overall marketing mix.  As with any new data or system provider in the world of Marketing 2.0, these providers are not a panacea.  Leads can come from many sources, and it’s important to recognize the trade-offs.

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original); click to enlarge graphic

The new marketplace reality, thus, also requires marketers to assess all of their lead-generation-oriented marketing programs against a number of alternatives and in the context of the net impact of these programs.  As I was thinking through this, I built this chart to conceptualize the landscape.  On the x-axis I have made a relative assessment of the net credibility various programs bring in the eyes of the prospect – i.e., the degree to which a lead is pre-disposed to being interested in that brand-company and a relative indication of how hard marketing and sales will have to work to nurture a lead.  On the y-axis I have made a relative assessment of the net estimated cost per lead of different types of lead-generation-oriented marketing programs.  In doing so I considered both time and money, as it is critical to look at both.  For example, inbound marketing may have low dollar cost but it is not a no-cost activity; successful content and engagement requires time and energy, which translates into real dollars via salaries, overhead, etc.  This is why I have it at roughly the same cost level as paid sourcing.  What do you think about this matrix and where I’ve placed various types of marketing programs?

I hope this framework helps you better think about where the online compiled lead sourcing providers fit into the mix and provides a frame of reference as you dig into the status of this segment.  I believe it is particularly instructive because it speaks to some of the opportunity for evolution in this segment and is indicative of the segment’s overall trajectory – particularly predicting moves that will help improve the net credibility of leads while maintaining low net cost per lead.

So what’s new with the online compiled lead sourcing crowd, and how do we break down the vendor landscape?  Moreover, how are they innovating to keep pace with the tidal wave of change in integrated marketing management technology?  And what does this mean for marketers?

As I indicated earlier, there certainly is a lot of activity around this segment, and my goal with this piece is to get my arms around the key points.  So I’ve done my usual research; however, a few highlights include:

• I reviewed a report by Ruth P. Stevens and Bernice Grossman, titled “Online Sources of B-to-B Data:  A comparative analysis,” which helped me break down the current community of lead sourcing providers and better understand the rapid evolution of their capabilities.  (If you are a marketer evaluating providers I highly recommend this report, which has a very thorough and thoughtful methodology.)
• I also got a deeper picture of how the industry is evolving via my conversation with Schulman at InsideView as he outlined how his company is hoping to change the dynamics of lead sourcing and qualification through greater value-added content and context.

You will notice as we dig into this segment that a key trend is the blurring of the line between these providers and the integrated marketing management platform providers, particularly advanced CRM.  For example, in January I noted in a blog piece that SugarCRM had announced its new Cloud Connectors, which allow the platform to tie into the systems of lead sourcing providers such as Crunchbase, Hoover’s, Jigsaw, LinkedIn and ZoomInfo.  The other key trend seems to be the increasing granularity of insight and contact information provided – drilling down more accurately and in a more targeted way than ever before to improve the value of prospect information to marketers and to raise the net credibility, as identified above.  So let’s dig in …

What is an online compiled lead sourcing provider, and how are they differentiated?

At their core, these providers are all aggregators of individual and corporate information.  They aggregate this information into compiled records for individual people and individual companies, and they sell these compiled records to marketers that are trying to reach specific segments of people and companies.  And to improve the efficiency of access, they make it available online – through a browser and increasingly through common ‘Web services’ APIs.  This is where the similarities among these providers end.

What differentiates one provider from another is its sources, its aggregation methods and the relative degree to which it keeps its compiled records up to date.  For example, let’s take a look at four popular but different providers and how they approach their businesses, in their own words (courtesy of the report by Stevens and Grossman, cited above):

• Jigsaw:  “Jigsaw is a user-generated B2B database built and maintained by its … B2B community members (marketers, sales, recruiters, analysts, business owners).”
• NetProspex:  “NetProspex, is a … sales contact trading system that uses the power of the Internet to let sales and marketing executives buy or trade business contacts.  All user-contributed contacts are validated before being published.”
• OneSource:  “OneSource combines and organizes content from over 2,500 information sources supplied by 50 content providers creating an unequalled information resource. This includes public and private company profiles, executives, corporate families, industries, financials, news, analyst reports and trade and business press articles.”
• ZoomInfo:  “Because ZoomInfo crawls the Web 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year, we’re able to deliver customers the freshest business information available.”

This cross-section of information on providers speaks to the fact that this is a complex segment, which requires that marketers first, get to know their provider before engaging their services and second, ensure that the nature of a given provider’s approach is really a fit with the marketer’s objectives for pursuing third-party sourced leads.

What are the plusses and minuses of using this source of leads, and where does it fit into the marketing mix?

B2B sales guru Mac McIntosh explains in a blog post last year, “Your in-house database of customers, sales rep additions and past inquiries is often your best source of new business sales leads.  /  However, business-to-business marketers often need additional companies and contacts to market to in order to get enough qualified leads into the sales pipeline.”  This is where online compiled lead sourcing providers serve a very real need. 

Stevens and Grossman provide additional insight into the importance of using third-party lead sourcing for B2B marketing through their report, cited above.  I think their comments also would apply in direct marketing to high-value B2C prospects:

Compiled data is critically important to B-to-B marketers for two reasons:

1. Business marketers tend to target relatively narrow audiences.  Compiled data, built from such sources as government records, telephone listings and credit data, generally provides better breadth of coverage, compared to response files. For example, not all machine tool manufacturers will appear on the subscriber files of, say, American Machinist magazine.
2. Each account has a high revenue opportunity, so it’s important to gain access to every potential prospect.

The final major ‘plus’ in partnering with a third-party provider is their ability to add additional insights beyond the basic contact information.  This is a critical capability of services such as Jigsaw and ZoomInfo, and it is the focus of value-added providers such as InsideView.

So the key gap filled by lead sourcing providers is two-fold:  (1.) expanding the number of contacts on the overall prospect list for marketing programs and (2.) deepening the level of information associated with each to improve the effectiveness of marketing segmentation, targeting and execution.

The obvious drawback of any type of third-party-sourced lead is that it is probably still a ‘cold’ lead from a sales perspective, as hinted at in my earlier chart – pointing to the low net credibility for this type of lead.  Without any pre-existing relationship, context or brand awareness, the likelihood of success in directly reaching out to the lead is very low; moreover, outreach via mass e-mail may be limited by government regulations, such as the Can Spam Act. 

“Just because you can now order or append email addresses, doesn’t imply that you will be well-served by blasting out emails to prospects,” comments direct marketing agency principal Robert Lesser in a recent blog post.  “Most of our clients are disappointed with this tactic.  A more rewarding approach is to call the prospect and then send a 1to1 sales-style email that is personalized to the prospect.”

Your problem also may not be that you need more leads, it may be what you’re doing with your existing leads.  Laura Ramos of Forrester commented in a Q&A with BtoB Magazine, “Instead of trying to find new ways to reach untapped buyers, B-to-B marketers need to put the process, technology and discipline in place so they can track prospect interactions over time, assess their level of engagement and continue the dialogue with them by offering relevant content and information.”  This is where demand generation and marketing automation/EMM can play a critical role in lead qualification, lead nurturing and the personalization of communication and offers.

Lesser’s and Ramos’s comments also speak to the underlying role of third-party sourced leads and of e-mail in the overall marketing mix.  Marketers need to invest in programs that will build brand equity and awareness at a broad level, especially via thought leadership initiatives, and that will catalyze a relationship between the brand-company and the prospect at an intermediate level, especially via events and promotions.  This should exist alongside direct, brute-force contact and will serve to amplify these efforts.  This integrated effort is what is most critical, and one cannot achieve maximum success without the other two.  (In fact, I recently saw some data from P&G that indicates that when they run integrated multi-channel campaigns – syncing advertising, promotion, in-store, etc. at the same time – the combined ‘perfect storm’ provides additional gross sales lift from 15 to 25%.)

Also, marketers need to operate in a multi-channel fashion, anyway, given that customers today make buying decisions cross-channel.  Akin Arikan explains in his recent book, Multichannel Marketing, “[W]hen we aggregate the behavior of groups of buyers, it becomes clear that certain channels are more typically frequented during certain stages of the customer life cycle.”  He notes that channels such as broadcast, out-of-home, events, product placement, Web ads, blogs and search, “… are best at attracting potential buyers but not so apt at converting them to customers and maintaining an ongoing relationship.  The latter purposes are better achieved through …” channels such as Website, e-mail, mobile, direct mail, call centers, stores/salesforces and service teams.

Ramos provides additional validation of Arikan’s point of view in the same Q&A, cited above: 

Our research shows e-mail is not as effective for new customer acquisition or for building awareness. Of the 212 b-to-b marketers who responded to a survey we fielded last October, 85% said they use e-mail in their marketing mix. Of these, only 18% said they found it highly effective for building brand. In contrast, 56% said that they felt e-mail was highly effective for communicating with their existing customers. If you establish a relationship with a prospect or customer, then e-mail is welcome communication, not spam.

Merely having a large number of potential leads does not in any way guarantee success.  There is still quite a bit of marketing ‘polish’ that it takes to turn leads from third-party providers into customers.

How are these providers innovating?

Back to the topic of this segment’s evolution and overall trajectory … here are some of the key areas of innovation I’ve noticed through my research:

> User-based record updating:  Lead sourcing providers are increasingly harnessing social media, social networks and user communities to ensure that records are up to date, as opposed to the type of intelligent guessing that many traditional direct marketing providers still engage in to match record information. 

Jigsaw is one example, which leverages its user base for adding and updating contacts.  This also is an integral part of the approach taken by NetProspex.  ZoomInfo, meanwhile, leverages a blend of Web crawling and allowing individuals to update their own records, much like on LinkedIn, which is also getting in on the game.  The SugarCRM Cloud Connectors announcement, above, included access to LinkedIn for lead sourcing and updating. 

The key differentiator of user-based record updating is not only accuracy, but also relevance.  Relying on people who actually know the contact (or may actually even be the contact), versus a common/public database, has the potential for much more accurate and relevant results.

> Cloud access and live contact updates for basic CRM and integrated marketing management platforms:  A major area of innovation is in re-architecting how marketers access the data of lead sourcing providers — moving to a cloud services / Web services model.  The idea is that of simplifying the interface with live data (via common cloud/Web APIs), allowing marketing organizations to easily port this data into their basic CRM systems and/or their integrated marketing management platforms — which is the core of the SugarCRM announcement, cited above.  This way marketers can either populate new target lists or update existing contact lists.

This concept is at the core of the rollout of Jigsaw Clean about 18 months ago.  The company’s press release from when it first launched this service explains:

Jigsaw Clean periodically scans a company’s CRM database in order to update and augment out-of-date contacts. It finds, flags, and deletes dead records by comparing the database to records in the Jigsaw graveyard … . The system also automatically identifies and removes duplicate records. Using the Jigsaw directory as a reference, Jigsaw Clean updates inaccurate data and augments incomplete records with up to date information such as direct-dial phone numbers, email addresses and titles.

> Multi-channel crawling and contextual insights:  Why rely purely on public records or traditional address lists when the Web freely offers a wealth of information about prospects, often self-updated – particularly via social media?  Moreover, what more can you learn about leads that takes your insights from pure demographic information to more-contextual ethnographic and behavioral insights? 

This is, in part, the concept behind InsideView, which is partnering with contact record providers, such as Jigsaw, and then adding additional content and context to improve insight into the prospective leads.  (Note, I have excluded them from the peer group of online compiled lead sourcing providers, given they are value-added and partners with this segment.)  As I mentioned earlier, I had a great conversation with CMO Schulman a little over a week ago, and much of what we discussed really focused on improving the conversion of leads via online compiled lead sourcing providers – a push toward improving the ‘relative truth’ of lead information.

“The more I know about you and the recency of that information, the higher propensity I have to convert to a sale.  It’s personalization,” commented Schulman to me.  He went on to say, “So what we’re doing is we’re raising the conversion rates to revenue because we bring more relevant information to [marketing and sales] users.  Essentially you have to think of us as the Bloomberg terminal for sales and marketing people.”

There’s more under the covers, but that’s the gist.

What’s next for providers in this segment?

Per my earlier comments, I believe that a lot of the innovation and trajectory in this segment is being driven by two factors:  a push towards integration (especially with integrated marketing management platform providers) and a drive to improve the net credibility of leads (through greater accuracy, more content/context and better targeting).  This will continue to drive evolution among providers in this segment and are the key capabilities marketers should use to assess potential partnerships with these providers.

Today I am extending an open invitation for marketers that read this blog to help participate, both in my upcoming book – tentatively titled Connected Marketing – and in my current graduate research project, by taking part in a survey of US marketers that I am currently conducting.

As I noted in a previous post, the focus of my current research is on analyzing and synthesizing ways that marketers could better leverage technology for more connected and more strategic marketing, as well as identifying the cultural, organizational and technological barriers marketers face in trying to adopt strategic marketing technology (versus the myriad of tactical technologies they rely upon today).  By presenting insights both into the ‘state of the art’ and into what is keeping marketers from getting there, I hope to provide marketers with new leverage in how they attack the problem.

A key component of this research is an original benchmark survey of marketers focused on garnering insights into marketing technology priorities and experiences.  This is where I need your help.

Participate in the Survey

If you are a US-based marketer, please take a few minutes this week to participate in this survey.

• You can do so by clicking here, which will launch the survey in a new window.

This is the last week of the survey, and I need the help of the regular readers of Propelling Brands to hit my target research sample size.  So if you can take a few minutes today to fill this out, I’d appreciate it.  It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, and as a thank-you for your participation, you will receive a summary of the survey results and will be entered into a drawing for an Amazon gift card.

Deadline for completing the survey is Midnight PT on Sunday, April 19, 2009.

I’ve been doing a deep dive into the integrated marketing management segment over the past few months. My goal has been to unravel the complex vendor landscape; to help marketers discern the capabilities of distinct vendor segments; and to help figure out what is a ‘best fit’ for their marketing organizations. (While we’re on this topic, as an update for those following this series, I DO plan to publish the final installment of my three-part series on the ‘Top 20′ platform vendors in this segment – i.e., the final ‘list’ – at some point over the next few weeks. So stay tuned.)

I have primarily focused on three ‘camps’ – demand generation, marketing automation/enterprise marketing management (EMM) and advanced customer relationship management (CRM) in my research and writing to date. My hypothesis with these camps has been that despite “… different roots, aims, legacies and constituencies, [they] are both converging on and vying for this core integration and management layer,” as I wrote in February.

Source: iStockphoto

Enter the fourth camp – the ‘inbound marketing’/marketing content management crowd – examples of which include new inbound marketing pure plays such as Hubspot, Magicomm, Vazt and Video Army, as well as content management stalwarts such as Crown Peak, which are evolving toward inbound marketing.

I’ll admit that when I first heard the phrase, inbound marketing, I said, ‘I don’t get it.’ In fact, I thought, ‘Wow, more confusing buzzwords.’ But I wanted to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, so I dug in, did some research, sat down a few weeks ago with Hubspot marketing VP Mike Volpe and more recently had a call with Vazt co-founder Seamus Walsh.

Now I think I get it, but I’m not sure that the phenomenon around this fourth camp is purely about inbound marketing. Dynamic and search-optimized marketing content management is a critical component and key value-add in a broader, integrated marketing context and for companies that deploy both inbound and outbound marketing. That’s why I describe this space as a dual helix of inbound marketing and marketing content management that is bound to eventually intertwine with the other camps. In fact, my conversations with Hubspot and Vazt made me think of the evolution of Marketbright, which started as a marketing content management system but has evolved into a demand generation system.

So what is inbound marketing, how is it tied to marketing content management and what does this all mean for marketers? Moreover, is this a real ecosystem of solutions, or is it merely a Hubspot phenomenon?

Before we go too far, it’s worth level-setting what I mean when I talk about this camp. The common thread you’ll see emerge: a dual set of capabilities of managing dynamic marketing content and of optimizing this content for search engines. Walsh at Vazt summed up this positioning: “We actually use content to drive business to [the] site.”

What is inbound marketing, and what are its plusses and minuses?

Inbound marketing seems to be everywhere. Now it even has its own event – the Inbound Marketing Summit – which attracted more than 300 marketers at the first one this past September, according to a press release. The Web site for this event frames up the challenges facing marketers today and how inbound marketing plays in:

The Internet has transformed the nature of shopping and the sales and marketing funnel. In order to remain competitive, your business needs to be found on the Web and leverage inbound marketing techniques to reach customers with targeted messages that customers seek out, not ignore.

What is interesting to note, though, is that inbound marketing as a concept is not new. Companies for years have strategized about how to better seize on opportunities when customers reach out to them. A quick search of the destinationCRM site, for example, found this reference to inbound marketing as a technique for turning customer inquiries into sales scenarios: “In an inbound marketing model every agent in the call center changes roles, from customer service representative to a salesperson,” noted a September 2004 article. But in this scenario we are talking about existing customers.

What is different about the new approach to inbound marketing is its focus on capturing new leads, which are ideally not existing customers, as well as on increasing the likelihood of those new leads finding your company. Moreover, the new inbound marketing crowd is focused on optimizing inbound leads via Web 2.0 mechanisms, versus via the simple one-on-one telephone conversation at a call center.

Let’s turn to the most vocal advocate of inbound marketing for a modern definition. Hubspot’s founder and CEO, Brian Halligan explains what he means by this term in a post on his company’s blog:

When I talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods “outbound marketing” where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

I think outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time …

Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.

Clay Schossow expands on this point of view in a post on his New Media Campaigns blog. He explains (almost as though outbound is somehow, suddenly a ‘thing of the past’) that outbound marketing “… was largely a numbers game – you knew you had to, on average, get in contact with a certain large number of people before one of them would be interested and make a purchase. This method was inefficient and expensive, causing marketers to waste time getting in contact with tons of people who may have had no interest in their offering.”

Sounds interesting, but we should provide some context around this ‘pro-inbound’ point of view:

• First, it’s important to clarify that ‘pure play’ inbound marketing is largely about ‘passive’ lead generation and not so much about lead nurturing or lead conversion – differentiating it from the demand generation and marketing automation camps and pointing to gaps in this mindset.
• Second, it’s important to point out that advocates of inbound marketing suddenly do not put much faith in the ‘active’ communication that salespeople and marketers engage in to connect with customers – i.e., the majority of the current practice of marketing today. In fact, it’s a bit of a marketing ‘counter culture.’ “We’re 100% organic,” ironically commented Vazt’s Walsh to me. But do customers always know what they want or how to find it? Can you be 100% organic in your marketing?
• Third, it’s also worth mentioning that marketplace interest in inbound marketing is largely being driven by the folks at Hubspot – a company that may have even invented the term (although I can’t verify this) and that are the lead sponsors of the Inbound Marketing Summit.

Not everyone buys the argument that outbound marketing is a thing of the past or that inbound is much more than a shiny new thing.

Christopher S. Penn takes on inbound marketing on his Awaken Your Superhero blog in a piece strongly-titled “Falsehood as Truth: The Lie of Inbound Marketing.” Penn comments:

There is more than just “make a cool video on YouTube” or “optimize your web site for Google” to marketing. Do these things matter? Absolutely. Search and content that rocks are vital components of any marketing program, and it’s just as insane to dismiss them as it is to dismiss outbound efforts like direct mail and cold calling.

The truth of the matter is that inbound and outbound marketing are both vitally important to your company, your products, your services, your ideas, and they complement each other. They are equally important, and they balance each other.

…

If someone tells you that any marketing methods, inbound, outbound, direct, fax, whatever, is the only thing you need, you know two things to be true – they are either lying or clueless, and they probably have something to sell you.

And that would be the ‘response’ to the counter-culture.

What type of marketing organization can benefit from inbound marketing?

I must say that I agree, in part, with Penn’s comments. There is no either/or, zero-sum choice ever to be made in marketing. Inbound marketing should be something every company deploys … as one part of a balanced marketing program. It’s not the whole game, and no company should rely 100% on an inbound marketing pure-play without other marketing systems or tools.

That said, there are clearly certain types of marketing situations where companies are better positioned to benefit from pure-play inbound marketing than others. This is something I’ve been thinking through following my recent conversation with Volpe.

There seem to be two marketing situations in which a company would want to really focus heavily on inbound marketing. These are:

• Relying on word-of-mouth or being sought out: companies that are typically based on personal networks and that provide consumer-focused professional services, such as accounting firms and law firms, or that people call only when their services are needed, such as a plumber
• Early stage and/or facing a massive lead deficit: companies that really don’t have processes sufficient for delivering leads, that don’t have complete insight into who they might want to target and/or that are focused on a niche area

Volpe explained to me that their target customer is a small business, often without a formal marketing organization. “We serve anywhere from 5 to 500 employees,” said Volpe. “A huge portion of our customers don’t have a full-time marketing person,” he explained later. “They’re not a classically-trained marketer.” He went on to explain that when his team does work with companies that actually do have internal marketing teams, they typically have 1-3 marketing people on staff, maximum, and have their hands full.

Looking at the two situations I’ve posed above, I get the first one. And I doubt that any amount of active outbound marketing will cause people to need plumbers when their pipes aren’t bursting. But I have a question about the second situation: Doesn’t this point to a company with a bigger marketing problem? Basic marketing 101 starts first with knowing your company, customer and competition and second with assessing segmentation, targeting and positioning. All of this should occur before you launch full-scale outreach – i.e., you need to know your audience before spending on lead generation and marketing communication. Is a lack of leads the result of inefficient outbound marketing or of a more-basic and fundamental business-positioning issue? Who is to blame? It’s worth asking the question.

Volpe differentiated his solution from the demand generation vendors by commenting that needing a demand generation platform “… almost assumes you have too many leads.” He went on to argue: “The truth of the matter, for [most] companies, is that’s not the problem.” But I go back to my question about whether that is more a comment on marketing tools or on businesses that have found resonance in the marketplace versus those that have not – whether they are large or small. Again, it’s worth asking the question.

What do inbound marketing vendors really do, and how is this linked to marketing content management?

I mentioned earlier that the common thread between vendors in this segment is ‘managing dynamic marketing content and optimizing this content for search engines.’ Here’s how this translates into what inbound marketing vendors really do:

> Managing dynamic marketing content to drive customer engagement: The core of the software services provided by companies in this segment are marketing content management systems. (Crown Peak may be the most advanced of this set.) That is why I have referred to this segment as the inbound marketing/marketing content management crowd, and it differentiates this segment from the firms that merely do search engine optimization. In fact, the marketing content management engines of vendors in this segment are robust and blur the lines between traditional Websites, social media and other communication channels. This is particularly critical as a way to drive greater customer engagement. Walsh at Vazt described it to me as “… aligning content with sales lifecycle.” Such an intelligent system also supports more-timely and resonant content – a step away from traditional marketing content that was focused strictly on features and functions and typically content that is more likely to hit home with a potential customer.

> Optimizing this content for search engines to connect interested customers with relevant brand-companies: Given that inbound marketing requires robust content – i.e., it is more thought leadership and customer dialogue than traditional static information on products and services – it must be constantly optimized for search-ability. This is where these vendors lend a hand – helping marketing organizations develop timely content in a way that makes it more likely to be found.

As I mentioned earlier, some prime examples of companies converging on this fourth camp include: Crown Peak, Hubspot, Magicomm, Vazt and Video Army (linked earlier).

What is the significance to marketers of the inbound marketing/marketing content management ecosystem, and how does it relate to the integrated marketing management space?

The value of the inbound marketing/marketing content management crowd extends beyond merely optimizing content to be reached via search engines. What this fourth camp brings to the table is complementary to the core capabilities of firms in the demand generation, marketing automation/EMM and advanced CRM camps, and it is strategic to the evolution of the integrated marketing management space. Moreover, as with the other camps, pure-plays in this segment are increasingly extending the capabilities so that they increasingly look like the other camps vying for the integrated marketing management prize.

Some additional thoughts on what this fourth camp brings to the table:

> Dialogue vs. drip: The world of automation and demand generation platforms are built on fostering interest in products and services, but this type of a ‘drip’ marketing and lead nurturing is not really true customer-brand dialogue … today. Systems from vendors in the inbound marketing/marketing content management camp are increasingly built around customer-interactive content, such as social media – enabling real dialogue around substantive issues. These capabilities are value-added to the other camps, especially in a B2B context. Following up my earlier note on Marketbright, sales VP Mike Pilcher recently explained to me why he believes it’s valuable for a demand generation vendor to be built on a robust content management system: “The transfer of information between supplier and buyer is at the core of business to business selling. What we also believe is that this information is not just white papers and brochures.”

> Authenticity: This type of dialogue also leads to increasing authenticity – especially as companies are forced to produce content that is less an encapsulation of features/functions and that is more about timely issues customers are grappling with. This is the same type of ‘small talk’ salespeople used to leverage in customer meetings but that is increasingly migrating to the Web. It also speaks to the topic of social CRM, which has been a key area of discussion over the last few months, most recently by CRM guru Paul Greenberg.

> Pervasive search optimization: Bringing the fourth camp together with other camps in the integrated marketing management segment has the potential to make search optimization a more-pervasive aspect of marketing systems. This is critical as the ball swings and marketers increasingly embrace neither inbound nor outbound exclusively, but rather embrace an integrated blend of the two.

We are starting to see firms in the inbound marketing/marketing content management space integrate with the other camps. For example, Hubspot syncs with Salesforce.com, enabling closed-loop analysis of program effectiveness.

There is much evolution that needs to occur among this fourth camp for it to offer more-sophisticated marketers the type of enterprise-grade capabilities they demand, but it is interesting to watch the progress and to recognize that this camp will certainly play a role in the long-term evolution of integrated marketing management platforms.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.  Strange … you’d think that getting to the top of marketing hierarchy would be the pinnacle of one’s career.

The challenges faced by the CMO speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization, built from the ground up with sophisticated, financially-savvy and technology-empowered closed-loop systems and processes in place that can scale, that can manage increasingly complex and customer-centric communication execution and that can provide necessary transparency into multi-channel program performance.  And this transparency must provide other C-suite colleagues with the real-time status of key performance indicators (KPIs) and on the return on investment (ROI) of marketing programs in net present value (NPV) terms.  “[F]inancial accountability of marketing is here to stay,” argues Quelch in the Advertising Age column.  “[I]mproved accountability requires CMOs to be financially literate, to understand the balance sheet as well as the income-statement effects of marketing initiatives.”

Source: iStockphoto

Too often, though, such an organization does not exist.  “Although the marketplace has changed beyond all recognition due to Web 2.0 and the explosion in digital – marketing technology and process have not kept up with the changes,” commented Bob Barker, VP of corporate marketing at Alterian, in a recent post on DM News.

The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change. 

And that change must be focused on building just such an organization.  It is not sufficient to manage execution of the existing organization or to believe that your company is already ‘getting it right’ today.  There is no room for complacency or incremental efforts.  Marketing is a dynamic practice that keeps an organization in check with the dynamic needs of its customers and of the marketplace.  CMOs must drive change because their organizations must constantly change to remain competitive – a fact that was validated in a recent CMO Council report, which noted “… 61% of respondents believe that marketing operational transformation will be an essential area of focus for them in the months ahead.”

So how do CMOs do this?  And where should they focus their efforts to transform the marketing organization?

First, the solutions should be driven by the strategic goals marketers are trying to achieve.  What are CMOs’ priorities?  A recent JupiterResearch (now Forrester)/Verse Group survey of marketers at some of the largest corporations in the US helps better understand their challenges and opportunities … and begins to speak to some of the solutions:

Two major themes are emerging.

The first is the need for greater accountability in marketing.  With corporations cutting costs everywhere, marketers will have to prove that a dollar spent on marketing will provide a greater return than a dollar spent elsewhere in their company.

The second is the need for a better method to manage brands across multiple platforms.  While it is true that digital media is growing, traditional media is not disappearing overnight.  Therefore companies need to create a coherent brand experience across all platforms and customer touch points.

The following are the top 5 priorities that CMOs and senior marketers have for 2009:

1. Achieving measurable ROI on marketing efforts (50%)
2. Developing marketing programs that integrate online and traditional media (43%)
3. Translating brand experience across different touch points (32%)
4. Cutting marketing budgets without cutting performance (31%)
5. Optimizing [the] portfolio of brands (26%)

Second, driving effective change and achieving these goals requires attacking the problem on two fronts – and it’s critical that marketers address both:

• Organizational change:  Part one is holistic and gets into issues of how marketing is organized and operates, how it defines its objectives and how it integrates with sales channels and the rest of the enterprise. 
• Technological change:  Part two is technology-focused and gets into the topic we’ve covered on this site over the past several weeks – the need for CMOs to make sure their marketing information systems are up to the task of dynamic, scalable and integrated marketing management.

What is the change CMOs must drive in how they organize and manage their marketing organizations?

> Customers must be moved to the center, not the periphery; brands must be re-invigorated in terms of aligning the company with its customers’ needs:  Despite the lip service paid to customers, we must all admit that most corporate processes and systems are designed to make the company more efficient, not necessarily make the customer’s experience better.  We are optimized to deliver products and services as efficiently as possible, and we likely define our companies in terms of industries and categories, not customer segments.  The modern concept of the holistic ‘supply chain’ focus on improving efficiency of existing channels and routes to market, rather than challenging the underlying logic of the channels and routes, themselves.  CMOs must be the voice inside the company that challenges this and that re-orients the company’s processes and systems around the customer.

This product-centric versus customer-centric bias can also be seen in terms of how we define our brands.  Again, we think in terms of categories and competitors’ products and services.  But gone are the days when a tagline or a logo naively defined a brand.  Academics that study marketing science are learning more and more that brands are living, breathing assets, defined by customers and playing a role in how customers define themselves and their social networks.  CMOs must re-position and re-invigorate their brands with a sense of customer purpose.

 “Companies have let profits replace purpose. As firms optimize left-brain management techniques for squeezing out additional profits, they’ve lost something very important — their raison d’être,” argues Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin on his Customer Experience Matters blog.  “ True brands are more than just marketing slogans, they’re the fabric that aligns all employees with customers in the pursuit of a common cause.”

> Revenue must become part of the marketing mission and the link between marketing and sales; brand must be re-framed as an asset:  I had a great conversation via telephone this past week with Mike Pilcher, VP of sales at marketing software vendor Marketbright, and his ideas resonate with how the CMO should reframe the goal of their marketing organizations.  Pilcher argues that one of the greatest disconnects among marketers, especially as marketing takes on a greater responsibility in demand generation, is a recognition that the primary KPI for marketers must be more than pages views, engagement, leads or brand awareness; it must be revenue.  “What needs to happen is marketing needs to be as influential in the revenue process as sales.  …  Marketing needs to understand they need to be part of that,” noted Pilcher.  And this is more than just a way to reinforce the importance of ROI.  It must be a critical component of how marketers are evaluated and compensated.  “Marketers have to embrace the risk associated with the revenue generation process,” adds Pilcher, if they are going to be positioned to succeed against this goal.  Such positioning also will help improve collaboration between marketing and sales as both teams have a common goal.  CMOs must ensure not only that every marketer in their organization embraces this idea, but also that they are compensated to live up to this idea.

Where does brand building fit into this?  CMOs are often charged with being stewards of the corporate brand and/or the total brand portfolio.  Let’s be clear, brands are critical.  They are, arguably, a corporation’s most-valuable asset, but as marketers we too often fail to frame the brand in this context.  It’s not bad to build the brand … a stronger brand provides more leverage in revenue generation.  But building the brand, per se, will not lead to revenues; instead, it will provide us with a critical asset that we must understand how best to leverage.

> Best practices must BE practices:  No marketing organization should have a separate set of ‘best practices’ that somehow are a step above day-to-day standard operating procedures.  Often CMOs are tasked with defining and promoting best practices, but it’s necessary to take this a step further.  CMOs should set the standard for how marketing organizations operate – defining both culture and processes.  These must be backed by goals and metrics … and compensation … that can be understood and acted on by marketers at every level of the organization.  CMOs must raise the bar for their organization’s marketing practices and make sure that this standard is pervasive.

> Creative/abstract approaches and an analytical/concrete mindset must be guided to equilibrium:  Marketers are asked to do the unthinkable – taking a daily leap of faith as they tie together that which is easily measured and known with that which is not easily measured and is largely unknown.  Smart marketers must do the unthinkable in abstractly visualizing the potential for something in the future that may have no precedent in the past; moreover, marketing and sales must be the sole optimists in a sea of corporate pessimism.  Yet, interfacing with counterparts in other parts of the enterprise and being a responsible architect of sustainable marketing programs requires some discipline.  Marketers must find a balance between creative/abstract thinking and analytical/concrete thinking.  Marketers must spend more time balancing their brand vision with a sense of the NPV of marketing programs.  CMOs must actively cultivate this equilibrium, through hiring, training and cultural imperatives.

> Marketing technology and marketing systems must be viewed as a strategic asset, rather than a ‘problem for IT’:  Let’s not pass the buck.  As marketing becomes more complicated, and as our communication channels with customers become more Internet-centric, it’s time for marketers to dive in and re-think our skill set.  Our marketing data, and the systems that collect, manage and leverage this data for planning, targeting and execution, are critical to our roles as marketers.  Scott Brinker, who writes the Chief Marketing Technologist blog, and who had a great, recent post on the new set of skills marketers must embrace in this Web 2.0/3.0 world, commented on this new impetus:  “In a wired world, marketing must be technology-savvy for a business to compete.”  CMOs must  be the champion of a technologically-savvy, data-centric marketing culture.

> Marketing system ‘architecture’ must reinforce marketing sustainability and be designed with a longer-term perspective:  In driving change, CMOs must look beyond achieving quarterly objectives and think about the longer-term.  They should have a sense of building a dynamic but supportive system architecture – i.e., placing elements and capabilities that can continuously listen to and learn from customers and, in doing so, better drive revenues from meeting their needs.  This is in part a cultural and people-process issue, but it also is in part a technology issue.  CMOs should also have a sense of ensuring the sustainability of that architecture.  This is where the balance between building the brand asset and driving revenue must be recognized.  Examples include choices of how marketing organizations engage their customers via Internet – avoiding short-term ‘buzz’ and instead focusing on building long-term community and brand advocates (an issue I’ve written about on this site in the past).  CMOs must focus their companies on investing in and building marketing organizations that do not sacrifice longer-term opportunity for short-term gain and that can scale delivery to customers in a repeatable and value-added way over time. 

What is the change CMOs must drive in their marketing technology infrastructure?

> Breaking ground and leading the charge on enterprises’ build-out of customer-centric information systems:  Paul Greenberg, whom some refer to as the ‘godfather of CRM,’ writes in his book, CRM at the Speed of Light, that the time has come for enterprises to recognize that their existing information systems really only capture half of the equation – i.e., that ERP and holistic supply-chain-management is a product-centric view of the world.  What is missing are the customer-centric systems – the peer of ERP – that facilitate the assessment, modeling, intermediating with and management of constantly-changing customer demand.  The goal is to help enterprises focus on responding to customer ‘pull’ rather than working harder to ‘push.’  “ERP was the methodological omega point for the product-driven corporate ecosystem,” explains Greenberg.  “It took the MRP systems and expanded them to include other critical business departments such as human resources (labor) and finance (capital).  …  But it was still based in a world that was driven by product creation and consumer demand, though a computerized, much more flexible version of that world.”  The CMO must be the chief advocate for not only transforming his/her company into a more customer-centric organization but also for ensuring that enterprise systems mirror this objective, rather than hindering it or sacrificing it to short-term profitability.

> Focusing the spotlight on strategic vs. tactical marketing technology:  The most telling insight I’ve garnered from my writing and research over the past year is the fact that marketers are unquestionably engaged with technology today; however, that engagement is primarily with tactical, communication-channel-specific technologies, and they are overwhelmed by the proliferation of Web 2.0/3.0 data streams.  Never before have marketers needed to take a step back and survey their marketing systems and communication channels.  It is certainly important to drive excellent tactical execution (and to be knowledgeable about the nuances of each communication channel), but it also is critical to map this back to and to manage against a total, systemic sense of revenue-generation and brand-asset-building goals.  Balancing tactical execution with strategic goals and objectives is certainly an organizational imperative, but too often it is not the reality in marketing systems.  CMOs must question their organizations’ existing marketing systems and push for investments that balance priorities and help achieve what I like to refer to as ‘holistic agility’ – i.e., effective and detail-oriented execution at the periphery that remains constantly guided and bounded by the strategic whole.  (One way to do this is via investing in an integrated marketing management platform, covered next.)

> Investing in an integrated marketing management platform:  Despite what is without question a very complex challenge in bringing together disparate marketing processes, communication channels and data sources into a centralized system, it’s a complex problem that requires a complex solution. 

“[I]mprovements can only be brought about if driven by integrated marketing technology that is designed for the speed of marketing and the scale of the Internet,” comments Bob Barker in his DM News post.  “If marketers can pull together all of the data, users, channels, analysis, execution and reporting, not only does the marketing department become more streamlined, process-driven and accountable, but the CMO has access to analytics to drive both decisions and execution.”  In fact, the CMO Council backed up this statement in its report:  “A single-platform solution – the CMO Council would argue based on the findings of Calibrate How You Operate and other recent studies conducted by the Council – would yield these benefits, as well as serve to integrate and unify the diverse operational processes and systems marketers must manage.”

This is an issue I’ve been addressing in my multi-part series on integrated marketing management platforms over the past month.  I commented on this in the first part of the series:

From a business-process perspective, I believe these platforms really have four ‘holistic’ goals — (1.) driving new revenue growth and profits, (2.) maximizing return on marketing investments and resources and (3.) supporting a holistic brand experience (thus, building brand equity) while (4.) maintaining customer-focused dialogue and delivery of products and services.  …

This may make an integrated marketing management platform sound as monolithic as corporate ERP systems.  Yes and no.  The truth is that business processes are complex and ugly … and unraveling them via software is no easy task … .  But marketers need more than to get their arms around the problem, they need to gain leverage and strategic advantage.

I am not arguing for such a monolithic, single-vendor solution, but I do argue for a system approach that has as a goal building such as unified, singular system; moreover, I believe that technology vendors will benefit by enabling marketers to easily and rapidly integrate these resources via cloud services.  Today there are three primary ‘camps’ that are attacking this problem – (1) demand generation, (2) marketing automation/enterprise marketing management and (3) ‘advanced’ customer relationship management (which Paul Greenberg has been referring to as CRM 2.0 and which also touches on the related concept of ‘social’ CRM).  Each has a different history and original aim, but they are all converging on the same issue, as I also noted in the first part of this series.

CMOs must work to understand and champion investments in these systems.  They are critical to the success of their marketing organizations in responding to a dynamic customer environment; they are a key step toward becoming more customer-centric; and they are the critical link to ensuring real-time accountability of marketing.  Plus, “[i]t’s insurance for the CMO,” commented John Rotheray, a friend and mobile software entrepreneur, via phone.  I might take it a step further:  An integrated marketing management framework is the strategic infrastructure a CMO requires to succeed.

> Making sure business intelligence and predictive analytics are pervasive throughout marketing systems:  Marketing systems must be built not only to facilitate process improvement and dynamic execution but also to enable analysis of processes and execution.  To do this, business intelligence must be a pervasive element of the system architecture, and the goal should be to increasingly approach a continuous state of predictive analytics – i.e., leveraging your total data set to make smarter, real-time decisions at all levels from the C-suite down to the call-center level.  If a key goal for the CMO is finding the ‘right formula’ for the company’s aggregate marketing mix, (s)he needs the right tools to analyze the inputs into and the results of this formula.  CMOs must be aware of and push for business intelligence and predictive analytics being a critical element of their marketing technology infrastructure.

> Pushing for a balanced picture of both online and offline marketing activities:  An unfortunate effect of our current Internet-centric world is that we tend to forget that what happens offline may be more critical than what happens online.   It’s critical to take any given marketing data set and ensure that its proportionality is taken into account.  For example, cash-register data may be a fertile source of transactional behavior information, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the process a customer went through to make a product selection at the aisle level; thus, it must be analyzed with a sense of proportionality, and a push must be made to collect and integrate data that rounds out the picture.  CMOs must push for marketing technology infrastructure that balances the total picture and integrates both online and offline pictures of customer-brand interaction.

> Integrating with other enterprise systems:  Marketing does not exist in a vacuum; moreover, the picture of a customer is much more robust when it is a total picture.  To achieve this and to improve the level of accountability John Quelch argues marketers must face, marketing technology infrastructure must be integrated with other enterprise systems.  So while it’s important for marketers to embrace technology and take the lead in building their systems, they also need to ‘play nice’ with IT and the rest of the organization.  CMOs must lead the charge on this integration and remind their peers that the type of real-time insight they demand into marketing activities is not possible without total integration.

What’s next?  What do you think?

As always, this dialogue is just beginning.

• What are additional areas of organizational or technological change you believe CMOs should drive?
• How can CMOs better position themselves to succeed and to deliver value to their organizations?

The Internet changed everything … especially for marketers.  Now more then ever, customers have a million tools and information sources at their disposal, and the power balance has forever shifted to the needs of the customer versus that of the brand-company and its products and services.

Customers are now driving the marketing process … in case you haven’t heard.

The consequence for us as marketers (and our role in demand generation) is that our fundamental posture must change.  Yes, it remains increasingly important to get the attention of your customers and to ‘rise above the noise,’ but it also is increasingly important to be a better listener and observer – catering to the needs, preferences and timing of your customers.  I liken our new role as marketers to being similar to the attentive and omnipresent, but unobtrusive, waiter at a five-star restaurant at The Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons – standing by and ready to cater to the customer’s every need and knowing exactly when (s)he wants something.  Fortunately, the same Internet domain that has made our job tougher as marketers can also be a source of new and valuable insights into customers’ ‘digital body language,’ as Steve Woods (Twiter: @stevewoods), CTO and co-founder of Eloqua, calls it in his new book, (not coincidentally titled) Digital Body Language – Deciphering  Customer Intentions in an Online World.

Source: New Year Publishing

Steve Woods is a forward thinker who has spent the last decade of his career learning about and building systems to help marketers better leverage insights into customers’ digital body language.  His book is the culmination of his domain expertise and years of experience in software architecture, engineering and strategy for marketing systems, as well as his track record of client successes since Eloqua’s founding in 1999.  This expertise, experience and track record led to him being named one of Inside CRM’s Top CRM Influencers in 2007.

Prior to co-founding Eloqua, Woods worked in corporate strategy at Bain & Company and engineering at Celestica.  Woods holds a degree in Engineering Physics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

So what does it take to better understand digital body language, and how as marketers can we better leverage digital body language to improve our delivery to customers, our collaboration with our sales-team colleagues and our fundamental ability to drive demand generation?

We’ve touched on this topic and on Woods’ high-level insights into digital body language in Part 1 and Part 2 of our current series for marketers on evaluating integrated marketing management platforms, but we thought it was important to dive further into this topic, by itself; thus, we wanted to present his perspectives here.

So here is our Q&A with Woods on digital body language and his new book.

PB:  How would you describe ’digital body language’ (and its underlying drivers) to someone in 200 words or less?

Woods:  Quite simply, Digital Body Language is the online equivalent of physical body language; the set of hints, insights, and guidance that you can pick up from observing people’s interests and reactions.  Whereas the sales professional used to be able to “read the room” by observing physical body language, now the marketer is tasked with reading Digital Body Language in order to understand today’s online buyers.

A core premise of your book is that the roles both of the sales professional and of the marketing professional are shifting dramatically, especially in the once-sales-driven world of the ‘consultative sale.’  This is synced to a shift in the point in time when a sales professional now gets involved with a prospect in the sales cycle — i.e., when the ‘hand-off’ from marketing occurs.  Can you explain what is driving this shift and how companies and their marketing organizations must respond?

The fundamental shift is in information access.  Now information on almost any product or service you might be considering is available online, for free, tagged and organized by social media, and indexed by search engines.  [The sales organization] is no longer the conduit for information on a company’s products or services. 

This leads to two main shifts.  

• First, marketing must be involved until much later in the buying cycle, as most buyers will only want to engage with sales when they are much closer to being ready to purchase.  
• Second, sales must work with marketing to mutually understand and define what aspects of Digital Body Language indicate that a buyer is ready to engage in purchase discussions.

You note that buyers have a ‘new tool kit’ for assessing purchases.  Can you talk about this tool kit and how it differs at different stages of the buying process?

The tool kit is all the information sources online.  Whether it is industry articles, social media sites, blogs, vendor Websites, competitor Websites, or news articles, the information is there.  For a marketer, however, the tools that are most relevant depend on what your marketing challenge is. 

I describe three main categories of challenge in the book:

• The Flying Car:  You have a solution to a problem that most potential buyers don’t know is possible to solve.   In this case, the buyer tools to focus on are general awareness tools like industry analysts and press.
• The Wallflower:  You have a recognized category, but you are not brought into consideration for opportunities.  In this case, the buyer tools to focus on are solution discovery tools like search and some viral marketing strategies.
• The Redheaded Step-Child:  You have a recognized category, and you are considered as a vendor, but you are not selected.  In this case, the buyer tools to focus on are validation tools like comparison charts, evaluation guides, and influential bloggers.

It’s a very high level framework, but the idea is simple.  Understand what your marketing challenge is, then understand how prospective buyers would find information that would help them with that aspect of their buying process and focus on those aspects of the buyer’s tool kit.

As the sales professional has less opportunities to observe and interact with the potential customer during the nurturing process, you argue this responsibility shifts to the marketer, who is playing an increasing role at this stage of the sales cycle.  How is it possible for marketing organizations to get a better sense of nuanced ‘body language,’ especially in the digital domain and on a scale level?  What are the key indicators?

The first step is data – being able to understand all your interactions with each prospect and to put together a picture of their Digital Body Language.  This picture grows and evolves over time.  Whereas historically the main use of a marketing database was an occasional outbound mailing, now the main use of the marketing database is as a source for insights into buyers’ Digital Body Language.  This means we as marketers need to ensure the data is kept clean, standardized, and de-duplicated, or we will be unable to draw insights from it.  This requires a more significant focus on data quality than was previously common in marketing – which I recently wrote about [on my Digital Body Language blog].

Once this step is in place, that raw data on a prospect’s Digital Body Language can be understood by scoring it to understand what stage of the buying process they are at, what they are interested in, and how they like to receive information. 

The key things to look at, however, differ based on the buying process for each product.  A white paper, for example, may either indicate a prospect is educating her self on a market, or is ready to purchase depending on its content, so the key indicators have to be mapped based on the specific buying process.

You suggest that being capable of reading digital body language requires a new level of ‘marketing-operations discipline’ that marketing organizations must embrace and that this further requires “… a new suite of skills and thought processes within the marketing organization … .”  How would you describe this discipline, and what are the new skills and processes required to support it?

There are a few key aspects to this new discipline.  Data, as we just spoke about, is one key element.  On top of that, because the buyer is in control and wants information in his or her time frame, we as marketers need to build the systems and processes to understand and react to these buyers’ needs. 

Large, outbound campaigns once or twice per quarter, targeting an audience of unknown interest level, were the norm historically.  Today, it is more important to build the processes that allow us to recognize when an individual buyer is showing interest and to react to that interest by providing the right information.  To do this requires the ability to think in terms of processes, automation, business rules, and exceptions.  Many marketing organizations have begun to develop these skills, and these marketing organizations are seeing significant success today.

What is lead scoring, and how does it relate to understanding the true nature of a prospect’s digital body language?  How does lead scoring help broker the hand-off between marketing and sales and eventually support the optimization of your marketing process?

Lead scoring is the discipline that allows us as marketers to act on what we learn from our buyers’ Digital Body Language.  By taking the raw information on interest areas, interest levels, and reactions, and applying rules to it, we are able to turn raw data into insight. 

Many marketers use lead scoring to determine when a lead is ready for sales, by scoring on who the prospect is (explicit information like title and industry) and how interested the prospect is (implicit information like Web activity and searches).  This way of scoring is something I recently wrote about [on my Digital Body Language blog].

Some marketers, however, are sophisticated enough to use lead scoring to understand exactly where in a buying process a prospect is.  From there, not only can the hand-off to sales be managed, but so can the best way to communicate with that buyer throughout their entire buying process.

You assert in Chapter 6 of your book, “Marketers have it backward.”  You go on to talk about how customers are now driving the marketing process, “… and they have no use for a marketer-defined sales cycle.”  You also talk in Chapter 7 about how marketing has evolved into a complex ‘process ecosystem.’  What do you mean by these observations, and how does it relate to marketers’ increasing role in nurturing of prospective customers?

Buyers are now in control.  They can get information online from a multitude of sources, and they want to get that information on their own timeframe.  This leads to a fundamental shift in how we, as marketers, must communicate with them.  Rather than large outbound campaigns on our own timeframe, we must put the processes in place to understand the interest area and interest level of the buyer, and to react to that by communicating just the information that they need at that moment in their buying process.

To succeed in this shift from large outbound campaigns to reactive inbound campaigns, however, requires automation and process to be successful.  Each prospective buyer is an individual, and without the automation of marketing processes, it’s impossible to communicate with each individual on their own timeframe and interest level.

What is the new collaborative model for sales and marketing?

Marketing is a key part of the [sales] funnel.  It’s no longer a model where marketing drives brand perception and awareness while sales is involved from first inquiry to close.  Marketing must work with sales to establish objective criteria on what level of interest and what type of buyer can be handed over to sales, and then take responsibility for the funnel upwards of that. 

If there is a clear definition of what makes a Marketing Qualified Lead, marketing has processes in place for scoring and delivering them, and sales has the processes in place to work them through to close, then you have a model whereby sales and marketing can effectively work the funnel together.

Without that, you are left with a situation in which marketing hands sales thousands of unqualified inquiries which sales doesn’t follow up on, and both point their fingers at each other for the breakdown in the process.

How does an awareness of (and an aptitude for measuring) digital body language lead marketers’ closer to the ‘Holy Grail‘ of accurately measuring marketing effectiveness?

If you are using Digital Body Language to measure where each prospective buyer is in his or her buying process, then you can begin to understand the effect that marketing campaigns have on guiding buyers through that buying process.  Any complex or lengthy buying process is comprised of many touch points, so you need to understand the phases of that buying process in order to understand how each marketing campaign influenced buyers within it.  If you are not observing your buyers’ Digital Body Language, it’s difficult to understand where in the process each buyer is.

You believe the results of investing budget in new marketing processes, systems and skill sets to better leverage digital body language far outweigh the costs.  How would you defend this belief to marketers whose budgets are being scrutinized now more than ever?

The numbers are clear.  Anyone who is spending money to get new names in the top of the funnel, while only a handful of those names progress through to become new business, is wasting money due to leaks in their funnel. 

Putting the right marketing processes in place to understand who is leaking out the side of the funnel, and then capture them in a nurturing program, allows you to generate extra revenue without additional campaign expenditures. 

Do you have any final thoughts for marketers about how to gain leverage, achieve order and improve marketing ROI in the chaos of the current digital marketing environment?

This current environment can be looked at as an opportunity.  Budgets for big conferences, city tours, sponsorships, and large outbound campaigns are being slashed.  That means that there is an opportunity to put effort into the processes and approaches that will allow you to understand each individual buyer and to deliver the right message at the right time to each of them.

This transition in marketing is only accelerating, and the marketers who have the processes in place as we come out the other side of this downturn will be in the best position to thrive.

This is the second in a three-part series of posts on integrated marketing management platforms.  The first post identified the strategic need for integrated marketing management, mapped this to key marketing ‘pain points’ that these systems address and provided an overview of the disparate technology camps that are vying to deliver robust integrated marketing management platforms to marketing organizations.  Click here to view the first post, “Marketer’s Needs + Technology Landscape.”

Today’s post will present high-level thoughts for marketers on approaches to analyzing their needs and to selecting a platform that is the right ‘fit’ for their organization.  The final post in this series will present snapshots of the top 20 vendors I’m watching and that I believe are representative, forward-thinking leaders in this segment.

What should guide your decision to purchase an integrated marketing management platform? 

Let’s start with the basics:  What are your fundamental business goals?  And what marketing programs have you deployed to achieve these goals?  Ideally you want to invest in technology infrastructure that can help you achieve your business goals, that mirror your marketing programs and that (when all is said and done) can help you measure the impact that you made in reaching this goal.  Seems straightforward … except (and let’s not sugar coat this) … marketing processes and communication flows are complex and borderline ‘ugly’ when it comes to the level of complex, integrated execution and monitoring involved.  This means that your technology infrastructure must be able to handle this ‘ugliness.’ 

Source: iStockphoto

That brings us to the more advanced issue in evaluating the purchase of an integrated marketing management platform:  “How do I bring method to the madness?” as Market2Lead CEO Geoff Rego framed in a phone interview.  Whereas focus should rule the day in marketing strategy and planning, robust capability and the ‘kitchen sink’ factor should, in part, guide your technology decisions.  You want a platform that can give you real leverage.  In fact, you probably need more than you think you need.  And you can’t ‘wimp out’ when it comes to digging into this decision; this is a system that will become your lifeline; nor can you simply go with the marketing technology equivalent of ‘Big Blue’ (because no one got fired for buying Big Blue, right?).

“One thing not to do is to look at a generic list of the ‘top three’ products or ‘industry leaders’ and refuse to consider any others,” comments industry analyst David Raab in a white paper, titled “Three Differences that Matter in Demand Generation Systems.”  Raab continues, “On the other hand, few marketers have the time or inclination to perform an in‐depth technical analysis of several dozen demand generation systems, or even to document their own needs in detail.”

So then what is the middle ground, and how should marketing organizations approach finding the right ‘fit’ for their organization … without having to build CIO-level expertise and while staying true to their current, successful (but not fully leveraged) marketing processes?

A few things to keep in mind:  First, this is a business investment decision, and as a marketer you must make a decision about the useful lifecycle of the technology and the scope of needs within that lifecycle.  Second, related to that lifecycle, it’s important to not lose sight of the net present value (NPV) of your investment in an integrated marketing management system – i.e., the ultimate return on that investment (which we’ll come back to later).  It’s a balancing act.  Third, points one and two notwithstanding, such a system will enable to achieve new levels of efficiency and capabilities you are probably not capable of fully measuring today … so a little faith is required.

Given this, there are a number of factors to be considered in finding the right balance.  You need to know up front the benefits and drawbacks of such a platform.  Then you need to consider three areas of evaluation:  (1.) internal marketing-organization needs, (2.) technical platform capabilities and (3.) ‘creature comforts,’ given you will have to ‘live’ with the platform day in and day out.

What are the benefits of adopting an integrated marketing management platform?

The previous post in this series focused heavily on the ‘pain points’ that integrated marketing management platforms have evolved to address – from many different ‘camps.’  Briefly, the point of a central and robust integrated marketing management platform is to more efficiently and effectively manage integrated marketing processes, channels and resources in a fashion that improves the customer focus and the return on investment of aggregate marketing activities.  Marketers need “… smart spending on marketing time and money,” commented Sarah Lander, a product marketing manager at Silverpop (which acquired Vtrenz), in a phone interview.  The ultimate goal, she explained, is for marketers to “… take [their] money and put it together in the best spots possible.”

> Strategic benefit:  The core benefit of such a platform, thus, lies in bringing operational efficiency and strategic focus to what is otherwise a complex process for cultivating, nurturing and building a profitable and loyal customer base.

The market for these platforms has rapidly evolved over the last few years as demand for these benefits has reached a fever pitch.  In fact, a survey by the Australian School of Business a little over a year ago found:  “Concern about [return on marketing investment] is high among the majority of CEOs. More than half of CEOs (55%) stated that providing a return on marketing investment was a great or critical concern.  …  Furthermore, improving marketing efficiency is a great or critical concern for 44% of CEOs.”  There is no doubt – given a challenging global business environment – that if this survey were conducted again this year it would have even more dramatic results.

> Operational benefit:  A related operational benefit of these platforms is the critical role they play in managing and brokering customer-brand dialogue and keeping marketing programs customer focused.  “It’s about how the technology can help sustain the conversation,” commented Neolane President Stephan Dietrich in a phone interview.  Active Conversion President Fred Yee echoed this in a separate phone interview, referring to the back-and-forth conversation with customers as a ‘dance’ that it is critical to understand and manage and that ultimately is critical to driving customer sales.

> Functional benefits:  Integrated marketing management platforms also have a critical set of functional benefits.  The previous piece provided a diagram for where the integrated marketing management ‘layer’ fits into the world of marketing technologies.  Taking this a level deeper, these platforms really tackle four key areas – i.e., their core areas of benefits:

• Data integration
• Tactical management and execution of processes, channels and resources
• Strategic planning and management of customer nurturing and customer-brand dialogue
• Support for marketing intelligence and analytics

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original)

The functional benefits also will play a key role in a marketing organization’s ‘technical’ evaluation of an integrated marketing management platform (which we’ll cover below).

What are the drawbacks to an integrated marketing management platform?

The benefits of an integrated marketing management system generally outweigh the drawbacks, but an educated buyer needs to understand the shortcomings of these systems – drawbacks that are not small issues.

> Authenticity of dialogue:  This is perhaps the greatest downside of systems meant to ‘automate’ customer interactions.  Ideally an integrated marketing management platform should facilitate the marketing process but it should not replace authentic customer-brand dialogue.  Many vendors talk about ’sustaining conversation’ with customers, but who is doing the talking?  For instance, call-center representatives should be equipped not only with ‘up-sell opportunities’ and scripts but also the right context and training to listen and to have an open and honest, person-to-person dialogue with a customer about his/her real needs.  Such a dialogue also should be aligned with the core values of a company, versus being the promises made in a ‘pinch’ or to move product a customer doesn’t need.  “Authentic brands define and proclaim a set of appealing and relevant values which drive all corporate actions and decisions,” comment Claudia Fisher-Buttinger and Christine Vallaster in their recent book, Connective Branding.  Taking this further, authentic marketing communication messages also must be more than just personalized, they must be customized to the real needs of a target customer.

This is a critical issue, perhaps best ‘evangelized’ by Valeria Maltoni, who recently headlined on her Conversation Agent blog, “Customer Loyalty Comes from Conversation.”  Her piece went on to explain, “Conversation leads to brand experience, which in turn may lead to loyalty.  Card or no card, a reward for many customers today is often a prompt customer service rep who seeks to listen and understand what is needed and has the ability and company back-up to make it happen.”  It’s critical that integrated marketing management systems support authentic dialogue, but many platforms are not there yet.

> Holistic brand experience and context:  All of the camps vying for the integrated marketing management layer have shortcomings when it comes to the most fundamental aspect of marketing and its touch points with customers – building a consistent and pervasive brand experience that supports a commercial relationship.  The brand is the point of identity with which the customer is engaging, and the brand experience continues long after a customer has finished reading a product sheet or has finished using the product/service for the day.  It continues via a myriad of touch points, and – good or bad – it is amplified by brand communities, which add their own perspectives.  Vendors need to better support and measure the impact of complex, integrated activities on a customer’s total brand experience outside of being immediately and efficiently ‘nurtured’ or ‘scored’ as a sales lead.

> Integration of the online and offline worlds:  Another major shortcoming of many of the platforms is that if a customer interaction isn’t originally tied to an Internet channel, a database or an application programming interface (API) … it’s as if it doesn’t exist.  This is clearly not a complete picture of a company’s business.  Customers interact with and share brand experiences both online and offline; thus, it’s critical for vendors to begin to find new ways to capture offline data and to stream it in near-real time and with a sense of its proportional relevance to the overall, accumulated customer data set.  This sense of ‘proportionality’ in managing and measuring customer-brand dialogue is something I’ve talked about in past blog pieces, and I believe it is a critical factor when interpreting and responding to such dialogue.

> Qualitative feedback and customer insights:  Marketers and the CEOs they report to like simple numbers (as do their CFOs) – such as a Net Promoter Score – to describe how customers feel about their brands and to measure return on marketing investment.  Yet qualitative insights are critical to adapting and improving products, services and their marketing, and they are multi-dimensional.  Eloqua CTO Steve Woods hints at this in his Digital Body Language book, commenting that “[w]hen information is exchanged with a prospective buyer, the insights one can gain by understanding who consumed the information, and why, are as important as the information itself.”  How can this complex, qualitative data be part of the feedback loop in an integrated marketing management system?  Vendors in this segment, for example, are just now beginning to explore integrating social media into their platforms, but they’ve still got a way to go towards ensuring that customer dialogue is truly two-way in its meaning from the brand-company perspective.

Despite these drawbacks, it’s important to realize that no technology platform can solve everything – especially given the budget constraints available for investment in marketing technology infrastructure.  I prefer to characterize these drawbacks as opportunities both for marketing organizations and their platform vendors to tackle and improve on over time.

What internal evaluations should marketers do in assessing their needs from an integrated marketing management platform?

Once a marketing organization recognizes a need for an integrated marketing management platform – and is cognizant both of benefits and drawbacks – the next step is to think through the nature of its core infrastructure needs.

This is a challenging step.  “Marketers aren’t used to doing this evaluation,” commented Steve Woods via phone.  “You’ve got a buyer who’s not asking the right set of questions.”  Why?  Because as marketers we’re not used to the asking these questions. 

Scott Brinker, who writes the Chief Marketing Technologist blog, suggests that one step is to think through the interconnectedness of marketing goals and activities.  He calls it ‘system thinking,’ which he explains in a recent blog piece “…can illuminate interdependent opportunities and save you from disastrous dead ends.”  In fact, system thinking is exactly the type of mindset marketers must increasingly embrace in the new era of marketing; however, it is a mindset that bristles at the concrete and forward-action-oriented ways many marketers may think today.

There are many aspects to consider.  Just keep in mind that an integrated marketing management system should not only help accomplish complex marketing tasks today, but should also provide leverage for managing and growing marketing activities over an extended period of time.  So be open to new capabilities.  At the same time, “[t]here is truly no substitute for identifying your own needs and assessing the vendors directly against them,” as David Raab eloquently put it in a recent blog post.

Key issues to think through in further detail include:

> IT-driven vs. marketing-driven decision:  This may seem an odd place to start, but let’s be real … who’s driving the purchase, and how ‘nice’ does marketing have to play with IT?  Keep in mind, too, that there is an inherent tension between IT and marketing in this type of purchase.  And “[t]o a certain degree, IT and marketing should conflict,” comments Scott Brinker in another blog piece.  “Businesses as a whole succeed by balancing competing priorities. You need to have both IT infrastructure stability and innovative marketing experimentation, in some reasonable proportion to each other. The ideal point of that fulcrum depends on your particular firm and its strategy.”

How does this impact your purchase?  Well, there are a variety of solutions, both Web-based and on-premises, with a variety of integration capabilities, some that are turn-key and some that require more complex, IT-led integration.  The good news is that a marketing organization today can purchase a platform that is entirely Web-based and does not require any integration with existing enterprise systems, but this is not necessarily the best approach to building a ‘connected’ enterprise.  So there is a decision path that is necessary and that, in part, assesses how much of the purchase is a marketing-department-only versus an enterprise-wide initiative (which includes IT).

> B2B vs. B2C / direct selling vs. channel selling:  The high-level nature of your business and of your go-to-market strategy is critical to selecting the right system.  Do you sell to other businesses or to consumers, and is this direct or via channel partners?  There is a ‘big dichotomy’ between the B2B and B2C worlds, stressed Marketo Marketing VP Jon Miller to me via phone.  He’s right, and that extends to marketing directly versus channels.

The answers to the questions about your target and go-to-market strategy have a lot of impact both on the vendor/platform considered, as well as on the ‘camp’ you may want to start with.  The differences in marketing-organization needs account for some of the differing approaches taken by vendors.  For example, those historically from the demand generation world have had strong B2B/direct roots and are particularly good at integrating with SFA and CRM systems; meanwhile, those historically from the marketing automation/enterprise marketing management world have broader strength also in B2C and capabilities both for direct and channel selling – especially for supporting high-volume ‘mass brand building’ activities.  When it comes to more-sophisticated channel integration and support, the advanced CRM world – especially those platforms that are integrated into larger ERP systems – has additional layers of support for channel communication and information sharing that also may be beneficial.  Thus, thinking through your fundamental marketing approach will be a critical screen in narrowing the platforms to consider.

> Nature of selling – consultative vs. transactional:  On one end of the spectrum we have a marketing and sales process to sell a million-dollar piece of capital equipment via a complex, consultative sale and selective distribution – i.e., a product and selling process that “… elude[s] easy specification,” as Steve Woods describes in Digital Body Language.  On the other hand we have mass, intensive retailing of a so-called ‘fast-moving consumer goods’ (FMCGs).  “These convenience goods are the stuff of everyday life,” explains Coughlin, Anderson, Sterna and El-Ansary in their textbook, Marketing Channels.  “Given an acceptable brand choice, buyers will tend to take what is offered, rather than search for their favorite brand.”  This implies a marketing and sales process that looks much more like scale warfare to get distribution, build brand awareness and ‘rise above the noise.’

The implications are very clear for your choice of technology platform.  Do you need the sophisticated nurturing that is delivered by demand-generation platforms?  Or do you need a scale, high-availability, multi-channel mass-communication platform, which is the pedigree of many of the marketing automation/enterprise marketing management platforms?  Understanding the nature of your selling is another critical screen in narrowing the platforms to consider.

> Scope of marketing communications:  How complex are your integrated marketing communications programs?  Is it strictly e-mail based, or do you have a multi-faceted, international campaign that includes numerous digital touch points, live and online events, public relations and advertising via major magazines and broadcast outlets.  You should make a list of all of the different communication channels you currently use, and you should seek out a platform that can bring together as many of these channels as possible.  You may think you don’t need everything managed under one roof, but not integrating and managing these communication channels centrally has severe implications for analyzing the impact of your efforts.  If you deploy integrated marketing communications, you should be measuring both qualitative and quantitative ROI also in an integrated fashion.

> Scale of marketing operations (i.e., firm size and communication scale):  Is your marketing organization five-person or five-hundred-person?  What is your volume and frequency of outreach?  And what is the scale of your budget and resource-management needs?  Are you the right fit for a platform such as Active Conversion, which targets small-to-mid-size enterprises, or do you require the ‘high-volume transactional/personalized messaging capabilities’ of a platform such as Neolane?  I’ll shed much more light on the nuances between various systems in the final piece in this series. 

> Existing CRM-system capabilities:  Do you have an existing CRM system?  That’s an important question.  Your current platform may have some of the features you are looking for already built in – especially if your needs are not as complex.  It’s unlikely that a CRM system will have everything you need, but a gap analysis can help shed light on how much more you need in terms of an integrated marketing management platform.  Also, not every platform vendor has native integration with every CRM system.  So whether you’re using Microsoft (Dynamics CRM), NetSuite, Oracle (Siebel), or Salesforce – some of the more-common platforms – or another platform, you should look for an add-on-platform that will integrate and build on your existing capabilities.  CRM systems are becoming more robust, though, over time, and it’s increasingly viable for ‘advanced’ CRM systems to cover an increasing percentage of the types of functions an integrated marketing management platform can provide.  So the nature and status of your CRM system will tell you a lot about how you want to approach building out your marketing infrastructure.

> Required NPV:  Earlier in this piece, I mentioned that understanding your ROI in terms of the lifecycle of the platform and its resultant NPV is an important step in assessing the scale of investment that is ‘worth it.’  Given, however, that an integrated marketing management platform has a broader set of benefits that will ultimately improve efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing – and that may not be fully measurable yet – it’s worth setting an NPV threshold that takes all of this into account.  Consider this your ‘required’ NPV for moving forward, and make sure your purchase does not exceed your cost-basis assumptions for this threshold.

What technical evaluations should marketers do in assessing their needs from an integrated marketing management platform?

The functional benefits cited earlier in the ‘benefits’ section of this piece should form the basis for your technical evaluation of the capabilities of various platform vendors.  This evaluation falls into four major categories:

> Data integration:  There are three issues that are important to a marketer when it comes to data integration:  (1.) bringing together disparate, internal and eternal, marketing data sources, (2.) enabling real-time access to this data and (3.) ensuring the quality and synchronization of this data. 

The first two points are likely obvious things to look for in a platform, although it’s worth mentioning that the value of marketing data is significantly increased when you can correlate customer records with campaigns, transactional history and both qualitative and quantitative customer feedback.  The good news is that the emerging trend of connecting everything via Web services/cloud services means that real-time integration is closer at hand than ever.  It is becoming the standard for this segment.

The third point, though, is critical and is something that has come up in numerous conversations with vendor executives.  Marketers don’t really want to think in terms of data management, but marketing data is their lifeblood and requires greater attention over time. 

A starting issue is one of data quality, especially when it comes to CRM systems.  “Often times CRM is not the cleanest data,” commented Steve Woods in a phone interview.  That’s why a vendor must be able to deal with issues such as intelligent field mapping, de-duplication and master data management. 

A related issue is the nature of a given platform vendor’s integration with an existing CRM system, and there are two, different beliefs about how to approach this.  Some vendors want to be able to integrate with nearly any customer database or CRM system via ‘mapping’ or by connecting ‘in the cloud’; meanwhile, others believe this leads to inferior results.  Jon Miller argued in a phone interview, “[It's] not about which ones, but about how well you do it,” and he says that is why his company has focused primarily on Salesforce integration.  It’s interesting to comment here that this argument is similar to one that has existed in the ERP world for years – i.e., the debate over adopting a ‘monolithic system’ versus going with a variety of ‘best-of-breed’ platforms.

A final, and perhaps most-important, issue is underlying architecture for data management – critical to keeping your marketing data ‘clean’ and to supporting intelligent execution and analysis.  “It starts off with the right architecture,” Geoff Rego commented in a phone interview.  He thinks of customer marketing data as occupying one of three categories, ‘behavioral,’ ‘self-reported’ or ‘enriched,’ and he has built the Market2Lead data architecture around handling disparate sources via these categories in a centralized fashion.  He also stressed the importance of making business intelligence capabilities pervasive throughout marketing data (discussed below).

> Tactical management and execution of processes, channels and resources:  I mentioned earlier that a platform must manage the ‘ugly.’  Tactical management and execution is about as ugly as it comes, and with an increasing diversity of communication channels, it is the bane of many marketers’ existences.  The marketer has taken on the role of ‘air traffic controller,’ but marketers need leverage in these efforts so that they do not become mired in tactical issues and miss the strategic opportunities. 

This is a critical component of all integrated marketing management systems.  Fortunately, I believe it is an area where marketers are probably the most well-versed and the most comfortable asking questions – so it is not an area I will discuss in greater detail here … except to say, ‘Ask lots of questions!’

 I will also note that this capability is something the marketing automation/enterprise marketing management companies – such as Aprimo, Neolane and Unica – do particularly well.  It is also an area where Eloqua has invested heavily over the last few years.  So regardless of the type of vendor you are speaking with, I’d benchmark against this peer group in this particular area of analysis. 

> Strategic planning and management of customer nurturing and customer-brand dialogue:  This is tightly connected to tactical management.  Given a robust integrated marketing management platform that manages tactical execution, the next layer up is to better coordinate – better orchestrate – diverse elements toward unified goals.  I’d add here that this should include both a sense of ongoing project management and also of budget management – given these are critical elements at a strategic level – moreover, the budgetary flows should be captured as part of the tactical management capabilities (above).

One core concept that many vendors discuss is the idea of ‘nurturing’ of leads to get them ‘sales ready’ – a complex process that requires an immense amount of two-way feedback and complex logic for lead ‘routing’ among various pre-defined campaigns and interactions.  Adjacent to nurturing is the idea of holistic customer-brand dialogue – which is a pervasive sense of brand experience and of consistent interactions in all marketing communication activities.  This is something that an integrated marketing management system also should help ‘enforce’ across all communication channels.

These concepts are baked into all of the integrated marketing management platforms, but their execution of this concept differs widely.  In particular, how interaction logic and lead routing is programmed and managed in the system is a critical issue to consider, and it is related to the issue of usability (discussed below). 

Logic and lead routing is an area where I believe David Raab is producing some great insights via his current technical analyses of vendor platforms for his Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems.  He commented in a recent blog post:

I had documented the mechanics of this process during my research, but not thought of it as a lead routing mechanism. Yet even though there is no explicit lead routing involved, leads are still moving from one campaign to another. As Kurt Vonnegut never said, no matter what you do, lead routing happens.

So that’s my grand epiphany: every system has a lead routing approach. Simplicity-focused products route leads by default, via independent campaign selection rules. Complexity-focused products route leads explicitly.

> Support for marketing intelligence and analytics:  This is a critical link and is what enables a marketer to take integration and execution to the next level.  The robustness of this capability is not consistent across platform vendors.  Everyone has cursory ‘dashboards’ with ‘analytics,’ but to be truly effective as a planning tool and as an integrated part of a company’s enterprise systems, a platform needs to have enterprise-grade business intelligence capabilities built in.  And these capabilities should interface with industry-leading analytics platforms from vendors such as Omniture, SAS and SPSS.

What are the ‘creature comforts’ marketers should consider in doing their final evaluations of integrated marketing management platforms?

Usability is critical.  I had lunch last week with Geoff Rego out in Santa Clara, and near the end of our conversation he re-iterated his belief that usability will be a key differentiator among integrated marketing management platform vendors.  Similarly, David Raab has been beating this drum heavily on his blog in recent weeks. 

The underlying challenge:  How to make systems robust but simple for marketers to operate. 

Jon Miller called this “… delivering marketing technology in an ‘easier’ package – easier to own, easier to buy and easier to operate” in a telephone interview.  The folks at Silverpop have integrated this into their positioning, as well, referring to their software as being ‘built by marketers, for marketers’ in a telephone interview.  I have to admit I like this sentiment.

As mentioned above, this is the second in a three-part series.  The final post in this series will present snapshots of the top 20 vendors I’m watching and that I believe are representative, forward-thinking leaders in this segment.  Stay tuned for more …

What’s next?  What do you think?

As always, this dialogue is just beginning.

• What other areas do you believe are critical for marketers to think about when analyzing their needs from an integrated marketing management system?
• Are there additional technical requirements that marketers should think more about?

Today’s post is a bit different from the usual.  We won’t be diving into a key topic at the intersection of brands, marketing, innovation and technology, nor will we be presenting a Q&A with a forward thinker in the space; instead, I am asking for your help with a project.

Source: iStockphoto

I am in the process of writing a book – tentatively titled Connected Marketing – that is for marketers, that covers the topic of marketing technology and that is meant to help marketers deploy and use technology in a substantially-different way than they do today.

This book has evolved from a convergence of 1.) my interests and blogging about this space, 2.) my past experiences as a marketing leader and consultant in the technology industry, 3.) my ongoing discussions and interactions with leaders in the marketing technology space and 4.) research I’m conducting as part of my current graduate program, which I will conclude in May 2009.

So what are the details, and how can you be a part of helping marketers to better leverage technology and, thus, to take the ‘connectedness’ of their marketing organizations to the next level?

Below is a brief outline of my current approach to this project.

What are your thoughts on the direction I’m taking?  What else should I be considering, researching or thinking about to maximize the value of this book to marketers?

I’m ‘crowd-sourcing‘ here.  So help a guy out.

What am I researching and writing about?

My core focus is analyzing and synthesizing ways that marketers could better leverage technology for more connected and more strategic marketing, as well as identifying the cultural, organizational and technological barriers marketers face in trying to adopt strategic marketing technology (versus the myriad of tactical technologies they rely upon today).  By presenting insights both into the ‘state of the art’ and into what is keeping marketers from getting there, I believe it will aid marketers in changing how they attack the problem.

What topics does this include?

The book centers around:

• Assessing the state of the marketing technology landscape (understanding the segments, the vendors and the platforms they offer)
• Understanding the current state of adoption by different types of marketing organizations (including an original, primary-source survey I’m in the process of developing)
• Identifying opportunities and barriers to adoption by marketing leaders and brand managers
• Hypothesizing future evolutionary direction of marketing technologies and the resultant opportunities and challenges for marketers

The core of this project is its focus on understanding the dynamics that exist at the intersection of supply and demand for marketing technologies.  Specifically, what is the current ’state of the art’ from software vendors, and how does this compare with what marketers know, want, expect and have a comfort level with?

Marketing organizations have some of the lowest levels of integrated technology infrastructure in the enterprise.  Why is that?

It is my working hypothesis that there is a pervasive mis-match – where marketers remain relatively unsophisticated about their marketing technology needs at anything above a tactical level, meanwhile vendors either sell at a purely tactical level or rely on (and speak to) IT for high-level, strategic solutions – that leads to little being achieved and the deployment of solutions at a ‘more-strategic’ layer that too often do not meet core needs and/or do not mirror dynamic marketing processes.

Given this, a major focus of my research and in the book will be on understanding the levels above basic CRM and tactical marketing communications (e.g., ads, e-mail, phone, search, SMS, social media, Web) – focusing on what I’ve recently referred to as the ‘integrated marketing management’ layer and above.

That includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• Advanced CRM/SFA
• Brand monitoring
• Business analytics/predictive analytics
• Business intelligence
• Competitive monitoring and synthesis
• Cross-channel customer personalization
• Customer sentiment/feedback monitoring and synthesis
• Dashboards and visualization
• Demand generation
• Enterprise marketing management
• ERP integration
• Integrated marketing communication/campaign execution management
• Lead management, scoring and nurturing
• Marketing asset/resource management
• Marketing automation
• Marketing co-creation
• Marketing operations management
• Real-time marketing measurement and ROI analysis
• Semantic analysis
• Web services/SOA/cloud-services integration

How am I researching this book?

There are several key pieces to my approach:

> Original survey of marketers:  This is the cornerstone of my research.  Over the coming weeks, I will survey a large group of marketers to get their insights and feedback into what works and what doesn’t, what they need and what they don’t and — most importantly — what is standing in the way of their better leveraging strategic marketing technology.

> Briefings with marketing technology vendor companies:  This is off to a start, and I thank the many vendors that have already done briefings with me.  The goal is to make sure I’m as up-to-date both on the technologies and platforms in the marketplace today, as well as vendors’ experiences with their marketer customers.

> Review of existing articles, books, ideas, papers, posts and reports by leading-edge thinkers on the state of marketing technology and marketers’ opportunities and challenges in deploying marketing technology:  My goal is to build on the great work and insights that have already been developed and are available in the marketplace today, rather than merely duplicating their content.  This book will help take these insights to the next level.

What is my angle?

I approach my research and writing through the lens of a marketer, not that of a technologist. 

Yet I have spent nearly 10 years of my career working in the information technology business – including 4 1/2 years leading marketing for IT-analyst group The 451 Group and past work on marketing programs for clients such as Motorola and Platinum Technology (now CA), as well as for numerous start-ups and growth-stage companies. 

My experiences tell me that marketing technology has significantly advanced, even if as marketers sometimes our awareness, skills and processes have not.  I want to get to the bottom of this ‘digital divide.’

Who is my audience?

Marketers, primarily; however, I’m hoping that the insights of my research and book also will have significant impact on vendors and their approaches to developing and selling solutions to marketers.

What is my final deliverable?

My core focus is on writing the book; however, there are two additional ‘ongoing’ deliverables that are in close support of this deliverable.  The first is a graduate thesis research project I’m working on this semester, which will be a precursor to the book and is where I will derive much of my primary-source research.  The second is my ongoing blogging here on Propelling Brands and my dialogue with both marketers and technologists in the industry – which I use as a ‘sandbox’ to develop and cement ideas.

So the book will wrap a neat bow around things, but I see the ideas and insights as having a continuous life here on the blog and in the offline conversations it spurs.

What is my time frame?

My goal is to complete the bulk of (if not all of) researching and writing the book by mid-year 2009.  So stay tuned as I get further down the road!  I will keep you updated here on Propelling Brands.

How can you get involved?

I’m glad you asked.  This is the most important part.

You can get involved in a couple of ways:

> Marketers — participate in the survey:  Click here to let me know you’d like to participate in the survey.  Write ‘Marketer survey’ in the subject line on the contact form, and then tell me a little bit about your role and organization.  I’ll follow up as soon as the survey is ready to go.

> Marketing technology vendors — set up a briefing:  Click here to let me know you’d like to schedule a briefing.  Write ‘Vendor briefing’ in the subject line on the contact form, and then tell me a little bit about your company and its technology platform.  I’ll be in touch very shortly.

Beyond this, if you have ideas for the book or want to share interesting insights that would be useful, either leave a comment below OR contact me via Twitter and I’ll get right back to you.

I look forward to your thoughts.  Already deep in my initial research and getting good early feedback, I’m excited about the prospects for this book.  With your help, we can make it a truly-valuable resource for marketers.