Properly used, you get bigger and stronger.
 
Most likely your marketing and sales organizations are using a combination of SaaS and software applications that promise to meet your objective of bigger and better demand generation.
 
Never before has marketing and sales been presented with such an array of productivity-enhancing opportunities. The side effect of all of this capability is that we are often unprepared to tap into the potential of our marketing systems. We get locked into a few features here and there. Whether due to lack of vision, lack of manpower, or lack of training, the result is a weak and lackluster program. Many begin to question the overall effectiveness of their marketing systems, wondering: Are they generating the ROI that is expected or desired? How many of these types of systems are in use and are they effectively working together to meet objectives?

So how do you get the most out of your current systems when you may be using a combination of marketing systems, including:

• Social media monitoring tools (e.g. Radian6, Visible Technologies)
• Website analytics (e.g. Omniture, Coremetrics)
• CRM/SFA (e.g. Salesforce, Siebel)
• Marketing automation (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo)
• Social CRM (e.g. Lithium, Helpstream)
• Enterprise Marketing Management (e.g. Aprimo, Unica)
• Partner Portals (usually built internally)
• Other

By analyzing the number of systems and their interconnection, we often find a variety of challenges that allow us to identify opportunities for improvement:

• Issues of properly set expectations and objectives - Do you really know what you want to do and are you able to measure it using your systems?
• Ownership of results - Who really needs the info and are they getting it?
• Right people in place to implement - Is your staffing at an adequate level to truly make the systems shine?
• Training - Are the people administrating the systems expert in their implementation?

What is the next step? Pull a team together with the purpose of identifying these opportunities. Call in a few experts who can identify the points of integration. Evaluate your campaigns and how well the systems have handled each phase.

Evaluating the systems in use and providing insight, strategy, and execution to tap into the best of what you have will provide you with the shot you needed to improve your demand generation results.

Our clients are not betting that the economy will get better soon. Not only are budget cuts remaining in place, but the focus on sales, and marketing’s direct impact on sales is growing. I believe this will become part of the “new normal” way of doing business.
 
As it relates to marketing’s direct impact on sales, one area of tremendous focus is lead generation and lead management – no surprise there. An interesting development we see (and we are helping clients with) is that sales is demanding that marketing provide a new service to them. Sales is asking marketing to use a combination of database marketing and market research to create qualified leads for them.
 
Here’s a quick overview of an approach that is working:

• Define the attributes of prospects that are most likely to buy,
• Create a research approach that will screen for those attributes,
• Develop targeted lists from existing customer data and new lists,
• Conduct the research (after screening out the least qualified) to more deeply qualify prospects,
• Collect the data and record in a lead management system,
• Determine the best next step for the company to reach out to each qualified prospect, which could include anything from immediate outreach to defining future nurturing campaigns,

Done correctly, the result will be a shorter sales cycle.

What do you think?

While Twitter can’t take all the credit for Avaya’s recent sales story, I’m impressed with its role in making the sale happen. Many kudos to Avaya for listening! (see more on Social Media Listening).
 
What are you doing to listen to your market?

It struck me in a very personal way the other day that cloud computing is here in a big way – and it’s not good for the channel.
 
For me as a consumer, here’s what it looks like:

• I download my books from Amazon to my Kindle, so Barnes & Noble lost my business,
• I download as many movies as I can watch via Netflix, so Blockbuster lost my business,
• I listen to my music via Pandora, so both the poor record store and even iTunes lost my business.

In these examples, one channel player won, and the other lost. And it’s not happening just in a B2C environment. From a business perspective:

• We store business information on a wiki (Socialtext), so the local server reseller lost our business,
• We backup our systems via Mozy, so Best Buy / Fry’s (the channel) lost our business,
• We use Salesforce, so the local CRM reseller lost our business.

In these very simple examples, you see how the channel is disintermediated. (And if you would like a more comprehensive and more enterprise-level perspective of cloud computing, see here.)

From a vendor perspective, the changing channel landscape poses both an opportunity and a challenge. Your opportunity may lie in grabbing a greater share of wallet of the buyer because you don’t need the channel as much. Or, your opportunity may lie in aligning yourself with the emerging channel players (transitioning from CD stores to iTunes to the Pandora-like solutions).

However, your challenge lies in the fact that you probably rely very heavily on the channel today. The vendor that creates the best value proposition for the channel to sell their cloud computing solution will take the most market share. We see some of our clients who help their resellers change to succeed with them and we see others that don’t yet understand the importance of the channel in cloud computing.

Have you determined who the right channel players are for you and what your value proposition should be for them?

Social CRM is coming and has potential to completely change the insights and influence you can have on the success of your company, products and brands. Oh, and your personal success as well (assuming it’s tied to the success of your company, products and/or brand).
 
The best article I’ve read so far on this topic (“Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship”), provides a lot more detail on what the future might look like. I’ll provide you with my opinions, mixed in with some conclusions from the article.

SCRM can be thought of as a better way to manage a community. (Click here to see more on Creating Great Communities). SCRM has the potential to create a deeper and more engaging relationship with your customers. For your customers, it can enable them to:

• Be in more control,
• Stay in contact with you,
• Leverage self-service, collective history and peer to peer relationships.

However, issues remain:

• Who decides what the “official” answer is, or if there is one?
• Which customers are the right ones to listen to? (see a historical perspective on Dell’s IdeaStorm)
• How do you measure success? (Here’s one thought)
• How do you (a small number of people) successfully interact with the community participants (hopefully, a large number of people)?

A successful SCRM scenario includes a few of the following:

• Peer to peer and person to company interaction
• Participation mechanisms like competitive contests, joint product design, innovation / prediction markets
• Shared collective intelligence
• Mechanisms to handle huge volumes (believe it or not, you may need more people to help make this happen)

What are you seeing happening in Social CRM?

At this link, if you click on “Look Inside”, you can see the first few pages of a Case Study collection on Social Media ROI Success Stories. I mention this because this is great information and supports an earlier post entitled Finally – Good Data to Measure the Impact of Social Media.
 
At Crimson, we are heavily involved in helping one of the companies featured in this document via a worldwide team who is monitoring, analyzing and participating in social media conversations … with significant success. Wish I could tell you more, but it’s confidential.

What ROI are you seeing on your Social Media efforts?

This post is a mix of my opinion and many great ideas from an article in the WSJ entitled “The Fans Know Best”.
 
When advising our clients on community strategy, we often encounter a resistance to let go and an unreasonable expectation that “control” works. Hey, let’s face it. Communities are going to happen whether you like it or not. If you embrace some of the suggestions here, you can truly have significant impact on what people think about your company, your brand and your products. You accomplish this through participation, honesty and education.

So now, on to some tips:

1. Stop controlling everything. Allow customers to post criticisms and complaints. They are going to do it somewhere. Why not in an environment where you can shine by responding to those criticisms and complaints?
2. Welcome diversity. We marketers like to think we know who our customers are (aren’t we funny that way?). Some vendors restrict communities to users. Those that open their communities to all learn more than they ever imagined they would.
3. Give visitors ways of interacting. A community is not about a visitor interacting only with the company, it’s also about letting visitors interact with one another. After all, this is what people want to do!
4. If you can’t be like the fan sites, at least monitor and support them. No matter how good your community, there will be more discussions going on outside your community than inside. You need to listen (see further discussion on listening).

I’d love to hear your success tips on communities.

We get asked a lot to help our clients with Social Media strategy. One of the most important steps we encourage is “listening”. Of course, what we mean by this is first to find out what people are saying (about your company, brand, products, service, etc.).
 
We are often asked for help around a product launch. A product launch is a natural catalyst to tap into your market. Even so, we think our clients are waiting too long to listen … and only a few are institutionalizing the listening process.

So when should you listen?

• Now. Irrespective of what is going on in your product planning, find out what the sentiment is for what your attempting to sell. You’d be amazed what you can learn by listening without an agenda. Our clients discover current product concerns, gain competitive insights, receive product ideas and develop better value propositions from the conversation.
• Just prior to a product launch. OK, the product is going to launch whether you’ve listened or not. However, if you can begin the listening process just before you launch, you can make last-minute adjustments that can have a profound impact on the success of your launch. For example, what are the critical issues your target market cares about right now? Armed with that information, you can tweak your positioning to address very recent changes in buyer sentiment.
• From now on. Listening is in incredibly cost-effective mechanism for always being in touch with your market and the reason your product is succeeding or failing.

At the simplest level, listening is a ready-made panel of prospects and customers. It’s inexpensive market research. I can’t think of a reason a company wouldn’t do this.

(This is a summary of an article called People are Talking)
 
According to recent research by Lakshman Krishnamurthi (Montgomery Ward Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School), their research shows a direct correlation between online word-of-mouth and actual market performance (sales).

It turns out that there is a measurable connection between online product discussions and buyer behavior. That’s something many of our clients have been hoping to hear. Now they can better justify their social media investments. So, how does this work?

First, we need to agree that potential buyers are influenced by existing users. I won’t review the substantial data that supports this supposition, we’ll just agree that it’s true.

Second, we need to agree that a relatively small group of influencers can have significant influence on the majority. (As it turns out, this holds true both online and offline).

Third, we should agree that this small group of influencers consists of the active participants in online discussions, whereas the “influenced” are more often than not those who read but don’t participate.

We can reach several significant conclusions from this research:

• Influencing online word-of-mouth (conversations) can have an impact on sales (everyone seems to be looking for proof – here is some proof!)
• Monitoring conversations also enables companies to:
  • Participate in the conversations to create influence
  • Quickly modify positioning language for the product to more quickly impact sales
  • Greatly increase the speed of response to customer and prospect comments and concerns
  • Gain greater insight into competitors’ issues

The value of monitoring and participating in conversations has been viewed by many as obvious. However, there are many more (maybe even the majority) that have been waiting for data to help prove the value. This work is a great start in that direction.

What do you think?

We conduct all types of research for our clients. You name it and we help them with it. One type of research is emerging as more valuable (and less expensive) than others, and we call it “Deep Qualitative Research”.

This consists of having an expert sit down with a small number of customers / prospects to gain a deep understanding of their experiences. Conducting this type of research isn’t necessarily easy, but done well, it can be extremely effective. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Know your target market (see more in What Market Segment?). If you’re going to make decisions based on a small number of inputs, you need to ensure the input is absolutely from the right type of person. I can’t emphasize this point enough. Make sure the input you receive is representative of the target market to which you want to sell.
2. Develop a small number of open-ended questions with which the interviewer can probe. The idea is to get the interviewee to talk – a lot.
3. Have an expert do the research. This is not a check-box questionnaire approach – the interviewer needs to be able to ask additional questions that were not thought of when the original set of questions were written. Again, this is about probing deeply.
4. Use reflective listening techniques to further engage the interviewee and get them to express even more about how they feel.
5. Keep asking if there was anything else they felt or would like to say. I call this conversational probing. Some interviewees will go deeper and deeper with you and this is when the most valuable information comes out.
6. Write up your findings in language all your stakeholders can understand and use. Make sure your stakeholders get the “Aha”s that you got from your interview process.
7. Change the way you market and sell based on what you’ve learned.
8. Rinse. Repeat.

What qualitative research approach have you used effectively?