Sales and Marketing Performance Blog

Value Creation and Differentiation—Sales, Marketing Achilles' Heel

Stan DeVaughn of Turner DeVaugh sent me a survey his firm conducted late last year in conjunction with Jigsaw for the CIO council entitled, “Vendor-CIO First Contact: Smarter Approaches for Vendors Seeking to Connect with CIOs”, which you can download by clicking on the link.

This is an enlightening, yet disturbing survey into the business development behavior of sales and marketing representatives from IT vendors and B2B software companies. It surveys more than 300 CIO’s about their experience with first contact from new vendors and suggests ways that corporations can better defend themselves from unwanted cold calls and SPAM.

The survey interviews 30 sales professionals to understand the problem from both sides and offers enlightened vendors suggestions on how to better engage their target market, and is worthwhile reading for every sales and marketing executive.

The chart in figure 3., excerpted from the report is worth pondering a few moments;

• Sales reps revert to the cold call and telemarketing to generate leads, (despite low conversion rates) in order to satisfy sales managers, who need to be seen to be driving lead generation – this does not serve either organization.
• Lack of preparation and lack of homework prior to a call is just plain unprofessional–period.
• Unsolicited emails are SPAM and are as unwanted and annoying as cold calling to CIO’s; IT executives are actively encouraged to use permission-based SPAM filters.
• Emails and voicemails with no clear value proposition–from the clients perspective, rank in the top 5 DON’T DO list.

We’re in Q3 2010, yet many IT vendors doggedly persist in 1980’s cold calling and poorly targeted email techniques, despite the miniscule success rates in vain the hope of connecting with IT buyers. 

“When we want or need a product like yours, we will find you” - is the CIO mantra that sales and marketers need to heed and understand; IT executives are not waiting for your call or your SPAMMY email.

The right approach to engage IT executives is made clear for vendors in figure 9:

1. Vendors wanting to make first-time contact with CIO’s should do their homework prior to making an approach; leading with an opinion on value-creation, specific to the company and relevant to the industry.
2. They should seek to connect through referrals from trusted acquaintances and social network introductions with a clear and relevant value proposition,
3. They should also be prepared to include rather than circumvent the executive administrator (gatekeeper) in the process of calling IT executives,
4. They should be prepared to use current technology to reach buyers on a permission basis and track click-through rates to measure buyer interest,
5. Vendors should be prepared to use vendor portals and to communicate with a clear and relevant value proposition, coupled relevant proof points.

Conclusion and Call to Action

If the activities of your sales and marketing team rank high on the CIO annoyance scale in chart 3 or if they struggle to communicate value and differentiate offerings as in figure 9., then more of the same Outbound Marketing techniques are not going to help.

We believe the top priorities for IT vendors to help CIO’s and IT executives to find you on the Internet, understand your offerings and interact with your sales and marketing team are as follows;

1. Value Identification and Messaging Alignment

• Develop messaging that identifies the buyer persona and value creation and enables the vendor sales and marketing organizations to align around how products are used by IT to create value and use it across all touch points in the organization,
• Help the sales team understand industry issues and convey product usage in the context of achieving buyer goals and solving IT problems and integrate relevant proof points in Buyer Relevant Messaging templates

2. Adopt an Inbound Marketing
 model

Use the output of the Messaging Workshop to drive Website messaging and Inbound Marketing process to help you

• Get found on the Internet by IT executives looking for products with similar capabilities,
• Convert those visitors into leads through using compelling offers and landing pages and
• Analyze performance and make changes in a closed-loop system to accurately measure marketing cost per lead and cost per customer and integrate sales and marketing process for better sales performance.

We recommend, resell and implement the Hubspot Inbound Marketing System which has produced on average a 450% increase in leads in the first 5 months of usage for the 3000 HubSpot customers.

Connect with us to discuss whether the Value Identification and Messaging Alignment process and an Inbound Marketing model is right for your business.

Get Clarity in Messaging or Get Trampled by the Competition

The symptoms of marketing under-achievement are fairly standard and there are tens of thousands of companies Worldwide with good to great products that are under-performing in marketing. Here are a few symptoms of a problem at B2B company, Acme Inc.:

• The Website message is fuzzy or just plain lost in text and gobbledegook.
• The problems the products solve for their customers are not articulated clearly in the main pages on the Website.
• There is no blog, not much recent news, save for a few new partner and customer announcements, the Website is like a static brochure and shows its age.
• There's a sign-up form on the Website that you have to fill out before you can read any in-depth material.
• If you Google up their key markets and the keywords they should rank for, they are invisible.
• 99% of traffic coming to their site from search engines either has the company name, product name or principal's names in the search string.
• Several pay-per-click campaigns have been run in the past, but with poor results.
• The tool Acme's sales team uses most frequently to engage customers and prospects, the PowerPoint presentation, morphs from one presentation event to the next.
•  At any time there are as many versions of the Powerpoint presentation circulating as there are salespeople in the company, which dilutes the message and pollutes the brand. 
  

As a result of the above, Acme doesn't get any inbound leads other than through word of mouth...I'm not knocking word of mouth by the way, it's a fabulous achievement and an asset for Acme.

Acme has a great product, but are under-achieving their potential....if the problems identified above are left unattended, their business will decline as more agile competitors with Marketing 2.0 savvy and competitive products erode their installed base and capture new business from new customers looking for similar capabilities on the Internet.

Get on message or get killed...is a comment I wrote after an exhaustive messaging development process with my old team at MicroStrategy. The rigor and value of the messaging process has stayed with me and we have adapted and evolved it over time to form the basis of our Buyer Relevant Messaging Process and Customer Messaging Architecture development.

Clarity takes time and effort, but it's worth it.

Many companies don't realize there is a messaging and differentiation problem, or have the time, know-how or commitment to stop what they are doing, take the best minds in the business to focus and create a clear and compelling set of messages. Then to test and validate the messaging and flow it thought the website, collateral and through training – get it into the conversations of the sales team and then maintain it over time.

As a result the marketing value message in the Website is diminished and potential prospects for their products engage their competition over the Internet.

If the above symptoms are familiar, you could start a transformation process with Marketing Messaging Alignment, to align sales and marketing messaging with buyer goals and needs.

Inbound Marketing - attract new prospects and retain existing customers

Acme's CEO states that they have spent money on Search Engine Optimization over the past couple of years, yet are not happy with the results. This is unsurprising given that:

• the Website is static and hasn't been updated for a year.
  
• there is no blog.
• there is little fresh content.
• the Website is under 50 pages.
• there are less than 100 inbound links.

The CEO states confidently that "inbound leads are useless if they don't serve your growth goals and turn visitors into new business over time"...which is absolutely true.

However the problem is that the CEO has no idea of the capabilities of Inbound Marketing platforms like HubSpot. Nor is the CEO aware of how Inbound Marketing using on-target messaging, can transform a business by attracting high quality inbound visitors to their Website and through compelling offers and landing pages, convert visitors into leads.

Our problem is that Acme's CEO/Owner/VP sales and Marketing is unlikely to read this post. Acme needs a change agent, to develop a vision of what is achievable and help in overcoming the status-quo and getting people used to the idea of doing things differently – the rest is easy and follows a logical Inbound Marketing sequence of events.

If you know someone running a business who is under-achieving and you think has a great product, then we would appreciate it if you could forward a URL of this article, or arrange introductions.