2013 B2B Marketing AdvisoryGuidelines for selling to today’s technology buyers

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The B2B technology buying process has changed—full stop.TodAy’s Business Technology Buyers Are More eMpowered And independenT. They’re not waiting to be ‘sold’ on your product’s latest features. In fact, they’re not waiting to be sold to at all. Industry research indicates that buyers are two-thirds of the way through their purchase process before they even engage with a salesperson1.1The Lead Nurturing Payoff for the Tech Industry (Forrester Research, Inc., October 2011)

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It’s clear that marketing must play a more direct role in shaping purchase decisions, especially early on in the buying cycle. Specifically, as a forward-thinking B2B technology marketer, you must adapt to confront these new realities:

• Fact is—it’s easier than ever for buyers to tune you out

• Thought leadership is the new currency for attracting buyer interest

• Lead nurturing is a marketing mandate

• Ensuring sales readiness is on your plate, too

• In the age of the social web, every customer is an influencer

• Measuring return on marketing investment is no longer a luxury—it’s a must.

Why should you read any further?Fair question. This guide communicates our vision for how to approach today’s challenging B2B technology market. You can use it to cultivate more productive, profitable relationships with your best prospects and clients. Still in? Read on.

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Know. Then act.iT’s A siMple TruTh, BuT one ThAT is ofTen overlooKed—before you can adapt your engagement strategy, you need to take a closer look at how your market has evolved.

When it comes to making technology purchase decisions, today’s buyers exhibit the following tendencies:

Immersion in information—Technology buyers have access to an unprecedented level of information about your products—and they take full advantage of it. They deep-dive into white papers, analyze case studies and blog posts, and seek out customer reviews early and often as they define their buying criteria.

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Self-reliance—As buyers get more savvy about using digital tools to find what they need, they place less value on direct contact with sales representatives. This is especially true early on in the buying cycle.

Risk-aversion—Doing more with less isthe new norm for marketers nowadays. It’s no wonder your prospects are approaching expensive technology investments with greater caution. And they are under greater pressure to show return on investment.

Demand for authenticity—Stakeholders need assurance that a vendor’s solution solves their exact business pains. They are less tolerant of traditional ‘broadcast’ marketing techniques and favor those vendors that show the greatest level of understanding and eagerness to help.

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Amplify your brilliance.in The noisy world of The weB, a fresh, knowledgeable perspective delivered with candor and a confident voice sells.

Your organization already has a unique take on the issues that your prospects and customers care about most. It’s time to download that information from your best people, distill it into consumable marketing pieces, and deliver it to your buyers. In other words, you need to embrace content marketing.

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• Adopt a non-biased tone—Your content can and should be persuasive, but it shouldn’t explicitly promote your products. It should serve to educate, not sell.

• Offer a balanced perspective—One of the most important ways you can build trust and credibility as an advisor is to consider the solution you’re offering the way your buyer sees it—limitations and all.

• Add your take on what’s out there—Add your voice to the conversation by selecting and commenting on the best available industry knowledge.

• Ensure consistency—Once you’ve put yourself out there as an expert, you need to continue to show up, delivering timely advice and thoughtful insight when your prospects need it most.

• Keep pace with the speed of conversation—Remember when product releases and industry events dictated publishing schedules? Those days are long gone. Your thinking and your content need to evolve much more rapidly to stay in sync with the pace of digital dialogue.

Content marketing is different. Here’s how.At its core, content marketing is the practice of communicating with your customers without injecting the inevitable sales pitch into the conversation. That’s precisely its power—and what sets it apart from a traditional broadcast strategy.

While you should always position content to showcase your expertise, it should never be about you. Instead, it should reverberate with your deep knowledge of and empathy for your prospect’s concerns and aspirations.

Today’s digitally driven content marketing is defined by a number of bedrock principles. Here are a few best practices:

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Lessons from Best-in-Class Content Marketers• Invest 31% of their budgets in

content marketing, compared to least effective marketers, who allocate 18%

• More likely to segment content based on the buying cycle (45%) versus laggards (29%)

• Plan to increase content marketing spend in the next 12 months (63%) versus laggards (59%)Source: B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends

Quality content is hard to create, but well worth the effortConsistently delivering meaningful, insightful, compelling information to your audience is a tall order. This challenge is compounded by the breadth and diversity of the channels through which your buyers can engage. But it is well worth the effort. Your prospects will appreciate and reward your attentiveness over time.

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use personalized content to connect with buyers.TodAy’s Technology Buyers spend ample time on the web conducting independent research before surfacing to engage with sales. It’s marketing’s job to stay digitally connected to buyers, providing them with useful, timely, and personalized information at key points throughout their decision journey.

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Lead nurturing is a marketing imperativeThis process of delivering customized content to buyers in exchange for increasing influence is known as lead nurturing. And it’s one of the most important functions marketing can fulfill. In fact, in the B2B technology market, where buyers perceive a high level of risk and the decision process is long, an effective lead nurturing program is integral to keeping prospects engaged—while building trust every step of the way.

Clearly, the role of marketing has expanded from brand awareness building to cultivating qualified prospects over an extended period of time. This complex task requires discipline and coordination. Marketing automation tools can help technology marketers efficiently collect and segment buyer information, and accelerate delivery of the right thought leadership content to the right person at the right time.

ROI of lead nurturingCompanies that excel in lead nurturing:

• Generate 50 % more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost per lead

• Reduce the percent of marketing generated leads that are ignored by sales (from as high as 80% to as low as 25%)

• Raise win rates on marketing-generated leads (7% points higher) and reduce “no decisions” (6% points lower)Source: Marketo

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Arm your sales team.in This new environMenT, marketing needs to better prepare and advise sales. It’s your responsibility to identify what issues matter most to each prospect and what content will best facilitate the buying process for that individual.

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Sales enablement—the systematic practice of ensuring that sales reps have the information they need to close deals—requires tight alignment between marketing and sales organizations. As a modern marketer, you need to make it easier for your sales team to access the following resources:

• A prioritized list of prospects detailing which ones have engaged in activities that qualify them as promising buyers

• Behavioral data that indicates a prospect’s interests and purchase priorities

• Content libraries mapped to each phase of the buying process

• Tools to track prospects throughout the buying cycle and alert them to key activities

The Urgent Need to Improve Sales ReadinessThe following research underscores the critical need for marketing to take a leadership role in preparing sales staff to engage more effectively with prospects:

• The average salesperson spends 7 hours per week looking for information to prepare for sales calls.Source: IDC Sales Advisory Service

• In a recent survey, only 42% of technology sales executives indicated that the salespeople they speak with are able to provide relevant examples or case studies to support their purchase decisions. Source: Forrester Research Inc., Executive Buyer Insight Study: Are Salespeople Prepared For Executive Conversations?, August 2012

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Transform customers into impassioned advocates.The journey doesn’T end wiTh converTing leAds inTo cusToMers. You have an opportunity to leverage each customer’s power as a peer influencer and outspoken reference for your products and services.

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But you also need to plan beyond soliciting testimonials from your best customers. An integrated, sustainable approach to customer engagement should span:

• Account planning and management—Focus on making your customers more successful as you expand your role as a trusted advisor.

• Customer engagement—Ensure that you continue to nurture existing customers to build long-term loyalty

• Customer reference management—Develop systems for identifying, qualifying, connecting with, and supporting those customers eager to help tell your company’s story.

The power of peer influencePeers hold enormous sway in the technology buying process. And as your prospects and customers increase participation in social media and expand their online networks, peer influence will continue to grow.

Word of Mouth Marketing and the WebConsider that:

• Word of mouth is the primary factor in up to 50% of all purchase decisions; its influence tends to rise in direct proportion to the risk and expense of the purchaseSource: McKinsey & Company

• Social media and online communities have become permanent fixtures in the technology buyer’s portfolio of information sources.Source: Forrester Research, Inc., 2011 Social Technographics For Business Technology Buyers, July 2011.

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Measure what matters.To jusTify MArKeTing’s elevATed role in The Business, marketing leaders must be able to directly link specific outreach activities to revenue. But a transactional view of return on investment simply does not fit the complex, often lengthy B2B technology purchase process.

You need to develop a holistic approach to quantifying marketing’s impact at each stage of the revenue cycle through the adoption of Revenue Performance Management practices. This methodology involves explicitly defining the stages of the buying process in close coordination with your sales team and then selecting the metrics that will yield the clearest insight into Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).

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The future of marketing measurement is predictiveWith improved lead management capabilities and analytics tools, you’ll be better equipped to quantify marketing’s success, including the number of people at each buying stage, conversion rates and trends, lead-to-revenue velocity, and total pipeline value.

But it doesn’t end there. Predicting revenue is integral to the expanded role of marketing in today’s organizations. You must move beyond tracking which campaigns and channels have performed well in the past to forecasting future sales. The most important question that marketers will need to be able to answer is: “what if?” And the only way you can answer this question in a reliable way is to apply a framework for measuring performance at every stage of the revenue cycle.

The challenge is clear. So is the payoff. By detailing the depth of marketing’s impact on present and future pipeline and revenue, you’ll secure credibility that lasts.

Metrics that MatterTo accurately communicate ROMI, marketing leaders must be able to track and report:

• Aggregate number of leads generated

• Number of leads at each stage of the buying cycle

• Lead-to-revenue velocity

• Percentage of sales revenue directly attributable to marketing effortsSource: Marketo

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stop and look around.we’ve covered A loT of ground in These pAges. Let’s take a look at where we’ve been.

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Here’s our view of the most striking contours of the new B2B technology marketing landscape—the ones you definitely won’t want to miss:

• Revenue is still the final destination; as a modern marketer, your mandate is to play a more direct role in navigating there.

• Today’s buyers crave independent access to information, not “old-school” interruption; you need to up your game in generating useful, timely content tailored to their needs.

• Content marketing starts with thought leadership—your own; it promotes your organization’s unique perspective on the issues that matter most to your prospects—while offering smart, objective commentary on competing ideas.

• Alignment with sales is a must so that you can provide the precise direction they need to close more deals.

• Customer success is contagious. Harness the outsized reach of the social web to tell your story to more people and position yourself as a trusted advisor in more places.

• It’s no longer enough to achieve results. You need to account for them, measure them, and even predict them. This is your challenge. This is your opportunity.

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Turn here.now whAT? I guess you could pretend that none of this is really happening—that marketing can just stay the course and still succeed. Nope. We didn’t think you’d buy that for a second. So now it’s time to re-orient your people, processes, and tools to today’s B2B technology market. Let’s get started. Need help? We’re here.

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some additional resources.weBsiTes And Blogs• The Yesler Blog—Our own B2B marketing insights and inspirations

• Content Marketing Institute—Research, daily posts, and information about upcoming content marketing events

• WebInkNow—David Meerman Scott’s blog

• Marketo Blog—Best practices and more from a leading marketing automation software provider

• SEOMoz Blog—Smart information about the nuts and bolts of digital marketing

• MarketingProfs—Resources, seminars, research and more from the content marketing pros

• SiriusDecisionsBlog—Sales and marketing alignment thought leadership

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About us.yesler is A B2B MArKeTing Agency that helps technology companies deliver predictable revenues, sustainable growth, and measurable results. A Projectline agency, Yesler is built on more than a decade of experience working with some of the world’s largest and most innovative B2B technology companies.For more information, visit www.yesler.com or subscribe to our blog at http://blog.yesler.com.