Author Archives: Scott Hornstein

No one has a monopoly on insight. Figuring out the ‘who,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why’ of sales prospecting requires a collaborative approach

If you happened to get lost in the woods (and gasp) your cell phone battery dies, let’s hope you’ve got a map and a compass, because the most effective method of figuring out where you are is triangulation.

Find a nearby high point, like a ridgeline, where you can get a good view of your surroundings (and let’s hope it’s a fairly clear day). Basically what you’re going to do is find at least two features that are also on your map. By taking bearings on these features with your compass and plotting them on your map, you’ll see where you are.

Triangulation, as it happens, is also a powerful technique for validating and verifying data. And because B2B marketing sometimes feels like being lost in the woods, it’s a tried-and-true method of finding your way to greater success.

Understanding Where You Really Are

It goes without saying that the better you understand your B2B prospects, the more efficient and effective your prospecting will be. However, often we are too confident in our belief that we know exactly what’s going on. In reality, no one silo or point of view within the company is going to give you the “who,” “what,” and “why” of prospects and the buying process.

There is no monopoly on insight.

The answer is to triangulate intelligence, or we are no more effective then the blind men of poetry, trying to determine what an elephant really looks like, each by touching the strange beast once, each from a different angle.

The Elephant in the Room

The prospect is the elephant in the room. Here are the three points of intelligence you need to understand just who that prospect is, and how to market to them:

1. Data analysis. This tells you what prospects are doing now. It’s strong on the “what,” but not the “why.” And if we don’t understand that “why,” we’re hamstrung into repeating this step.
2. Internal intelligence. Sales talks to the elephants all day long, every day. We need to tap into their real-world knowledge. This gives us perspective and insight, but it comes through a filter.
3. Persona research. Creation of a prospect persona, or personas, based upon new qualitative research, yields the human insights into the individuals who comprise the buying center, their own values, perspectives, and agendas. It takes the learning from behavioral data analysis and inside intelligence and matches it with motivation.

The Elephant Found

Here’s a case study of a firm that helps clients (very large) to mitigate foreign currency risk. The firm is composed of unassailable experts.

Recently, it introduced a highly specialized software package that helps companies to gather and process the necessary data, but sales were behind projection. It decided to triangulate intelligence and better understand the prospect.

1. Data Analysis. As is often the reality for B2B firms, the current data was in Salesforce but much of the history was in Excel (and some in personal recollection). When the sources were compiled, the strength of the relationships they had forged was clarified—individuals who were clients of one service became prospects for another.
2. Internal Intelligence. The internal view was that the software was unique and robust. With their reputation in the industry, understandably, they thought they knew the prospect. Sales felt they could now compete as a software company.
3. Persona Research. The research effort validated steps 1 and 2, and added a new dimension—motivation—and refined the sales process. Prospects were not looking for software; they were looking for an expert that also offered software. First, they needed to engage with people who could help them to better understand how to make the right decisions, then to install the software that could provide better decision support.

Understanding How to Maximize Opportunity

Any one point of view can be true but still not account for the totality of the situation. By putting data analysis together with internal intelligence and persona research, we start to empathize with our prospect, and that makes all the difference.

Or as one of this firm’s new clients said, “Are they expensive? You bet. But they are worth every penny. First they installed best practices. Then the software to make it efficient.”

Let’s begin with a question:

How many of your marketing staff have ever seen or spoken to a prospect? Or a customer, for that matter?

Not many. Not many out there.*

It’s not just you, it’s your competitors as well. Which is why gaining a first-hand, unique insight into the men and women that inhabit our classification of “prospect” or “customer” is a potential game changer.

Changing the game

Bottom line, marketing needs to be:

• Valuable and relevant
• Distinctive
• Compelling, and urge the prospect through the consideration journey.

Positioning, content and messaging can become infinitely more effective once we gain a deeper understanding of how our prospects and customers describe their issues and challenges, their individual and collective contribution and rewards, who they trust, and how and why they make a decision.

My experience is that the skill to learn, adopt, or strengthen in 2018 is gaining this unique insight. If you do this with commitment and agility, it will bring a vitality and immediacy to your marketing, and your product or service to your customers.

I’ll tell you how, but first I will tell you why:

Here’s why

I’ve had extensive experience with Voice of Customer research, and as it has evolved into the prospect persona process. Within that experience is a high-reward trend: the persona process has consistently prevented costly mistakes and illuminated the way to accelerated revenue. Each “aha” moment is a high-value insight:

• One company was successful in Market A and wanted to enter Market B. Prospects in Market B said that the company’s “tried and true” positioning was absolutely wrong, and why.
• One company’s product innovation was revolutionary and disruptive. However, the Market was risk adverse. The company felt that surely they could capture the mission-critical applications even without a track record. Prospects disagreed and pointed them to the appropriate entry point.

Here’s how

The persona process involves talking, probing, and carefully listening to prospects and customers, with intelligence and empathy, within a purposeful conversation. The result is a portrait of the person, framed within their business setting. An archetype.

It is their story, written by them, of how they do business. And because it is authentic, it can engender a vision and understanding common to both marketing and sales. It is most powerful when marketing a high-consideration product or service.

However, the persona process does not stand alone.

The power of 3

Marketing is most effective when it is combining information from 3 sources:

1. Data Analysis. What definable and measureable actions and steps have prospects taken? Analysis of the data brings a critical aspect to our understanding of the person and the organization.
2. Internal Intelligence. Nothing can replace or even replicate the Sales knowledge of the industry, the players, and the personalities. I’ve also learned through bitter experience that if you want Sales’ buy-in, they must have input.
3. Persona Research. This not only unifies the marketing and sales perspective, but it enables us to talk to our customers and prospects about what they think is most important, where they go for trusted information, in their own language.

“Knowing our customer and communicating with them in their language, in the places they go in an appropriate way… everything else is tactics.”

– Peter Bell, Product Marketing Senior Director, Marketo

The most powerful lever

Within this triangulation of customers and prospects the most powerful lever is the research, because it lets those individuals speak for themselves. When you put this all together and load it into the MarTech rocket ship, you turn competitive differentiation into clear and compelling competitive advantage.

*From Bruce Springsteen’s spoken intro to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I please have your undivided attention.

Hah! Good luck with that.

Nirvana

B2B marketing wants and needs the attention of its prospects to shove them along the consideration journey. We’d like our messaging and content to fall from the heavens onto the tongues of prospects thirsty for knowledge, but the deck is stacked against us.

Reality

Our prospects are hiding under their bed, with their digital covers pulled over their head, suffering from:

• The incredible shrinking attention span. Much has been made of the unfavorable comparison to goldfish, nevertheless, goldfish are not our targets. We must earn attention span.

• The irresistible urge to multitask, which fractures what little concentration is left. Interestingly, neuroscience says multitasking is not really the concurrent performing of tasks (nor is it efficient). Our brains actually go through a stop/start process. I stop reading this article and start looking at puppy videos. Costs time, but multitasking is how we process our lives.

• The Network of Me. Prospects are both executives and people, and the people side sharply restricts who and what gets through the digital cyclone that comes at us everyday. The person in you decides, beforehand, what sources are interesting. It’s likely that you’re not on the list.

Under-achieving

So what’s a marketer to do? Here’s the short, marginally effective list, which you could probably get anywhere:

• Be clever. For instance, write headlines that are abstractions of pop culture. An analysis of defensive tactics in the SuperBowl might be Game of Zones. (A poor example but you know where I’m going.)

• Be quick. Utilize the 4-line rule: no paragraph can be more than 4 lines. Let folks know how long it will take to read your content. Put everything in bullets (like this post).

• Be everywhere. Tonnage works. Cover every possible avenue a prospect might take looking for inspiration or information. Throw a lot against the wall.

Impressed? Not so much.

Over-Achieving

Or you could get to know your prospect better than anyone else. Empathy and insight will put your content and your message on the Network of Me, inside your prospect’s DNA, on the vein to the brain.

I am definitely advocating distinguishing yourself by taking the time to engage in persona research, where you engage individuals in a purposeful conversation – qualitative research to understand them as executives and people, what is important to them, and how they make decisions.

Compelling Competitive Differentiation

This is a compelling competitive differentiator, and will enable you, or the marketers who get their first, to empathize with your prospect, recognize what really matters and speak directly to it. The trust and respect that engenders is what really matters.

“Knowing our customer and communicating with them in their language, in the places they go in an appropriate way… everything else is tactics.”

– Peter Bell, Product Marketing Senior Director, Marketo

It takes commitment, and the courage to change if the research says you got it wrong. The dividend is better qualification, earlier engagement, and accelerated revenue.

As my good friend, Stuart Taylor, SVP of Nielsen said, “B2B is a personal sell. Always has been.”

Gotta hand it to him, he’s right.

My partners and I are consumed with answering the question: how can marketing create compelling competitive differentiation, by itself. We’ve spent the last few months reviewing our case studies, brainstorming, and bumping our shins.

We start off assuming that the product (and the company) is a leader in quality and innovation. However, marketing touches the prospect before they’ve had first-hand experience. If they will lend us an ear, if we can then create a conversation, engagement happens sooner and with an aura of the expectation of satisfaction.

Aha + Tools + Agility = Strategic Readiness

Our journey has led us to a working theory on how marketing can create this competitive differentiation. I’m going to lay it out as simply, and in as few words as possible. You tell us if it passes the sniff test.

The foundational construct is what we call “strategic readiness”. This is when marketing has everything it needs to create this compelling competitive differentiation. There are 3 legs that give this concept stability. You have to have all 3 to pass GO.

Aha

Creating a series of “AHA” moments. This involves talking, and carefully listening to prospects and customers, with intelligence and empathy, to gain a deeper understanding of who they are as professionals and people, how they define their needs, and their criteria for a decision.

Each “Aha” moment is a moment of truth. If you are in B2B, and/or market a high consideration product or service these “aha’s” are high value insights.

We find the persona process to be uniquely strong in helping us to gain the insight we need. Per Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute:

“When buyer personas evolve from authentic stories related by actual buyers – in the form of one-on-one interviews – the methodology and presentation allows you to capture the buyer’s expectation and the factors that influence them.”

One could say it’s like getting the answers before the test. Another way to look at it is – we are privileged to know and work with the smartest marketers. But none of them are clairvoyant.

Tools

Marketing technology may be the tools we’ve always dreamed of, but you need the persona to know how to use these tools.

“Knowing our customer and communicating with them in their language, in the places they go in an appropriate way… everything else is tactics.”

– Peter Bell, Product Marketing Senior Director, Marketo

MarTech appears to be an area of critical concern, where adoption and deployment are often without the Aha or the Agility, and often result chronic underperformance. A recent poll undertaken by our organization reveals that 90% of marketers are realizing less than 50% of the potential of their MarTech investment. Strategic readiness is the cure.

Agility

The term originates in Latin and then surfaces in Middle French and Middle English to mean nimble, fleet, quick. We hear agility mentioned as an attribute of an athlete – the quickness of motion.

Marketing must be agile as a core competency. As we looked through our case studies we found an obvious, but distinguishing trend: the persona process frequently revealed that the emperor was wearing no clothes, that some basic assumptions, some widely held beliefs were dead wrong.

• One company found that their “tried and true” positioning for Market A, told decision makers in Market B exactly what they did not want to hear.
• One company’s product innovation was revolutionary, if not disruptive in a risk-averse market. They learned the appropriate entry point.
• One company entered a new market touting that the benefits of their recent release (11!). The decision makers didn’t care, they wanted the basics (release 1).

This is like open source code. We’re putting it out there and relying on all those really smart marketers we mentioned before to co-develop this. Put a comment here or hit me up at scott@hornsteinassociates.com.

Marketing illuminates the path to solving a problem. Not just any path – your path. This is somewhat academic in low-consideration consumer products, but lifeblood to high-consideration B2B products and services. To get these prospects to follow your path, you must lead.

These high-consideration products and services are often are mission- and career-critical and so there is an element of trust that sits on prospects’ shoulders during the consideration journey. To earn that trust you must do more than mark the trail with colored stones and leave treats along the way. Demonstrate authority, leadership, and humanity to prove your competitive advantage is differentiating. It gives prospects a strong reason to believe.

Teach them to fish: 5 qualities of B2B prospecting leadership

1.    Humanity. The B2B marketing leader takes the time to understand prospects as both executives and people, with both personal and corporate goals and responsibilities, which sometimes conflict. The prospect persona process provides remarkable insight, and how these individuals come together to make a decision. This quality is essential. Recognizing and embracing humanity leads to empathy, which is the basis of all effective communication. Everything starts here. Or stops.

2.    Honesty. “Speak”, whether in print or in person, with ethics, morality, and a crystal clear vision of what is and what isn’t. A key component of honesty is respect for your prospects and their corporate culture. Don’t embellish your capabilities or denigrate the competition. Lay out, in terminology that prospects can understand, how your product or service can address their concerns, that success is a journey and not a slam dunk, and how you, as a leader, can bring a value add.

3.    Commitment. It is critically important that your prospect knows that you are committed to their success, and not just to selling your product. Your commitment to the marketplace emits the confidence that your solution is not just viable, but superlative. Let your prospects see you with your sleeves rolled up and your fingernails dirty. Admit problems and setbacks, and if an aspect is particularly gnarly, fess up. Bring your team of leaders into the conversation.

4.    Partnership. You are here for the long-haul, and provide the tools and insights necessary for success, which may include ongoing training, troubleshooting, and the instillation of positive energy. The consideration journey is rarely straight and narrow. Put your arm around your prospect. Show authority and guidance. Use creativity, and sometimes humor, to make your point.

5.    Measurement. Your prospect is very serious about the steps they must take and the answers they must find while considering potential solutions. A leader must understand how the prospect measures success, and configures their own measurement system to coincide and complement. It may be uncomfortable but it communicates seriousness, underscores the other qualities. and provides the basis for continuous improvement.

Moving from reactive to proactive leadership.

We are all aware of the conclusion of various studies that the “sales process” is disappearing. Depending on which study you reference, about 60% – 70% of the consideration process takes place prior to engagement with the selling entity. Placidly accepting these results breeds reactive positioning. They don’t want to talk with our reps, so we can hide behind the curtain. That is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Once you take the first step with the prospect persona process you are on your own road to leadership, which by definition is proactive. Which not only gives prospects a reason to believe, it gives them a reason to engage.

I took a few minutes and googled Customer Service, and here are some of the definitions I found:

Customer service is the process of ensuring customer satisfaction with a product or service. (Investopedia)

Getting customer interactions right has never been more important, especially since social media has given unhappy customers a louder voice. (HBR)

Makes sense and I’m going to assume we all agree with the above statements. However, in practice, customer service is an area that can be taken for granted, overlooked, or considered a cost center and treated as such.

Death by a thousand cuts.

Here is a sad story of bizarro customer service actively undermining brand and customer satisfaction while wildly inflating the cost of delivery. I do not believe that lightning struck me, that I am the exception.

I have had a subscription to my hometown newspaper for about 30 years (and my hometown is among the largest on the planet). I decided to become a digital subscriber when the most recent cost of delivery was subtracted from my credit card. I called the same day and was assured that the switch to digital was immediate, that my checking account would be charged for the digital subscription and the home delivery charge would be refunded.

The next day I looked at my online statement and the new charge was there, but not the refund.

• I went to chat under Contact Us and was assured that everything was fine and that someone from billing would call me that afternoon or the next day to straighten everything out.
• No one called, so I did. I was told it takes 90 days to get a refund. I asked for a supervisor and was transferred to someone who identified as “an advocate”. They started to argue with me.
• Next I got a gentleman who apologized for the runaround and, since this was late on a Friday and the billing department was closed, he would call me back at 10am Monday morning and we would both speak to billing “and find out what it will take to get your money back right now.”
• Monday, I waited until early afternoon, called, and asked to be transferred to him. I was told it was not possible, but they asked to help. I explained the situation and they said that someone from billing would call me back that afternoon.

I saw this play.

I completed the email form on their website. The form said it would take 2 – 3 days to get a response. Sure enough, on the 3^rd day I got an email that said it takes 10 – 14 business days to get a refund and that there was no way to make it happen quicker. Included was a GIF of an iron door clanging shut.

On the 15^th business day I called to inquire about my refund. I spoke to a supervisor who told me that the refund had been transferred to my account several days ago, but it would not appear on my online statement, that I should call my bank.

I asked the supervisor if they really believed that answer. On a lark I called the bank. They asked me if I really believed that answer.

On the 17^th business day I received a paper check in the mail.

Up is down.

Since we started with definitions, let’s go to bizarro, which I believe was first introduced in Superman comics:

The opposite of the real world. Good is evil, round is square, hello is goodbye. (Urban Dictionary)

Up really should be up.

Many large organizations embrace the moment of customer interaction as a way to burnish their brand, to create happier customers that stay longer and buy more. There are others who do not, and this is one.

What’s the harm in having a supervisor authorize a clearly justified refund on the spot? Was this worth the expense?

The story above is chaotic and self-destructive. No company would knowingly design such a system. Fixing it begins by viewing customer service through the eyes of profit, not as a cost center.

Should I stay or should I go.

When the call ends these CSRs say, Thanks for being the best part of the (name of the publication). What a bunch of hooey. Check clears and I’m gone. It’s a perfect storm Everyone loses.

The advances in marketing technology are awesome, as are the sheer number of marketing technology providers.

ChiefMartec began tracking this space in 2011, identified about 150 players, and presciently started their eponymous infographic. Their 2017 chart encompasses almost 5,000 companies. It’s as if the 2011 chart exploded.

Yet, the question looms – is this growth sustainable? Interviews we’ve conducted with martech executives, and our own experiences, indicate that the “demand” side of the equation may not be able to uphold its end of the bargain.

Inherent in the business model of, I’d guess, each one of these martech companies is the assumption that a profitable customer is one with a long and deep lifetime. To make this wish come true, their customers, especially B2B, must have complete and effective marketing strategies whose impact would be profitably multiplied by the power of the marketing technology.

The reality is that many B2B companies lack this strategic readiness to truly benefit from much of these advances. As one martech executive said,

“This doesn’t surprise me one bit, as it is the immediate pattern we saw as we began. Based on all the brouhaha around content, content-driven experiences, marketing automation and lead nurturing, we assumed there were many orgs out there who could take advantage of what we’d created. We were wrong.”

Everybody Loses

Interviews we’ve had with martech executives indicate that their biggest business problem is that many clients are awed by the power of the platform and adopt it as the strategy going forward – that this will provide the framework for success, a seat on the rocketship. This “new” marketing would have us think that strategy is dead and we can A/B test our way to nirvana. This platform is automated growth hacking, and agility trumps plodding preparation.

However, when you’re a B2B company, all those sub-optimal B tests means that you are putting out sub-optimal messaging to your finite market. You may be A/B testing to oblivion.

Then, when programs underachieve, customers blame the martech platform and do not renew.

When a Drip Campaign Becomes Chinese Torture

In my first test drive of a major MarTech platform, I was shown the ability to orchestrate, to automate every aspect of a campaign. If we take a very simple example, a drip campaign, communications are sent to qualified prospects delivering specific value at specific points in their consideration journey (or certain time intervals). The object is to move that prospect from tire kicking to conversation. The platform tracks results of the individual and aggregate effort, and adjusts the lead grade of each prospect accordingly.

The technology is the tool, but if the strategy is off, it persistently delivers perhaps the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong person, until the campaign has indelibly convinced the prospect that they do not appreciate your brand and do not want to do business with you.

For B2B marketers this can be a hurricane’s worth of damage.

Everybody Wins

Companies, especially B2B, must bring come to the martech table with the prospect integrated into the marketing planning process. Information from 3 sources must be combined to enable marketing to begin to provide value as the prospect defines value:

1. Data Analysis. What has this executive done before, what have other decision makers in the organization found valuable, what actions has they taken? Analysis of the data brings a critical aspect to our understanding of the person and the organization.
2. Internal Intelligence. Sales has feet-on-the-street knowledge of the industry, the players, and the personalities that can’t be found anywhere else. They must contribute or they will never agree.
3. Persona Research. Prospect personas, when created from new, independent qualitative research, validate the data analysis, personalize the internal intelligence, and provide insight into motivation. We need to understand the confluence of personal and professional responsibilities to be able to effectively communicate from a unified marketing and sales perspective.

Then, and only then, will the martech platforms provide the magic carpet ride to success, for everyone.

As the median age of b2b decision makers goes down, the perceived difficulty of reaching and persuading them through marketing goes up. Many successful marketers raise their eyes to the skies looking for divine inspiration. Do the processes and concepts that have driven success up to now no longer matter? Is it now just an investment in marketing automation that makes the difference?

The world is old and it is new

It’s still marketing’s job to create sales by delivering messaging and benefits that are

• Valuable and relevant
• Distinctive from the competition
• Compelling, and create the urgency that propels the prospect through the consideration journey

However, there is one element that is brand new – these new decision makers only subscribe to one channel of distribution, and that is the network of me.

What’s new is the network of me

The network of me is an electronic channel that encompasses several overlapping media: for instance, social (both textual and visual, still and video), SMS, traditional internet, industry news, and more, both ephemeral and lasting. The information that gets through is a carefully curated subset that is specific to the individual, where the lines between personal and corporate are blurred.

Each individual is much like the famous Magritte painting that hides a gentleman’s face behind a large green apple. It’s called The Son of Man and was intended as a self-portrait. If you look closely you can see his eyes peeking out between the apple and its leaves.

Now, substitute a cell for the apple and voila, your prospect.

You must be so tall to get on the network of me

Your place on the network of me “dial” is earned, and is never secure. However, there are two secrets. The first is that b2b marketing is, and always has been personal. To put your faith in marketing automation as the secret sauce is folly. GIGO is the operative acronym.

The second secret is an understanding the individual both as an individual and as a contributor to the corporate decision making process.

So how do you understand the individual who is hiding in plain sight?

Jumping up and down and yelling may not have the desired effect. Intelligence is the only path to success.

Intelligence comes in 3 flavors

1. Data Analysis. What has the company done before, what have other decision makers in the organization found valuable, what actions has this decision maker taken? An examination of the data brings a critical aspect to our understanding of the whole person, but it’s just them peeking out. We need to know the who and the why of the behavior
2. Internal Intelligence. Sales has a knowledge of the industry, the players, and the personalities that can’t be found anywhere else. They actually talk to these prospects all day long. BTW (another acronym) when was the last time you or any of the marketing staff spoke directly to and in depth with a prospect? Consider going on sales calls with your sales brethren.
3. Persona Research. There is absolutely no substitute for a carefully choreographed dance with your targeted prospect. Create a prospect persona(s), with sales’ participation, based on new qualitative research. This will validate the data analysis, personalize the internal intelligence, and add motivation to the mix. It’s only this professional and personalized methodology that will yield the human insights into the individuals who comprise the buying center, their responsibilities, preferences and foibles.

This is a quiet and intricate pursuit, but what you get at the end is compelling competitive differentiator, which is called understanding. Perhaps it’s like the process of building a fine painting.

Of The Son of Man, Magritte said, “…you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly.” It is access to the individual peeking out from behind that we seek. And, recognizing the individuality, The Son of Man is within a series: Man in the Bowler Hat, where the face is obscured by a passing bird; and The Great War of the Facades, where a blossoming flowers hide the face of an elegantly dressed woman.

A healthy dose of understanding will land you on the network of me.

The better you understand your b2b prospect, the more efficient and effective your prospecting will be, and no one silo or point of view within the company is going to give you the “who”, “what”, and “why” of prospects and the buying process.

The answer is to triangulate intelligence, or we are no more effective then the blind men of poetry, trying to determine what an elephant really “looks like”, each by touching the strange beast once, each from a different angle.

Let’s prove the point.

The Elephant in the Room

The prospect is the elephant in the room, and while no one perspective yields a true and complete portrait, there is no monopoly on insight, grasshopper.

Here’s the three-sided equation, or the three points of intelligence you need to grok:

1. Data analysis adds an important dimension in recognizing what prospects are doing now. It’s immediate and improves targeting and enables greater efficiency. However, it doesn’t provide depth to the “who” and the “why” of the behavior, which leads us to include Sales’ internal intelligence.
2. Internal intelligence. Sales talks to the elephants all day long, every day. We can tap into their real-world knowledge, both of the individuals and the specific accounts. Marketing needs more depth on the real people who we are calling prospects.
3. Persona research. Creation of a prospect person, or personas, based upon new qualitative research, yields the human insights into the individuals who comprise the buying center, their own values, perspectives, and agendas. It takes the learning from behavioral data analysis and inside intelligence and matches it with motivation.

The Elephant Revealed

Let’s see how this plays out in reality, with a very prestigious firm who breathes the very rarified atmosphere of derivative accounting, helping their clients (including Google) to mitigate foreign currency risk through consulting and outsourcing. Long seen as unassailable experts, they have made their reputation by being smarter, better prepared, and more proactive then their much larger competitors.

They recently introduced a highly-specialized software package, but results were not pacing with expectations. To really understand the prospect, and to improve prospecting, they had to triangulate.

1. Data Analysis. This is reality and not a mega b2c company with oceans of data. The current data was on Salesforce but the history was on Excel (and some in personal recollection). When the sources were compiled and matched to the products and services purchased, it became obvious that the strength of the relationships they had forged – individuals were clients of one service, then became prospects for another, sometimes at a different company, then clients again.
2. Internal Intelligence. The internal view was that the software is unique and robust. The tie-breaker was that everything is based on their insight and expertise, which is without peer. Sales felt they could now compete as a software company.
3. Persona Research. The research validated the data analysis and the internal intelligence, and added a critical component – motivation – which changed the entire picture. Prospects were looking for an expert that also offered software. First, they needed to engage with people who could help them to better understand how to make the right decisions, then to install the software that could provide better decision support.

“Seeing” the Opportunity

Much comes from this triangulation, not the least that as pioneering experts in this very specialized accounting field, the client understandably believed they already knew how to position and sell the software. Markets evolve, even in accounting, and more than one might think. We all need a regular dose of outside prospect perspective

Here are some of the takeaways:

• Long-term relationships are a competitively differentiating asset and constitute the investment with the highest return. A client is a prospect is a client. (And really, b2b is a personal sell.)
• Education is a critical component. Rebrand the firm’s training classes as a professional institute.
• Stop leading with software. The untapped potential in this case comes from being who your client needs you to be and when, by walking down the consideration journey arm in arm. Software comes later in the continuum of the relationship. Software first is selling the elephant’s tail. Help them to “see” the rest of the elephant first, then they can appreciate what’s missing.

Full Circle

Again, any one point of view can be true, but still not account for the totality of the situation. Putting data analysis together with internal intelligence and persona research, we start to get a glimpse of that strange and wonderful beast, our prospect.

Or as one of this firm’s clients said, “Are they expensive – you bet. But they are worth every penny. First they installed best practices. Then the software to make it efficient.”

This was originally posted to the AMA Executive Circle / MENG blog

In My Face

A colleague recently asked, “With all the data available to us now, what role, if any, does qualitative research play in b2b prospect intelligence? Isn’t that ‘old thinking’?”

Somewhat in my face, and a tad confrontational, but a good question. To answer the question, I had to take a step back. While stepping, I tripped over a memory of the poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe.

Elephants and Prospecting

In this poem, 6 blind men go off to find out what an elephant really “looks like”. Each blind man is given an opportunity to touch this strange beast, each from a different angle. Each, per their limited experience, develops their own mental image of an elephant – perhaps a tree, a spear, a fan – and then they talk.

So oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant not one of them has seen!

The argument stops just shy of physical violence. No agreement is ever reached. The point is that data analysis leads to just one view of our prospect.

The Elephant in the Room

The prospect is the elephant in the room, and no one perspective, no one point of view yields a true and complete portrait. There is no monopoly on insight, grasshopper.

A three dimensional view of our prospects can only be achieved by a three-sided equation:

1. Data analysis adds an important dimension in recognizing what prospects are doing now. It’s immediate and improves targeting and enables greater efficiency. However, it doesn’t provide depth to the “who” and the “why” of the behavior, which leads us to include Sales’ internal intelligence.
2. Internal intelligence – Sales talks to the elephants all day long, every day. They experience how prospects interact with their company. Let’s tap into their real-world knowledge, both of the individuals and the specific accounts. How do prospects articulate their issues.

To complete prospect intelligence Marketing needs more depth on the real people who we are calling prospects.

3. Persona research. Creation of a prospect person, or personas, based upon new qualitative research, yields the human insights into the individuals who comprise the buying center, their own values, perspectives, and agendas. It takes the learning from behavioral data analysis and inside intelligence and matches it with motivation.

Full Circle

All of which is to say that one point of view can be true, but not account for the totality of situation. Putting data analysis together with internal intelligence and persona research, we start to get a glimpse of that strange and wonderful beast.

Or, as the great marketer Groucho Marx once said, yesterday I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What he was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.