Author Archives: Scott Hornstein

Get a Grip

Your website is your core digital asset, the hub of your digital presence. It can be a much smarter, more powerful sales tool that will generate higher engagement, proactively move prospects along their consideration journey, and give conversion a big boot in the butt. It can work hard to help you increase the yield from your targeted accounts (ABM).

Or, it can lay there like a lox.

Is Your B2B Website a Library or a Cocktail Party?

Websites have become passive, where stuff resides, not where relationships blossom.

Take a look at your website and ask yourself whether it is engaging prospects and encouraging them to take action or more passively providing resources and materials without any real guidance as to how to use them and why they’re important.

The Billboard of Me

Is your website doing what your B2B prospects want and need it to do to move them through their unique consideration journeys? How do you know?

Here’s a quick challenge that will reveal the prospect orientation of your website – go to your website and under the Edit menu, go to Find. Enter a first-person pronoun, such as “we”. How many times does it come up? My guess is, a lot. Now try searching for a third-person pronoun, like “you”, as in prospect.

My guess is that this is the billboard of “me”. You can search some more, but you won’t find the money you are leaving on the table.

The Unrealized Potential

Consider this:

Your website does not stand alone, but must be part of a larger marketing effort, from email marketing to social media and integrated with your CRM or marketing automation platform to personalize each prospect’s experience based on their interests and past interactions, moving them along the consideration journey.

Your website should address the needs of each audience segment separately. Once you’ve identified which executives contribute to the purchase decision, populate areas of your site with information that most directly addresses their considerations.

Your website must provide strong competitive differentiation based on who your prospects identify as your competitors and stressing the differentiators they find most compelling.

Three Critical Success Factors

I can’t give you the dissertation on smarter websites, but I can share these the three critical components of smart websites:

1. The Prospect to Product Connection
2. Metrics that Matter
3. Insurance

CSF 1: The Prospect to Product Connection

Let’s get very serious about what connects your products to your prospects. What is the insight on how to win your prospects and not just identify them when they cruise by.

New external research with current prospects and customers will generate a prospect persona for each of the contributors to the buying center. Each is an archetype, with substance, form, and personality. They provide a window into a company’s consideration journey and buying process.

This research also generates a Key Prospect Insight (KPI) which provides the competitive superior insight into these real people regarding their needs, information behavior, attitudes, and motivation – the prospect to product connection, which drives segmentation, personalization

Prospect personas drive:

• Persona-lization, or the website’s ability to speak directly to the individual/persona.
• The account persona, or an overview of all participants and a map for how the account moves through the decision cycle, who is involved and when.
• Persuasion-oriented content. Tell the visitor, by persona, why they should care, why they need to change to solve their issue, and why should we change to you.
• Use the KPI to identify the big idea. Communicate the big idea. Roll out the big idea.

CSF 2: Metrics that Matter

There are primary metrics, secondary metrics and tertiary metrics. The primary metrics are the ones that leverage increased interest, engagement and conversion. They are:

Unique visitors, and we can narrow this down even finer, unique visitors from targeted accounts.

Action. The clearest way of measuring engagement is when the visitor takes action, or responds to one of our offers – get information, ask a question, download a white paper. We’re not looking for just any action here, but the ones that correspond to key junctures in the consideration journey

Conversion. Are we converting visitors to leads, and leads into sales.

CSF 3: Agility

Let’s talk about the difference between goals and strategies. The goal of the smarter website is to increase attraction, engagement and conversion, and that doesn’t change. Strategy, however, has to change. It has to get smarter as we get smarter through experience. Which leads to agility, or the ability to listen, understand and respond.

I know it sounds like work, but think of this as an insurance policy and not a gym membership.

Agility requires us to:

• Give up the “campaign” or project orientation. We’re not done learning just yet. I know the tendency is to say, thank goodness the website update is done – I don’t have to worry about it for the next 2 years. However, agility, if it truly is a competitive advantage, takes what we’ve learned and puts it into immediate practice.

• Refresh key prospect insights regularly. Opportunities are regular win / loss analyses, and yearly net promoter score (NPS) surveys (with a qualitative component).

• Pay attention to the right things – the metrics that matter. Industry benchmarks are interesting, but your own baselines are what really matters. Movement in the primary metrics is evidenced in the secondary and tertiary metrics. Therein lie the clues to improving performance.

• Take action. If you learn something, do something.

As an added bonus, a recently published study by eMarketer (7/19/16) finds that companies that commit to agile marketing, embracing significantly shorter development and execution cycles, see workflows and outcomes improve. Marketing management also cites agility as critical for responding to disruptions in the marketplace.

What’s In It For Me?

In our experience, companies that have re-oriented their website have seen a 10% – 20% improvement in the website’s contribution to bottom line results – engagement, leads, and sales – within the first 6 months. Improvement from there is all in your hands, and in your commitment to agility.

This is a lot more than bright colors and a mobile-friendly orientation. This is about solid returns on your investment. It is a journey that starts with a line in the sand and a change for the smarter.

*I’d like to acknowledge the help and assistance of Wayne Cerullo, Phil Shelp and Andrew Schulkind in developing this post.

While conducting Net Promoter Score (NPS) research for a b2b technology client we asked the president of an operating division of a large multinational the following, “you gave our client the highest NPS score, what is the greatest benefit you get from them?” The answer, “our salesman”.

Listen to This.

Why? “Because he listens and is proactive in helping us solve our issues, whether it’s high level and strategic, or tracking a delivery. He’s proven his loyalty to our company, and to yours, and he is an irreplaceable asset.”

Let’s take those first three words and roll them around for a bit. “Because he listens.” Where, in our marketing process, do we listen? Anyone?

Our Prospects Built the Wall, and We Paid for It

In general, marketing does a crappy job of listening. We’re great at talking. In fact, we have marketing automation which throws broadcast mode into overdrive, enabling the relentless efficiency of generating outbound communications. Our prospects (and prospecting is the bulk of any marketing budget) have responded by conducting an ever-increasing percentage of the consideration process without direct engagement. They built a wall around themselves to protect them from the predatory barrage of unfocused and irrelevant marketing messages.

Unless we break this cycle, it’s constant escalation. Things aren’t working so we fire out more stuff and the wall gets higher. The only way to change the game is to stop, take a breath, and listen. Only then can you see the world through your prospects eyes.

6 Ways for Corporate Marketing to Open Its Ears

Experience says there are 6 ways that corporate marketing can increase the effectiveness of b2b prospecting by opening our ears to what prospects have to say. In our experience, these comprise a compelling competitive advantage:

1. Manage your database as if it is the single most important lever to marketing success – because it is. If you do not have your prospects’ and customers’ correct contact information, well, you can’t contact them. Marketing Sherpas estimates that b2b data decays at about 2% per month, which jibes with our hands-on experience. That’s 24% per year. Maintaining the accuracy of the database must become a corporate priority.

2. When someone opts in to your blog or newsletter they’re not acting out of idle curiosity. Treat this as if opportunity has just knocked on your door, because it may have. Introduce yourself. Thank them for stopping by and opting in. Ask them a simple question to help you provide more value, such as are you interested more in the financial aspects or technical, and then deliver on it. Send them off with something of value and remind them how to reach you with questions or comments. Most times when I opt-in I get nothing. Zip.

3. Ask a question as part of every interaction with every prospect. The question may be as basic as let me please verify your email address, or as complex as how do you articulate the problem you are trying to solve. It’s got to be appropriate to the prospect’s stage in the consideration process and to the level of trust that has been built. It’s got to be part of a consistent program of listening and learning more. (Hint: you can’t establish trust without listening. Doesn’t happen.)

4. Rep for a day. If your company has a call or response center, key marketing personnel should spend a day a month on the phone. Marketers are responsible for starting the conversation, but they rarely speak directly with prospects.

5. In the same vein, key marketing personnel should spend a day a month riding along on sales calls, not as a silent observer, but with a list of questions and a report to write.

6. Regularly conduct new and external prospect persona qualitative research. Engage prospects in directed conversation designed to help you understand how you can provide competitively differentiating value. Don’t view the persona as an end product – it’s an archetype, a vessel so that the data you put into your marketing machine is substantially better. Figure that your marketplace is changing at least as fast as your database is decaying.

No One Cares About You

Remember that not one of your b2b prospects cares one whit about your product or service, the colors it comes in or how wonderful you think it is. They only care about one thing, themselves. Listen and learn, or snooze and lose.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a high-stakes b2b prospecting strategy. To win more accounts through ABM, we need to move to the prospect’s side of the table, to begin to really understand what they are looking for, how they are looking for it, and how they get things done. That, my friends, is profound competitive differentiation.

Thus, I’m going to start off with a customer story.

In my agency days I worked on a large domestic automobile account, the agency’s largest account and greatest source of revenue. Part of the arrangement was a yearly account review.

So here we were around the conference table, on their turf, listening to the results of the review. We got high marks for our work, which was not a surprise. We got low marks on responsiveness, which was.

Our EVP leaned across the table and cut to the core. “We need to get back to basics. The problem is that we’re on Madison Avenue and you’re in Detroit. I want to rent space in your building,” he told the client. “I want to open a satellite office so our people are here when you need them.” And every one on our team sat back in their chair.

In retrospect, what pushed everyone back was being on the verge of a deeper definition of and commitment to value.

Compelling Value is Personal

Value is more than your product or service – that it “works” is table stakes. Value is more than answering your email and delivering to schedule. Value is more than a tight positioning statement or clever creative.

Value is getting under the skin of organization, into the DNA of the people on the team. Understanding their personal and professional pressures, and how they get things done. Value is helping them to do business.

Opening an office inside of our client’s headquarters gave us the ability to walk down the hall, to have coffee with and really get to know the people. Walking down the hall turned us from agency guys to being part of the team. The responsiveness concern vanished.

Demonstrating this value is the basis of profound competitive differentiation. It’s how to win at ABM.

This deep dive used to be the wheelhouse of Sales.

Would You Like to Talk to a Salesperson?

Actually, no.

And for the most part, neither does any prospect. There is a vast swath of statistics that say about 70% of the consideration journey takes place prior to engagement, and is getting longer. We don’t have to be scientists to see that if we can engage earlier, we can walk down those same halls.

The priority is gaining indepth prospect intelligence through our willingness and investment in listening. Prospect persona research is designed to go beyond the obvious and generate the indepth understanding of the corporate and the individual, how they articulate their goals and pain. It provides illumination on learning behavior and generates insights into “how things get done”. Prospect personas also serve as rallying point for Sales and Marketing.

Going Where ABM Has Never Gone Before

This gives ABM two things it didn’t have before:

1. Indepth prospect intelligence that comes earlier and provides greater insight
2. The ability to channel that prospect intelligence into consensus

Driving Consensus by Identifying the Champion

We’ve noticed four trends in ABM:

1. The consideration journey is getting longer
2. The decision making process is becoming more complex
3. There are more executives involved in the process than ever before
4. The single biggest reason ABM fails is “no decision”.

The goal of doing all this is to win the business. In every buying center there is an “internal mobilizer” who pushes for team consensus. Not unlike herding cats, this unofficial team leader is persuasive in meetings and correspondence to which prospective vendors are not invited (but often decides their fate).

This champion may change depending on the issue, problem, responsibility or a host of other reasons. The point is to understand who is the champion and what makes them tick.

In recent win/loss ABM research we were interviewing internal consensus champions to glean more “after the fact” insight, to validate what our client learned in prospect persona research, and sharpen their approach. We asked an executives from a win, what was the most important benefit the company brought to bear, what aspect was most important to the sale. His response, my salesman. He helped me, and our company, to get a critical problem taken care of.

Hey, I’ve got a great new business idea – let’s take our least experienced, lowest paid, least trained and barely empowered employees and make them our customer-facing personnel!

Or,

Since about 75% of the b2b consideration process takes place without our direct involvement, let’s call prospects to “just check in” and see if they’re ready to engage!”

I would like my competitors to employ both strategies, please.

What’s In It for Me?

Of course, both strategies are pretty mainstream and sound pretty lame-stream when you shine a light. It’s just that some businesses have lost their way. Somewhere along the line, they lost the core meaning of the terms value and benefit, because they were looking in the wrong place. The answer is not in their heads, on the hard-drive or a Google search. These terms can only be defined by our prospect.

Every prospect wants an answer to the question, what’s in it for me? We’re advocating a deep-dive into “me” so we can learn how to answer the question. We’re advocating an indepth conversation with complex individuals who have both personal and business goals, and specific responsibilities to the buying center. How does this person define value? What benefits would help them to address an issue? Prospects aren’t going to tweet this, we’re going to have to dig it out of them.

3 Ways to Find “Me”

Here are three strategies that can improve every aspect of your prospecting by finding out more about “me”:

1. Prospect Persona Research

Really, there is no better way to find out what a person wants then by asking them directly, by engaging them in purposeful conversation.

Prospect persona research is a specialized and proven qualitative process that helps us to understand how an organization makes a decision and who is involved. It concentrates on gaining a human understanding of these individuals, the “me’s”, what they need and how they learn. It’s as an exploration into the life of a person who must solve a problem that your product is designed to address.

There are two things that we always look for in this research:

• What is the prospect-to-product connection? We must learn how we can express and demonstrate our compelling competitive differentiation so that our prospect can hear us. We need to create preference.

• Who is our potential champion? The decision making process is long and complex, and most often results in no decision. Among the players, is there someone who has the potential to champion our cause, helping others to embrace the prospect-to-product connection?

2. Win / Loss Reporting

We live and die by the close ratio, so let’s infuse some indepth understanding of the outcome. The only way to do that is to talk to wins, losses, and no decisions through the same qualitative research process. We want to know, overall and by persona (as possible):

• Why did we win?
• Why did we lose?
• Why was there no decision?

Throughout, we are looking to sharpen the articulation of the nuance, to polish the key insight, to refine our process, especially among high-value prospects, which will come back to us in the close ratio.

3. Customer Satisfaction as Measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Although significantly more money is spent of prospecting, customer retention is where the long-term money comes from. By better understanding where we are successfully satisfying customers and where we are falling short, we can influence both prospecting and customer sat. Customer sat, in turn, leverages customer lifetime value.

A usual Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey bluntly asks customers if they would refer us to a friend or colleague. Customers are asked to respond numerically, where 0 is awful and 10 is divine. Boom.

The NPS survey we would recommend would build on this to gain the overall score, and then within specific areas such as sales, products, and support. We would then employ qualitative research and dig deeply to understand, what do you mean by that?

But It’s Expensive

Many b2b companies we’ve spoken to feel that their prospecting is underperforming and lament the long sales cycle bereft of direct engagement. The tendency is to invest in end products, like content, without the rigor of the underlying research. Well – prospecting is underperforming, so marketing isn’t doing its job, and we’re not getting the results we need, and research is EXPENSIVE. Besides, we already know.

I think, unless things have changed, that convincing a prospect to become a customer is where the money trail starts. The better we understand the prospect…