It has been awhile since I wrote my last open letter to the SEC, but my goal with these is to summarize important trends that I see consistently across the executive members within the group in a way that helps highlight major strategic challenges.
In speaking with many of the CMOs, I am seeing that many have started social marketing programs, but many are struggling to integrate these programs into the rest of their marketing efforts and to justify the investments. You’ve shared with me examples of what’s not working and why you are frustrated, but everyone seems to be challenged as to why we are struggling in building traditional justification and accountability models in social marketing. I probably have had conversations with variations on this theme at least 50 times in the last month. It is also interesting to note that the more complex the sale, the harder it is to calculate the business impact. In the last couple of weeks, I think we have come to some startling conclusions about social media that I thought worthy of sharing.
After 27 years of living in a complex sales world, I’ve come to the realization that we are now witnessing one of the biggest disruptions in business in my career. We have seen the underlying trend that buyers are leveraging social media to assist in their purchase research, but I think the real disruption is that we have come to realize based upon our conversations with senior executives and our market research data that social media is actually changing complex purchase behaviors. We are hearing and seeing buyers leveraging social markets to build their business case for making investments in complex solutions BEFORE making the decision about what solutions to invest in and justifying their recommendation about who to invest in.
Simply put, buyers are evaluating vendors prior to the traditional engagement with the sales organization. They are making decisions about vendors many times even before engaging with them; sourcing options, soliciting recommendations, building long lists, validating vendors reputations, building short lists and even building requirements and expected ROI. All roles traditionally supported within the sales relationship. In short, traditional complex purchase decisions were made during the sales process and then the customer was responsible for building the business case with the sales organization to justify their decision. Not anymore.
Today, we are seeing the business case precede the vendor discussions. If you are not influencing that process upstream of your involvement, you are not really in consideration. This is forcing a major shift in the roles of marketing and sales as the responsibility of the business case now lies with marketing, not sales. Marketing’s role is no longer to create soft awareness or gin up demand, but now they have to make the business case to get in the door even before the sales team can be engaged. The sales team is still responsible for customizing the solution and assisting in the selection process, but now they have the added responsibility of assisting marketing in evangelizing the business case, protecting brand equity, and extending the company’s sphere of influence within the market.
In my conversations, I have heard the frustration as to the misalignment of expectations and the challenges that both sales and marketing organizations are struggling with as marketing was not supposed to make the business case nor was sales responsible for brand.
We are seeing this manifest itself in several ways within sales organizations; low response rates from traditional lead generation, sales teams struggling to reach decision makers, buyers coming to the table with better defined requirements, external market sources like blogs and peer networks being used more heavily by buyers to source, companies less willing to schedule onsite sales appointments, and gatekeepers increasingly blocking the sales team’s attempts at relationship building prior to decision. As a result your team is invited to do a presentation for the selection committee. Your team brought a canned presentation to educate the team, only to learn that the client was already ahead of you in their education and expected you to be able to discuss the specifics of how this applies in their organization. Your sales team is getting more and more detailed RFPs without the ability to engage with the prospects or influence the requirements. Your team learned that you lost a deal because the buyer based their decision on outdated information about you in the market which led them to believe you missed a key capability that they needed.
In marketing, we are seeing the results in less direct, but just as telling ways. The bloggers and review sites don’t really respond to the latest rebranding messaging, the click through rates from SEM and the email marketing campaigns are slowly eroding over the last couple of years. You purchase a list to give to the telesales team and despite their best efforts, they are getting about a 3% interest rate. You know it’s not a lot, but it’s better than nothing. Your agency built your presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter; your team is distributing content through these channels and you have gotten a good number of “followers”, but you can’t prove that any sales resulted directly from these programs despite the upgrades in marketing automation and analytics.
For social marketing to be effective and impactful, we have heard four major “themes” that we believe will assist your organization in thinking about this from your buyers’ perspective:
Killer Applications vs. Killer Features
- The majority of the buyers in the market have a business pain/problem/need and have yet to determine the solution.
- Buyers can’t tell which is the best solution, if they can’t figure out how it’s going to solve their problem. They can’t build their business case on generic/theoretical information/approach. They need to build different business cases for different applications. Social marketing allows for “mass customization” of these business cases.
- Rather than focusing on “killer features”, marketers should be analyzing and assessing the market to understand the buyer’s “pain” and the “killer applications” that will best serve them.
Evangelism and Advocacy
- The ultimate goal is to align the buyer’s business case with your solution to enable their decision about their investment. Rather than relying on your buyers to figure it out for themselves, help them. It’s no longer just about the homework you’ve done on them, it’s about the homework they’ve done on you.
- Evangelism is about helping the buyers figure out what they need to do (business case). Advocacy is about helping the buyers through their decision support process so they invest in you (justification).
- To build credibility, you have to do both, at the same time, in real time, in a balanced fashion. If you swing too far towards evangelism, you’ll educate the buyer, but they may not select you. If you swing too far towards advocacy, you may be seen as self-serving.
Complex Buying Process
- Today, buyers go through a very complex, multi-directional, multi-dimensional, multi-influence, networked buying process to build consensus around the investment while mitigating their risk around the decision.
- Rather than solely focusing on the impact of their demographics/attributes on this process, it’s critical to understand what types of buyers they are, their motivations, what’s going to trigger a change in behavior as they transition from browsing to shopping.
- Focus on the specific interactions that will compel the buyers to take action and propel them further/faster in their buying process.
Economics of Buying/Selling
- The organization that can assist the buyers in building their own “custom” business case earlier in the process will be the winner.
- The business case is not a one-sized-fits-all canned document, but is a component based, distributed set of thought leadership, business decision support tools that enable buyers to quickly assemble the information they need, when they need it, and in their own terms, to compare solutions options and validate your offering on an apples-to-apples basis.
- When done correctly, social marketing’s delivery of this business case can be tracked, measured, and will produce a hard ROI in terms of efficiency for the both your organization and the buyers.
- The ability to easily validate from other customers the quality of the delivery and the caliber of the customer experience is a part of the business case as buyers who have to go out of their way to check references and validate your claims have to absorb that cost. Companies that foster that transparency and cater to their existing customers have a huge advantage in that they can easily reference customer satisfaction in their business case.
- We are seeing those companies that have transitioned from marketing communications via social media to more buyer decision support to assist buyer’s in lowering the cost of acquiring their solution are finding that they are able to measurably see the return in terms of impact to their business.
If you had told me several months ago that the ability to generate a tangible ROI from social marketing would hinge on the ability to deliver a customized business case; I am not sure I would have recognized the importance. However, we are now seeing that this may be the foundation for really producing effective results. More importantly, we are also seeing this as the “tip of the spear” in terms of building the larger social business case within the organization. If you can tie a hard ROI from revenue growth to social business by assisting buyers in building their business cases while aligning the organization to improve delivery of the solution; it will be much easier to justify the soft ROI from enterprise collaboration and productivity gains from social business.
