In this episode, we discussed:

• Why marketers should focus more on their top-of-the-funnel strategy
• Whether more campaigns are better
• How top-of-the-funnel campaigns scale
• How to attribute brand awareness strategies to revenue

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

Back in the 90s, if you wanted to grow fast, you hired more salespeople.

“Nothing could be more stupid, in hindsight. If you just throw salespeople at growth, they have to manage their own funnel, which means you have to expend resources trying to find new buyers. That was back in the days of Salesforce and SuccessFactors‎ getting started in SaaS. We’ve measured this balance of growth vs. budget vs. efficiency in terms of growth percentage, but we also look at a magic number called CAC (customer acquisition cost). CAC shows the productivity of your go-to-market strategy.”

We used to focus only on the “magic number.”

“In the days when CRM was still fresh and new, we looked for a magic number around .3 – .8. Then moving to the next generation when CRM was fairly stable, we had  a system of record for customers and sales interaction, and marketing automation was born. That created a lot more efficiency. Now we’re able to not only know who you are but develop your interest and do that in an automated way.

“At Marketo, I was able to get our magic number from 1.25 to 1.75 — a much more efficient model where the same salesperson could achieve a much higher quota because they were spending the bulk of their time closing business. Marketing had come deeper into the funnel, generating and qualifying leads for salespeople.”

Now Marketing Automation is mature.

“The inefficiency ball has moved to the top of the funnel. How do we identify anonymous people who are good potential buyers and engage them with our company at scale? When they fill out a form or execute a free trial, they’re now a lead. That lead is logged in a marketing automation platform and nurtured into a buyer and handed over to a CRM. That’s the way I look at it.” 

Most companies want to increase their reach through digital channels.

“There’s more opportunity to learn faster in digital channels than the old print media world. For example, when we talk to companies about their paid strategy, we ask, ‘What are you doing in search advertising and social that you’re paying for?’ What we usually hear is they’re spending $100k a month with a conversion rate of 4 percent. They always say, ‘I’m not going to spend more on my paid campaigns until we get the conversion rates up to 6 or 7 percent.’ The question is, if you have your conversion rates at 6 or 7 percent, would you spend more to unlock more budget and let it become more efficient? The counterargument to that is in SEO.”

On the organic side, there’s a lot of opportunity for learning.

“If I can learn what keywords are working with new pools of buyers I haven’t reached before, I can create a new campaign associated with a dedicated landing page. That’s a lot of wins. The company is going to learn what new content to develop, what new keywords are working, or that old keywords aren’t.

“That input that I’m learning on these virtually free campaigns can help drive my paid strategy. Maybe now I’ve found some new keywords to develop a whitepaper or videos around. I also want to buy new search phrases because they’re less contested and I’m beating my competition to market segments. I also want to rank for certain phrases with a new product release or in a new geography. The most efficient way to do that up front is with organic campaigns that feed a more intelligent paid strategy across search advertising and social.”

TOFU personalization has really been about optimizing a template and account setup.

“In the paid world, the landing page can be dynamic, which obviously is different than SEO where it’s static. I might have 5-6 variables on a page: header, footer, ad copy, etc. That’s five variables, maybe four templates I want to test. Maybe I have seven persona filters and four hundred ad groups. How do I test all of those variables with different content that’s going to drive up conversion rates? That’s been impossible, but now you can put AI against that to figure out what demand is out there and what content to suggest. Then you test it. You can drive up conversion rates and drive out that inefficiency using technology.”

* * *

B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketing professionals, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow us on Twitter: @B2BNation_Smar.

___

*Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.  

The post Learning to Love the Top of the Funnel appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

In the episode, we discussed:

• How the way companies look at customer success has changed
• Properly framing customer success with desired outcomes
• How companies can and should make their customers more powerful
• The relationship between ABM and customer success

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

“Customer success” has been around for over 15 years.

“Five years ago, it started to really become a thing of its own. The notion of customer success started at Salesforce. That had a lot to do with people actually leaving Salesforce and going out to start companies, join companies, or to become investors. It also coincided with a maturing of the SaaS world. Investors looked at churn and said ‘This is a problem. What can we do about it?’ The vendor’s job, then, was not just to acquire customers, but find ways to keep them from leaving.

“Once you stop churn or get it down to a very low level, where do you go from there? Are you done? No. Customer success is something that’s super powerful if you think about it as a lever for growth.”

Desired outcome is the key.

“Customer success is when a customer achieves their desired outcome through their interactions with your company. Desired outcome is very simple. It’s what the customer needs to achieve in the way they need to achieve it. There’s the desired outcome, and then there’s their appropriate experience. When you bring those two things together, you get the desired outcome.

Customer success is when a customer achieves their desired outcome through their interactions with your company.

“If we can help them achieve their desired outcome, they will be successful and stay with us. They will buy more and they will advocate for us. We need to do that through all of our interactions with them, not just their use of our product. Starting when they first interact with sales and marketing to the time they buy, we need to be selling to them in a relevant way. In a lot of cases, customers will stay for five or even ten years.” 

Customer success started with SaaS.

Here’s why:

1. “SaaS is generally a subscription model, so it’s very easy to know when a customer leaves. They tell you they’re done. ‘I’m not going to pay you anymore.’ It’s very easy to notice that. In a transactional business, you don’t really know when a customer stops being a customer. If I go to Starbucks and decide this is the last time I’m going to buy a cup of coffee from them, I don’t get my cup of coffee and then tell the barista, ‘Write this down. This is the last time I’m going to buy anything from you.’ 

2. “In the SaaS world, most successful SaaS companies have funding from venture capital firms from very early on. What that means is that there are external people, a board of directors, looking at their numbers. So we have a subscription business model where we know it’s easy to identify when customers leave. Then we have an external set of eyeballs looking at our numbers, putting pressure on us to reduce churn. Those two things are why I think customer success really took hold in SaaS.” 

Customer success affects startups all the way to enterprises.

“I’ve had some interactions with HP, Cisco, and Citrix. This is stuff that big companies are applying and finding a lot of success with. But very young companies are also seeing amazing results when they apply ‘desired outcome’ thinking.

“In some ways, customer success as churn mitigation is just another way of doing account management; it’s about the financial side of an account — kind of just renaming account management to customer success. A lot of those things are already happening, so the movement seems to be getting traction.” 

Customer success isn’t just about happiness or delight.

“Understanding customer success as an operating philosophy is one thing. But customer success management should be a part of the organization. Customer Success needs to have the same structure and the same processes as sales, as marketing, as product, as every other part of the company. It’s not just about delighting the customer and making people happy. It’s about actually making customers successful. To do that, we have to know what success is. Sometimes there are customers who never seem happy —  the ones who are always opening support tickets, pushing back on us, asking for new features.

“I would love for everybody that I work with to be emotionally happy. But I can’t solve for your happiness. The only thing I can truly solve for is making sure you achieve your desired outcome. If that makes you emotionally happy along the way, that’s a bonus. There are times I might even push a customer into discomfort, because I know they need to do that in order to achieve their desired outcome.

“That’s something we need to understand. In a real-world example, do you always like your personal trainer? No. They push you outside of your comfort zone and make you work harder. They get results. “

The FlipMyFunnel Festival will be great.

“I’m really looking forward to hearing from everybody. It’s going to be an amazing event. I’ll be giving a talk called ‘How to take the power back.’ We talk a lot about all this great stuff, but the reality is, especially in the SaaS world, there’s a lot of power in the customers’ hands. How can we take that power back? There will be a little bit of twist there.

How do we take the power back? How do we use customer success to do that?

“It’s going to be a lot of fun overall. I hope to get everybody hyped up about customer success and how it fits in with ABM.

Planning to attend this year’s #FlipMyFunnel Festival? Click the banner above and use promo code “TA50″ to get 50 percent off your ticket price. 

*

B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketers, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topic customer service in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow on Twitter: @B2BNation_Smar.

___

*Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.

The post Desired Outcome is the Key to Customer Success appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

In the episode, we discussed:

• • The importance of account-based marketing (ABM) research 
  • How the structure of marketing KPIs impacts ABM adoption
  • Some of the biggest mistakes companies make with ABM
  • What “account-based everything” means

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

Marketing automation is the “digital demand generation revolution.”

“Marketing automation is one of the reasons we are here today. When we bought marketing automation, we did inbound marketing, we rolled out content, we did lead nurturing and all this stuff . . . and we’re seeing fabulous improvements in how marketing provides value to an organization. What demand gen lacked was the fact that sales was actually targeting a very specific set of accounts. With horizontal marketing, you’re really just hoping the leads and the interest level hits that target account base.”

Only 15 percent hit their target account list.

“That’s the problem we’re here to solve today. ‘Account-based’ is a movement that’s happening for all the right reasons. Companies are realizing there’s a specific set of accounts that are the most valuable to them from an LTV economics perspective. Many people think about ABM as a way to get into the enterprise or specific verticals, and that’s the right thing to think about. To do that, you can’t just create content and put it out there and hope people come to it; you need to have a strategy reaches those accounts, drives interest, and ultimately opportunities.”

Horizontal marketing and ABM can/will coexist.

“We’re still going to have large, horizontal marketing efforts. Those efforts today typically feed mid-market inside sales teams where you have a large target market. When we’re trying to focus on the accounts that we want and need, that’s going to require ABM, which is essentially a different function in the marketing organization. It’s happening fast. We’re already seeing great results for companies doing it.”

Marketing KPIs are very MQL-centric.

“That’s a by-product of all of the influence of the digital demand generation and marketing automation era. The focus is on big numbers, lots of downloads, 1,000 people-to-a-webinar metrics. Those are great when they feed a very particular part of the organization, but they don’t always allow us to track and manage marketing outcomes against investments.”

Marketers got addicted to big numbers. 

“They wanted to see big scoreboard-type numbers. Analytics are one of the best things that happened to marketing, but now can we apply what we’ve learned over the past 10 years to a specific set of accounts, as opposed to the whole world consuming your content. What can we do from an account-perspective? That was the big miss. I don’t think marketing was completely doing the wrong thing, because they were putting up big numbers, and we’ve seen some big companies built around feeding inside-sales teams in a scalable way. But if your business says you need to sell to specific accounts, it’s time to shift strategies. 

“If you’re getting 20,000 leads, many of those leads don’t matter; we can look at a smaller subset of those and make sure we’re getting a higher-quality opportunities. This point-of-view requires buy-in from executives, and step number one is that you have to agree on the target list. It sounds so simple, but boy is it a big deal.”

You’re about to make a big bet.

“Can we look at these accounts and figure out which are most likely to buy in the fastest time possible? You have to look at internal/external data and a lot of different things when you’re making that decision. Everyone has to agree on that. If you’re going to be successful at account-based everything, you have to burn the boats. You can’t change your mind a month later.”

ABM can’t be effective in isolation.

“If sales development gets appointed to certain accounts and doesn’t coordinate with marketing, they can’t be an effective. Sales has to change the way they sell. If you have 20,000 leads, you can figure out which ones to work on, but if you have 100 accounts, you have to sell at any stage in the buying cycle and provide value to those people early on.”

Account-based everything is resonating.

“ABM, on its own, wasn’t really moving the needle; you can’t impact results unless the behavioral change applies to the entire organization.

“We present ‘account-based everything’ to CEOs and VPs of sales, and they love it. The way we define it is a coordination of personalized marketing, sales development, sales, and customer success efforts to drive engagement and conversion among a targeted set of accounts. We believe account-based everything has five attributes:

• • 1. A targeted, set of high-value accounts
    2. Intelligence-driven campaigns.
    3. Campaign orchestration across marketing, sales, and sales development
    4. Personalized buying experiences
    5. Coordinated, high-effort, high-frequency outreach 

“What I’m really looking forward to at the FlipMyFunnel Festival is being able to engage with people who are working in all stages of account-based. I like talking to people who are thinking about it, and I want to know why they haven’t started already. I want to meet people who have tried and failed, as well as people who are successful and figure out why.”

Planning to attend this year’s #FlipMyFunnel Festival? Click the banner above and use promo code “TA50” to get 50 percent off your ticket price.

*

B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketers, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow on Twitter: @B2BNation_Smar.

__

*Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.

The post Understanding Account-Based Everything appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

In the episode, we discussed:

• What demand generation means today
• How to use data to inform your marketing
• The importance of demand gen personas
• How agility impacts marketing campaigns

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

I have a traditional definition of demand generation.

“Demand generation is the generation of demand for a business’s products or services with the goal of driving closed business. Sales and marketing work together to devise those strategies and meet their objectives. I think we carry that definition further when we ask the question, how?

In some cases, the line between demand generation and lead generation gets fuzzy. Marketers often exchange the terms for one another. Lead generation begins to answer that ‘how’ question; it’s the collection of qualified leads with the intent to build those leads into relationships by nurturing them and closing them as customers.”

If data is not informing your marketing decisions, it’s time to re-evaluate.

“The days of just looking at email sends, opens, and click-through-rates are not gone, but that needs to be a small part of a bigger strategy. At Teradata, we learning something every day from our data.

“Our demand gen strategy is an integrated, multichannel, year-long campaign. It’s not an implement-and-leave-it approach. I compare it to a toddler, because it requires constant supervision; at any given moment it can change direction. For example, what was working in one channel yesterday isn’t working today. We have to be able to see that and understand why so we can make directional and timely decisions. We do that by looking at the data.

“We conduct quarterly, monthly, and in some cases weekly reviews of incoming leads before we pass them to our inside sales team. We track how they progress through our demand gen waterfall from MQL responses to sales accepted leads to sales qualified opportunities. We look at what the data is telling us is happening by channel. We look at cost per lead and how leads are being dispositioned, and this data helps us determine if we need to adjust our scoring model to turn volume up or down. We also create a monthly executive dashboard that shows awareness data, share of voice, website data, and a high level waterfall overview. Analytics is a huge component of our demand generation strategy.”

Personas and segmentation should play an integral part in your demand generation strategy.

“In a lot of our channels, we are going to market with a particular persona or market segment, be it a mid-market company or enterprise. Segmentation is a huge part of our demand generation plan from beginning to end. We’ve got to constantly look at that to see what the business is telling us. We also do a lot of ABM. That fits into our overall campaign strategy.”

Doing more with less continues to be a challenge.

“I’ll follow up on our data and analytics discussion by saying that proving demand generation effectiveness is one of the top challenges. There was a 2015 study by Salesforce that stated less than 3 percent of marketers rated their demand gen campaigns as effective (click to tweet). That’s remarkable. For me, there are three parts to a potential solution.”

• Report on your demand generation campaigns. What is the data telling you? Is it telling you to stop putting your dollars towards a particular segment or channel? Are the connections low-quality or falling outside of your target persona?
• Marketing automation is the key to improving on your demand generation strategy and helping you expand in digital channels. When it comes to nurturing leads through the buyer’s journey and turning prospects into customers, it’s invaluable. 
• Don’t overcomplicate your demand generation strategy. If it’s necessary, start small. Sometime we sit on those decisions for so long we become immobile. You have to test the waters.

It’s the age of individualized marketing.

“We live in a buyer-centric world. Our potential customers are very well informed before we even get to the table. It’s not just a tidal wave of data that we have to navigate; it’s a tsunami of new channels and ways for buyers to converse and get more information about the products and services they’re after. Social media continues to play a major role here.

“Digital marketing is only going to play a bigger part in the buyer’s journey, in my book. I don’t think we can really get through this discussion without talking about content. With this digital marketing evolution, your content is more critical than ever to capturing the attention of the right buyer at the right time. It has to be hyper-targeted, authentic, in the right voice, and establish your thought leadership in the right channels.

“It’s the age of individualized marketing. As marketers, we have to make sure every interaction we have is relevant and purposeful. In a recent Ascend survey sponsored by Teradata, 66 percent of enterprises said individualizing the customer experience is their single most important objective across the business. Don’t forget your content strategy in helping to develop those wins for your business.”

Agility is very important to demand generation.

“Marketing organizations must strive for increased agility in order to maximize their marketing spend, resources, and overall efficiency.

“If individualized marketing and the unique customer experience is such a high commodity, assumptions of where to reach your potential customers and when may be a guide, but you have to be ready to change gears. If something isn’t working, you need to tweak or make a change to your plan. Having that insight into your campaign performance and resources gets you on the path to being more agile. I also think it’s a vital competitive advantage.

“You have to be on your toes. If we were all perfect, we would implement plans that work 100 percent of the time. That’s just not reality. It’s important to the overall success of demand gen to have the necessary processes, tools, resources, and analytics. You need to have all of that in place to provide that insight and support decision-making. In the end, we learn more not just about what is working and not working, but more about our customers and our business.”

* * *

B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketers, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow us on Twitter: @B2BNation_Smar.

__

*Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.

The post Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

In the episode, we discussed:

• When/why you should repurpose your content
• What to consider when developing a repurpose strategy
• How to measure your content for “repurpose-ability”
• The ultimate form of repurposing: writing a book

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

Repurposing should be a best practice for every marketer.

“You really don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time you create a new piece of content or campaign. What’s great about repurposing content is not only that you’re using content you already have, but you’re using your best content and finding new ways to reach your audience.

ALSO READ: 7 Companies Winning at B2B Content Marketing

“When a piece goes live, it’s not the end, but the beginning of promotion. You can always find new ways to reuse it and recycle it, thereby reducing the amount of time you spending creating new content.”

There are two ways to repurpose something.

“You start with that big meaty piece of content like a webinar, podcast, or ebook. That’s what takes the most time, money, and resources. It might also be gated so you’re able to generate leads from it. Once you have that content, you can slice and dice it and reuse the pieces:

• Every chapter from the ebook is a blog post, and the first chapter is a SlideShare.
• Make it a podcast, or do a webinar with the author.
• Share content from that ebook on social media.

“The opportunity to put all your focus on this big great piece of content will lend itself to lots of fruit later on. That’s the main way we typically do it.

“If you don’t have time to create a big ebook, there’s another option available. Take your best blog post, webinar, etc., and make an ebook out of that.”

There are two forms of content you should never repurpose.

“Repurposed content should fall in the top and middle of the funnel. When you get to the bottom of the funnel with data sheets and case studies, you don’t typically do a lot of repurposing. The other kind of content that isn’t repurposed often is time-sensitive content like the Oreos blackout tweet heard round the world. Definitely a one time thing.”

Engagement is important, but so is ROI.

“Shares and views are great, but is it driving ROI, revenue, or leads? Certain types of content might be more appropriate, depending on your target metrics. You can get more shares and likes, but fewer conversions, if you’re doing an infographic or a ‘clickbait’ blog post. If you want higher conversions, you might consider a blog post or ebook with fewer viewers but ones that are more active and specifically looking for that information. I actually like to repurpose a mix of different content types.” 

We made an awesome repurposed campaign for Dreamforce.

“We had all of our ad partners give out pins for Dreamforce attendee lanyards. Then we gave out prizes for people with a lot of pins. One of the pieces of content we created that did well were these infographics that showed what you could wear at Dreamforce, how to dress with comfy shoes, whether to wear jeans, and so on.” 

“We included the pins with that infographic and started to tie in other campaigns. The infographic was sliced and diced for each social channel, and we brought it all together for a recap blog post for Dreamforce and beyond.” 

Repurposing opportunities are endless.

“If you’re constantly measuring and seeing what’s effective, you can take your top performing content and do more with it. And you should. It will keep giving you that SEO juice if you’re linking back to your site and sharing on multiple social networks.

“We had Guy Kawasaki for a webcast once, and we had him do some videos at the end with quotes and best practices. These videos linked to a blog post, which linked to the webcast, which is gated with a web form. Having that connective tissue throughout your blog posts, social channels, and online network is important.”

*

B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketers, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow on Twitter: @B2BNation_Smar.

__ 

*Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.

The post The Purpose of Repurposing Content appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

In the episode, we discussed:

• • The history and growth of advocate marketing
  • How to measure success with a program like Influitive
  • How MarTech’s growth impacts software purchases
  • Why ABM is the next stage in the B2B marketing evolution

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

Word-of-mouth marketing isn’t new.

“Word-of-mouth marketing isn’t new (click to tweet). It used to be something every brand really wanted, but no one knew how to create. You wanted people talking about you in the marketplace and that buzz associated with your brand, but it was something that had to happen organically. You had to have the right product at the right time. Your marketing can help your customer experiences, but it’s either going to happen or not happen.”

ALSO READ: 7 Ways to Get More B2B Product Reviews

“What’s changed is the idea of engineering word-of-mouth marketing. Things have changed with the rise of social media and social communities. The social web means that any buyer or consumer can basically connect with any other buyer or consumer with a little bit of research.”

Advocacy marketing is like Yelp.

“Just as you would use Yelp to read reviews from people like you instead of a restaurant’s website, the same is true for most companies today. In the B2B world, because of the rise of social media and social communities, I can see people just like me who are trying new products and services and new business plans. It’s more comforting for me and less risky to rely on what people are saying in my role than the promises of some marketing campaign or slick salesperson. Today, word-of mouth is more important than ever if you want to grow.” 

What do our customers really want from us?

“Platforms like Influitive allow you to systematically cultivate advocacy, ignite that passion, and mobilize your followers to say the right things in the right places. If you start to think about why your customers would agree to be a reference or do a case study, think about the social capital and status they’re trying to acquire, the expertise they’re trying to project, and build a whole program around cultivating that. You can get a lot more advocacy from your customers.”

There are nearly 4,000 MarTech products.

“Our number one challenge is not whether people believe in advocacy; it’s that there are so many other tools I can pick and choose to solve a variety of problems in my go to market strategy. How do we get advocacy up onto the radar above the fold? That’s a challenge for us, too . . . getting marketers to wrap their head around the idea that maybe the best voice for your marketing efforts is your existing customers — not your next email campaign or personalized widget.”

Maybe the best voice for your marketing efforts is your existing customers — not your next email campaign or personalized widget.

Lifetime value is a critical metric for SaaS companies.

“Lifetime value is the amount of time customers stay with you and how many additional products they buy. Your lifetime value is influenced by things like retention, upsell and cross-sell rate, and to a lesser degree, customer satisfaction scores. Those are things that can be influenced heavily by advocacy. When people see other customers talking about you, they’re more inclined to stick with you and redouble their effort.”

ABM frees you from the tyranny of the funnel.

“It frees you from this idea of pouring in thousands of names at the top to get a .25 percent conversion at the bottom. I view ABM as the next stage in the evolution of B2B marketing. It’s moving to a stage that requires the best of your investment in technology and your creativity in order to think more like a sales person. I believe that account-based-marketing is marketing trying to do the role of sales through their capabilities.

“If you’re a salesperson and your boss tells you to win 10 deals this quarter, you don’t go and target 200 companies; you target 10 great companies and start calling them. When one drops out, you pick up an 11th. That’s not the way marketers have been operating. They operate by saying, ‘Hey, if I need to close 100 deals, I’m going to target 1,000,000 people and give them content and draw them down this funnel.’ That’s just the way we’ve been operating. Those are the systems we’ve built, the process we have in place. ABM flips that on its head and says, ‘think like a salesperson.‘”

* * *

B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketers, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow us on Twitter: @B2BNation_Smar. 

__

* Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.

The post Advocate Marketing: Growing Affinity for Your Brand appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

In this episode, we discussed:

• Why businesses should focus on retention more than acquisition
• How that impacts the customer journey
• Why “zero paid media” should be the new marketing model
• The importance of connecting startups with established brands

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

Focus on your repeat, returning, and recurring customers.

“What percentage of your marketing dollars do you invest in recurring revenue contribution compared to of programs for first-time buyers? There is an obvious disconnect: the majority of our dollars come from current customers, and yet we take them for granted. We become complacent by wooing those new conversions and leads. There’s a legitimate business case behind treating customers better.”

Use existing customers to gain new ones.

“You can grow your business from the inside-out. How? Through advocacy, loyalty, referrals, and testimonials. You can even embed loyal customers and advocates into the R&D engine — the actual innovation engine or ecosystem of the company. It’s not just business sense; it’s common sense.”

So much of what we classify as retention is not.

“I use a Maslowian hierarchy to suggest there are your six levels of retention. The first three levels leave a lot to be desired. On the bottom is churn, countering churn and attrition. Then we move to competitive conquesting, then cross-sell and upsell. Those aren’t customer-centric. They’re corporate-centric — valuable to the company but not necessarily to the customer.”

True retention should be customer-centric.

“It’s only when you get into content creation, referrals, and formalizing and scaling advocacy (even embedding customer voice into the R&D engine or innovation ecosystem) that we accomplish true retention. It’s kind of a catch-22. We are focusing too many of our dollars on the wrong priority: the traditional funnel vs. the flipped funnel. Considering how little we spend on retention, I’m not even sure it’s correct to classify it as such.”

Look at your funnel as a bow-tie.

“When you put the traditional and flipped funnel together, you get a bow-tie. The bow-tie itself is not meant to be linear. It’s also a poorly-tied bow-tie, because as we get better at using existing customers to gain new ones, we’re going to spend more on retention than acquisition. This optimization favors customer retention as the new acquisition.

“From cold leads to warm leads to hot leads to third-degree burn leads, you have awareness, interest, desire, and action. Once you have a customer, on the other hand, you actually get to hear their voice. After the moment of conversion, there’s a constant iterative cycle, and we start to see the relationship yield increasing returns.”

I don’t think marketers focus enough on the journey.

“It’s the destination we’re so obsessed with. There’s that old truism, success is a journey, not a destination. We need to focus on the journey between point A and point B instead of trying to oversimplify it and lose sight of the means to that end. The end will take care of itself if we focus smartly on the means.

“The customer journey has so many unique components and moments of truth — from onboarding a B2B product, through usage milestones, anniversaries, and of course when things go wrong. In the flipped funnel, I have this process I call ‘ADIA’ that stands for Acknowledgement, Dialogue, Incentivization, and Activation. Those are four different components that should be factored into the journey. Businesses need to have real conversations with their customers.”  

People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.

“Human-to-human and customer-to-customer conversations are so important. They go beyond the you-only-call-me-when-you-need-something-or-have-something-to-sell dynamic. A relationship is so much more than that.”

* * *

B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketers, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow on Twitter: @B2BNation_Smar. If you enjoyed this post and episode there is a special bonus episode with Joseph Jaffe as a prize for reading this far. Enjoy!

__

*Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.

The post Why Customer Retention is the New Acquisition appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

In anticipation of 4A’s Transformation 2016 conference, we talk about several of the ongoing transformations in the marketplace today, including advertising and marketing, creative media, and customer interactions.

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

The heart of advertising will always be storytelling.

“The definition of advertising has undergone a massive transformation within the 66 years that DDB has been practicing. The emergence of different platforms we can use to promote products, engage consumers, and create experiences — all of this will always change, but at the art and core of great advertising is still great storytelling.

“If you want to take the longest view possible, platforms always change. You can go from hieroglyphics to the printing press to transmission of voice, transmission of picture, and now the internet. But even back in the ages of etching stories on stone walls, it was always about a story.

“At the very heart of advertising is this wonderful combination of art and science that we call storytelling. If we can get that right, I’m not at all worried about all the platform changes that are to come.”

Creative and Media are reintegrating.

“When we split creative and media proudly in the 90s, we thought we were so brilliant and that we were really onto something great. The internet was in its infancy, and we didn’t even realize what we were doing at the time. Fast forward to now: connection and content are interchangeable.

“That means [creative and media] have to work exceptionally well together, if in fact not put these two back together in some fashion. That’s where the marketplace is. We need to acknowledge that change and lead the change to make sure we’re helping our valuable client’s brands succeed.”

Experience, engagement, and interaction are at the heart of every program we run.

“We do not control the conversation anymore. We’ve lost the unilateral ability to plan and execute and re-plan and execute again. That’s not what the industry looks like anymore. For many of the clients and brands we work with, the volume of conversation is not controlled by any agency, but rather from fans and people talking about the brand.”

Brands have to earn the right to join the conversation.

“You can’t add this huge volume of content that isn’t authentic to the conversation about your brand. Brands need to consider themselves as a participant in the community. “Good participants give and take. They’re constantly thinking about growing and enhancing the community. When brands honor their communities, they succeed and thrive. In my experience, I’ve seen many examples of that.”

Transformation 2016 is an opportunity to talk about what’s new, what’s next, what’s different.

“How are we are going to protect and enhance this community and industry that we all love? This conference will be an opportunity to learn, grow and share together. I’m also excited for the first time to be in front of an audience as a member of DDB and to talk about our story a little bit, our observations, what we’re learning and focusing on, and some of the things our clients are doing. That will be a tremendously proud moment for me.”

* * *

To learn more about Transformation 2016 and see the full lineup of speakers and sessions, click here. B2B Nation: Smarketing Edition is a podcast for B2B sales and marketers, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry.

__

*Some written excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.

The post The Art and Science of Brand Storytelling appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Our goal with B2B Nation: Smarketing is to help you evolve your own strategies using expert opinions and advice on the most important trends in the industry. We’re launching with 25 episodes and will continue to release 2-3 per week.

ALSO READ: 6 Ways Smarketing Can Reel in Better Leads for Your Business

The show will cover everything from content marketing to social selling, lead generation, customer journeys, and more. To give you a taste, we’ve featured excerpts from five of our latest episodes below.

HubSpot: Aligning More Than Sales and Marketing

Emma Snider, Section Editor of the HubSpot Sales Blog

“My co-workers and I share a ton of articles. Someone will read something on another website about generating leads with your blog, and then we share it among ourselves. We try to create a culture of constant learning. With so much available content, it’s good when everyone can benefit.

“Experimenting is also huge. It’s not enough to just keep up [with competitors]. You can actually invent new things. If you aren’t sure about a tactic, you can experiment with it, or try it out and tweak it. Maybe it’s not right for your industry. Maybe it’s better if you do it differently. Either way, trying it out is huge. That’s one way you can set yourself apart: if you’re trying these experiments and then, say, publish a blog post on it, you create a name for yourself in the marketing community at large.”

CEB: Challenger Customer Panel Discussion

Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at CEB

“We’ve traditionally sold to the head of IT, or the head of marketing, or the head of HR. But now we’ve got the head of procurement, the head of finance, and the head of sales in the mix.

“We have so many people with slightly with different agendas involved, and when those agendas, those criteria, those metrics, those priorities don’t fully overlap, your customers are going to look for a common denominator. If what they all agree on is to do nothing, that’s what they’re going to do. You hear from our members all over the world: their number one competitor today isn’t so much ‘competition’ but status quo.”

Matt Sweezey: Does the “Customer Journey” Exist?

“If you were to ask me, “Should every lead be nurtured?” that would follow the linear logic of nurturing. I.e. anyone who performs an action is set on this linear path. The reason we have that mentality is because that’s the way everything has worked up until this point in time.

“Go back to ’95 when we first got a website. Then we used SEO to draw people there. Then we started putting forms up, and there was a need for content. Now we’re at social media, and it’s just keeps iterating and iterating until we get to a point where those iterations no longer accommodate the modern buyer because the modern buyer has changed.

“The difference between all those previous iterations and now is the amount of power a consumer has to bypass information. It’s never been greater. If a person does a Google search on their desktop device, they harness more power than all of NASA in 1969.

The power they’re harnessing to get the exact right information instantaneously is so great that it changes how they teach themselves to do all these other things.

“Many people have the same idea — going back to this linear idea of nurturing. Websites are designed in a linear fashion, one page after another, starting with a home page and then a landing page. That’s a 1995 idea.

“Now, Google teaches people to expect instantaneous results when they ask a question. People expect things instantly, and if you don’t deliver, they go back to Google and ask a different question. We have to understand how this modern buyer acts. It’s not linear.”

KarmaCRM: The Resurgence of Cold Emailing

Brandon Sellers, KarmaCRM

“We’re kinda beyond the stages of cold calling 2.0. Aaron Ross abdicates that it’s a good idea to email the top guy, the CEO of the company, and let him do the legwork for you.

“People are much less likely to respond to this strategy because they’ve seen it so much already. They’re more likely to think you should put the onus on yourself and figure out who the right stakeholders are. I’ve seen a pretty drastic decrease in emails to CEOs asking for that trickle down effect. That’s very important.

“Don’t just send one cold email, expect to get a response, and wonder why you’re not. You should have a 3-7 email sequence, or you won’t get the reply rates a ton of these guys are seeing.

“We’ve had some pretty insane reply rates over some of our campaigns, and a big reason is because we don’t just send one email. We might send them seven. Those emails obviously must add value, but you still have to send more than one.”

Joe Pulizzi: Why Nick Offerman is the Ultimate Content Marketer?

“Patience is really important with content marketing, but you have to have a plan. Go to most brands’ YouTube account. There’s a mosh pit of videos sporadically submitted, not focused on anything in particular. What really works on Youtube or iTunes or on your blog is an ongoing series that positions you as the leading expert on something.

“For most content created by brands, there’s probably seven to nine other resources talking about the exact same thing. You have to figure out how your story different. Why would they choose to leave the information they already have and go to yours? You aren’t just competing with the other brands, but also with Google and Facebook. So it has to be really valuable. Are you creating value? Do you understand the needs of your audience?

“If you take the logo off, will people know it’s you? Probably not.

“Traditional marketing isn’t going away, but how do we use content to make all we’re doing that much better, making SEO and advertising better. It’s not an either/or. We’ve ignored content and owned media for so long. How do we make it an important asset to attract and retain customers?”

* * *

Like what you’ve heard so far? Check in next week for the launch of our HR Edition of B2B Nation. If you enjoy the podcast, please rates us on iTunes!

Top CRM Software Recommendations

The post Introducing B2B Nation: Smarketing Edition appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Below are Gretchen’s four biggest insights from the conversation.

1. With HCM, you have to take the old with the new.

The functions that HR provides are always going to stay the same. There will always be a compliance component. You will always recruit talent and try to engage talent. You want to motivate them. At some point certain people leave the organization, but you want to retain them as long as you can. Those processes will stay the same.

But what we’re looking at is, what are the additional enablers? What other capabilities can we bring into HR processes to help employees and match their expectations — but also help make the system richer?

2. Personalization is the future.

You might have different preferences when you log into the system than I do. How do we help you personalize the system so that you see what matters most to you as opposed to seeing what matters most to me? Because we’re in different roles, we have different jobs to do.

Recommendations are another way to personalize. If I’m looking at career development for example, I don’t just want to see you’re currently in a development role and your next step is senior development manager. I want to see how have other people done that. What can I learn from them?

3. Learning and development technology is something companies should be investing in.

Companies need to help employees understand not just what they need to know right now, but what other people are looking at, watching, learning from — people who you know, people who you respect. How do you get beyond just compliance training, which everybody does, and into engaging and helping employees grow differently?

4. Our Work-Life Applications start by saying: you bring your whole self to work.

Building your reputation ties into work-life. How do we engage you when you’re at work? How do we help you find new ways to connect with other people?

Among the things we’ve looked at is one of the products we call My Reputation. As I’m doing work, participating in the social network, commenting on other people’s capabilities, posting videos, what have you — I am building my reputation. I am sharing what I’m interested in with people and what I’m good at. That is probably as valuable — and in some cases, I might argue, more valuable — than what my resume actually says.

5. Employee engagement is a critical tool for the future of HCM.

Having the ability to build and maintain your reputation helps an employee see, for example, that they want to move into leadership, but they don’t have a lot of experience yet. But through working on some of the elements of their reputation, they can show that they’re building those leadership skills, which is exciting.

Another employee engagement tool we have is My Wellness. We discovered that a lot of people want to engage other people around their health goals.For example, if you’re training for a 5k, you can discover who else is training for a 5k, then build that community within the organization and find running buddies or other people who share similar health interests. It’s a way to build a connection beyond your immediate colleagues.

6. Competition is another trend affecting HCM.

This is a fun one because it’s not what you think about typically for HR, but HR gets involved often because it has to do with people. You name it, companies have competitions running all the time within their organizations, and most of them are very informal. It might be a department, it doesn’t have to be a company-wide thing. Things like a competition to name the latest product, or a competition for quality, or a competition for who completes compliance training first.

We provide the ability for a company to very easily set up a competition, say who’s involved, and get the leaderboard in place so people can see where they are. Studies have found it’s human nature to like to see that recognition — they like their name on the leaderboard. It doesn’t necessarily have to be millions of dollars in prizes, but it’s a way to engage people differently. And having that tied into HR, again, helps us understand when people participate.

Whenever there’s a quality initiative and an employee is in the competition and they’re participating, that’s good insight for me to have as a manager to think about what opportunities I might give that person next. It’s not just about the fun of the competition, it’s about collecting other information to help inform other decisions, too.

Here’s the short version: if you use any of Oracle’s products, databases, or applications, you will directly benefit from joining a user group. If you aren’t a member yet, stop by the User Groups Pavilion (Moscone South, Upper Lobby) to learn more about new programs and the benefits of membership. All full conference attendees will have access to SIGs and User Group Forum sessions. Check out the session catalog for a full list. Get your tickets now, and be sure to follow @oracleopenworld on Twitter for updates.

Top Human Resources Software Recommendations

The post Expert Interview: The Impact of Digital Disruption on HR appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.