Marketing News: April 2016

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table of contents

APRIl 2016

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

VOL. 50 | NO. 4 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Rob Malcolm Chairperson of the AMA Board 2015-2016 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org Andy Friedman, AMA Chief Content Officer afriedman@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF

Phone (800) AMA-1150 • Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor msoat@ama.org Zach Brooke, Staff Writer zbrooke@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org

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Michelle Markelz, Staff Writer mmarkelz@ama.org Kristina Zapata, Art Director kzapata@ama.org Vince Cerasani, Associate Art Director vcerasani@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF

Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Michael Gay, Account Executive mgay@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4421 Nicola Tate, Account Executive ntate@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4437 Jordan Berthiaume, Media Sales Representative jberthiaume@YourMembership.com (727) 497-6565 x3409

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Circulation: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 Tel: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Marketing News, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, 60601-6320, USA. Periodical Postage paid at Chicago, Ill., and additional mailing offices.

Opinions expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the AMA, its officers or staff.

Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope.

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Nonmembers: Order online at amaorders.org, call 1-800-633-4931 or e-mail amasubs@ebsco.com.

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Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601.

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The Seven Big problems aMa thought leaders present and dissect some of the major issues facing marketers in today’s uber-connected, highly distracted world.

Decoding the Sales enablement enigma

christine crandell has been showing businesses the way to sales enablement for two decades. She explains the new partnership between sales and marketing as they pursue the empowered consumer.

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the buzz

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core concepts

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snapshot

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scholarly insights

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the middle market

Seen on aMa.org

Digitization

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ray Kemper, chief marketing officer at Televerde

50 ama careers Work/life Balance

Aaker on Branding

Digital marketing has four objectives. aaker gives advice on how to tackle them.

20 Global Marketing

To ensure the u.S.’ global business future, leaders must focus on education.

24 cMo Survey

Marketers are less focused on customer insights, despite proven value.

44 10 minutes with

William l. Wilkie and erin anderson award winners

Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for all content (including text, representations and illustrations) of advertisements published, and also assume responsibility for any claims arising therefrom made against the publisher. The right is reserved to reject any advertisement.

THoUGHT LeADeRSHip

product Development

54 ama community

Single copies $10 individual, $10 institutions; foreign add $5 per copy for air, printed matter. Payment must be in U.S. funds or the equivalent. Canadian residents add 13% GST (GST Registration #127478527).

MarketinG ManaGeMent

e-mail personalization Sour patch Kids

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Sales and Marketing Alignment

When aligning sales and marketing, unify the prospect-to-customer lifecycle.

56 back page

Mike neumeier, owner and principal of arketi Group

Copyright ©§2016 by the American Marketing Association.

All rights reserved.

Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org.

Reprints in quantity are available by contacting Kristy Snyder at Sheridan Reprints: (717) 632-3535.

Printed in the U.S.A.

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thebuzz Letter from the Editor

Keeping an Eye on the Prize

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hings change. In news, as in business, you’re either moving forward or backward. But marketing is experiencing some growing pains: startups are expanding faster than they can scale; small companies are grappling with digitation standards set by large corporations; globalization is, at once, shrinking and growing the marketplace.

For decades, Marketing News has been a bellwether for insights and stories that matter to marketers.

In this issue, we put forth major problems that plague marketing teams and shape strategic decisions. In turn, these problems—from digitization to globalization to innovation—shape Marketing News content.

The AMA is releasing its first intellectual agenda this spring, which reflects our focus on newsworthy and actionable content. In

it, we lay out the “Seven Big Problems” marketers face in the boardroom and in the marketplace. These problems are a large part of that intellectual agenda, and will help us hone in on how we inform and inspire you, the marketing community.

One page 28, we dive into the questions that stem from each of the seven problems.

AMA thought leaders discuss the “what” and “why” of each pillar problem, while we leave the door open indefinitely on the “how.” After all,

marketing is all about rolling with the punches.

Within every big problem, there are a million small solutions. This issue provides a few: how to best equip your sales allies with the collateral they need (page 38), how to make your brand famous like a rock star (page 12) and how to personalize e-mails so that they’re used, not deleted (page 10).

I have been with Marketing News for four years as a staff writer, learning how quickly the marketplace evolves and

how quickly marketers adapt. Now, as the editor, I’ll continue to explore the topics that matter most to your daily work and your long-term career. Someday, we’ll answer all of your questions. In the meantime, we’ll focus on your problems.

Molly Soat Editor @MollySoat

Contributors

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David Aaker

Angela Southern

Michael R. Czinkota

David Aaker is vice chairman of San Francisco-based marketing consultancy Prophet. He is the author of Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success and Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant.

Angela’s always been handy with a pen and paper. She’s created custom lettering for many national publications, and currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Michael Czinkota is a professor of international business and marketing at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His book International Marketing (with I. Ronkainen) is in its 10th edition.

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thebuzz Election 2016

Jeb Bush’s $130 Million Marketing Fail

photo by Michael Vadon

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eb Bush announced he was suspending his presidential campaign on Feb. 20 after the South Carolina primary.

A combination of missteps and missed opportunities contributed to the speed of his demise, but Bush’s campaign proves one of the hard truths of marketing, according to one political marketing expert: No amount of advertising can sell a bad product.

“The brand [Jeb Bush] represents was not attractive because voters are looking for an anti-establishment brand,” says Bruce Newman, professor of marketing at DePaul University in Chicago and editor of the Journal of Political Marketing.

“Movements have become the name of the game in politics,” Newman says. At the time of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, political strategist and pollster Cornell Belcher told US News that Obama’s White House run “is taking on the look and feel of a movement. This isn’t just politics anymore.” Bush’s campaign never transcended politics, Newman says.

“From a marketing standpoint, you put your feet in the shoes of the customer, and you respond to the customer needs and wants. …

I don’t think Jeb Bush was able to convince the voters that he would make a difference in their personal lives, that he would make an impact on their economic standing, on their pocketbooks.”

Some have claimed that Bush never stood a chance. “What we find in political marketplaces, which is no different than in the commercial marketplace, is there must be an emotional connection between the organization and the customers— in this case the politician and the citizens who support that person.

[Bush] just wasn’t able to make that emotional connection with voters,” Newman says.

There is a place for Bush’s brand of campaigning in American politics, and voters got behind it in 2008 when they supported John McCain in his bid against Obama. “John McCain was not a very charismatic personality either,” Newman says, “but he was a war hero. The theory

about Jeb Bush is that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and he comes from one of the great historical powerhouse families in the history of this country. I don’t think he stood out as someone who was his own person.”

— Michelle Markelz April 2016 | marketing news

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thebuzz SEEN ON AMA.ORG

Marketers Bullish on Investments, According to New Quarterly Report

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he inaugural Marketer Confidence Index survey reveals U.S. marketing professionals are bullish on their firms’ prospects over the next six months and hopeful about marketing investment opportunities and budgets.

The next six months hold promise for companies to invest in

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growth, according to the majority of U.S. marketers surveyed for the quarterly Marketers Confidence Index. The survey, conducted by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in partnership with global marketing consultancy Millward Brown Vermeer, found marketers similarly optimistic about customer spending and the

growth of marketing budgets over the next six months.

Overall, marketers across a wide range of for-profit and nonprofit industries—including manufacturing, technology, health care and education—shared this viewpoint, contrasting with widely reported fears about an economic slowdown. The overall Marketer

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thebuzz

January 2016: Marketers hold a positive outlook on their industries

Confidence Index came in at 121, where 100 is neutral.

Sixty percent of marketers say that they are in a positive investment climate. Forty percent indicate that they’ve seen increased customer spending over the past six months, and 39% predict another increase in the next six months. One-third of marketers expect marketing budgets to rise.

When asked how they would allocate an increased marketing budget, marketers showed a preference for media placement, innovation, creative, insights and analytics. Budget reductions, most said, would spare funding cuts in analytics, innovation and market insights.

Additionally, marketers feel their influence within their organizations is growing, with 64% predicting that the power and influence of the marketing function will increase over the next few years. This optimism seems to be fueled by the increasing use of technology innovations and analytics that enable closer customer relationships, micro-targeting and improved measurement capabilities.

Marketers are excited about advances in data and analytics, specifically pointing to opportunities for Big Data to drive personalized marketing, automation, data integration, omni-channel interactions and micro-targeting.

“Though market volatility is the new normal, marketers are now more confident about leading their organizations through change,” says Marc de Swaan Arons, chief marketing officer at Millward Brown Vermeer. “This confidence is supported by new and evolving opportunities to leverage insights across marketing investments to drive ROI. At the same time, the pace of innovation is challenging marketers to align strategy and talent in a more agile way, and as we track the index over time it will be interesting to see how marketers manage this challenge.”

Russ Klein, CEO of the AMA added, “We know that organizational confidence is a strong predictor of performance. The results of this inaugural release, combined with

other learnings, would suggest that customer-centric firms, when also displaying high levels of marketing confidence, are poised for growth.”

The study identified a number of challenges marketers are facing, among them proving and determining optimal ROI amid an ever-increasing number of channels, not being able to use all the firm’s customer data and the growing level of complexity of technology integration. Challenges are structural, as well. For example: • Only one in three marketers feels confident that his firm has the right operating model to be competitive.

• Thirty-four percent say that their company has the right people, structure, processes and tools to be competitive.

• Forty-one percent believe that their marketing organization has a clear and well-understood strategy in place to be competitive.

• Forty-three percent say that the group understands the ROI of marketing plans.

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coreconcepts

E-mail personalization

Me, Myself and I As consumers have come to expect regular communication from brands, they’re looking for information, not promotion.

Experts weigh in on how to personalize e-mails to make sure your message is heard.

By Michelle Markelz | Staff Writer

 mmarkelz@ama.org

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-mail is the leading advertising channel for return on investment, according to VentureBeat. This is good news for marketers, as e-mail is a relatively low-cost way to reach large audiences, but the platform won’t perform without personalization.

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By definition, personalization can be as simple as directly addressing a recipient by name, but experts say that this tactic creates indifference among recipients of e-mail marketing and can easily become problematic if its source data isn’t clean (e.g. filling out

an online form with a fake name or all lowercase letters).

Experts agree that in the current and next e-mail marketing arena, rich data, sophisticated automation and realtime tailoring are table stakes. Often consumers have handed over all the information marketers need to give them what they want. Marketers must leverage it. Here are three ways to do that.

Root yourself in data.

“For any kind of personalization, the most essential component is data on your subscribers,” says Keith Sibson, vice president of product and marketing at e-mail service provider PostUp. All the traditional information marketers use to segment an audience can be leveraged to personalize e-mail, and that

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E-mail personalization

data and its application fall on a spectrum of complexity. Basic targeting for gender, location and age are important, but used in isolation they can be problematic. April Mullen, senior marketing strategist at Selligent, a marketing automation provider, offers a personal example of when e-mail personalization goes wrong. “Somewhere along the way, a marketing model has shown that because of my current state it must mean I’m about to become a mother,” says the 30-something, Midwestern wife. “I receive so many baby e-mails. ‘Time to buy a stroller or a car seat.’ This is so far off from my current reality.” False assumptions can turn a consumer off from a product or brand, says Mullen.

Effective personalization relies not just on demographic segmentation, but on behavioral data, and most companies are moving toward this practice says Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at digital marketing provider Silverpop. “It’s not about tailoring content.

It’s about triggering a single e-mail to a single person at a moment in time,” he says. “We’re not tailoring a message and crossing our fingers that they’ll find it relevant based on who they are. It’s their behavior they’ve initiated that triggers a message designed specifically in response to that person.”

An abandoned shopping cart could indicate a lack of follow-through, or the fact that that consumer needs to sleep on any purchase decisions. In either scenario, an infrastructure needs to support the gathering and leveraging of that behavioral data so that the response is timely.

McDonald acknowledges that bringing together customer data—be it from online forms, CRM data, website interactions or a

host of other sources—is the single biggest challenge to marketing teams. “A few years ago, [a 360 degree view of the customer] was a dream … but to compete now, that’s really becoming a must-have,” he says, and “If you can get all the data you need, then the question is whether you can sync that up with e-mail in real or near-real time? …

In the old days, a lot of things were done in back process. Every 24 hours all the data would be captured and sent out. … That’s no longer good enough.”

“We’re not tailoring a message and crossing our fingers that they’ll find it relevant based on who they are.

It’s their behavior they’ve initiated that triggers a message designed specifically in response to that person.”

Loren McDonald, Silverpop

Automate for scale.

Whether you’re a marketing team of one or a full-fledged department, effective e-mail marketing relies on automation. The cost of manually responding to customer cues (such as abandoned carts or anniversaries) is missed opportunity. In the time it takes to manually identify the right targets for a birthday promotion or a reminder to register for a conference, those would-be conversions have moved on.

Automation allows marketers to respond with context, which is a critical

coreconcepts

element for maintaining relevance, says Alison Lindland, senior director at e-mail marketing platform Moveable Ink. “Context is a huge determinant to willingness or ability to purchase or take action,” she says. “Time of day, location, the device you’re on—these tend to be things marketers don’t have in their power, but … [automation tools can help marketers] understand about 32 elements of context and employ that as logic.”

Selligent’s Mullen is seeing bigger budgets for CMOs to beef up their data capabilities, and that’s a good trend.

“E-mail has reestablished itself as the workhorse of marcom,” she says. “We’re seeing the most traction when investment is made into a data ecosystem that can provide automation to the marketing stack.”

Humanize the brand.

E-mail has increasingly become a business communication channel as personal conversations move to texting applications, experts say. But just because the subject is business, the tone doesn’t have to be. Brands can delight their customers by humanizing their e-mail with simple touches. “We’ve focused on the human as this customer prospect,” McDonald says, “but what about you, the brand? How can you bring that alive?”

He points to an e-mail from a global airline that is sent to passengers on its limited flights from the United Kingdom to the U.S. Two days before the flight, customers receive a note from the chief flight attendant on the trip, including restaurant recommendations, weather forecasts and local points of interest. “We’re talking about all this technology, but at the end of the day, e-mail works best when it’s one-to-one,” McDonald says. “Although most people understood the technology behind that message, passengers would still print out the e-mail and talk to employees about it on the flight.”

The potential is high and growing for marketers to capitalize on e-mail marketing as a personalized, direct communication channel. To play at this table, there is a bit of a buy-in, but the returns will show as customers begin viewing your campaigns not as spam but as a special delivery. m April 2016 | marketing news

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TKTKTKTK

15 Flavors of Fame Sour Patch Kids’ heavy investment into online content generates huge returns in cultural currency

By Zach Brooke | staff writer

 zbrooke@ama.org Goal Marketers of commodity brands, especially those aimed at teenagers, have long been aware of the need to deliver experience along with their products. It’s a tough trick to pull off, which is why marketers for food giant Mondelēz International’s brand Sour Patch Kids knew they needed a game changer if they were going to make headway into the market.

“When we looked at Sour Patch Kids, it was a growing candy brand loved by millions of teenagers, but still surprisingly small in a big soft-and-chewy candy category,” says Farrah Bezner, head of business ventures at Mondelēz International. “When we really stepped back and said, ‘How are we going to transform this business, not just small

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growth, but really transform and stepchange growth?’ we looked at the different options we have.”

Bezner’s team decided to get ahead of their target market and drive teen chatter, not mirror what was already being said.

They needed to make the brand, in a word, famous. To reach their target audience of teens, the marketing team set about three tasks: beefing up their social media presence, developing ambitious new video content initiatives and even making an entrance into the music industry.

“There are a lot of different marketing metrics you can look at, but we landed on fame because we felt that really encapsulated how we needed to behave as a brand. Even though fame was difficult, we really thought fame was the driver of

cultural relevance and our goal ultimately was to connect with teens and millennials in a way that is meaningful to them,” Bezner says.

Action To make the brand famous, Bezner’s team studied the paths to fame taken by some of today’s biggest young stars. The team then outlined a number of strategies which hit on the theme of fame: being unique, showing depth, hanging out with famous people and distinguishing yourself online.

Investing heavily in social media, Sour Patch Kids launched a Snapchat account in July 2014, and quickly tapped social media star Logan Paul to create content for the account, engaging in “sour” and “sweet” pranks around New York City with the brand’s mascot, “the Kid,” in tow. Paul’s brother Jake was also recruited to helm the brand’s social media accounts during Nickelodeon’s 2015 Teen Choice Awards, which were sponsored in part by the brand.

It also developed an app that lets users download a custom emoji board using sour and sweet “Kidmojis.”

On top of social media, the team developed a robust content strategy centered

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Images by vito fun.

snapshot

BRAND AFFINITy

left: Halsey at the Brooklyn Patch.

IMAGES By VITO FUN.

Above: X Ambassadors perform in the Brooklyn Patch’s studios.

around four pivotal events on high-schoolers’ calendar: Valentine’s Day, prom, summer and Halloween. The “sour then sweet” theme played heavily into that messaging. The team aimed to make the brand about more than just candy, Bezner says. “It means being more than one-dimensional and having the characters and the voice of the brand come through in a way in that’s [about] more than its taste,” she says.

A Valentine’s Day 2015 campaign, for example, made use of story-sharing site WattPad. As they did with Snapchat, Bezner’s team enlisted the help of top influencers on the site before gamifying the project by encouraging fans to write their own love stories with twist endings. The winner’s story, “When Miss Sweet Met Mr. Sour,” was turned into an animated digital film that was distributed on the brand’s Instagram account.

Sour Patch Kids then developed a scripted series centered around high school students called Breaking Out, and cast YouTube celebrities, including Ricky Dillon and Andrea Russet—with a combined total of more than five million followers—in the roles.

“Scripted content living on the influencers’ channels, incorporating the ‘sour then sweet’ [theme] and

incorporating the Kid [mascot], was another way we were ‘hanging out’ with famous people,” Benzer says. “When we did a meetup, we had kids lined up outside for three hours waiting to come in and meet with these influencers.”

Finally, the brand also entered into the music industry, setting up houses in Brooklyn, Austin and Los Angeles for emerging artists who “are on the road and on the rise,” Bezner says. Dubbed ‘The Patch,’ the dwellings are designed to be comfortable and high-end with flourishes of Sour Patch Kids branding sprinkled throughout the floorplan. While staying at the homes, artists are encouraged to post to their social media accounts with brand hashtags. Artists who sign up for longer stays can make use of camera crews and engineers to produce more substantial content. This is on top of the in-house recording studios available to the artists should they be overcome by the urge to jam while holed up in The Patch. Since opening, the residences have played host to at least 175 artists, including Halsey and Deer Tick, according to Bezner.

snapshot

In January 2016, Sour Patch Kids put out casting calls in Los Angeles and New York for a web-based reality game show focused on a high school prom, and judged by social media sensation Twaimz.

“The brand continues to see tremendous consumption growth, and we’ve also been gaining share in the category,” Benzer says.

“We talk about cultural marketing and how that is creating an impact. Although I don’t think there’s a direct KPI to measure culture. … I think the Kid is more famous than before, and fame is always something that continues to build.”

“I think the only ROI they could possibly be looking for is brand advocacy. From that perspective, I think they did that pretty well,” says Luba Tolkachyov, co-founder of digital marketing and cultural advertising agency Gravity.

South Patch Kids’ focus on the touchstones of teen culture have won Tolkachyov‘s respect. “Their consumer is a teenager. It’s a very coveted but also very hard to identify target audience. … They’re playing with a very fickle consumer,” Tolkachyov says. “It feels like the Sour Patch team is up to the challenge and they are doing tactics behind the scenes that we might not be exposed to as outsiders. Kudos to them; they’re doing really great work.” m

coMpany

Results Global market research Euromonitor International shows the brand doubling its market share between 2010 and 2015, and more than doubling its retail sales over the same period, going from $120 million to $248 million over the five-year span.

Between 2014—the year the “famous icon” efforts began—and 2015, sales shot up by nearly $30 million.

Mondelēz International heaDQuaRteRS

Deerfield, Ill. caMpaign tiMeline

Spring 2014 - Present ReSultS

106% revenue increase from 2010 to 2015.

aprIl 2016 | MARkeTinG neWS

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scholarlyinsights

product development

The Raw Idea Does the original product idea always dictate go-to-market success?

By Lance A. Bettencourt | contributor

 lance@liftphd.com

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ow important is the quality of the raw (or original) idea to new product success? It seems like a no-brainer to say that it is critically important. Research certainly shows that superior products are more likely to succeed. The problem is, that’s the final product, not the original idea.

By the time a new product or service concept gets to market, it may not even resemble the original idea. If that’s the case, then design and development would be critically important, but not the original idea. Beyond that, others would contend that what matters most are the marketing resources a company puts behind a product, since even bad ideas can succeed with enough marketing muscle—or so the thinking goes.

This is certainly more than just an academic question. If the raw idea isn’t that important to success, then companies can forgo any rigor in idea screening early in the innovation process. If, on the other hand, the raw idea is an important determinant of success, then most companies would do well to increase the level of rigor and resources they put into testing ideas early in the process.

Does the Raw Idea Matter?

To gain insight into the importance of the raw idea, Professors Laura Kornish and Karl Ulrich of the University of Colorado and Wharton, respectively, have published a research study that relies on data from the community product development website Quirky.

Quirky specializes in consumer products that retail for under $150.

Each week, Quirky runs contests in which more than 100 ideas are submitted by community members. The best ideas, described in text and images, are

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selected for development. Members earn points for contributions to the development process and then earn money for points and product sales.

Given its structure, both the original ideas and product sales via the Quirky store are publicly available.

The paper, “The Importance of the Raw Idea in Innovation: Testing the Sow’s Ear Hypothesis,” published in the February 2014 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, presents results of an investigation of 160 products in the Quirky store. In addition to the raw idea description and product sales, the research team used two separate panels of consumers and consumer products marketing and product development experts (none of whom were familiar with the Quirky products) to get ratings of the quality of the raw ideas.

Consumers rated ideas (without price information) using a 5-point purchase intent scale: 1 = “definitely not,” and 5 = “definitely.” Experts rated ideas “on a 10-point scale on the basis of anticipated units sold.”

The analyses revealed that higher quality raw ideas do generate more sales.

In fact, the results indicated that a one standard deviation increase in the average purchase intent rating by consumers (.0841 on the 5-point scale) led to a 51% increase in sales. And the strength of this relationship was even stronger for products that had been on the market longer.

Expert ratings also performed well at predicting sales, but not as well as consumer ratings. Further, expert ratings did not perform well at predicting other market outcomes such as units sold, but consumer ratings did. So, while expert ratings have some merit, consumer ratings were more predictive.

The Raw Idea Does Matter.

Now What?

Perhaps the key implication of the research is stated succinctly by the authors: “Because a good idea leads to a greater level of success, there is value in accurate selection.” Indeed, the results make it clear that “higher-fidelity screening in the earlier stages may be worth the investment.”

In particular, the research shows that companies should incorporate consumer ratings into the evaluation of raw ideas.

And the research shows that a simple purchase intent measure is useful for consumer evaluation.

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product development

By its very nature, innovation is uncertain.

As such, it is critical that a company spend as little as possible as early as possible to learn as much as possible. Having a consumer panel use a simple measure to rate a range of candidate ideas to determine which should move forward into development fits this description.

Most companies have lots of ideas, but they don’t know which are most valuable.

This research indicates that getting consumer input early in the innovation process can be immensely valuable.

Although companies might be hesitant to expose early concepts to the market, there are two things to keep in mind. First, the sample of consumers need not be large

and can certainly come with confidentiality protections. Second, every company has a ready pool of employees who, themselves, are probably like target consumers.

Although not a direct conclusion of the research, this also points to the importance of having a solid understanding of customer needs when generating ideas. It also points to the importance of having these needs front and center during design and development so that the fundamental value in the raw idea is maintained during the development process.

While this study was narrowly focused on the question, “How important is the raw idea to market success?” the question could also be framed as:

scholarlyinsights

• How important is the front-end of innovation to market success?

• How important is the idea generation process to market success?

• How important is a solid understanding of unmet needs to guide idea generation?

To all of these questions, the research answers: “Very.” m Lance A. Bettencourt is a co-founder and managing partner of LIFT PhD, and a distinguished marketing fellow at the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University.

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themiddlemarket

Digitization

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Delayed Digitization A report from the National Center for the Middle Market details the growing importance of organization-wide digitization

By Zach Brooke | Staff Writer

 zbrooke@ama.org 16

new survey by the National Center for the Middle Market and branding agency Magneto found that middle market managers are giving lackluster evaluations to their organization’s efforts to digitize despite placing great emphasis on the importance of digitization.

“How Digital Are You? Middle Market Digitization Trends and How Your Firm Measures Up” incorporates responses from 500 C-level middle market executives surveyed in October 2015. Middle market refers to companies with annual revenues between $10 million and $1 billion while digitization is defined as the process of converting manual, paper-based or offline business processes to online, networked, computer-supported processes that facilitate a real-time operating and decision-making environment. For the back end, that means things like invoices and HR enrollment documents, while the front end pertains to customer-facing interaction such as websites, apps software and analytics.

The reports looks at the pace at which middle market companies are digitizing their workload. While the survey found that 63% of respondents say digitization is very or extremely important relative to other business activities, barely a third view their organizations as digitization leaders. Asked to rate their companies on digital performance, the majority of respondents awarded themselves a C+.

“I did not expect to see a high digital grade point average. …I was surprised by the across-the-board mediocrity, however,” says Thomas Stewart, executive director for Center for the Middle Market.

“I would have expected more, particularly in those back-office functions where people have been digitizing for 50 years.”

The higher the company’s annual revenue, the more focused it is on digitization, with companies having annual revenues between $100 million and $1 billion placing the most importance on digitization. Across industries, business services and health care providers were the most eager to digitize while retail and whole trade and manufacturing were the least likely to say digitization was very or extremely important.

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Digitization

The survey identifies the causes of the digitization lag as twofold: first, efforts to digitize are being outpaced by business change, making digitization projects reactionary and not anticipatory; second, digitization initiatives are not designed to link to broader plans of digital business transformation.

Stewart says the companies have suffered from leaving digitization to IT experts and other employees who don’t get a seat at the boardroom table drawing up corporate strategy. This explains why, even though respondents rate one-off digitization projects as successful, they can be frustrated by the lack of progress in overall digitization transformation.

Other findings include:

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Companies that are more digitized tend to grow faster than less digitally savvy competitors. Companies with annual

revenue growth at or above 10% are more likely to consider digitization as extremely important and consider themselves digitization leaders.

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Digitization investment is shifting from nuts-and-bolts business operations to corporate strategy. Increasingly, businesses

are spending their digitizing dollars in areas that directly affect future growth. While half of all digitization efforts are currently going toward improving efficiency and cutting costs, about 30% are being implemented to increase revenue and better engage with customers. Middle market organizations are spending roughly one-fifth of their digitization budget on front line efforts like accounting and human resources. Forty-two percent of respondents indicated they anticipate to increase their organization’s digitization spending for business analytics and strategic development, and 39% expect higher budgets for innovation projects moving forward.

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Digitization brings a sizable ROI, though not quite in line with company expectations. Ninety

percent of middle market companies

describe their last digitization project as a success, though overall measured ROI (27.5%) falls a bit short of expectations (30%). ROI was higher for organizations with high levels of growth (38%) or that were faster to digitize (37%). Companies that spend 10% or more of their annual revenue on digitization efforts garner the highest level of ROI at 39% while expecting an ROI of 44%.

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the human or financial capital to rapidly deploy and support the most cutting edge digital tools,” he says.“To help bridge this gap and accelerate adoption, growthoriented companies turn to lenders or strategic partners, such as private equity firms. Digital technology can help middle market companies better meet evolving customer and market needs and have greater visibility on operational costs

Barely a third of respondents view their organizations as digitization leaders. Asked to rate their companies on digital performance, the majority of respondents awarded themselves a C+.

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Digitization efforts are managed largely in-house.

Seventy percent of all digitized spending is directed internally, even though 65% of executives cite in-house skills shortages as hindrances to digitization initiatives. The study’s authors suggest investing more in training employees in digitization or partnering with outside organizations can increase digitization speed and satisfaction rates.

Gary LaBranche, President and CEO of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), notes that many middle market companies are inadequately resourced to tackle problems by themselves. “Adoption of digital tools is clearly becoming a competitive advantage for middle market firms, as well as a driver of business transformation and growth. However, many middle market firms don’t have

and efficiency. Finding the right capital providers and strategically deploying digital can increase the valuation of middle market companies.”

While acknowledging the resource scarcity to tackle large-scale digitization projects, Stewart identifies the collective “meh” on digitization efforts to more than just a lack of funds. “In general, throwing money at things has a marginal effect,” he says. According to Stewart, a more important question might be how people are looking at digitization. “Are they taking a view from what it would be to be a digital enterprise and then playing it back to the organization and saying, ‘Ah! Therefore, let’s do this and this.’ …. Or are they running projects in silos and departments to fix things and improve things and expecting that eventually they will grow together? Right now I think it’s the latter. I think that’s the source of the problem,” he says. m April 2016 | marketing news

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AAKER ON BRANDING

The Four Faces of Digital Marketing by david aaker

 daaker@prophet.com

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igital marketing has four distinct marketing objectives. failing to recognize these differences will lead to ineffective and suboptimal digital effort. The four digital program types vary in terms of how connected they are to the offering—from augmenting the offering, to supporting the offering, to amplifying marketing programs for the offering to being unconnected to the offering. They also will vary in terms of what aspects of digital are being employed.

I’ll explore each objective.

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augmenting or enabling the offering by extending its value proposition. Starbucks has an app

that allows a speedy purchase, the ability to tip, earn stars to redeem rewards, find stores, find personalized offers and more. Competitors without such an augmentation will be at a disadvantage. When the augmentation is significant, a new subcategory can be created that renders competitors who lack that augmentation irrelevant.

Offering augmentation can create unique “must haves” that define new subcategories. The result can be strategic, proving a sustainable advantage in the future that will need to be nurtured through ongoing innovation and an aggressive branding strategy with supporting brandbuilding programs. Augmentation can also be defensive, responding to the innovation of competitors to keep the offering relevant. In either case the staff involved in creating

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and improving the offering—from R&D, design, manufacturing and marketing—will need to partner with the digital team.

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Supporting the offering and its use. This is accomplished

by providing information about its benefits, how it provides value, the applications and how to obtain it. For some offerings or segments the digital route will be a primary go-to source of learning about the offering and a place to engage in interactive dialogue about the offering, its value and its use.

For others, digital can enable a brand to provide customer validation to the offering. Walt Disney World’s Moms Panel, for example, answers questions about the Disney vacation that does not come with any commercial bias. Real moms provide information based on real experiences.

For still others, digital can engage the customer in product development

and evaluation. There is a win-win opportunity to get customers to both provide and evaluate ideas.

MyStarbucksIdea, started in 2008, has provided Starbucks with the ideas for the splash sticks that protect customers from hot drink spills, mobile payments, new flavors including skinny beverages and cake pop treats.

Creating effective digital programs that will support the offering and its use will involve understanding the relationships of the target segment to the offering and proactively generating digitally driven solutions to issues and problems. Is the offering limited because of issues with visibility, perceptions, credibility or loyalty? Are there weaknesses or problems with the important customer touchpoints? Where there is a brand performance gap or weakness, how can digital play a role?

In developing programs, the digital team needs to work with business and marketing units to generate ideas.

Digital cannot simply “be there” in reactive mode.

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amplifying other brandbuilding platforms by providing more depth, exposure and involvement. A program such

as a World Cup sponsorship can only get so far with conventional media and attendance. Digital can create a website plus apps that will add value to the event with schedules, news and insights providing an interactive experience. A successful advertisement or video can have an extended life through social networks and outlets like YouTube. Brand building home runs rarely happen without digital amplification.

Digital amplification will be maximized when two things happen: first, when digital works with each of the marketing programs during the plan and design phase, not after; second, priorities should be established across marketing programs so that digital programs that show the most promise are fast-tracked.

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Creating customer “sweet spot” brand-building platforms, centered on a customer’s

“sweet spot” (interests and activities about which customers are intensely involved), in which the brand is an active partner. These sweet-spot programs are designed to create relationships and equity rather than support the offering.

Although digital does not have to be involved in such programs, many are viable only because digital technology enables or drives them.

Sweet-spot programs are based on the observation that customers are rarely interested in your offering, your brand or your firm. They are interested in what they are passionate about. It makes sense to attempt to reach them where they are instead of where you are. Digital can help a brand become a partner or companion in that interest.

Consider Sephora’s “BeautyTalk,” for example, which offers “real-time answers, expert advice, access to a community and your fix to all things beauty,” is made possible because of

website technology and other digital technologies around mobile and social media. Nature Valley’s Trail Views provide “street-views” of trails in national parks that, for some, are close to actually experiencing the hikes.

The feasibility and success of digitally driven, sweet-spot program should be tested with three questions.

First, is there a need for a new sweetspot programs? Is there a real demand with a worthwhile audience in terms of size and quality? And is there an opening for a new program or have others already gained a dominant presence? Second, can the firm deliver? Can it deliver a program with real substance that is in some way unique? This is more likely if the program is built on existing firm capabilities and assets. Third, can the program get traction and be linked to the brand? Will the proposed sweetspot program get enough visibility, relevance and credibility to be considered by target group members?

Does it fit the brand?

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The strategic role of digital is too often neglected, and usually related to a tactical role. But the first and last roles, in particular, can create a long-term asset that can meaningfully affect the brand vision, the brandcustomer relationship and competitive advantage. It can even create a “must have” that defines a new subcategory that some will insist on. Recognizing that a digital program is strategic affects its organizational position, its resourcing and its management over time. In particular, there should be a broadly experienced senior person involved in creating digital programs, a person with breadth of capability and a link to the business strategy so that the strategic role of digital will be on the table. A stand-alone tactical team, no matter how good, will not be adequate. m David Aaker is vice chairman of San Francisco-based marketing consultancy Prophet and author of Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success.

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International marketing

Securing America’s International Business Future

By Michael R. Czinkota and Peter R. Dickson

 czinkotm@georgetown.edu  dicksanp@fiu.edu

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he greatest threat to future U.S. prosperity and job prospects is the insufficient interest our leaders have in deploying resources to ensure that American engineers, managers and entrepreneurs are the best in the world at commercializing innovations and improving business processes.

Twenty years ago we presented a processlearning perspective on what was needed to ensure that America continues to be a winner in free trade markets and a shining city on the hill. Drawing on how Great Britain lost its lead in the industrial revolution, we proposed several integrated programs to promote the process-learning market. Central was the creation of well-paying jobs through superior commercialization of innovation.

Since then, individuals such as Michael Porter have been outspoken about the need for a major public policy-driven innovation initiative, but little action has resulted. Interest in the topics of learning and innovation has actually declined in public discourse over the past 11 years, as measured by Google trends. It should have increased instead.

Meanwhile, the world moved on.

The extraordinary growth of Asian economies, in particular China’s, over the past 20 years has dramatically changed the challenges and raised the stakes.

According to the World Bank, in terms of port container traffic the Chinese economy has grown logistically from

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being about equal to the U.S. in 2000 to being four times larger in 2015.

Judging by these traffic flows, a lot more experiential learning is being done in the Chinese economy—and it’s not just learning how to move containers.

It is learning how to develop, market and distribute new products to the market. Learning-by-doing has made many sectors of the Chinese economy more capable and competitive than their counterparts in the U.S. This enormous learning advantage gained by active international traders, many of them from Asia, appears to have been insufficiently recognized by the political and business leadership of the U.S. Failure to learn because of not doing will lead to diminished results for the U.S. economy. It will bring lower wages and greater income inequality to the United States over the next several decades.

We propose a number of public/private sector initiatives that can be implemented rapidly by a new administration to rebuild the nation’s competence and confidence in its process-learning capabilities and commercialization of innovation.

How the Business World Has Changed Much pivots from innovations in transportation, communication and logistics. The key trade barrier that reduced competition between national economic enterprises was the prohibitive cost of transporting products safely to far away destinations.

The impact of this trade barrier has shifted due to lower tariffs and better information flows. Declining energy prices contribute to low transportation costs. Innovation has led to higher trade volume. Research has found a positive and statistically significant correlation between innovation and export. Manufacturing and distribution quality control were supported by the innovation of at-a-distance systems controls, such as ISO9000 certification and performance contracts.

As collateral effects, these breakthroughs have accelerated the learning of foreign suppliers, and created cheap and seamless logistic flows between low labor cost (LLC) economies and Western markets.

Marketplace technology transfers between developed and developing economies now occur at a breakneck speed. Online tools are the new reality that permits the legal transfer of ideas from innovator to imitator at almost no cost and in real time. Beyond that, the Internet has empowered the theft of intellectual property estimated to cost US companies more than $300 billion per year.

American business ideas support America’s competitors. American higher education transfers its newest thoughts and practices to the world’s knowledge workers as a deliberate business development strategy. American multinational company managers increase owner profits by transferring ideas and added-value processes to their global supply chains and operations in LLC economies. Sadly, the transfer prices typically charged are based on the cost of knowledge replication rather than that of knowledge re-generation, thus providing very little recovery of investment capital.

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TH e U . S . A n s w e r : C r e at e N e w C u r v e L e a r n i n g / c a pa b i l i t y

L e a r n i n g / c a pa b i l i t y

T h e c h i n e s e l e a r n i n g c u r v e a d va n tAGE

U.S. businesses are about here

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U.S. businesses are about here

Chinese businesses are about here

Chinese businesses are about here Time/experience

The Learning Curve Advantage of Imitators Transfers to offshore imitators reinforce those who already possess a steeper learning curve than the original innovator. An imitator’s learning curve is always steeper than the original innovators’ learning curve. However fast we move into new fields, the rest of the world will catch up faster. In terms of a learning curve, in many technologies U.S. businesses are at the top, while Chinese businesses are half-way up and thus learning faster.

Also, American firms often follow traditional and conservative improvement methods. Many Asian companies, in contrast, find innovative ways of dealing with new issues, letting them climb even faster.

The advantage, however, flips when American innovation frequency creates new firms, markets and learning curves.

Then, American companies are on the steep part of the learning S curve while Chinese and many other Asian start-ups are still at the fermenting stage. Younger firms have more to gain than older firms from increasing sales through exports.

Sadly, however, U.S. intensity of start-

Time/experience

up activity of firms is declining—or tepid at best. In some quarters there is expectation of a growing firm founders gap, which causes the U.S. to fall behind.

Strategic constraints can, if understood well, also help the success of the underdog. We’ve established the benefits that Asian imitators can obtain from American innovators. There is, however, no prohibition of an imitation strategy by U.S. firms. We already do so with Indian products and services, such as the radio (1895 in Calcutta) and the discovery of water on the lunar surface (2013), and Chinese products for the Fourth of July fireworks (7th century A.D.), or, in the future, with the Beijing Electron Position Collider (BPEC) (2016). Any firm or industry that can position itself on the steep part of the S-curve through imitation, can have an advantage. The bottom line: Imitation strategies can work for American firms too.

managerial, production and logistical expertise arising from greater product experience, leading to lower costs. Small firms can rapidly decrease their high initial costs, since their cumulative volume tends to be small and can be doubled and redoubled quickly. Thus, a good way for a new firm to compete with an established one is to increase sales volume rapidly, thus quickly lowering its costs, even if this strategy hurts short-term profits.

Exporting can be a key strategy for new and young firms to do so. By selling outside the domestic market to more customers, small firms gain more rapidly in product experience and decrease unit costs, and are better able to compete with established larger firms. Larger firms, on the other hand, do not have as much to gain by increasing their sales volume through exporting, as they have already obtained earlier significant cumulative outputs in the domestic market.

Experience Curves and Exports In studying the effect of experience, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found costs on value added go down 20-30% every time cumulative output doubles.

BCG attributes this decline to greater

The Enterprise Development Dynamic The effects of logistics innovation, accelerated technology transfer and Continues on the next page >> April 2016 | marketing news

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learning advantage loomed large in the 1980s when American supply-chain capabilities leapt forward. The actual cost of distribution as a percentage of GDP declined while the quality of service went up. Distribution bundlers such as FedEx flourished. Many companies rerouted their supply chains through LLC economies to stay price competitive and increase their profits. Otherwise, they were outcompeted and investment dried up.

This shift is not unexpected according to Vernon and Wells, whose product cycle theory concludes that profitable innovations require large quantities of capital and highly skilled labor. Innovating countries increase their exports while competitors exercise downward pressure on prices and profit margins.

For mature products, manufacturing is completely standardized. The availability of cheap and unskilled labor dictates the country of production. Profit margins are thin, and competition is fierce. Exports peak as the LLC countries expand production and become net exporters themselves.

Initiation of production in the United States and the moving of factories abroad can be done by the same firm. Transfer of production locale may mean a job loss for employees but is not necessarily a loss of competitiveness for the firm. Yet, without any planning for transition, the value of unemployed workers quickly races toward zero. This is unacceptable and explains why re-shoring must become a new preference. Currently, the dynamic progresses through these steps: 1. Western engineers and managers set up production lines that meet desired quality standards in LLC economies. Western technology and manufacturing innovation that fit with the LLC worker skills, work ethic and costs are transferred to new supply chain partners.

2. With increasing manufacturing experience, both costs and quality defects go down (i.e. the experience curve). Supply-chain partners innovate processes that increase quality and reduce costs continuously.

3. Goods supplied by supply chain partners start to be sold in the LLC

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International marketing

domestic economy at low prices, encouraging local market and brand growth. Source nations such as China, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil create new, powerful brands of world class.

4. The new brands are marketed and sold in other emerging markets where they often outcompete established Western brands.

5. The new brands absorb share and profitability in Western economies.

6. New brands become of higher quality and outcompete established brands.

The above development dynamic expands around the globe. Highly motivated, education-focused workers and companies will likely design and deliver lean products and services to global markets than those less motivated, interested and educated.

Reality creates not just a labor market problem but also a capital market problem. Investment may continue to flow through and greatly enrich Wall Street, but it will pool where the action is: the “main road” of People’s Republic of China, where markets, jobs and capital are created.

New patterns of trade have, often seamlessly, integrated U.S. interests even without effective industrial policy.

Localized competitiveness is used to encourage innovation. The U.S.’s economy remains large, variable and vibrant, and its consumers are loyal to domestic products. In consequence, any decline tends to be gradual without vision of the abyss. But the slow, intermittent nature makes the situation highly insidious. Like the slowly cooked frog, who does not notice the rising heat, there is no alarm to trigger broadbased sacrifices in support of decisive action. Some possible remedies include: 1. Rapidly increase the number and proportion of new firms.

2. Encourage and assist with the cost of training process improvement expertise. Highlight innovations that have system wide effects.

3. Sponsor research and training centers focused on supporting new processes, such as Big Data analysis through cross-collaboration, for example,

between the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the International Trade Commission and the Agency for International Development.

4. Have public and private sectors jointly create pop-up research centers that better train process improvers, and domestically distribute insights of companies that innovate successfully.

5. The Commerce Department should assert its communication role by patronizing an annual case competition with key examples of how international business obstacles have been creatively overcome through process innovation.

6. The U.S. Commercial Service should identify key global innovators, from whom it can acquire process information and distribute, such as a clearing house or seminar coordinator both for American innovators and imitators. Government servants had to learn for more than a decade that service exports are just as good as exports from manufacturing plants.

Now, they must learn to appreciate American imitation and support it as an information clearing house, perhaps even through export fireside chats. While we strongly support the gathering and distribution of targeted information focused on interested firms, we do not support the selection of winners and losers.

7. There is need for an ongoing thrust in support of innovation, maybe through an Innovators’ Day when firms can brag a little and crown their key contributors to innovation. There could even be innovation competitions in schools, reminiscent of spelling bees and an annual school district innovation runoff.

There is nothing demeaning about supporting business. Government, firms and employees need to write a new history. Training and support of knowledge workers who help to commercialize American innovation, imitation and incubation is crucial. The goal is to increase American knowledge workers’ likelihood of producing

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innovative goods that outsell global competition, allow America’s economy to adapt and move into newer fields quicker and more successfully than anyone else, and ensure that the American economy profits from freer trade.

Innovation scholarships can be awarded to local students and faculty with the best commercializing innovation ideas for the three business sectors most important to each state’s economy. Of crucial importance is not to let such awards become captive to one interest group. Rather, there must be an early cross-fertilization between fields, for example venture capitalists, successful academics, service experts and engineers. The sponsorship of a meaningful number of scholarships would consume only a fraction of the savings achieved by forthcoming U.S.based closures in Europe.

Each team will nurture a start-up business venture around the central innovator’s idea. Higher education

should be expected, using its own endowment funds, to invest in a portfolio of job-creating business ventures.

These should be limited to two years for any given project and end with a major attempt to secure crowd funding.

Concurrently, a series of innovation and imitation presentations, starting at the local level and continuing upwards, can enlighten and encourage supporters and participants. Such collaboration between fields and facility has already been applied quite successfully in Germany.

Our findings indicate the necessity for and a benchmark of some key terms: trade deficit, export promotion and competiveness. They reflect the positioning for the U.S.’ international business policy actions and outlook.

While the apparent loose correlation between the three factors in general appeals for a partial linkage between them, we find the downslide, which occurred for all three factors during the past 11 years, to be quite troublesome.

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In sum, we recommend a sustained decade-long deployment of government and higher education resources to provide incentives which encourage planning and training for the facilitation of creating younger and more internationally oriented firms.

The firms then must be provided with dedicated workers and a supportive broad-based educational infrastructure, and successful management capable and willing to innovate, imitate and internationalize. The youth of this nation must again think of progress in terms of internationally commercializing its work. After all, they are the future. m Michael R. Czinkota is a professor of international business and marketing at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Peter r. dickson is the Harliss Eminent Scholar and a professor of marketing at Florida International University.

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cmo survey

Insight on Insights

By Christine Moorman

 moorman@duke.edu

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ustomer insights are an essential element in any marketing plan. Insights give rise to innovations, new go-to-market strategies and new business models. They can also produce critical tactical-level improvements in marketing activities.

So it is disappointing that the February 2016 edition of The CMO Survey, which surveyed 289 U.S.-based marketing leaders, finds that those marketers report a slight reduction in their companies’ development and use of customer insights, compared to data from 2011 to the present. If customer insights are so important, why aren’t these numbers increasing? Here are twelve culprits worth a good look:

1

Weak theory development skills.

Developing insights requires strong theory development skills. This means that managers must connect disparate observations and information obtained from various sources and methods to derive novel explanations about customers.

2

Unreceptive organization.

As much as companies say they want insights, companies are known to suffer from status quo bias. A great deal of research shows that managers reject information that challenges their existing expectations. It’s difficult for insights to penetrate such a mentality.

3

Same methods, same insights.

Companies are often entrenched in existing methods for developing insights, including the steps taken, who takes them, when they are taken and how the results are handled. These

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routines serve a useful purpose in the ongoing production of insights.

However, routines are also “sticky” and they can interfere with the development of new methods for producing and using insights. Related, it is easier for vendors to sell existing, off-the-shelf insights tools to firms than to develop new techniques that generate unique insights. Both of these tendencies work companies into a “same methods, same insights cycle” that can dampen performance in this area.

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Own-industry bias. Managers

often believe that they can only learn about marketing from companies in their own industries. There is indeed a great deal to learn there, but there may be even more to learn from firms across other industries. Marketing processes, such as segmentation, targeting, positioning, pricing and market intelligence, can transfer effectively across industries. Likewise, the effective development and leveraging of insights can be learned by studying best practices of firms in a wide range of industries.

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Managers don’t observe customers. This may sound like

Marketing 101 but it’s a good bet that it has been a while since most managers actually observed their customers using products and services. This observation should extend into what

Erich Joachimsthaler calls the “demand landscape” to include a customer’s environment that produces, involves or results from the use of products and services. For example, when do I decide to go to a movie at a cinema instead of watching a movie at home? What is happening at home or in my life that prompts this decision?

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Insights are difficult to leverage. If an insight is not

something that can be translated into action, its value is limited. Looking for insights that are closer to choice behavior is one way to improve the translation likelihood. An insight may involve understanding that a certain consumer behavior triggers a purchase. For example, the culture and environment at the Fuqua School of Business is so impressively positive and friendly to prospective students that once they visit campus, they very likely accept an offer to enroll. Why do some students make the decision to visit? What obstacles exist to making that decision?

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Companies don’t invest the required time, people and financial resources. Creating insights

is not like reading a report or crunching numbers. It requires speculation, going down dead ends, metaphors, talking with colleagues … and then reading reports and crunching numbers. It requires time.

It also requires money. Often overlooked, companies don’t spend the time to find the right group of people to support insights. To paraphrase Jim Collins, if your “insights” bus doesn’t have the right people on it, your insights will not likely travel far. Develop tools to screen on the abilities to develop and leverage insights inside and outside the company.

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False insights confidence.

Most companies have boatloads of customer data these days. This may lead managers to believe that they already know their consumers well enough and that the ROI invested in developing additional insights would be low. This is a mistake. Insights are different from

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Developing and using customer insights Rate your company on each marketing knowledge metric during the last 12 months ( 1 = p o o r, 5 = e x c e l l e n t ) Developing and using customer insights

4 3 2 1

3.5

3.4

3.5

Feb-11

Aug-13

Aug-14

3.25 Feb-16

*Questions asked irregularly: reporting complete time series 2011-2016.

data and they rarely jump straight from data. Instead we need multiple looks, broader data and think time to generate a good insight.

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Lack of insights metrics. Insights

are a unique type of knowledge, and most companies lack metrics to assess the quality and quantity of insights. If managers manage what they can measure, insights are going to be left on the sideline. A different metrics problem arises when new insights need new metrics. For example, if the insight is around customer time spent browsing, we may need eye tracking or time-inaisle metrics to measure performance to see if the insight worked. If the insight is pushing the firm into a new area, metrics may not exist which could hinder whether or not the insight is leveraged.

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Weak insights capabilities.

Capabilities are bundles of marketing skills and accumulated knowledge, exercised through organizational processes, which enable a firm to carry out its marketing activities.

Research shows that capabilities can exist in all areas—strategic marketing areas such as planning activities, specialized marketing areas such as pricing or channel management and

in learning about markets. However, no research has measured information capabilities focused on insights. My guess, based on these CMO Survey results, is that the capabilities are weak.

If companies lack knowledge about how to develop customer insights, is it surprising that customer insight production is flat?

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Tunnel vision. When Bob Drane, former vice president of innovation for Oscar Meyer, was traveling in Japan, he saw people eating out of bento boxes. This seemingly unconnected observation might have been lost on other meat products companies. Drane, however, turned this observation into the Lunchables line which earned more than $140 million dollars in 2014. Under his reign, Oscar Meyer developed a packaging capability and replaced sushi, rice, and daikon with bologna, crackers, and M&Ms. There are many opportunities like this missed every day around the world.

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Siloed or no-responsibility organizations. Companies

often have customer information in different areas of the firm—marketing, finance, sales and information systems.

This means, unfortunately, that rarely does one group or individual have easy access to a complete view of customers.

This challenges the development and use of insights because developers and users of insights may be missing a critical piece of the puzzle. A different problem occurs when there is no formal group or individual responsible for developing insights. Insights seem like they should be everyone’s responsibility but are likely no one’s. Best to designate a group that is not only responsible for helping to develop metrics, but also to disseminate them to potential adopters and support their use in marketing decision making. m Sponsored by the American Marketing Association, Deloitte LLC and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, The CMO Survey collects and disseminates the opinions of top marketers in order to predict the future of markets, track marketing excellence and improve the value of marketing in firms and in society.

Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch Sr. Professor of Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and founder and director of The CMO Survey.

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marketingmanagement

sales and marketing alignment

United We Stand, Divided We Fall

By Paul Cole

 paul.cole@inquba.com

I

t’s an age-old question: How can two very different but inexorably linked functions, marketing and sales, become better aligned to deliver stronger business outcomes? In today’s digitally driven, non-sequential world, alignment should not be the ultimate goal.

Instead, business leaders should be working to unify the entire prospect-to-customer lifecycle by moving from a functional or process view of marketing and sales to an experiential view.

One of the unintended consequences of todays’ customer experience (CX) movement is that it has become largely synonymous with the postsale servicing of the customer. Once marketing has done its job creating brand pull, filling the funnel with qualified leads and the salesforce accepts leads and drives to closure, we register the transaction and create a new customer record. This is usually when customer experience management kicks in. But what if we took all of the CX principles that have been developed to help build brand advocacy for existing customers upstream into our overall design thinking, collaborating across marketing, sales and service on what the experience of moving someone from target to prospect to customer should look and feel like from their point of view? Doing so just might help avoid the dissonance that often characterizes the sales and marketing relationship and ensure that your (customer perceived) performance equals your brand promise across all of your market-facing activities. Think

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of the cable company or mobile carrier whose marketing message claims they are easy to do business with and then you have a peek at their sales contract and policies and realize it’s all fluff.

Or the auto insurance company that promises “new car replacement” in the case of an accident but the terms and conditions make it impossible to qualify for full recovery. Let’s remember that while we may tag individuals as targets, prospects, customers or advocates, at the end of the day it’s the same human being; someone who does not appreciate or care about whether you represent the marketing, sales or customer service department.

At a minimum, research has shown that today’s buyer values—beyond price and product functionality—are characterized by a universal interest in simplicity, emotional gratification and a frictionless experience.

How can you go about internally unifying the strategy, practices, touchpoints, policies and metrics that ultimately influence the type of journey a (prospective) buyer will experience

when discovering, researching, selecting, consuming and hopefully advocating your brand? Below are a few interventions:

Unifying the experience: Institute cross functional governance. First, it is incumbent upon the front office functions (marketing, sales and service) to create a collaboration mechanism to devise, deploy and monitor the prospect to customer experience.

This can take the form of a formal management position such as chief experience officer or chief customer officer, or creating a formal “Office of the Customer” with representatives of the business functions or informal steering committees.

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2

Develop the story: Utilizing design thinking methodology, start by exploring and brainstorming answers to the following questions: a. What does a day in the life of a typical buyer look like? Where do they go for information? What do they want to know? What motivates them and what do they value? b. What words and phrases would we hope they would use to describe their journey to a friend? c. Where across that journey can we best differentiate ourselves?

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Create the playbook: Based on

the above, develop the elements of the plan including: a. A buyer/user experience statement: This is distilling down the essence of what doing business with you should feel like and the emotions you want to evoke. b. Buyer personas: Based on your market research inputs, create a narrative that describes characteristics of the ideal customer in terms of demographics, motivations, channel preferences, usage patterns and support requirements. c. A journey map: For each persona, lay out the activities that correspond to that “day in the life,” along with the touchpoints, inputs and desired outcomes for each moment of truth

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sales and marketing alignment

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Engineer and actively monitor the experience: While a lot of

creative thinking should go into the design, an equal amount of rigor should go into the engineering of a gratifying, simple and frictionless experience. This should include investment in a platform that enables you to: a. Capture the voice of the customer on an event-driven basis, meaning soon after an interaction with the company, whether pre- or post-purchase. b. Apply predictive analytics, and analyze the structured and unstructured information you collect

to determine cause and effect of various actions and predict the impact of operational adjustments on your customer-perceived performance. c. Add a customer KPI dashboard to your operational metrics. Whether you use a customer effort score, CSAT measure or the Net Promoter Score, track and publish these data across marketing, sales and service. d. Engage the customer. Rather than simply looking at aggregated customer scores, get into the weeds and use your intelligence to actively engage and close the loop with the customer when the system alerts you to a problem.

marketingmanagement

Every product and service category holds out the promise and potential for winning the hearts and minds of buyers by delivering a superior experience. But to do so requires you to stand above the functional silos and design your operating system from the outside in. Only then can you become a true “experience maker” and reap the associated rewards. m Paul Cole is a Los Angeles-based customer experience expert who leads customer engagement, sales and marketing strategies at CX software povider inQuba.

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Marketing Marketing has has problems. problems.

This spring, we’re unveiling the AMA’s first ever intellectual agenda in our almost 80-year history that features what we believe are the “seven big problems” confronting marketing.

The seven big problems will drive content for the entire AMA community: a multi-faceted and diverse group of professionals in marketing and sales, academic researchers and educators, and collegiate marketing hopefuls.

The AMA’s intellectual agenda seeks to serve as a big tent source of guidance and inspiration that includes both theoretical and applied knowledge that will ultimately provide actionable insights, frameworks, tools and resources for the AMA community. We’ve

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created a living document that can evolve along with the AMA community and the discipline of marketing itself.

A devout belief that “thinking” is what defines the human experience drives our intellectual agenda. In that vein, part of what you value is the ability to actually stay above and apart from the din and the fray that might influence your ability to be actionable.

And that’s what the seven big problems aim to address—how you can best be both objective and action-oriented.

You have a life pulling you in different directions in what is arguably the most distracted and distracting society in history.

You want to see your work come to life in the marketplace.

Because knowledge is not power.

Power is knowledge applied.

The seven big problems provide all of us with critical context.

Context matters. Context is the last frontier for marketers who know that mobile ubiquity and wearables powered by the Internet of Things are closing in on the holy grail of contextual understanding.

Will the seven big problems be an overnight inflection point in terms of the content and research that is generated by the collective AMA community? No. But what it will do is put a stake in the ground on the belief that context and managerial relevance matters to us, because it matters to marketers.

–Russ Klein, AMA CEO

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The Seven Big Problems

Effectively targeting high value sources of growth.

With all the fascination with new marketing concepts, digital technologies and new tactics, there continues to be one foundational issue that is proven and reproven to have a disproportionate impact on the value you create for your business: identifying the highest value source or sources of growth for your brand, product or service.

Choosing the wrong target, or one of less value, will certainly lower your growth and return-on-investment potential. It might even fail completely. Traditionally we called this market segmentation but lately many of the most successful marketers refer to it as “demand landscape mapping.”

There are two critical questions to understand about this subject: Why is this so critical, and how can I do it much better? There are five questions that dive much deeper in to the “why?” as we leave the door open on the “how?”

Can one product please everyone?

This is a simple

enough concept: How do you find the market that is most interested or in need of what you have to offer? Or if you are a new brand, find a need that is not adequately filled and create a better “mousetrap.” The key is to recognize that some people won’t be interested in you no matter what, and that’s OK. Find the ones that are.

What segments provide the most value potential for your company?

This plays into today’s data-rich marketplace.

Analyze the options and look for the one that has the most value to you, meaning it’s large and profitable enough for you to realize your financial goals, it’s reasonable from a competitive intensity standpoint and has a bright future.

Which segments are cost effective and easy to reach?

This one is not so obvious to most marketers. Even if you’ve found a larger and profitable segment that your product fits in perfectly, it may be very fragmented or very expensive to reach or serve.

How can you create a clear target that focuses on the motivations that affect customers’ decisions, upon which you’ll build your marketing program?

Understand the

drivers of purchase so you can begin to select the tactics most likely to effect the behavior you desire.

How can you position your product or service against something or someone?

When it comes down to developing your behavior, influencing tactics positioning is key. You have to know who you are aiming at to position it successfully. Usually you will be replacing something already in that person’s repertoire.

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What are marketing vs. non-marketing issues and tasks?

Has the scope of marketing activities and tasks expanded or has it contracted? Recent evidence suggests that most information is no longer controlled by the marketing function, but is now controlled as an organizational asset under the responsibilities of the analytics or IT group, and that has shifted the balance of power within the organization.

Is this the case, or is the evidence to the contrary?

How should marketing tasks be organized within the firm?

The role of marketing in the firm and the C-suite.

There is a long history of debate between how academic researchers conceptualize “marketing” and how that is reflected in the activities firms may engage in and how they organize to accomplish these activities. Thus, academic views and corporate practice concerning the role of marketing within the firm have often been out of alignment. However, as the world has become flatter, governments have increasingly shaped policy, supply chains have globalized and “customer demand” (not supply) is the limiting factor on corporate growth, it’s clear that from both perspectives the role of marketing within the firm needs to be carefully reexamined.

We need to explore what is possible, as well as what is already happening in some firms. For example, in some firms, marketing has lost power within the firm even though one of its fundamental roles is to represent the voice of the marketplace in firm discussions. In others, marketers have grown in stature and been given new responsibilities for a wider array of insightand demand-generating activities. Relevant questions include:

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When should organizations centralize marketing activities, and when should they decentralize them and push marketing activities into the businesses? Is there an optimum balance? And if there is, what determines what is optimal vs. non-optimal?

Firms such as Cargill have “atomized” its core platforms to over 80 business units and pushed marketing to the front lines. Other organizations have increasingly centralized marketing to share cost and services. What is the right model? Does it depend on industry and customer context?

What does a “world-class” marketing organization look like?

Popeyes chain of chicken restaurants has recently reorganized with the most senior “marketer” the chief brand officer. In turn, the CMO, guest experience and PR areas report to the chief brand officer. Some organizations do not even have a CMO, assuming that the growth function can be done with other organizationwide resources. What is the best structure? Or does it depending on the competitive context or other factors?

Some CMO’s are being given responsibility for building the organization’s marketing capabilities.

How do I build my company’s marketing capabilities? Is it more about finding and keeping the right people, or more about building a standard tool-kit? In either case, should I build or buy? If I decide to build what is the right “roadmap for change?”

Do I invest in training? If yes, what is the right form and design of these initiatives?

How do I attract the best marketing talent?

What does it take to keep the best marketing talent? How do I stop people getting “stale in the saddle” but keep them engaged in the same area long enough to benefit from their experience?

Who is/should be representing marketing in C-suite conversations?

Does it have to be a CMO? What are viable alternatives, if any?

What is/should be the role of the CMO?

Voice of the marketplace?

Demand generation? Growth champion? Innovation-driver?

Capability-builder? All of the above? What are the costs and benefits of different CMO roles under different conditions?

What is the impact of the changing role of marketing within the corporation?

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The Seven Big Problems

The digital transformation of the modern corporation.

Digital issues focus on pressing managerial problems at multiple levels of analysis. Our belief is that marketers have taken a very narrow view—examining social media, Big Data and the transformation of marketing communications. However, at the C-suite level, corporate executives are focused on much larger issues of business model change, survival and future competitive advantage. This is very evident in the world of banking and retail. However, even traditional industrial firms such as GE are transforming themselves from “dumb” to “smart” within the Internet of Things. Key questions include:

How will winning firms compete in the future?

In almost every industry, firms are moving from products to information and service businesses. It does not mean “products” disappear. Rather, they become the vehicles and platforms for informationbased businesses. Nowhere is this more evident than in health care. We are seeing the migration of patients from hospitals to homes, with attendant monitoring and care through information-rich technologies.

How do the firm’s interfaces with marketplace (e.g., communications, salesforce) and within the organization itself (e.g., internal crowd-source innovation, gamefication of learning and development,

flattening of the organizational hierarchy) change as a result of digitization?

Our key point here is that the entire organization is changing, not just the interfaces with customers. Structures, processes, workflow and decision right are being transformed due to digitization.

How will it/could it affect my business model?

What are the types of new business models that are emerging? Is one type of business model superior, or does it depend on context?

What should impact the way I communicate and interact with customers?

Formerly this was largely a one-way communication; now customers are taking control of the products, services, interfaces and communications. It is shared communication, not only between the firm and customers but between actors in the marketplace (e.g., customer to customer).

How do I use social and other digital media to both generate new insights about my customers and competitors?

Can I also use it to track my marketing performance?

How do I figure out the scale and scope of what is possible for my company as a result of existing and emerging digital technologies?

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Generating and using insight to shape marketing practice.

There is a fundamental debate that is unfolding concerning the role of Big Data and analytics within firms. However, this data orientation (or obsession) may obscure the differences between data, knowledge and insight. An argument could be made that while our data and knowledge are rapidly growing, our actual insight is not. What does it mean to have a customer insight that can be leveraged in the marketplace? This problem could be addressed by new methods, but we are more concerned with unique, different information that leads to competitive advantage. How do organizations collect, share, store, transmit and “use” this insight? More broadly, in our knowledge-based economy that leads to competitive advantage rather than a traditional view of products, routines, capabilities and assets. At an even higher level, how do we know we know?

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How can I best capture my customers’ experience?

We have all learned the tools of end-to-end mapping of customers’ journeys. What is unique about these journeys? Is it only about pain points, or about surprise points?

What is more important?

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Almost all of the focus to date has been on customer or consumer insights, but channelpartner insights?

Supplier insights? When are different types of insights more or less valuable, and why?

Folks have argued that market-driven companies are not marketing driving companies. If this is the case, what is the role of marketing in gaining new insights? Does it drive the process?

Simply aggregate views from other areas? Is it a catalyst function?

our business processes?

Most of the focus to date has been on generating insights, and it’s clearly not an easy thing to do. How do we make sure that we fully and quickly exploit the insights we do manage to generate?

What are the best insights tools and frameworks for us to use?

What firms have developed a “great machine” to take insights and deploy them quickly for revenue growth?

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buy from me?

Dealing with an omnichannel world.

The 1990s were marked by a back-office revolution in efficiency, systems and re-engineering. As we transition into the 21st century, the key revolution is the front-office interface with customers. It is no longer a simple mix of brick and mortar integration, or even “bricks and clicks” integration. Rather, with the advance of social media, mobile media, always-on communications, the Internet of Things and multi-channel markets, the new catchphrase is “omni-channel.” What do we know about this world? Is it truly different than multi-channel?

How might solving the “last mile” problem change the game in traditional industries such as consumer packaged goods—and who is going to do this? Amazon? Do the traditional theories and approaches work in such an omni-channel world?

What new capabilities do firms need to put in place to take advantage of this world?

The fundamental problem is not the maximization of a particular channel, but the interfaces that link between channels. Think of these as drop offs and hand-offs between channels. Where do we see the drop off occur?

Is there a standard pattern across industries?

What is the right mix of customer interfaces?

Keep in mind that many of the interfaces are no longer under the firm’s control (e.g., Yelp), so how can we stay in front of these messages. Can we shape the debate?

How does this work across countries?

In many cases, the technology in developing countries, or the political infrastructure, are at odds with integration in a world economy. How does the political, economic and social context shape the ability to integrate a global company?

The Seven Big Problems

How do I figure out how and where my customers and prospective customers want to

How do I organize to coordinate across channels?

The fundamental problem in most cases is the way the company organizes, rewards and manages profit and loss groups. A particular activity may be in the best interest of the overall firm, but not in the best interest of a particular business unit or group. How does the firm reward the unit that appears to be losing out?

What are the implications for in-store sales personnel?

How enabled and accountable do they need to be in terms of awareness, knowledge and access across channels? Put simply, do in-store personnel need to be experts on mobile, websites, call centers and other touchpoints that the firm is using to reach out to customers?

How do I develop an omni-channel strategy for my brand?

Are there general rules of thumb, or is every firm different? What is best practice, what is worst practice and what is next practice? What are the implications of omni-channel for selecting channel partners?

How is omnichannel changing B-to-B markets?

Are there unique challenges in the B-to-B world that we do not see in the B-to-C world?

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Competing in dynamic,global markets.

While terms such as “hyper competitive” or “fast moving” have been around for a number of years, the speed of change—at the customer and competitor level—is accelerating at unprecedented levels. At the customer level, this is reflected in “location-based” marketing based on mobile apps, real-time tracking of customer behavior, and continual advancement of new, nimbler competition. For many industries, at the heart of this change are smart products, smart applications and interconnected devices as well as an increasing willingness of firms to develop ecosystems of partners rather than go it alone.

In many industries, the new and nimbler competition may be from firms based in second-world or even emerging economies. What are the implications of dealing with such non-traditional competitors? Conversely, the biggest growth opportunities for many firms are in emerging marketplaces, with unfamiliar customer needs, channel structures and even institutional set-ups and political systems. What does dealing with such new and dynamic markets mean for the marketing function? Does marketing continue to be the key interface for the inflow of marketplace information and the outflow of market-informed products and solutions?

How can I compete with ecosystems vs. individual rivals?

There has been a great deal written on the shift from “go it alone” competitive dynamics to an increasingly networked world, where platforms compete against platforms. We see this most readily in the technology sector, but it is also apparent in most other sectors.

What does a good ecosystem of players look like?

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How can we better predict competitive shifts in our marketplaces?

To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the best way to predict the future is to create the future. How do firms shape the future? Do they do it alone, or in concert with others? What can we learn from this process?

How can I compete with global rivals I have never even

If my firm is mid-sized (or even small), how do I globalize

heard of?

quickly?

This is one of the most significant concerns of big global players: Who are the new-tothe-world players that will emerge?

How do I spot them early? Do I acquire them, or attack head to head? What does it take to make such foreign-market acquisitions work?

How can I make sure that I fully exploit them?

What country marketplace characteristics provide the best guide for growth potential that I can tap (vs. just size)? How can I access such markets both in front-end customer acquisition and back-end logistics and delivery? How do I organize to make that happen?

Trend analysis has been around for a while.

Is it keeping pace with marketplace dynamics? When and why is it not?

What can be done to bridge such gaps? For example, how can I better predict where and when new technologies may take off?

How do I organize to monitor and predict changes in my marketplace?

Is this marketing’s job or someone else’s? If so, who?

What are the costs and benefits of different approaches to doing so? Is simply trying to become more agile and respond quicker when changes occur a viable alternative to trying to better predict marketplace dynamics and change?

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organization?

Pepsi and other firms have done a wonderful job of incorporating design principles into their organization, not just to redesign products but also to look at systems, processes and workflow. What can we learn from Pepsi and other firms that have successfully deployed design thinking?

What is the dark side of design thinking? What does it create in terms of unintended problems for the firm?

Balancing incremental and radical innovation.

Firms need to compete in two time periods: the present and the future. How does one balance this dual, or ambidextrous, orientation? How do we fuel necessary innovation in the present, while investing in disruptive technologies, business models, partnerships, and customer experiences that set the course for the future? How do we foster innovation beyond the product—to the organization, networks, financial models, distribution channels and other forms of innovation—that can accelerate competing for the future? Can we and should we balance over time by sequentially switching our focus from radical to incremental (e.g., behave like a tech business and build new “platforms,” then add “modules”) rather than trying to do both at once?

How should we think about creating “platform” products?

It is not enough to have successful products. Successful firms think in terms of platforms, franchises and ecosystems. Think about American Girl. They are not simply products, but an entire ecosystem of products, information, brands and retail experiences. What are the lessons learned?

What are good ways to build prototypes and

How do I make sure we learn the right lessons from market tests?

How can I conduct such tests in a “fail-fast” way and still keep my intentions below the rivals’ radar?

What are good innovation metrics and how do I integrate them?

How do you differentiate between number and quality of innovations? Which, if any, innovation metrics should I build into reward and evaluation systems? For whom? Which innovation metrics may have unintended consequences? What are they? How can such negative outcomes best be avoided?

How should I organize to enhance innovation outcomes in my firm?

What determines when I should make vs. buy? Is there a viable business model in which I can effectively outsource innovation and just buy the ones I see as successful?

Can I still “win” financially by making such purchases and acquisitions? If so, how?

“fail fast”?

What do great firms do in this area? Can large firms like GE practice lean-start up models, or is it almost impossible for large firms to implement? Do large firms need to implement things differently?

Firms like Netflix, or even personal brands such as Madonna and Justin Timberlake, have successfully managed across two time periods.

In effect, they have re-invented themselves to “fit” into a new competitive space. What can we learn from these firms or brands?

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The Seven Big Problems

How do I successfully incorporate design principles into my

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Sales enablement is one of the most complex and common challenges facing businesses, and without a plan to

achieve it, it can be a roadblock to revenue growth. Tech-based solutions and CRM systems make claims of solving for sales and marketing misalignment, but seasoned consultant Christine Crandell, president of New Business Strategies (NBS), says enablement starts from the top down, with both an acknowledgement that the customer is in control of their journey and a willingness to accommodate that path.

Her methodology, which she refers to as the “Seller’s Compass,” grew out of necessity.

As a CMO at technology company Ariba during the company’s customer-focused turnaround in 2007, she found it difficult to promise to her CFO that the marketing team could deliver in revenue what it was allotted in the budget. Four years spent unraveling that Gordian knot, as she calls it, and she emerged with a process for customer alignment that works for every sector from higher education to B-to-B. Marketing News caught up with Crandell to learn how sales and marketing teams can find their true north.

You’ve been with NBS for 20 years, helping companies improve customer retention by focusing on expectations. How have you seen the challenge of sales enablement evolve over that time period alongside the evolution of customer expectations?

Let’s go back 20 years. There was a very different environment at play in which the salesperson was very much viewed by the buyer as the source of information.

We didn’t have the wealth or breadth of the Internet we have today. We didn’t have the access to information that we have today. In many ways, particularly in the B-to-B world, those salespeople were the conduit for information to buyers—and that was everything from in-depth analysis to white papers. There were tight relationships between vendor and buyer because it was symbiotic. If we look at what’s happened since then, it hasn’t just been the rise of the Internet and the ubiquitous nature of information. It really has been also a backlash from buyers who spent a lot of money on technology in the 1990s and early 2000s … only to find it didn’t work, they didn’t get the ROI, and, in many cases, there were personal consequences as a result. There was this skepticism that started to rise, meaning [buyers are] no longer viewing the vendor as [their] primary conduit of information, as [their] primary confidant, as [their] primary coach to help [them] be successful. [They]

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now no longer need the salesperson because [they] can now turn to [their] social graph, [they] can turn to the Internet, and [they] can get access to the information that the salesperson doesn’t even have access to.

That was the fundamental pivot that happened in the economy when the buyer, who really was always in control and just never knew it, basically said, “I now no longer need the salesperson, I now no longer trust marketing, I now no longer trust the salesperson.

I will forge my own experience. I will make my own decision.” That is the environment we’re in today. We went from an environment in which the salesperson had very clear role, and the value chain was very clear, to a role today in which marketing and sales have a very secondary role as it relates to that buyer achieving their particular outcome.

Now, for sales and marketing, the enablement part of this is not about generating more content, and it’s not about generating more tools. It’s really about gaining credibility and trust in the eyes of those buyers, and doing it on their terms. That is a very different game than it was 20 years ago.

The Seller’s Compass methodology suggests salespeople build trust by delivering an experience customers expect. How do marketers build trust when consumers have come to expect

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ri Ch

content marketing, they have the literacy to recognize it, and they often disregard it as advertising? How do marketers approach this new educated and somewhat wary consumer?

Let’s shift from seeing the world through the eyes of the vendor to seeing the world through the eyes of the buyer. … That wariness is symptomatic of vendors that really don’t get it. Even though the customer controls the relationship, there is this belief, and it’s very prevalent within the customer experience management technology space, that you, the vendor, can actually craft the journey your customer will go on. That’s total nonsense. That’s why [customers are] getting bombarded with all of this [content]. Because the vendor has bought into this belief from customer experience software and CRM vendors.

The vendors who are actually very successful step back and say “I get it.”

A while back, I had spoken with the CMO of HP Software. He’s very progressive. I said, “What is it you guys are doing differently in terms of marketing?” and his response was, [they] stopped fighting the customer and trying to control the customer. … [They asked customers], “What is the journey that you go on, and how can we play in that journey?” And that is the fundamental shift that companies need to make. This is where sales and marketing have a completely new role in this relationship. It’s not looking at it through the eyes of the vendor, but it’s stepping back and saying, “I need to go understand and walk in the shoes of my customer.” ... Companies that do that are seeing phenomenal growth without additional significant investment in product features. … The customer will reward you for aligning and understanding what they want to achieve and enabling [them to achieve it].

In your experience, where does the understanding of buyer experience and customer expectations break down in organizations?

There [should be] no line between the border of my company and my customer. ... [I should] engage in co-creation with [my] customers on everything from marketing to company strategy to products.

Organizations that have a philosophy that comes from the CEO, that’s baked into their culture, have a much more holistic understanding of the customer and the salesmarketing partnership to enable that customer is very fluid and very effective. In the case where the philosophy of the CEO is that [enablement] is a marketing thing or a sales thing ... you see the rub between sales and marketing

st

in

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an Cr

dell

because the ownership of that customer relationship has been delegated to some part of the company that really doesn’t [oversee sales and marketing] nor the engagement with the customer.

The smarter CEOs who philosophically might not be there yet but have seen their revenues decline, regardless of how many CMOs they’ve replaced, and how many chief revenue officers they’ve replaced, and how many acquisitions they’ve done to buy revenue, those are the ones who have this wakeup call and are the most rapid in saying, … “We now understand the price of not understanding our customer and not aligning to our customer and enabling them.”

There have been differing opinions about to whom sales enablement reports within a business, especially on small teams. Who should take the lead on sales enablement: marketing or someone else? Is this an initiative for more than the sales and marketing departments?

If you have a very strong and seasoned CMO who is progressive and has a relationship with the CEO in which the CEO truly understands the role of marketing, which is a very strategic role, then it makes sense for that project to be initiated by marketing because they’re able to have much broader access to customers. Marketing tends to have a much broader view of the customer lifecycle. In cases where marketing is relegated to nothing more than tactical execution of activities often defined by what sales wants, you may have the sales organization be in a much better position. I find that to be a minority. In those particular cases where marketing is not very strong and sales rules the roost, what you find is that your customer service and your customer support organization are in a much stronger position to undertake this understanding and to push it from the back-end up into the sales process.

“There is this belief … that you, the vendor, can actually craft the journey your customer will go on.

That’s total nonsense.”

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It seems much of the friction in sales enablement does come down to finger pointing. What are some of the biggest contributors to the disconnect between marketing and sales? Are they the same among small and large operations?

The skills you hire in marketers are different than the skills you hire in sales, and as a result, they are motivated differently and they have a very different language.

When salespeople talk about a lead, they may have a very different mental definition of a lead than a marketer.

That marketer could be talking about an enquiry, an MQL (marketing qualified lead), or SAL (sales accepted lead). We wind up having the case of Venus and Mars where we may be using the same language, but we’re really two very different people, and we have two very different languages.

The other source of this disconnect is compensation.

Sales is driven by the deal. I call them revenue junkies.

Marketers aren’t compensated that way. They might have a base salary, and they might have a bonus that may or may not be tied to some metric that sales is compensated on. … A lot of companies today are giving marketing a quota, and they’re drilling that quota down to product marketers and demand generation [marketers], to tie what marketing needs to focus on, their performance and their bonus compensation, more closely to what sales is also being compensated on.

The third [source of friction] is cultural. In many organizations, sales gets this hall pass on bad behavior.

Anything goes because they bring in the revenue, and marketing is often the stepchild—especially in budgeting where you have a zero-sum game. There’s this annual debate that says, “If we don’t put this money into marketing, we could hire this many more salespeople.”

It sets up this adversarial relationship between sales and marketing. What I’m seeing in some companies is that budgeting is done at the market level, and sales and marketing create their consolidated budget as one entity.

Marketing has input on what revenue numbers should be for a product or market, and sales has inputs on what the route to market should be and how much ought to be invested in repeat business versus new acquisition. That is a way of starting to tear those barriers down.

The next piece is in the business planning process.

Often marketing and sales are measured by very different KPIs. In best practice, you find that there are shared metrics. … It could be number of new customers, it could be reduction of churn by a certain percentage.

Having these shared objectives usually causes these two organizations to resolve their differences in language, compensation, touchpoints—who’ll do what when and

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who’s accountable to whom for what—and that gets them on the road to actually functioning as one team.

The majority of salespeople feel marketing does not enable sales. One 2013 survey by Sirius Decisions suggested 60-70% of marketingproduced B-to-B content isn’t used. Is the traditional role of the marketer in line with the business objective to generate revenue? If not, should the next generation of marketers be thinking differently about their contribution to the business? Do you think it’s up to marketers to redefine their role?

I absolutely do. We all talk about how sales isn’t very productive and [there’s] this huge debate about how predictive analytics has made sales lazy, but we don’t talk about marketing. There’s this plethora of tech and new approaches, everything from ABM (account-based marketing) to you name it. It really comes down to the marketer not taking the easy way out and starting to ask the tough questions. That’s my biggest beef with marketers: Just as they are pointing the finger at sales and saying, “Sales is waiting for the predictive analytics to tell them which deal to go chase,” marketers are equally sitting there and saying “My marketing automation system said this campaign performed, so the leads ought to be closed, and I’m not going to question the results.” Marketers are not questioning what the technology is telling them, and they’re not questioning what they’re hearing from customers. In fact, many marketers never go out on sales calls and never go out and talk to the customer. … Until they go and do that, they’re not going to magically fix themselves. There’s a lot of blame that needs to sit with marketers because they aren’t undergoing self-reflection to see how they can improve themselves.

How can marketers incentivize sales to use enablement materials and marketinggenerated content?

Generally, if sales doesn’t use what marketing produces, no amount of arm twisting will convince sales to use that tool. It’s just a bad tool. It misses the mark. I always chuckle when I see sales enablement platforms that have baked-in gamification as a way of getting salespeople to use the tool, because if it was really worthwhile, salespeople would be using that tool. What’s often missing in this equation is teaching sales how to

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effectively use that tool. Marketing populates the sales enablement platform with videos, form letters, content, and a lot of stuff gets stuck out there. What doesn’t happen is that granular use case that says if you have a buyer in this industry, that fits this persona, that’s in this particular part of the journey, and has asked these questions, then this is the playbook and these are the pieces you ought to use and for whom you ought to use them. It becomes a decoder ring for the sales organization, but that’s often what’s missing.

If marketers aren’t providing the right information in their materials, what are they offering that’s not lining up?

Classically what will happen—and this is my beef with lead scoring—[is that marketers will] have all these campaigns. In some cases leads may be journey-based, in many cases they’re not. And just because a prospect attended two webinars and downloaded three white papers, they accumulated the points that have been set in the marketing automation system and reached that lead threshold. That gets flipped over to sales. While sales may see Joe Smith at XYZ Company, what’s missing is context.

What is this company about? What do we know about Joe Smith? How should we have that first conversation?

What questions should sales be asking of marketing and what questions should marketers ask of sales to create the best materials and resources?

One of the questions marketing should ask of sales is, “What is actually happening in that interaction between the salesperson and the customer? In essence, repeat for me what happened on that last sales call.” Half of it is just guiding sales to make sure they find out not just what [the customer’s] problem is and [his] budget, but [his desired] outcome and how [he is] measuring success.

The questions need to be focused on the customer, not what sales did or did not do. What behavior is creating a positive reaction in the customer and what is creating a negative reaction? Marketing needs to ask sales what content the customer asks for. And when sales gives the customer a white paper, what is the reaction? They need to draw in sales to get feedback through the eyes of the customer on marketing work and whether it was actually helpful [to sales].

On the sales side, they need to go back to marketing and say, “Before you give me this lead, I need a full

“that waS the fundamental pivot that happened in the economy when the buyer, who really waS alwayS in control and juSt never Knew it, baSically Said, ‘i now no longer need the SaleSperSon, i now no longer truSt marKeting ... i will forge my own experience, i will forge my own path. i will maKe my own deciSion.’” background on this company. What’s their past interaction with us? Have they been on our website?

What did they engage in? Did they download white papers? Did they do a webinar? Did they come to our trade show? Can you give me a longitudinal history of our engagement with the customer? Can you give me a profile of this buyer? … Equip me to have an intellectual conversation about emerging issues for the customer.”

You’ve talked about the best sales enablement as a product of strong marketing leadership. In organizations where marketing is a small shop or doesn’t have a C-suite representative, is it possible to optimize sales enablement?

It’s easier to do in a smaller company because it’s easier to communicate. … Having a small team, you can get everyone in the room once a week and start to change that conversation. Everyone can focus on what happened to the pipeline this week, what happened to orders that closed this week, what happened to outbound calls to prospects, how many of them were fruitful, and what it was that the call center needed. Marketing can come in and say, “Sales, what is it that you need to be more successful?” It’s much easier at a smaller company because the conversation doesn’t involve hundreds of people. People can very quickly figure out how to do one or two things differently, see if they work, and move forward. The key is a CEO who is very supportive of experimentation. By sales and marketing figuring it out themselves, they learn to appreciate each other and place less focus on who did what wrong, and more on what happens to that customer and how they make that customer happy. m

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sales and marketing alignment

knowledgebase

10 Minutes With

Ray Kemper

Chief Marketing Officer at Televerde

By Hal Conick | Staff Writer

 hconick@ama.org

W

hile the alignment of sales and marketing sometimes seems an insurmountable goal, Ray Kemper, CMO of B-to-B lead-generation agency Televerde, finds joy in the challenges of bringing together the two teams.

Over his career, Kemper has worked in a variety of roles and come to enjoy the flexibility that comes with his marketing career. He’s worked as the global director of marketing for Bing Search at Microsoft, senior director of channel marketing at AT&T Mobility and now is the first CMO at Televerde. “We’ve had directors of marketing and marketing activities, but as the company continues to grow and expand globally, the stronger establishment of the marketing functions at Televerde was critical,” he says.

More than anything, Kemper touts the necessity of common goals between sales and marketing. It’s critical, he says, to agree to a common source of data, a common goal and a common language. Marketing News caught up with Kemper to learn a bit more about how sales and marketing can efficiently and effectively come together.

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sales and marketing alignment

Q

You’ve been in the game for about 20 years. Have you seen the way sales and marketing work together change? Has your view of how they interact changed over time?

A

It really has. The traditional silos are breaking down between sales and marketing. I think as so many marketing technology tools have come aboard, I’ve definitely seen a lot of change. … Marketing technology allows marketers to be much more focused on the impact and the results that their activities are having. The data and the analytics have led a really strong focus on alignment with sales based on what’s driving the quality sales leads and the ones in particular that are most likely to convert.

Q

You said in a blog post, citing research from Marketo, that aligned teams are 67% better at

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closing deals and 20% better at growth in annual revenue. This makes aspects like software integration and communication seem essential, but many marketing and sales departments still aren’t in tune. Why?

A

Analytics has made that understanding of what the levers of growth are [stronger], so marketing is more focused on that now, but I think there are a lot of key issues in alignment.

At Televerde, we conduct sales and marketing alignment workshops with our clients as part of our demand generation and sales acceleration solutions. Honestly, our success in contract renewals depends upon alignment with sales and marketing.

If we are generating a sales pipeline with our teleservice sales development agencies and integrated campaigns, it’s only going to be successful if that sales person that catches it converts on that sale and shows that ROI.

There are [a couple of] primary issues on alignment. One is just agreeing to a common language. [What is] a lead to marketing, sales might not think that’s a lead. The common language of what a lead is, what an inquiry is, what a qualified lead is, what an accepted lead for sales is—agreeing on a common language is definitely a place to start. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It needs to be clear, simple and intuitive. Common language is a big foundation.

The critical piece is alignment of goals. Traditionally, sales has a goal and marketing might have an influenced goal, but at the end of the day if sales misses or marketing misses, one or the other will have to make up for it. It’s better to set the tone at the first of each year to jointly adopt an overall goal and work backwards to see which channel will influence which part of this goal.

You’re always focused on the overall goal versus the different components.

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sales and marketing alignment

You can mix up the components of the channels that are delivering in order to reach that goal. That’s where the focus is.

It forms the teamwork instead of saying, “Oh, you didn’t meet your goal, I’m going to finger point” as we reach the end of the year.

Q

So it’s more of a focus on the process versus the outcome?

A

That alignment on the overall revenue goals allows you to just focus on the levers that drive that revenue and the growth you need. [You need] a clear understanding of what’s going to help you reach that goal.

Q

How did you align the two departments when you first came to Televerde? Did they have a good common language and common goals?

knowledgebase

“That alignment between sales and marketing is even more important with all the new channels of information and the way clients are self-educating along the buyer’s journey.”

A

That’s one of the very first things I did when sitting down with the head of sales: we looked at what the overall goal and what the levers of driving that revenue are. [I wanted to set] the tone for how we would do it together, and [figure out] how to help marketing as well as sales drive that goal.

Today, there are so many ways to get leads and [many ways] we touch customers or potential prospects. …

That alignment between sales and marketing is even more important with all the new channels of information and

the way clients are self-educating along the buyer’s journey.

Q

Does that kind of environment mean sales and marketing departments need to stay flexible and reassess to figure out new ways to appeal to consumers?

A

Absolutely. I think the open communication is key as well as alignment goals at the first of a fiscal year, but ongoing meetings between sales and marketing with the health of the

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sales and marketing alignment

“By looking at the health of the sales pipeline, you can also look at what may be breaking down and what has been your traditional conversion rate from a marketing-qualified lead to a sales-accepted lead to a salesqualified lead to a closed one.” sales pipeline at the tip of the agenda and for discussion is key to the focus. …

When you meet with sales, I’d recommend that’s done weekly or biweekly, to discuss the health of the sales pipeline and activities that

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are going to drive leads. It really maintains that communication level. … By looking at the health of the sales pipeline, you can also look at what may be breaking down and what has been your traditional conversion rate from

a marketing-qualified lead to a salesaccepted lead to a sales-qualified lead to a closed one. You’re able to see where there might be some challenges along that pipeline.

Q

That makes sense, taking it point by point to have a full view of the progress.

A

That kind of structure is pretty key. ... Before the marketing technology was fully there, for marketing a lead was an inquiry—a “contact us” form—coming in. For sales, a lot of times those would be unqualified leads that were tire kickers.

You need that level of ... inside sales support before it gets to your sales team to qualify and nurture a lead until it’s ready for your sales team to act on it. Particularly with all of the avenues for generating leads these days, that additional layer really makes a difference. m

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amacareers

work/life balance

The Work/Life Balance Myth

By Tom Gimbel

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ork. Family. Kids. Hobbies. I get it. Finding time for everything isn’t always easy, but searching for a “balance” isn’t going to give you the answer you’re looking for.

Work-life balance is a topic that’s debated constantly. What does it look like? How do you achieve it? What careers and roles are best for it? But the fact of the matter is those conversations are a waste of time.

Work-life balance doesn’t exist, and that shouldn’t be viewed as a negative thing.

When things are in balance, they’re static. There’s no room to excel in one area or another, and that’s not the way to a fulfilling career or personal life. To be great in both those areas, they have to co-exist. Work-life integration means work-life happiness.

A lot of people are fulfilled by their jobs, and they identify with their career.

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They like surrounding themselves with hard-working people. They like learning something new every day. They like staying up to date on the latest trends.

They like accomplishing things that seemed out of reach at one point. They want to keep working hard because they enjoy what they do every day and they want to stay competitive in their role.

The key to finding work-life happiness is doing something you’re passionate about. When you’re in a role you love, you won’t be looking for an arbitrary balance that doesn’t exist.

If you hate your job, you’re not going to want to think about it outside the

office, and that’s going to slow your professional growth. You’re more likely to fall in love with your career and want it to be part of your life when you look at it as more than just a job.

Over the years I’ve had plenty of candidates come into my office and say to me in an interview that they want worklife balance. What I really hear is, “I don’t want to put in the extra effort to excel in my role and become great.” They’re already eliminating the possibility of loving the role because they’re already thinking about clocking out.

Candidates who really want the role, and who really want to grow and excel, view their career as a contract deal. They not only want to get on board, but also want to keep proving they’re the right person for the job.

In marketing roles, especially, you have to invest in your career and put in time to learn and develop. Whether you’re on the analytical or creative side, the world of marketing is constantly evolving. You have to go all in and stay current; you can’t just go through the day-to-day motions. The integration part happens naturally. I don’t believe in life outside of work being any different than life inside the office. When you look at the two as one, you’ll be much happier in your career and in your personal life. m

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AWARDS

The William L. Wilkie Award

T

he William L. Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” Award honors marketing thinkers who have significantly contributed to the understanding and appreciation for marketing’s potential to improve the world. The award is a major academic achievement for the field, recognizing marketing thought leaders whose conceptual developments, substantive applications, or empirical studies served to provide significant bases for improvements in the world.

The American Marketing Association Foundation (AMAF) named Dr. Thomas C. Kinnear, Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan as recipient of the 2016 Wilkie Award.

“Tom is an exemplary winner of this award. His career accomplishments reflect his appreciation for the positive roles of marketing for firms, as well as its strong broader impacts. Of special note, his vision in founding the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing has provided the much needed venue—at nearly 700 articles and climbing—that’s both stimulated and preserved scholarship on marketing and society through the past 34 years,” says William L. Wilkie, the Nathe Professor of Marketing at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. “Congratulations to this fine marketing scholar.”

Kinnear holds an undergraduate degree from Queen’s University in Canada, an MBA from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, editor of the Journal of Marketing, and vice president of both publications and education at the AMA. His research has been published in numerous academic journals and he has

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written marketing textbooks on the principles of marketing, marketing research and promotional strategy.

Kinnear has also served as a consultant to the Federal Trade Commission and is currently serving as a member of the National Advertising Review Board (NARB), the final court of appeals for non-government enforcement of deceptive and misleading

advertising cases. Kinnear is currently CEO and chairman of the board of directors of the Venture Michigan Corporation, a $450 million venture capital fund aimed at economic development of technological firms.

As the recipient of the 2016 Wilkie Award, Kinnear joins previous winners including Philip Kotler, Jagdish Sheth and Alan Andreasen.

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Awards

amacommunity

The Erin Anderson Award

T

he Erin Anderson Award, established in 2008, was created to honor the life of the late Erin Anderson, a widely respected scholar from INSEAD whose research made significant contributions to the marketing discipline. Recipients are chosen based on the impact of their research publications and on the degree to which they exceed expectations in mentoring doctoral students and junior faculty members.

Cait Lamberton, associate professor of business administration and Ben R. Fryrear Faculty Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, is the recipient of the 2016 Erin Anderson Award from the AMAF. An expert on consumer behavior, self-control, sharing behaviors, assortment size and structure, and the role of interpersonal and social relationships on decision making, Lamberton has been a member of the Katz school faculty since 2008. She has taught courses in consumer behavior and project-based marketing in the undergraduate, MBA, doctoral and executive education programs at Pitt’s business school. Lamberton’s research has been published in a variety of top marketing journals.

She recently co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology (2015) and also works on consulting projects for the U.S. Department of Education focused on applying behavioral science to post-secondary school attendance and outcomes.

Beyond her scholarly work, Lamberton is dedicated to mentoring others. In addition to acting as the Katz Marketing Ph.D. program coordinator, she has co-authored with multiple doctoral students at Katz and other schools, has coordinated and presented in the field’s major doctoral symposia, and was part of a team that

obtained grant funding for the field’s first Design Thinking workshop for junior women in the marketing academy, held last year. She has been invited three times to be a Faculty Fellow for the AMA-Sheth Doctoral Consortium and provides behind-the-scenes mentoring as an associate editor for both the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology.

“Cait deserves the award based on her research and mentoring alone,” says Leigh McAlister, Chair

of the 2016 Erin Anderson Awards committee. “But, like the person for whom the award is named, Cait doesn’t just ‘meet the requirements’ for awards. She goes above and beyond in seemingly everything. Like Erin, Cait is a beacon for the field.”

Both the William L. Wilkie and the Erin Anderson awards were presented at the AMA’s 2016 Winter Educators’ Conference in Las Vegas. For more on the AMA’s virtual and in-person events, including conferences and webcasts, visit AMA.org.

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backpage

EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS

“aT THe enD of THe DaY,

the most important question we can ask as a marketer is, ‘Why did someone buy?’”

Q

Technology has a lot of potential, but has there been any deviation between sales and technology? Where have the trouble spots been?

baCkGround Technology has meant a paradigm shift across every aspect of marketing, but sales and marketing alignment may be the most easily quantifiable.

If the departments aren’t in step with each other, it will almost certainly be reflected in the numbers

Mike neumeier, owner and principal of arketi Group, a B-to-B PR and digital marketing agency, said the integration technology into the sales and marketing department has been met with a mix of opportunities and challenges. Small companies can measure how marketing affects sales, but are sales and marketing speaking the same language and making the best use of these pieces of technology? Are qualified leads slipping through the cracks because there’s not a closed loop between the sales and marketing departments?

Neumeier has spent his career creating and delivering plans to help organizations generate revenue and growth.

Companies must use the new technology, data and multiple channels at their disposal to drive more traffic, conversions and revenue, he says.

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a

We work with tech companies in the B-to-B space. Say you have a company that has a marketing department that has decided they’re going to deploy a marketing automation tool. … The potential for the biggest disconnect is not around the technology itself but how you’re implementing best practices around things like lead scoring. When does a prospect become a marketing-qualified lead and when does it get pushed over to the sales department and become a salesqualified lead? Sometimes marketing thinks, oh, we pushed 500 leads to the sales department last month, and the sales department might say, “Well, five of them were good.” That begs the discussion: What does “good” mean? Is there a disconnect from how marketing describes a good lead and sales describes a good lead?

If there’s a disconnect between those two, who’s going to win? Sales will win every time. As marketers, it behooves us to have that conversation. … You have to say, “For three months, let’s work with this criteria and see if it works for you guys and let’s tweak it. Let’s tweak how the lead scoring goes. Let’s tweak how there’s a threshold at which this type of a prospect gets popped over to the sales team so they can start following up.”

Because you’re going to learn.

Q

it’s almost like there needs to be a consistent re-measurement between sides,

like a new language must be built between sales and marketing.

a

We have a whole practice that works with companies that implements marketing automation technology. Worry less about picking the tech you’re going to use, and worry more about the concept and how you’re going to use it inside your company.

When you start using technology like this, you might be guessing. You might say, “This is what a qualified lead should look like.” Now we have analysis and we have a tool; three months down the line, that will change, because we’ll be smarter.

Q

How do you handle sales and marketing alignment in your business?

a

For the marketer, when is the last time you picked up a phone and talked to a customer? When’s the last time you’ve been in your retail or selling environment and watched the sales process? Sometimes marketers get so busy that they forget that they really need to be talking to customers. They really need to know why customers buy.

At the end of the day, the most important question we can ask as a marketer is, “Why did someone buy?” If we can understand why someone bought en masse, then we have a good part of the sale equation. This is what resonated with them. This is why they bought—maybe it wasn’t price, maybe it wasn’t convenience, maybe it was something else—and really understanding that. As marketers, we can never spend too much time talking to customers to understand that. m — Hal Conick

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