The central theme in my evangelism over the last few years has been stressing the importance of B2B marketers’ adopting a more ‘buyer-centric’ approach in their demand generation efforts – or as I often term it, ‘putting the buyer back at the center of B2B demand generation.’ It’s at the core of the approach we take with our clients at Left Brain DGA. And it’s the central theme of my new book, Balancing the Demand Equation, which releases on Amazon on September 19 (this coming Monday).
The core of the issue is simple: In a social, Web 2.0 world, sellers have little, direct control over the information consumed by a buyer during his/her buyer education process. Instant online access to product information and reviews and to peer input via Web search and social media applications has more than ever shifted power from sellers to buyers. Thus the ‘content consumption’ journey, as we term it at Left Brain DGA, that each B2B buyer goes through in making a purchase decision is very personal … very one-to-one. This has led to the rise of a distinctly-new B2B buyer – one I term ‘Buyer 2.0’ in my upcoming book – for whom legacy, product-centric, one-size-fits-all, mass-marketing approaches to B2B demand generation don’t work like they used to. Success with Buyer 2.0 requires that our demand generation be built bottoms-up – i.e., centered on the buyer, triggered by the buyer and one-to-one in the timing and scope of content delivered to that buyer – not top-down.
Buyer-centricity, thus, is the new strategy in B2B demand generation.
Fortunately, this changing dynamic in B2B marketing is conveniently occurring in tandem with significant innovation around marketing technology – particularly customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation. And adoption of these technologies is growing at a significant pace. Dreamforce – the annual user conference for Salesforce.com – had a record attendance of 45,000 people this year; meanwhile, growth in the marketing automation space, while it has slowed a bit, still clocked in at 55% year-over-year over the past year, according to analyst David Raab. Clearly CRM and marketing automation technology adoption is in its heyday.
Yet these technologies – while they have the buyer/customer in mind – were not originally designed to perpetuate ‘buyer-centricity,’ per se. Instead, they were originally designed to improve the operational efficiency of collecting buyer/customer insights in one place, of campaign execution and of the qualification of leads, while still leveraging the legacy, mass-marketing models I highlighted above. The truth is that the majority of B2B marketing organizations that adopt CRM and/or marketing automation continue to operate in a mass, ‘batch-and-blast’ mindset, and in fact, it is only in the last 2-3 years that marketing technology and B2B demand generation processes, together, have really begun to turn the corner toward buyer-centricity.
So when I look at a CRM or marketing automation platform and/or review a vendor’s news, this is what I’m looking for – evidence that we’re moving the bar. My critical lens? ‘How does this platform and/or update to the platform improve my ability as a B2B marketer to be more buyer-centric in my demand generation?’ Plain and simple.
And so it was through ‘lens’ – really looking for glimpses into how CRM and marketing automation infrastructure is enabling buyer-centricity – that I took in three days straight of Dreamforce 2011.
My first stop was listening to Salesforce.com’s latest announcements and analyzing their impact and implications for buyer-centric B2B demand generation.
Welcome to the Social Enterprise.
“Welcome to the social enterprise,” said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (Twitter: Benioff), using his opening keynote to frame his own company’s approach to this changing sales and marketing environment and to place context around Salesforce.com’s numerous announcements and acquisitions over the past year. In fact, to be honest, this was really the ‘big news’ at Dreamforce. There were certainly a number of product-feature-level and infrastructure-level announcements, but the big news was that Salesforce.com now has a vision for how CRM, together with its Chatter product, together with a bunch of social media product developments and acquisitions (including Radian6) all work together.
Benioff’s take is that the Web 2.0 buyer has changed priorities for corporations. He said today’s CEO must ask, “Am I doing enough to listen to the customer,” and he intimated that not doing this would one day lead to some CEO’s downfall.
“It’s more important to listen than ever before. It is,” said Benioff. “That’s the social revolution.”
Yet for a company that has spawned an ecosystem of marketing automation vendors and for an event that is probably the largest annual marketing automation conclave, Benioff’s angle on the ‘social enterprise’ has little to do with marketing or demand generation. He is focused more on sales, customer service and on employee collaboration. “It’s a social revolution, and it’s not just about consumers. It’s also about the Enterprise. … Our customers are social, our employees are social … what about our enterprises?” (What about our marketing … but I’ll come back to this.)
Benioff explained his belief that there is a ‘social divide’ today between those enterprises that ‘get it,’ and those that don’t. “How do we bridge this social divide?” asked Benioff, who used this as a jumping off point for weaving together a story of how Salesforce.com is addressing this ‘social divide’ with a three-step formula.
Benioff explained the Salesforce.com formula includes:
- Storing social data in the customer database
- Creating an employee social network
- Tapping customer and product social networks
What about driving and managing demand?
Benioff’s always-entertaining keynote was interesting. (PT Barnum would be proud.) But my appetite for B2B demand generation insights was completely unquenched, two-plus hours into his keynote.
My two takeaways from his keynote:
- One, clearly Benioff and Salesforce.com are not interested in moving the bar on marketing automation – a point that David Raab, who commented in his own post-event blog post, “Salesforce.com will leave marketing automation alone,” seems to agree with me on.
- Two, clearly I needed to sit down with the major marketing automation vendors and find out what they have been up to over the past year if I was going to garner any B2B demand generation insights from this year’s Dreamforce.
Buyer-centric Marketing Automation?
I subsequently spent a good portion of the next two days doing briefings with many of the leading marketing automation vendors.
I framed my conversations around the core question: ‘Has marketing automation moved us any closer to succeeding with buyer-centric B2B demand generation?’
Really. I wanted to see examples of new innovation from the leading marketing automation vendors that actually will make a difference in what I call ‘mass one-to-one’ interactions with B2B buyers. This means engaging, acquiring and nurturing buyers at a one-to-one, buyer-driven, automated level, but also scaling and optimizing this operation – the very ‘balance’ I talk about in my new book.
My other filter: I’m primarily focused on the enterprise use case – as is Left Brain DGA. This is our focus as a digital demand generation agency, so I was wanted to see capabilities that would make an appreciable difference in an enterprise environment.
So what did I hear? Three themes emerged.
> Theme #1: Connecting the dots between marketing program touches and revenue outcomes:
I highlight in Balancing the Demand Equation that a critical insight for modern demand generation is understanding the connection between our pattern of content offers as B2B marketers and the resultant revenue outcomes – something I refer to as “content elasticity of revenue.” B2B demand generation is driven by content offers; it’s the filament of all of our programs. So it’s critical that we know which offers – and in what sequence – are best suited to optimize a given revenue outcome. This is really the key to understanding what makes for a ‘marketing qualified’ or ‘sales ready’ lead. We obviously also want to understand what volume of these offers (as a function of list/database size and growth) and at what cost that we’re able to optimize our revenue results.
Enabling this insight is an area where many of the B2B marketing automation vendors are making signficant progress – albeit not yet delivering on what I might say is my full vision for content elasticity of revenue.
I spent some time with the Eloqua team taking a look at their Revenue Suite at Dreamforce. It’s software that leverages the platform’s ‘program builder’ and helps keep track of the revenue impact of marketing activities at various stages of a given demand generation program – so it helps a B2B marketer start to see the near-real-time revenue impact of marketing programs.
At the core of the Eloqua Revenue Suite are five key Revenue Performance Indicators – i.e., marketing program performance ‘snapshots’ at any given point in time – that Eloqua believes are critical to monitoring and managing revenue performance:
- Conversion: “For period X, what is my conversion rate through the funnel?”
- Reach: “For period X, what is my average database and funnel growth rate?”
- Return: “For period X, what is the average return on my campaign spend?”
- Value: “For period X, how has my total funnel value changed?”
- Velocity: “For period X, what is the average time to close?”
Of these five, there were two that I thought were the most aligned with buyer-centric demand generation and that most caught my attention.
The Reach Indicator is very interesting because it speaks to the relationship between our nurturing base of buyers and how that population – and the size and make-up of that population at different lead-qualification stages – impacts our revenue outcomes. So literally, how many buyers do I need to be nurturing at different stages of my lead qualification process at any given point in time to predictably meet or exceed my numbers?
Source: Eloqua
I also like the concept of the Value statistic – an insight most B2B marketers are likely not fully considering. For a given period, as B2B marketing programs come and go, what is the resultant revenue value of marketing programs? I.e., for what a B2B marketer is doing today, what amount of revenue is that activity likely to yield? It’s a different way to think about ROI because it gets to the total result (more of an NPV-like result than an ROI ratio or percentage-type result).
Source: Eloqua
For all five of these indicators Eloqua has been aggregating data across customers over time, so it is also able to provide benchmarks to show how a given organization is doing relative to its peers. This speaks both to Eloqua’s considerable experience and footprint with enterprises and their B2B demand generation programs over a number of years – which is a real value-add to any Eloqua customer.
One challenge I see with the benchmarking, though: It assumes that B2B marketing organizations all want to adopt the same (or a similar) funnel model, and this will not be the case over time, particularly as pre-MQL/SRL funnel models become more sophisticated. So depending on how an organization defines its funnel or ‘waterfall’ model, as SiriusDecisions refers to it, this data may or may not provide relevant benchmarks.
I also spent some time sitting down with Jon Miller at Marketo talking about his company’s own approach to ‘connecting the dots.’ One capability in Marketo I found most interesting – and in line with buyer-centric analysis – is the platform’s Program Analyzer.
Jon positioned Marketo’s approach by asking, “For any given program, what is success?” He highlighted that one challenge in B2B demand generation is that many of the acquisition sources that feed our nurturing programs play different roles in prospect nurturing and thus have different benchmarks and indicators of success, relative to the buyer. For example, you might analyze program performance of an event differently than a PPC program. But ultimately as B2B demand generators we want to normalize this performance – fitting it into our funnel model and breaking down its contribution to moving buyers forward in their processes at a one-to-one level – and we want to compare it against our entire marketing mix to find out what it takes to optimize our programs.
From what I saw, Marketo’s Program Analyzer is well-positioned to do this, and it ties back to the company’s overall Revenue Cycle Analytics vision. As Jon highlighted, not only can it help break down, “how many participated in the program, were acquired, were successes, then what’s my cost per X, ” but it can also address direct or indirect impact on revenue, as well as multiple attribution of content offers. Most importantly, the Program Analyzer can do this visually and with real-time, ‘mashed-up’ data, which helps a B2B marketer improve his/her analysis of programs and their impact.
One gap is that the Program Analyzer cannot today do the type of ‘critical path analysis’ necessary for truly analyzing and identifying the optimal path of content nurturing for a given buyer persona. So it’s still not yet going to help you construct a better multi-step nurturing-dialogue thread; however, it’s a good step in the right direction.
I finally spent some time sitting down with Bryan Brown at Silverpop, who showed me the latest B2B enhancements to the Engage platform – particularly around the revenue impact of marketing activities.
Brown framed Silverpop’s philosophy to closing the loop by saying, “That’s what really marketing automation is meant to do – tell me where to make my spend.” He continued, “How do you accelerate them through the stages of the cycle. … Tell me what’s turning into revenue for me.” And so he explained how Silverpop is evolving its analytics – beyond its linear, email marketing roots – to analyze the multitude of engagements with a buyer across inbound and outbound nurturing programs and to identify the revenue impact of specific programs.
Source: Silverpop
On this, Brown picked up on a theme also noted by Miller at Marketo, and that is the fact that successful B2B demand generation programs are multi-touch, not one and done; thus, our analytics – particularly our sense of a given program’s contribution to revenue – must take this into account.
Silverpop is able to show analytics both in its platform, as well as in Salesforce.com, but in an interesting twist, Brown also showcased the new ability of Silverpop to export data into pre-formatted Excel Pivot Charts and Tables. Although I’m a big proponent of real-time reporting, the truth is that in-system dashboards in Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop typically have a lot of limitations. (Which is why we typically use platforms such as Tableau to display demand generation performance results to our clients.) That’s why I must admit that as a B2B marketer I enjoy being able to analyze and manipulate data in Excel – especially ‘Pivoting’ the data – and to do really targeted dives into the impact of specific programs on specific buyers in the overall demand generation program, sometimes this is necessary. So it was great to see
One challenge I saw in what Brown showed me: The Silverpop analytics interface in Salesforce.com still seems to show rather rudimentary metrics – versus the very cool, buyer-centric metrics Brown showed me in our session and in the Excel Pivot Tables/Charts. The buyer-centric, multi-touch view of demand generation needs to catch up with the view that is shown in Salesforce.com.
> Theme #2: Tapping into the power in B2B buying of peer recommendation and influence via social media:
The number-one factor in most B2B purchases – highlighted in survey after survey – is peer interaction, and there’s increasing evidence that B2B buyers today are going to social media as a proxy for this type of insight. For example, TechTarget’s 2010 study of ‘hyper-active’ IT buyers noted that the number-one reason IT buyers visit “online IT communities (i.e., forums, blogs, wikis) and social networking websites” – cited by 67% of respondents – is to “hear opinions from peers.” It’s also important to point out that this type of peer/social activity tends to dominate much of the upstream, top-of-funnel engagement in B2B demand generation. Yet the first step in many nurturing programs is our asking B2B buyers to take a leap from this activity to being ready to be nurtured via email – a disconnect that needs remedying.
Silverpop wants to change this – introducing Social Sign In for B2B demand generation programs. Instead of asking for an email address as the first step in a progressive profiling effort, B2B marketers can allow a prospect to sign in with his/her handle from any of twenty different social media networks, including LinkedIn and Twitter – two networks that are important in B2B marketing.
Source: Silverpop
The company claims that social sign-in as an option can boost form conversion rates by 10-50%. It also sees this as an opportunity to better capture – and be able to score/route around – behavioral interactions with social media content. It lowers the bar, offers a different mechanism for contact and it allows the B2B vendor to begin to collect the very social data that Benioff advocates must today also become a part of our marketing data sets.
This is a nice addition to some of Silverpop’s existing social/peer-recommendation-enabling features, such as Share to Social and Forward to a Friend. The only gap I see is that while Silverpop aspires to be a behavioral marketing engine, according to channel VP Will Schnabel, the company has not yet really thought through how this social behavioral data should impact real/live scoring for B2B demand generation programs. So this is an area where they will need to close the gap at a best practice level.
Eloqua also announced new social features the week of Dreamforce in the form of its new Social Suite – news that was so popular on the floor of Dreamforce that Eloqua’s PR person had a hard time fitting me in for a demo!
Eloqua’s stated goal in a press release is to empower influencers to drive word-of-mouth marketing. “In today’s revenue cycle ‘the message is the messenger,’” noted their release, “making purchase influencers as important as the prospect’s title or behavior. Eloqua’s new features allow B2B marketers to consider an entirely new dimension – the individual’s social persona – when capturing, tracking and scoring leads.”
Among the key features of Social Suite that were announced (and that I felt were particularly compelling to buyer-centric demand generation) are:
- Klout segmentation, which “adds each prospect’s level of influence into the database and enables Eloqua to score leads based on their social activity,” according to Eloqua
- Social sign-on, which is similar to the Silverpop announcement
- Social sharing tools, which “facilitates the spread of promotions by allowing recipients to share relevant campaigns across their social graph, according to Eloqua
These are all very exciting additions to an already-robust, enterprise-grade Eloqua portfolio. The only drawback is that it’s not clear which is available on Eloqua 9 versus 10, and while Eloqua 10 has the stronger interface, it is not yet at full parity with Eloqua 9’s features. So – as is the case with any marketing automation vendor (and why I don’t want to single out Eloqua on this issue, per se) – it’s important that these features be available across all currently-sold platforms so that all customers can take full advantage of the capabilities.
> Theme #3: Buyer-centricity: Not Just for Enterprises
In addition to my conversations with Eloqua, Silverpop and Marketo, I also spent some time catching up with Pardot and Hubspot. (BTW: I also tried to connect with Neolane at Dreamforce, but was not able to do so, which is the only reason they’re not included here.)
Let’s be clear: Both Pardot and Hubspot are very open about the fact that they do not target (or pretend to target) enterprises. But both deliver some pretty robust and enterprise-grade capabilities that can help SMBs be more buyer-centric – which explains why both have seen explosive growth over the past two years.
And both – as the real leaders in the SMB segment – have been on opposite but complementary paths – with Pardot taking an outbound/marketing automation platform and layering in inbound capabilities, meanwhile with Hubspot taking an inbound marketing platform and layering in outbound/automation capabilities.
Adam Blitzer at Pardot sat down with me one evening and shared some of their recent focus and growth, and I was impressed – especially with their nearly doubling in size over the past year.
A major focus of Pardot with its clients is migrating them from viewing batch-and-blast email offers as the primary method of lead acquisition to getting SMBs to operate in a more iterative, nurturing fashion and to communicate across both inbound and outbound channels. For example, Pardot has integrated social directly into the platform, and Pardot customers can literally schedule and send Tweets directly from the platform. Pardot also can help build a social profile for a prospect and push that into CRM – rounding out the picture of engagement with a prospect.
I also sat down with Kirsten Knipp at Hubspot on the show floor at Dreamforce and she walked me through Hubspot’s announcements over the past year.
The major shift for Hubspot on the ‘buyer-centricity’ front is taking an inbound marketing platform and beginning to layer in classic outbound, marketing automation functions. “Inbound marketing and marketing automation go hand in hand,” commented Knipp to me. And she characterized the complement of the two as making the entire, integrated demand generation activity “more personalized.”
Hubspot acquired a company called Performable in June of this year. Performable has brought semantic, intelligent marketing automation logic and processing to the Hubspot platform. This enables Hubspot – which before was a collection of inbound tools but had limited capabilities to automate and/or trigger marketing (beyond auto-responders and drip nurturing) – to operate as a true marketing automation platform. “The Performable technology is really the brain, it’s the logic,” commented Knipp.
Hubspot hopes that the collection of their inbound capabilities, together with true marketing automation via Performable, will enable their customers to do truly one-to-one marketing. “We don’t want that someone at the end of the day feels like they’ve been spammed,” explained Knipp.
So buyer-centricity doesn’t require a multi-million-dollar annual B2B demand generation budget. SMBs can get sophisticated too, and Pardot and Hubspot are helping make this a reality – which is great.
Closing Thoughts.
So the truth is that despite its muddled roots, every year marketing automation technology is in fact moving us closer to buyer-centric B2B demand generation. Some still believe marketing automation is a tactical capability, but I believe opinion is shifting … helped along now that Eloqua has filed its IPO (read more here from David Raab and here from DemandGen Report).
And much of this movement is along the lines of connecting the dots between content offers and revenue outcomes, as well as tying our one-to-one engagement and nurturing of buyers together across both inbound and outbound channels (and well beyond mere email).
This is why I believe marketing automation remains the core of successful, buyer-centric B2B demand generation. And this is why – as buyer-centric B2B demand generation becomes a more strategic activity inside companies –marketing automation technology infrastructure also is becoming strategic.
Dreamforce 2011 reminded me that this evolution is a reality.
Yet all the features in the world are for naught without B2B marketers that have the skillset and knowledge to successfully leverage these capabilities and to build perpetual, buyer-driven demand generation programs. Choosing the right marketing automation platform is critical, but this is why succeeding with B2B demand generation continues to be primarily about non-technology elements – particularly people, process and technology. This is the next battleground.