Archives for category: Marketing

The B2B Account Planning Stages

November 14, 2016 //

I’m going to do a series of posts on the B2B account planning stages. It seems a good time to do the series. Any time’s a good time to do account planning, but it’s most commonly done in the final quarter of the current year, to make a plan for the following year.

Proper account planning is an underperformed and vastly undervalued facet of the B2B selling game. Statistics abound of the increased growth and revenues for companies that do account panning, against those that don’t. It makes brutal sense of course. If you fail to plan, and so on. Yet still companies don’t get round to doing it properly, or even at all. Amazing but true.

I’ve identified 8 discrete stages to the B2B account planning process, and I’ll devote a post to each stage. None of the stages is rocket science. You can devote many resources to each stage, or you can devote a few resources. What you put in, you’ll get back, if you do it right.

It’s very important that you follow a defined process. It’s nearly as important that you use software to help you plan and execute on your plan. Account planning is a team sport and software brings obvious collaborative and productivity benefits.

I hope you enjoy the series.

Tags Account Planning, B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Get it Out There

November 11, 2016 //

When is a product ready? When is a project done? When is the document finished?

It never is of course. Nothing’s perfect in the B2B world. It can always be improved upon. It can always receive another iteration. We can always go round again.

Back in the heady dot com days of the late 1990’s, it was all about ‘ready, fire, aim.’ Look where that got us. In many cases it generated false hopes, over-inflated intentions and a lot of failed businesses.

But there’s still an important philosophical argument to be waged between the ‘it’s ready enough, get it out there and see how it goes’ and the ‘no, it needs more work, let’s put the brakes on and get it out late but better’. This inevitably creates tensions within the business.

The younger and more junior you tend to be in an organisation, the more you favour the former camp. Customers will tell us what they think. It’s time to ask them and then we can iterate accordingly, or so runs the argument. ‘Pick a point and go,’ as I’ve said before. The older and more senior you are, with more at stake, and more experience to back it up, the more you side with the latter camp. It’s not going out like this. I’m not happy. We can do better and we should wait, get it right, and offer customers a better experience, you might say.

Hmm, get it right, versus get it out there. When is a product right?

Tags Business, time

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

500 Blog Posts

November 9, 2016 //

Hello. It’s Wednesday 9th November 2016. I know there’s been an important election, but I’m not focused on it right now.

This is my 500th blog post.

500. It’s a decent soccer or rugby win rate, a great test cricket score, a phenomenal baseball batting average. It’s a long book if you sew it together. I’m very pleased.

For the last 3-and-a-bit years, I’ve been sharing my ‘musings on stuff I come into contact with’, not caring that I finish my statements with a preposition. I’d like to think it’s a symbol of what I’m about; not quite iconoclastic, but certainly calling things and writing them the way I see them, without any sugar coating.

When I started this blog it was early September 2013. I had a little time and wanted to get into the discipline of writing regularly. I didn’t know how long it would last. I didn’t set myself a goal; maybe I should have. I’m surprised and delighted that I continue my Monday-Wednesday-Friday thing into a fourth year. I’m not quite in the Seth Godin league of 7-day-a-week pronouncements to the marketing masses for the last 7-plus years, but I’m still very pleased. My posts are generally longer than his short ones, and shorter than his long ones. I’ve always tried to go for consistency and occupy your attention for about 1-2 minutes, 3 times a week. I think that’s about the right level of intrusion for blog posts.

I’m conscious that this post has been almost all about me, which is something I always try to avoid, especially in the advice I dispense about marketing, sales, business and life. I think, however, that it’s OK to give yourself a pat on the back when it’s deserved, so I trust you will forgive this minute or 2 of self indulgence.

Tags Blog, Blogging

Categories Communication, Marketing, Sales

What Type of Account Manager Are You?

November 7, 2016 //

Account Management Coverage

What type of account manager are you? Is it something you’ve thought about? Account management coverage is a bit like a pyramid. Very large and important customer accounts are few and far between. Each account might have a number of people, a whole team in fact – looking after it, each of whom may take a specialist role. This is the n:1 approach, where the left side of the colon is the vendor or supplier, and the right side is the customer or buyer.

When I worked in sales effectiveness and sales training, I heard of one lady who was responsible for a team managing an account in the US pharma industry worth $10bn per year. That account was twice the size of the US sales effectiveness and sales training industry.

Some businesses work with large accounts, but they’re of a size where one dedicated account manager can serve that account himself or herself, full time. This is the 1:1 relationship.

Then there’s the other accounts which make up the vast majority of business. These accounts are sufficiently small that 1 person can manage them as a portfolio of multiple accounts. Sometimes this means 5 accounts, and sometimes it can be as high as 500. It depends on how strategic or tactical the accounts are, and how proactive or reactive your approach is. This, as you might have guessed, is 1:n account management and it probably accounts for most of the account management roles that people fulfil.

It’s important to think abut account management coverage this way because it helps identify the priorities that govern your company’s business, your time and your focus.

Tags account management

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Account Based Marketing without the Right Tech

November 4, 2016 //

In a previous post, I covered how Account Based Marketing, with the right technology like web personalisation software at your fingertips, threatens to become new ‘truth’ in demand generation. When you know who a visitor is as they come to your website, you can dynamically serve them up relevant, timely content, which is cool. You also improve your engagement and conversion rates, which is cooler still.

But how do you do this if you don’t have or can’t afford the right technology?

Account based marketing without the right tech becomes low tech, or old school. You have to go back to basics. First, you need to select the target accounts that you want to win. These accounts should be with a specific segment or segments, rather than the product of a scattergun approach. You’re not going to win them all. In fact, you should target maybe 5 to 10 times as many as you’re looking to win. Then you need to do some basic research into all of them, as follows:

Who’s the decision maker and budget holder?
What’s their email address, and social media handles if you can find them?
Who else is on their team?
What are they trying to do with their business? What are their goals?
What’s stopping them from achieving their goals?
How can you help them overcome this barrier?
How can you demonstrate you’ve done it for other businesses that they can relate to?

Armed with this information, you can design tailored information for them based on their circumstances, industry, personality and stage in the buying process.

Where the right tech enables you to go to war in an automated fashion, on this traditional battlefield your weapon is the trusty email. People will open emails and act on them if they present actionable content that’s relevant and compelling. Then you need to nurture their interest with further, well-timed emails that guide them through the buying process and the starting point of getting where they want their business to be.

Tags Account Based Marketing

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Account Based Marketing with the Right Tech

November 2, 2016 //

Account Based Marketing is like a cross between Account Planning and marketing. Instead of marketing to everyone and then qualifying the leads in your funnel to focus on the target leads, you do the qualifying up front, selecting the companies you want to work with, strategising on where and how they might need your help and targeting them with personalised messages.

Thanks to something called web personalisation, you can take a lot of the leg work out of your in-funnel marketing. You can automate the assets you deliver to certain people depending on the type pf person they are and their stage in the buying process. Web personalisation software uses functionality called reverse IP look-up, allowing you to know a lot about a website visitor, like industry, company size, and so on.

If you also recognise this visitor as one of your target accounts, then you can literally present customised web pages to them on the fly. Which is nice.

This is very powerful, and, understandably, has got a lot of people excited about more focused, higher return marketing investments.

Remember, though, that Account Based Marketing is not a silver bullet. You should do it in parallel with other more ‘traditional’ demand generation activities, because you need a good spread of differently sized opportunities for a healthy, forward-moving pipeline.

Tags Account Based Marketing

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Welcome Back

October 21, 2016 //

In 2000, I was in San Diego, California, for a conference. The day before the conference started, I had some time to kill and I needed a new travel bag with wheels and one of those extendable handles. So I went to the local mall with a colleague to do some research.

We split up and I went into a couple of shops. I nodded my hellos to the staff and I didn’t speak any more to a sales assistant. In the second store found the bag I thought I was looking for. I left the store and went to go find my buddy for a second opinion, as he travelled for work more than I did.

20 minutes later we came back into the store. ‘Welcome back’, said the sales assistant, a handsome African American bloke in his late-20’s. The store was Sharper Image.

What struck was that the guy remembered me. When he said ‘Welcome back’, I took the unspoken part of this to mean:

I noticed you come in before
You’re important to us
We pay attention to our prospects and customers
I want you to know that
We want to serve you so that you can become a customer

I bought the bag.

I still have the bag.

Tags Attention, Behaviour

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Best B2B Sales Deck Ever

October 17, 2016 //

The other day a colleague pointed me towards an article he’d seen by a chap called Andy Raskin on LinkedIn. It was a recounting and generalising around the best sales deck he’s ever seen. You can read the full article here.

If you can’t get to the article now, I’d recommend you bookmark it for another time. For now, though, the essence of the article is that the best flow of a sales deck, predominantly for B2B and disruptive technologies, touches on 5 key milestones. I’ve written about this a lot, and the following flow definitely hits all the major points.

Here are the 5 milestones:

1) Set the scene with a major change event in the world

2) Show that there’ll be winners who embrace this change event, and losers who don’t

3) Show them what success looks like when you’ve got there – what Andy calls ‘teasing the promised land’

4) Introduce your features as ‘magic gifts’ to get them to the promised land

5) Demonstrate your evidence that you can get them there, ie you’ve done it for others

Nothing new here perhaps, but it brings the prospect along the journey in an exciting way and doesn’t slam them on the defensive or put them off progressing because it’s too complex/scary/hard. As I said, the full article is here and well worth a read.

Tags B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

People and Culture Don’t Change

October 5, 2016 //

It’s really hard to change the culture iof an organisation. It’s even harder to do it quickly.

This is because culture is made up of people, who themselves find it particularly hard to change their engrained behaviour, as you might expect. You’re expecting people to change who they are. Not gonna happen, at least not without a ton of effort, time and patience.

I remember working with a company in the last 2o years where we worked hard on establishing the mission and values of the organisation, those important things we stood for. The difference, however, between what was on paper and what was exhibited by people, from the CEO down, was considerable. The value statements looked great on paper, but that was not how the company behaved.

This is why culture eats strategy for lunch, and why it’s so important that, once you’ve genuinely established the culture of your organisation, you hire people who are true to that culture. It’s easier said than done.

People and culture don’t change. Sometimes people join a company and find the culture is different to their experiences of it before they joined. Other times people join a company thinking – or more likely hoping – that the prevailing culture there is a good fit for them. In either situation, if you find yourself in a business either where the corporate culture is not your culture, it’s a good idea to consider trying to find a company where there is a fit, preferably as soon as possible.

Tags Behaviour, Culture

Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

I Died

September 30, 2016 //

These days, you hear kids say ‘I died’ all the time. Not as in ‘I died laughing,’ like my generation would have said, but as in ‘oops, I died,’ from losing their virtual life in a video game or anything that simulates real life.

It got me thinking about how seldom you would have heard kids saying that before video games like Pac Man, Space Invaders and the like. After all, to actually die – well, it’s a pretty horrendous concept for those of us who feel we haven’t accomplished much yet.

What a poor memory I had, and what a classic example of falling into the trap of judging everything from today’s perspective.

Of course, kids have been role-playing and more specifically playing war games since the human race has had toys, and they must have killed other soldiers or been killed themselves on many occasions. It’s all part of growing up.

Maybe it was mostly boys that played war games. I don’t know or remember, but it still sounds odd to me when I hear my daughter say ‘oops, I died.’

I recount this story not for its own intrinsic value but as a reminder to you and me that we often make decisions based on our own current context, when that can be the wrong context. It pays to think out of the box, and in the box of the person we’re trying to influence.

Tags Context, Games, Perspective, Real Life

Categories Customers, Language, Marketing

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