For background, I direct an in house marketing team of 4 (including myself).  I manage a marketing budget of less than 7 figures.  I procured a marketing automation system for my company in June of last year.

While I dream of the possibilities of closed loop lead reporting, effective lead nurturing and being able to provide the most solid of metrics on my marketing campaigns, from the outset, it was clear that getting there would be a herculean task.  I had little doubt that it would take my team months to really begin to make it work for us in a big way.  I’d be a fool to think this could be accomplished with the writing of a check and the flick of a switch.

So instead, I isolated our deployment – focused it on a very targeted marketing process where I took advantage of only 3 core features – registration, landing pages and timed/triggered response emails.  The purpose I used it for didn’t require anything too sophisticated.  I needed to convey a message to a group of people I knew how to reach.  I needed them to register to participate in the program and I needed to email them a series of follow up messages based on behaviors, and measure response.  And I knew that if I could pull this off, I would be able to quickly see the difference between this new process and my department’s old process.  And I knew that I could justify the ROI of the tool by doing this one thing right.  And along the way, perhaps my team and I would have the time to learn how to make the grander vision work for our business.

Sure, there is a learning curve with the system I bought.  It’s relatively “easy to use” but the trick is not as much using the system as it is setting up the business processes around it.  Call it a training or know how issue for my team, but not only is lead scoring a complex art, it’s an art that we were nowhere near prepared for while we were learning to build better landing pages, creating event triggers and adjusting as we went – all while managing our existing business.

One of my most important learnings was that my business systems and the social systems within my business were in no way prepared for what marketing automation demands of them.  I suspect this is also true of other businesses trying to make the leap.  Consider creating behavioral scores based on what web site pages are visited if it takes IT involvement and negotiation to get new java tags inserted on pages.  Or try interpreting how to score behaviors when your website hasn’t been built with this type of activity in mind.  What if your Salesforce.com implementation doesn’t treat data exactly in the same fashion that the marketing automation system thinks it should?  Time to start redefining your organization’s interaction with SFDC?

There are stakeholders whose lives become tougher if we change things.  And once you get past the technical systems concerns, then there are work process concerns  – sales teams will need to make changes to the way they work in order to take full advantage of what marketing automation offers.

Sometimes with all the talk of marketing automation, we forget that pain that so many business have gone through (and are still going through!!) related to putting in place CRM (does anyone still call it sales automation – or perhaps all you need to say these days is Salesforce?)  There was a time when more than 50% of CRM implementations failed.  Why is it fair to believe that the shift to marketing automation will be any easier?  Perhaps I’ll argue in a follow up post why I think it could be harder.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the promise of marketing automation.  I’m relatively happy with my vendor.  I am actively in the process of adjusting the way my business operates to take further advantage of the technology. But I can tell you that it requires a big shift in the way my team and my organization operates.

Will we see the promise?  I sure hope so, and am working like hell to make it so, but we’re not there yet.  And unfortunately, the shortcomings I see have very little to do with the technology.

What I found fascinating was one of the women who agreed to be profiled for the article gave her full name, city of employment,  industry in which she worked and time of her layoff.  She went on to refuse to name the company at which she worked because of the terms of her severance agreement.

And now for the silliness – using the web, how long do you think it takes to identify the employer?  I wish I timed it, but I’ll guess under 15 seconds.  Google search – linkedin profile – company name.

Having been downsized and looking for work makes you “web available. “  Of course she’s on LinkedIn if she’s looking for work.  And that means her story, including the company that dismissed her is public knowledge.

It’s only a matter of time before those searching on this woman’s name see this NYT article as listing #1 and her Linkedin profile as listing #2.   It just feels like it will take many of us – people and companies -  much longer to figure out what this new world of transparency means.

What struck me most was the exchange my mother had with the bank employee while they were verifying her details on a page that had been printed out.  Mom noticed that the paper stated that she had been a customer since 2003.   Mom wanted to correct that.

Mom: “That’s not right, I’ve been a customer since 1964.”

Citibank: “Well, sometimes, if you close the first account that you opended with us, your ‘customer since’ date changes to the date the new account was opened.”

Mom: ” Sure, but Citibank made me close that account.  I didn’t want to.”

Citibank: “I’m sorry. It’s just the way the system treats it.  There’s not anything I can do.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as a relatively innocuous exchange.  But think about it for a minute.   Mom wants the bank to acknowledge that she is a loyal customer.  She’s been doing business with them for over 40 years.  That relationship is important to her.  She is willing to mention it.  And the banks response is – sorry, 4 years, 40 years, doesn’t really make a difference to us.  We’re a big bank with big business systems – and our systems are more important than that relationship.

Not really a move that engenders loyalty.  It’s hard to attach yourself to a brand so indifferent about your feelings toward it.

So what you say.  We all know that the banks are these giant monoliths, and these days (especially these days) most people have little if no attachments to their banks.  And deservedly so.

But what about your business?  Are your business processes helping your customers get closer to your business, or pushing them away.  It’s so easy to forget that your B2B customers want to like you.  They’ve made a decision to purchase from you.  It was likely a well considered decision. If it was a purchase of any significance, the purchaser has put some of his personal credibility behind making that choice.   And there is nothing they’d like more than your help in proving to their bosses and colleagues that they made the right choice in going with you.

The trick is figuring out how to help your customers feel they’ve made the right choice.

Apparently, Senator McCain is on Twitter and someone had this great idea that he would use it to highlight a series of  the “Top Ten Porkiest Projects” in an upcoming spending bill.  Not a bad use of the medium.  It was item # 5 that seemed to get most people’s attention.

@SenJonMcCain: #5. $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi – how does one manage a beaver?

Kinda a snarky tweet and it was picked up almost instantly and solicited a fair number of equally snarky responses – some of which the senator may not have been proud to be associated with.

The fascinating part happened next – in response to the attention he was getting, McCain’s Twitter page deleted the tweet and re-posted a version  less susceptible to high school humor :

@SenJonMcCain: #5. $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi

The “how does one manage a beaver?” portion of the tweet was removed.   So the tweet isn’t memorialized on his Twitter page – but that isn’t the same as making it disappear.

Hundreds of replies later, and it no longer matters whether McCain removed it from his page or not – it’s still out, and there is nothing the Senator from Arizona can do about it. For one thing, many people didn’t notice the change and responded to the initial post.  But what I found most interesting was the feeling that deleting the post was a good idea – as if deleting it could make it as if it hadn’t been posted.

I love the idea of our elected officials using Twitter to become more accessible. And there’s a certain human (if not entirely authentic) feel to the un-edited tweet.  The original certainly fits well with the McCain persona – tough, a bit cranky and certainly snarky.  Definitely part of the McCain brand – whether he likes it or not.  But deleting signals that :

1) McCain and his staff don’t entirely “get” the medium despite playing with it in a very pubic way.

2) They’re not super comfortable with the true McCain brand identity, and try very hard to keep it in check.

3) They’ll probably error toward less authentic tweets in the future, to avoid the negative attention.

The shame of it is that the authentic part is the interesting part.  And as we manage authenticity and image on the web, we risk over managing, and managing out the most engaging parts.

One of my biggest measuring and adjusting frustrations revolves around the total sales cycle time – from lead through closed deal. It’s not as much the length of the cycle that bothers me, it’s the challenge it poses making adjustments to our programs.  It takes way too long to know if what we’ve done is really working.

Yes, we all aiming for shorter lead to sales cycles.  But what happens when you sell a product that takes a several months to be bought?

My current sales process starts with getting the attention of someone who didn’t know they had a problem and nurturing their interest,  and proceeds through large scale trials, identification of funds and can involve a buying group. Some things take time.  It takes 22 months for female elephants to have a baby.  While nowhere near as long, it’s hard to envision getting our average lead through sale cycle down below 150 days.

The challenge this creates is how to make nimble tactical adjustments to campaigns and programs when the true results don’t show up for months.  I will know how many leads a campaign brings in.  And I can score those leads against criteria I set for my ideal prospect..  But these only suggest that we’re on track.  It will be a while before I know whether or not I’m right – and whether this better translates into business.

Metrics will eventually tell me that I need to adjust – but not what I need to adjust.  And realistically, no matter how well my marketing is doing I need to adjust.  When have you ever heard, “we have enough good leads, please stop?”

The hard part is how to adjust, and that isn’t going to come from my numerical trends.  That needs to come from more qualitative interactions – actually speaking with the people I think I need to reach, and finding out what drives them to care – and what will help them to buy.  The irony, is I could have and should have done that at the start.

What are the most important metrics you look at to measure marketing ROI?

And Kathryn turns around with(emphasis added by me):

Metrics have always been and I suspect will always be a challenge. Recognize what they DON’T tell you. For instance, they don’t tell you what you are NOT doing that would have a bigger impact than your current efforts.

Considering how so many marketing conversations revolve around metrics, I find it refreshing that Kathryn uses this opportunity to remind us of their limitations.  (Dislosure, I’ve enlisted Kathryn’s help frequently over the last 12 months).

Too often, when I read about marketing metrics, the  phrase “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics“  comes to mind.  It’s not that I think metrics used by marketers are intentionally misleading, but sometimes they just feel incredibly limited. Probably because each paint such a partial picture of what we need to know to run our businesses.

A metric like cost per lead may tell us what investment I need to get a qualified name into my database.  It’s possibly a helpful figure for planning, but without some indication of the rate (both quantity and speed) at which my leads are converting, it’s not all that meaningful.  So we can expand our view and emphasize conversion rates on the leads as well.    As Kathryn points out, for many B2B businesses, the conversion rates (in percentage) can be misleading too.

I care much less about the proportion of leads that turn into business then a do about the gross quantity of leads that turn into business.  If I focus too much time on keeping either my cost per lead down that may affect my lead quality (or maybe it won’t).   If I get too concerned with the conversion percentage, I’ll do much less than I may have otherwise, and suppress my ability to grow my customer base.

So tying this back to avoiding B2B marketing mistakes, the mistake is to allow the metrics to drive your marketing.  Key metrics work much better when we use them to track trends and to help to inform the perspectives which allow us to make adjustments  – or see where adjustments are having an effect.  Most arching marketing metrics tell us what we did, not what we need to do next.  And that’s important to keep in perspective.

Long story short, a PR exec posted something not so nice on twitter about a town he was visiting to see a client, and offended said client.  Anyone speaking, writing, publishing in a professional context, needs to sure not to offend their customers.

The problem seems to be that we now longer know when we are communicating in a professional context or a personal context. I’m sure James Andrews is followed on Twitter by his wife and friends and felt like sharing his thoughts on the city he was visiting with them.  Whoops, he forgot about the his professional persona, and got into trouble.

I don’t have much of a twitter following, but it includes friends, family, and business contacts.

We all behave differently outside of work than we do at work.  Many of us have personal and professional email accounts.  But the divide shatters when it comes to things like facebook, twitter and our blogs.

We want the people we connect with to know us.  It’s the social web after all – it is supposed to be engendering a new age of openness.   But how open should we really be?  We’re all human.  And most interesting humans have religious views, political views and quirky and embarrassing stories.  We want to share and live them with friends and family, and the web has become a platform that enables communicating and sharing.

But as professionals, is it fair that we shut ourselves out of non-professional interaction on the social web?  It seems like  a large sacrifice to make as we earn a living and pursue our professional passions.

I don’t have a practical solution.  Splitting our identies between Bruce Wayne and Batman  doesn’t seem to be manageable for most of us non-superheros.  But I certainly appreciate the logic protecting the personas from one another.  Unfortunately, I expect this to get much worse before we figure out a way to make it better.

It may be like shooting fish in a barrel, but I want to make an example of my experience with NJ Transit today on my way home from work.

First some background. I am a commuter.  On a weekday I spend almost as much time commuting as I do with my kids.  Not exactly as I wish it to be, but we all do what we need to do.  I spend $250 a month on  train tickets and have been doing so for years.  I pay more for this service than I do for internet, cell phone, cable TV, lawn service, etc…  I’d like to think I’m a valued customer – but I’d be kidding myself.

I need to change trains in Secaucus to get from my home in Suffern to Manhattan. Today I was on the a 5:33 train out of NY Penn Station to catch a train at 5:50 coming out of Secaucus.  On a normal day, this part of my trip only takes 10 minutes.  But for the 3rd time in 3 weeks, my 5:33 train was more than 10 minutes late – which means that I can’t catch my train.  It also means I will have to take a train that makes my trip home take 50 minutes longer than usual.  Not so great.

Usually, I’ll just shrug it off, but it feels like a pattern is developing.   And with 40 minutes before my train arrives, I decided to visit the NJ Transit customer service desk.  So people were in line and upset.  Hours of their lives are being taken from them.

There were 2 reps behind the counter “servicing” people, and some woman was standing with us on the other side, apparently attempting to calm us.  She was announcing how there was nothing that they can do other than take our names, and generally conveying a feeling of hopelessness.  And she announced she was the station customer service supervisor.

No, we can’t have her business card.

Don’t worry, our complaints aren’t thrown out, they go into a database.

Just because they don’t respond to the complaints by mail or phone doesn’t mean they aren’t listening.

And why do you want a response – what good will a response do for you anyway?

So eventually it was my turn at the counter.  The rep greeted me politely, cheerfully and presented a generally understanding tone.  I told her I was disappointed and that I thought it was poor form to continuously be late.  I asked her what she could do about it.

She told me she could take my name and put my complaint in the database.  I asked her what good could come of that.  “Well, if there are enough complaints, maybe they will adjust the schedules.”  Whose they?  “The schedulers.”  Can I get an acknowledgment that someone  has read my complaint and intends to do something about it?  “I’m sorry, I can’t promise that.”

NJ Transit clearly invests in customer service training.  They obviously invest in staffing their desk.  It’s likely they’ve invested in a computer system to track customer interactions.  Perhaps they think these are good investments.  But if that’s the case, why do I think less of them each time I interacted with their customer service?

There was no attempt to solve my problem.  Not even the promise that tomorrow will be better if only I stick with them.  Not a thank you for providing them feedback on how they can make me happier.  Not an explanation, not an excuse.

They didn’t even take advantage of the situation to ask me questions – like would you pay more for this service if we could increase our reliability? – and yes, I would.  If anyone is listening I would also spend for a faster ride, a guaranteed seat, and a place to plug in my laptop.

Now change gears and consider what your customers experience when they interact with your customer service team.  Will they feel as I just have?  If so, will they do business with you again if presented with choices?

Part of the solution is demonstrating you care, the other part is showing you can help.  Can your customer service team solve problems, or can they only put entries in a database and hope someone, somewhere, higher up cares enough to solve problems?

Is your service just like NJ Transit’s?

Digging at what stakeholders mean by “a messaging problem,” I’ve heard each of the following situations defined:

a) We’re not adequately conveying the value of what we do
b) We’re not sufficiently pointing out a key benefit
c) Our message isn’t compelling to the people we’re selling to
d) The people I’m talking to haven’t heard our message

All are issues businesses face. And each come with a starting assumption:

We know what our target values and we know how our product contributes.

Well? Do you? How do you know? Better be reasonably sure, because it gets awfully expensive when you invest in getting a poor message distributed. And I’m not necessarily talking about advertising.  How much did it cost you to get that meeting set up? $100? $400.   Does your business want to consistently gamble in those increments?

Many in sales, marketing and management feel they know reasonably well what their targets value. In the B2B spaces I work in, this value is often expressed  as increased profit potential or decreased costs through increases in productivity / effectiveness or mitigation of risk.  Let’s assume  you’ve spoken with enough of your targets have done enough market research and nailed the things your targets value.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Identifying broad categories of B2B need is the easy part. The hard part is tying that need to what you do. How does your solution specifically address the need in a way that your target will care about?

You can try making it up – simply paint a vision and work tirelessly to make it stick.  But you may find it a more effective way to get this right is by speaking with enough customers to understand why they do business with you and why they value what you do. If you can’t say to a prospect “customer X who is like you in these Y way,  finds that our service helps them Z,” and be specific, you’re probably not on base with your messaging.

If you can’t pass that test, ask yourself, why? There are only 2 reasons I can think of:

1) Your customers and prospects can’t see your service that way
or
2) You haven’t invested sufficiently in learning how your service is valued.

It’s always tempting to think the problem is #2.  Remember, we can spend lifetimes and fortunes failing to prove a negative – “it’s not that it doesn’t exist, we just haven’t found it yet!”  Makes me think of the X-files and the hunt for aliens – we may “want to believe,” but wanting to believe is not so great a business strategy.

I’m not going to resolve in this post how to decide whether it’s #1 or #2 and when to move on, but I will say this. If you’re left to decide why you haven’t proven your desired message, it should not be your message (yet).

Kinda throws the 4 versions of messaging problems on their head.  Saying it louder,  more forcefully, more often or with better words isn’t the issue.  Your messaging problem is that you haven’t proven how your product does what you’d like to say it does.

Prove it first, then tell it. If you’re customers won’t stand behind your story, should it really be the message you’re delivering?

Before we can set our sights on the top of that mountain, we have to define what it is and where it is.   Goal setting is to define what we can reasonably aspire to achieve if we do our jobs well.

The goals we set need to push us, they need to challenge us and they need to motivate us.   Soft goals don’t challenge us – they let people coast, limit potential and will let the competition get a step on us.   Soft goals are bad for companies.

Good goals are achievable.  Unrealistically high goals are just as bad as soft goals – maybe worse.  Set goals beyond reach and instead of becoming a motivating factor (shoot for the moon, you may hit a star), they do just the opposite.  They remind us every day that we’re not living up to expectations, they tell teams, and entire organizations that we’re not doing well enough.

Unachievable goals warn us we’re not going to be compensated as we think we deserve to be.  Team members get frustrated, they lose faith in their leaders, they hedge their commitments as not to fail again.  People start following the “letter of the goal” instead of the “spirit of the goal”  to ensure they get paid.  Unachievable goals sour behavior, and make  performance cycle downward, prevent trust from being engendered and cause team members will look for environments where their efforts are valued in a greater way.

Well set goals aren’t immaculately conceived.  They need to based on market factors, performance trends, expected investments and to varying degrees, some good bets.   Sheer will for performance is never enough – and I can’t remember a situation where will alone was sufficient.

Good goals are negotiated upon based on the merits of the data that support them.  They’re not argued on the basis of how badly we want to meet a magic number. Good goals are accompanied by a plan for how to get it done.

Goal setting is so much more, and so much more important than just picking a number that sounds nice, round and large.  Doing it right is the best way to getting a successful year started on the right foot.