I’ve written about the average tenure of a CMO (23 months) time and time again here on The B2B Lead blog. And, even though I know full well the risks that come with this position, I made the leap recently. Fortunately, the new company is a ReachForce customer so I can continue to blog here on The B2B Lead.

Just as I was wrapping up projects and readying myself to take on new challenges, Six Tips for a First-Time or Newly Appointed CMO arrived in my inbox. More good fortune! It seems that Michael Sprouse had generously shared his lessons learned as a new CMO for Adzoogle. NOTE: You have to register to try the site for free. And, I highly recommend it.

I do believe Michael may have forgotten a very important piece of advice, however. I would suggest adding #7. Benchmark and begin tracking and reporting results of your efforts immediately. Perhaps with Michael’s advice and a fanatical commitment to accountability, newly appointed CMOs may buck the 23 month trend.

1. Don’t jam Marketing down people’s throat—be a sponge
   Everyone hates a know-it-all anyway. But in this particular case, for a new CMO or a CMO at an organization not yet comfortable with the CMO role, it’s important that your early efforts center on learning the organization, the business model, the customers, the staff and the infrastructure.
2. Make your first hire or personnel move very carefully and wisely
   The perception of the CMO’s ability to build and run a team starts with the first hire or first major personnel move that he or she makes. Hire someone better than you at that particular function.
3. Get some small wins early
   You will build a foundation of small wins that will then turn into larger ones shortly thereafter, all the while building credibility and instilling confidence from those around you.
4. Establish a close bond with other chief executives at the company
   Most of the time, a CMO cannot succeed without other senior executive buy-in and support. Sometimes, that buy-in is already built into the fabric of the company. Other times, it is earned over time.
5. After a few months, immerse yourself in a few important strategic initiatives for the company
   After gaining momentum, jump into big things right away and sink your teeth into important issues.
6. Always judge and evaluate your own performance
   As a C-level executive, you should not need a CEO or anyone else to provide you feedback on how you’re doing. You should know.

Any other nuggets of advice to share with this first-time VP of Marketing?

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Didn’t get approval to fly to London for last week’s Search Engine Strategies? Never fear, Susan Esparza kindly live blogged from the event and shared a number of wonderful lessons including this super post from Ian Lurie’s presentation on Search Marketing & Persona Models.

When explaining the concept of personae, a topic we blogged about on this B2B Lead post a few weeks back. Ian provided a very “sticky” definition: “A persona is your brand’s imaginary friend.” He also shared these wonderful words of wisdom for building a campaign to woo your persona:

• Pick the persona you want to start with
• Refresh yourself with their needs, motivations, wants, fears, limitations, etc.
• Become empathetic to that persona - really put yourself into their head.
• Too hard? Get a team together to act the parts…but be careful in your casting choices. (Don’t cast a competitive person as a competitive persona. It’s cross contamination.)

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If you are a regular reader of The B2B Lead, you have probably noticed us all talking more about events and tradeshows than usual. This subject has been on our minds because we are today announcing a new data service offering for events called ReachForce Capture.

Our mission at ReachForce is to reduce the amount of waste in B2B marketing. Current marketing tactics, including direct mail, email, trade shows and search engine marketing, have conversion rates of 10% or less. We introduced ReachForce Discover and ReachForce Refresh to increase response rates for direct mail and email from the industry average of less than 3%. ReachForce Capture will enable marketers to convert more trade show contacts and increase trade show ROI.

ReachForce Capture enables you to turn your trade show scans/attendees into actionable leads. At a targeted trade show, most of the companies will be a right fit but the attendees may not be the right decision makers. By identifying the right person or decision making unit by their role within an organization, not just their title, ReachForce’s approach to contact discovery is unlike any other data provider. Targeting prospects based on their role in an organization increases marketing results and sales conversions, ultimately driving revenue.

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Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a few tips on how to turn your tradeshow experience into a word of mouth marketing success.

When most B2B Marketers think of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing, they think of online/viral campaigns or customer referral programs. But, tradeshows can be the perfect setting for some of the best WOM marketing campaigns. Where else can you get so many people of like mind together in one place, short of Internet forums.

There’s nothing like a good stunt to get everyone at an event talking about your organization which contributes to both brand awareness and demand generation if you handle the lead capture and nurturing process appropriately. The guys over at GamePlan Marketing have been praised for their stroke of genius, “Operation Blueshock¸ a guerilla stunt that involved sending 150 male and 150 female models dressed to the nines onto the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show floor to talk up the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. For video of the stunt, visit http://www.gpexperience.com/work.php.

The results were staggering: on the day the models showed up at CES, the Bluetooth website had 18,500 hits– a 42-percent spike. In the post-show survey, 60 percent of respondents said they knew more about Bluetooth than just two days before.

So called “guerilla stunts” need not be one-hit wonders, however. A successful WOM event orchestrated by NetQoS has now become an increasingly successful yearly tradition. In an effort to catch the eye of Cisco and get a very target-rich environment to talk about the company, NetQoS marketers executed a WOM “stunt” at Cisco Networkers a couple of years ago. The company sent out invitations to an exclusive party at The MIX lounge in Vegas for an after-hours party starting at 11:00 pm. This generated a great deal of buzz on the show floor with attendees clamoring for an invite. Those lucky enough to attend were given shirts to wear the next day. This resulted in more than 200 NetQoS-clad advocates in sessions and on the show floor which helped to increase lead generation by 120% from the previous year. The next year, we expanded our presence further, booked the House of Blues and increased lead capture by more than 300%. We also gave out Flipcams to encourage attendees to spread the word via YouTube and the blogosphere.

How have you used WOM to improve your trade show experience?

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Tradeshows – Conferences – Users Group Events – May the religious wars begin. Sales loves them, marketing thinks they are cool as they make for a lot of creative fodder – CEO’s like the fact that their company is a player in the industry – businesses, at least high tech ones spend 25% or more of their marketing budget on events; to give away t-shirts and build “brand”. My view is that if you are a mid-sized business, the only branding you want to hear about is the one used to mark and track cattle.

Here’s another 90% WASTE statistic I heard about from Sirius Decisions – less than 10% of trade show leads are followed up by Sales. So what happens to the rest?

What are the best practices for reducing the 90% waste without all the rhetoric about branding – “was worth it because of the branding?” I get it, awareness on the business is important but why throw out the baby with the bathwater?

My view, as always, is to step back take a deep breath and think about this:

Why did sales only follow-up on 10% of the “leads”?
What was the makeup of the “good leads” or Glengarry leads?
Were the attendees (the companies) they came from a good fit?
Did you come back with the right company but wrong contact names (the IT Admin was at the event but our economic buyer is someone else that we want to target)?
How do we define the right company and filter them against those criteria?
Who is the right person/people at the company you want to reach out to?

Now that you have the answers to the question above, it’s time to turn the 90% waste into HIGH octane leads for marketing and selling. The yield will not be 100% but even if you end up yielding 1/3 of the 90%, you will be at 300% of where you are today with event leads.

Don’t let the data you collect from a tradeshow sit around – mobilize it to create actionable leads in your business. Take it from sludge to high-octane data!

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When you are communicating with your customers you should always mind your p’s and q’s. After all, your current customers are gold. You want to do everything in your power to keep them happy so that they will stay a customer. You need to keep in mind that every communication you have with your customer influences their opinion of you.

I recently received a new password from one of my SaaS providers. My preassigned password included the words “enemy” and “ogre”. Now if that doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, I don’t know what will! What are they thinking?! And while I am still a customer, this may be something I remember when my subscription comes up for renewal. The point is, every communication with your customers is important and as usual the devil is in the details.

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When I overhauled and launched a new ReachForce website, I wasn’t sure what kind of impact it would have on the company. Using Google Analytics, I could get some data but had no idea how easy it was to navigate and if the new copy really got our point and value proposition across. I was lucky and strategic in launching the new site the same day as we announced our Series B Funding so I did see a significant jump in traffic.

I guess if you put enough out there it will come back to you eventually. I strongly suggest, if you haven’t already, setting up Google Alerts for you company name. This will help you find out what people are saying about your company. You might even set up alerts for common key words for your industry or competitor names. Anyway, I got this link to KillerStartups in my Google Alerts. Check it out to see how they independently surveyed our site and interpreted our value prop on their own. Be sure to vote at the bottom as to what you think the future of ReachForce is. This was a great way to receive unexpected and unbiased feedback.

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Apparently dirty data and 2% response rates are global problems. New survey results from UK-based marketing communications agency Godfrey show business-to-business Marketers have ‘plenty of room for improvement’ when it comes to using customer and prospect databases for direct marketing purposes. The research offers new evidence that direct marketing campaigns could be more effective if B2B Marketers would clean up their data and use a systematic direct marketing program based on database marketing fundamentals.

Lynne DeMers, strategic direct marketing team leader at Godfrey, is quoted as saying: ” Direct marketing is not about sending 20,000 mailers to a rented list and hoping for a two per cent return.” Wow, where have we heard that before? Maybe in our Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook?

She also makes a great point about effective direct marketing: “It is about creating a programme and a system of messages, offers, information capture, measurement and refinement.”

The survey also found that:

• Only 60 per cent of Marketers use their customer database for targeted direct marketing, and only 40 per cent regularly update customers with new offers.
• While mass direct marketing techniques typically yield response rates ranging from 0.5 to two per cent, targeted direct marketing technologies are considerably more effective, according to Godfrey.
• B2B marketers can realize 40 per cent open rates, 10 to 20 per cent click rates and opt-out rates of less than one per cent with segmented email marketing and e-newsletter campaigns.

Sounds like it’s time for drastic change and there are many good lessons in how to make those changes in the complimentary Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook offered on this site.

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I’ve just begun working on Part II of the Funnelnomics book I co-wrote with ReachForce CEO, Suaad Sait. The new section is on B2B market micro-segmentation. Specifically, I want to detail the possibilities and a process for using automated pipeline analysis to slice your target market into smaller and smaller markets with common interests/needs. Then use marketing automation to deliver more relevant messages to those markets to drive Marketing ROI. Sort of like Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (http://www.longtail.com/) for B2B Marketing. (Still not totally sure this analogy applies, but you get the point, I hope.)

In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Get Real-time Insight into Your Marketing and Sales Funnel) I wrote about how I am using ReachForce’s new salesforce.com add-on to get real-time insight into my funnel or pipeline. Initially, I used it to spot our top vertical markets and then identify other companies that met our target market criteria. Now, I’m experimenting with using it to conduct some experiments in micro-segmentation. So, I want to see how I can use it to…

1. See which campaigns are producing high velocity leads—those leads that move through the funnel fastest and invest more marketing dollars in those campaigns.
2. Drill into the pipeline to identify trends in certain geographies and then identify additional opportunities within those geographies.
3. Identify bottlenecks—stages of the funnel where leads from a particular campaign are stuck so that I can move those leads along with tailored communications or timed offers.
4. And, last—perhaps—but not least, I recently realized that I can now spot gaps or “problem spots” in the funnel so I can actually tell Sales reps in a particular territory that they don’t have enough leads to meet their revenue number. Imagine that! Marketing telling Sales that they don’t have enough leads.

I’m absolutely fascinated by the possibilities of using automation to deliver more targeted/relevant campaigns to smaller and smaller markets. This would improve your response rates since the message and the offer would be more relevant to the market. It should also enable you to dramatically improve the efficiency and velocity of the funnel (ie. my funnelnomics). You could conceivably manage your funnel almost like a manufacturing process squeezing out inefficiencies as they became obvious. Plus, the reduced costs required to deliver more targeted messages—instead of spraying them to a broad audience—should ensure Marketing ROI will be higher.

So, these immediate rewards are pretty obvious. But what about the longer term effects of smarter, more relevant Marketing techniques on the practice of Marketing as a whole? Is it possible that this approach will take some of the heat off of today’s B2B Marketers who are criticized for being self-important Spammers who spray their messages out to target markets without bothering to understand what is appropriate for the buyer? I mean this video (B2B Marketing WTF: The Breakup) says it all, doesn’t it?

It remains to be seen if taking this type of approach can help Marketers penetrate the Teflon-like resistance of most buyers toward traditional marketing efforts. But Facebook, for one, is already unveiling its own version. Should be a good barometer to watch to see how actual users are reacting to this newly introduct ad targeting concept http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/22/facebook-experiments-with-ads-targeting-peoples-interests/.

It seems to me that if the content B2B Marketers deliver is truly relevant, it could become welcome content. However, if the ad platform enforces a sort of intimacy—yet the “content” still resembles advertising—it puts everyone in a very uncomfortable position.
Esther Dyson made a great point about this at the Defrag conference when she proposed that Marketers give users disclosure messages that are personalized http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6892 . She said that she wasn’t sure about personal rights, just that individuals have the right to demand to be made happy by whatever service they use.

Will micro-targeting make users happy? Will Facebook’s ad platform actually add value? Those are the real questions for Marketers to figure out. But I, for one, am excited by the possibilities. Stay tuned for more developments on the subject. Or, better yet, share your 2 cents.

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As new media has pushed its way into B2B marketing, many marketing departments reacted by hiring a specialist to tackle these new forms of marketing and PR, especially blogs. But as these new media have come to replace many traditional media and really become now media, all marketers need to accept blogging and twitter and YouTube and become educated, so that not just one member of your marketing organization understands these communities. In this podcast, I interview Josh Dilworth to discuss the changing landscape of marketing and PR in new media.

 

 PodCast 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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