How to Audit Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

It’s time to face the facts: the B2B buyer’s journey is anything but a solo act.

In fact, nearly half (43%) of B2B buyers said that the number of people involved in purchase decisions has grown. Because of this rising trend, B2B organizations must target many different stakeholders involved in the purchase. But, this becomes a complicated dance when separate teams within a single organization own different pieces of the process.

Every role within your organization—even roles within marketing—have their own tools, content types, and channels to manage. From sales to customer success to marketing, each function has a stake in the buying process. But lack of communication, or a clearly defined integrated strategy to execute upon, causes ad hoc content creation, off-brand messaging, and a disparate customer experience. To address the needs of every buyer in the purchasing process, B2B organizations need a closed-loop marketing strategy approach—meaning every team within the organization should be clued in, and have a stake in its success.

To get your internal teams on a “one-team, same-team mentality,” start by conducting an audit of your current B2B marketing strategy. This will help you assess current processes and establish company-wide goals. Here is your step-by-step guide:

1. Assess Your Internal Stakeholders

The first step to auditing your B2B marketing strategy is to assess each of your internal stakeholders, their roles, and the channels they manage. In order to serve a consistent story to all of the players involved in a B2B purchase, you and your teams need to be able to collaborate and work cross-functionally so each department within your organization is aligned around the same goals.

When assessing your internal stakeholders, start by listing out all of your internal teams. These teams could include the following: demand gen, digital, field marketing, marketing and sales operations, product marketing, and social/PR. Determine which channels each team currently manages, and the type of content they serve. Once you identify current roles and responsibilities, you can then identify gaps in the process, and address any areas where communication between teams is lacking and how to improve it.

2. Define and Map Content to Your Buyer’s Journey

B2B organizations often struggle to be in agreement across the company about the various stages in the buyer’s journey. When sales teams define the stages differently from marketing teams, the result is miscommunication, convoluted tracking and reporting, and poor visibility into the health of your pipeline.

To get your internal teams on the same page, start by outlining each stage in a buyer’s journey, from awareness to purchase to repeat customer. Identify what buyer activity looks like at that every stage, how you’re defining each stage, and which team is responsible. It should look something like this:

Once you’ve outlined each stage of your buyer’s journey, determine what content is used by which team at each stage, the goals associated, and the metrics you need to track.

Once you’ve defined your buyer’s journey—including agreed upon sales and marketing definitions—you can create a closed-loop, marketing-sales funnel. This ensures that all of your internal teams are aligned on the specific pain-points you need to address as well as the content served at each stage.

3. Audit Your Personas

Addressing multiple players in a single sale is not easy. Each person you target has a unique perspective on their company’s challenges, and they have different pain-points and concerns related to the purchase. B2B marketers are responsible for creating content that addresses these specific and unique challenges, but when the pain-point marketing addresses doesn’t match sales’ approach, there’s a disconnect that becomes detrimental to the buying process.

To conduct an audit of your current personas, survey your internal stakeholders on how they define your personas and their associated pain-points. This will help you to quickly identify where teams are in alignment, and where there is confusion. The key here is to get perspective from all your internal teams and mine them for information and insight. Your sales, customer success, and marketing teams have different interactions with each of your personas at different buyer stages. By leveraging information across these teams, you can build out better, more well-rounded buyer-personas.

Just as B2B buyer’s don’t make purchases alone, B2B marketers don’t propel leads through the pipeline alone. Gather your stakeholders, audit your current marketing activities, and get ready to build a winning B2B marketing strategy.

By Erica Lindberg • Business2Community

Exit Strategies - what every CEO needs to understand

MassTLC, along with our sponsor, Argosight, recently brought together a small group of CEOs to talk about different exit strategies, and the pros and cons that arise with each. The CEOs came from small, medium, large companies, some of who were greener and some of whom have had their fair share of exits. 

The discussion was informal and allowed the younger CEOs the unique opportunity to ask direct questions of those that have had ample experience.  

Overarching themes were focused on different types of investments, acquisitions, going public versus staying private, and most importantly having a true understanding of where you want to take your company. 

We put together the infographic below as a way to capture the substantial amount of information and ideas that were shared. Some key pieces of advice to bear in mind for any founder are:

1. Know your business, not just your function or role, but your entire business inherently. For instance, sales, sales projections, product lines, revenues under each product line, and so on.
2. When you are just starting off, read everything, learn everything. Because the decisions you make on day one will affect the decisions you will have to make years later.  That can be as little as the office lease you sign to as big as the Board you put together.
3. For those that take funding, know everything there is to know about the fund, when it was started, when it will vest, and what number your company will be in the fund.
4. Whether you are looking to be acquired or go public, it is imperative that your company is strong enough to stand on its own.

 

3 Creativity Tips For Content Marketers From Monty Python

Creativity comes easy to some, but when it comes to content marketing we are constantly tasked with being creative. Content Marketers must consistently come up with new ideas and concepts that will win over audiences and stand out from the noise of competitors, all while ever so subtly sharing our product information and building brand loyalty. Not so simple. At CMWorld, Monty Python alum John Cleese outlined three pillars of creativity that have helped him create, and more importantly replicate, pure creativity, and content marketers seeking new ideas should take note. 

1. The Overnight Phenomenon 

Cleese noted off the bat that no teacher ever noticed he had an ounce of creativity in school – even at Cambridge. He would act out but still couldn’t get the attention he craved. Eventually he realized that with a pen and a paper he could write things that would make people laugh. The problem with this, as most creatives understand, is sustaining and replicating the creative process – otherwise known as writers block.  

Cleese said that at Cambridge, he would write and write and write until he came to a point when he didn’t know where to take the story. He was stumped. Instead of writing anything just to finish the story, he would leave the pen and paper on his desk and go to sleep. The next morning when he woke up, he would stroll over to the desk with a cup of coffee and finish it right then and there. He realized that during sleep, his mind was working on his story. This overnight phenomenon was actually his unconscious working on the creative process. Even when you don’t realize that your mind is being creative – if you put yourself in the right mind frame to create – your mind will do the rest. 

Cleese noted how we all have some of our best ideas just as we’re falling asleep, and how inventor Thomas Edison frequently napped in his office with a handful of metal ballbearings over a metal bowl. The moment he fell asleep he’d be awakened by the clang of dropping the metal pieces into a metal bowl. He found he could easily solve problems and innovate in this space between being awake and asleep. Many content marketers face small teams and tight deadlines, but we should all try to build in time to “sleep on it” when working on a new piece or idea. 

2. The Intelligent Unconscious

Cleese then dove into a story about how he once, to great embarrassment, lost a script mid-story and had to start from scratch. While he was writing the new one, he found the old one at the bottom of his desk. He then compared the two – the new one he wrote from memory was significantly better. The best elements of the old story came naturally while he was able to sprinkle a whole new element of even better details in the re-write.

He likens this creative process to being behind the wheel of your car on a random Tuesday. Sometimes you just drive for five or ten minutes and before you know it you have gone a few miles without even focusing on the details of the road. Your intelligent unconscious enables you take control without focusing on the minutia. Your mind will continue to build on what it has already learned, even in an unconscious state. What does this mean for content marketers? Maybe step away from a Google doc or boilerplate that has been read and redrafted 100 times. You never know what you might come up with when you start from scratch. 

3. Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind

Lastly, Cleese recapped a book by Guy Claxton, entitled Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less. In his book, Claxton outlines two ways of thinking:

1. Hare Brain: The fast, purposeful, clear, precise, analytical way of thinking.

In this mindset time pressure, or the fear of failure or loss of status will put you in an analytical state where you can easily decide what is wrong and right. If you need to get a report on your boss’ desk by Tuesday afternoon, you can waste time by checking Twitter and Facebook or you can work on your report. Easy decision most of the time, right?

2. Tortoise Mind: The slower, meditative, creative state. 

If you need to come up with something creative or innovative, the biggest challenge is how do you get into that meditative frame of mind? It’s incredibly difficult to create on demand, yet that is expected of most content marketers. The answer is to separate your two worlds. In school, we’re taught the analytical path, but were not taught how to be creative. Cleese cited Albert Einstein, who carved out hours of his day to sit and look out the window when he needed to solve a problem, as being someone who could access his “tortoise mind.”

Claxton contends that you have to invent a creative space for yourself – a “tortoise enclosure” if you will. This is obviously easier said than done, but there are two boundaries that you must put in place for you to reach a creative state.

1. Boundaries of space

This means avoiding interruptions or working from home if you work in an open plan office. Cleese suggests you go to the park and find some time alone with no distractions. Literally distance yourself from the pressures and constraints of the workplace. 

2. Boundaries of time

You can’t just go to the park forever, you have to do it for a period of time and then go back to real life. If you go sit in a park and try to reflect, a lot of things will start to pop into your head. “I have to send this email….I have to call Bob…I have to pick up groceries…” However, if you’re patient, eventually those things will leave your mind and your mind will begin to settle. Then you will have ideas, albeit not all of them good. Once you have new ideas, you have a starting point. Then you have to oscillate between the creative and the critical process to decide which ideas are best – the key is having a point to start from. Once you have a starting point, you can let your intelligent unconscious and the overnight phenomenon do the rest. 

It’s not easy to create boundaries of time and space but its absolutely crucial for the creative process. The creative process is not easy, especially for content marketers. While you can’t live in a tortoise enclosure forever, it’s definitely a nice place to start. You should probably just sleep on this. 

By Chase Neinken • NewsCred Blog

Performance Management: It’s Review Time!

Rich Wellins, Ph.D. and Linda Miller

Looking to improve or reinvent your performance management strategy? Effective performance management requires that leaders have ongoing performance conversations with their teams—not twice a year but every day! Learn how DDI can help upskill managers to coach and develop others, or to review your approach to performance management.

Интернет вещей помогает производителям исследовать будущее

Понятие «Интернет вещей» появилось, чтобы отразить рост количества интеллектуальных, поддерживающих сетевые функции изделий и отметить новые, связанные с ними возможности

Количество вещей, которые сегодня подключены к Интернету, превышает общее число людей на планете. И мы ускоренными темпами приближаемся к 50 млрд подключенных устройств к концу десятилетия. Для производственных компаний последствия развития Интернета вещей огромны.

Согласно недавно опубликованному отчету института McKinsey Global Institute:

• Интернет вещей (IoT) обладает потенциалом создания к 2025 г. 6,2 трлн долл. США нового глобального экономического продукта в год.
• Данная фирма также прогнозирует, что к тому времени от 80 до 100 процентов производителей будут использовать приложения Интернета вещей.
• Потенциальное влияние на экономику может оставить до 2,3 трлн долл. США только для глобальной отрасли производства.

На появление и развитие Интернета вещей повлияло совпадение действия рыночных сил и параллельных инноваций в области позволяющих создавать соответствующие изделия технологий.

Чтобы воспользоваться этой великой волной возможностей создания ценности, производителям необходимо срочно переосмыслить практически все аспекты деятельности — от создания изделий, до их эксплуатации и обслуживания. Те, кто этого не сделают, подвергают риску свою конкурентоспособность.

Интернет вещей состоит из трех основных компонентов:

• совокупности интеллектуальных, поддерживающих сетевые функции изделий, систем изделий и других вещей;
• эти вещи связаны подобными Интернету инфраструктурами связи;
• инфраструктуры связи связаны с вычислительными инфраструктурами, создающие новые формы ценности.

Интеллектуальные, поддерживающие сетевые функции изделия в Интернете вещей

Фраза «Интернет вещей» возникла для описания растущего количества изделий, подключенных к Интернету, и отражает соответствующие новые возможности. Но эта фраза не очень помогает понять сам феномен и его последствия. Интернет, подключаются к нему люди или вещи, является лишь механизмом для передачи информации. Трансформация возникает не благодаря самому Интернету. а благодаря меняющейся природе «вещей» — самих изделий.

Новые возможности интеллектуальных, поддерживающих сетевые функции изделий и данные, которые они генерируют, открывают новую эпоху конкуренции.

• Изделия могут осуществлять доступ и контролировать окружающую среду. Когда начинается дождь, машина может закрывать окна.
• Запасные части к машинам могут поступать на объект, прежде чем проблема будет замечена, потому что их состояние контролируется.
• Дистанционное управление в режиме реального времени летательными аппаратами может обеспечить войска «глазом на небе», чтобы они не подвергались опасности.

Предполагать, что Интернет вещей изменит абсолютно все — это опасное чрезмерное упрощение. Как и в случае самого Интернета, интеллектуальные, поддерживающие сетевые функции изделия действительно создают совершенно новый комплекс технических возможностей. Но правила конкуренции и конкурентные преимущества сохраняются. В мире интеллектуальных, поддерживающих сетевые функции изделий понимание правил необходимо больше, чем когда-либо.

Customer Experience Governance: Do This, Not That

Governance doesn’t get much airtime in customer experience management conversations and writings. It's not as exciting and it's harder to wrap your mind around than customer engagement and VoC (voice-of-the-customer) and CX (customer experience) technologies. Just what is it, anyway?

The Business Dictionary clarifies governance as "establishment of policies, and continuous monitoring of their proper implementation, by the members of the governing body of an organization. It includes the mechanisms required to balance the powers of the members (with the associated accountability), and their primary duty of enhancing the prosperity and validity of the organization." To summarize as it applies to CX management:

1. The company leaders establish and monitor CX policies.
2. People are empowered and accountable to drive CX success.
3. Mechanisms are put in place to drive CX contribution to the company’s validity and prosperity.

Customer experience governance is essential to ongoing success, especially in terms of enduring CX ROI (return on investment). It's the "glue" that holds all the pieces together, the standards, and most importantly, the mojo of CX progress.

Here are 3 keys to getting it right: CXM infrastructure, CX champions, and CX momentum.

1. CXM Infrastructure: An organization accomplishes precisely what it is designed to do. Organizational design must support — not stand in the way of — CX excellence goals.

DO THIS: Define the structure, roles, and processes for CX facilitation at the beginning of your whole effort, and before deploying any tool, technology, or process. Create processes for CX excellence facilitation and set expectations across the organization for involvement and follow-through. Set up processes to coordinate the managers of the various CX management endeavors across the company: VoC, customer references, retention, escalation, business intelligence, front-line management, UX (user experience), and so on. Work through existing structure, roles and processes as much as possible, weaving CX facilitation into your organization’s fabric. Set standards of performance and determine how you will balance strategic and tactical needs of CX management oversight.

NOT THAT: Do not wait until something gets rolling for a while to start thinking about governance of it. Upfront planning will pay exponentially in comparison to shoring up support and sorting out processes retroactively. Even a pilot (test case) should incorporate planning for follow-through. Don't silo-ize CX management, especially not at the start! Broad-brush consistency organizationally and with processes and analyses will help you see the opportunities for synergy and meeting bigger opportunities for cost savings and revenue growth.

Don't forget about those you rely upon: suppliers, alliance partners, channel partners, distributors, and so forth. Create processes that build their consciousness of customers' realities and what they need to do toward your CX excellence goals.

2. CX Champions: Localized ownership of CX success, deeply and broadly across employees, is key to making customer experience excellence a way of life in your company. (And that's more cost-effective than investing in remedial efforts to make up for what wasn't done right the first time.)

DO THIS: Set up C-team customer experience leadership roles and processes. Determine selection criteria for CX champions in every business unit, region and functional area. Make CX championing a significant part of their other duties, and strengthen their skills for facilitation, story-telling, and influence. Teach champions how to motivate action on root cause issue resolution. Enable grass-roots ideas for CX improvement and innovation to be piloted by CX leaders. And wallpaper employees' world with customer-centered messaging and opportunities.

NOT THAT: Don't assign CX management to a department or rely on tribal knowledge. Avoid underestimating the dynamic skill set needed to influence others without authority over them, and to drive progress over the long haul. Refrain from keeping CX champions separate from active roles specific to their organization. Don't assume executive sponsors automatically know how to be effective in their role. If you can see that the company#39;s money comes from customers#39; choices to do business with you, then don't give CX championing short-shrift!

This is especially important in appointing an overall leader who should work with the C-team as their agent for facilitating all CX management. Warm bodies, bright minds, or a stellar specialized career path might initially seem like a good fit for this role, but you're better off to appoint someone who already knows a lot about CX, holistically (not siloed), and who has a rich career background in overall business management, process improvement methods, systems thinking, change management, and driving momentum in large initiatives through influence.

3. CX Momentum: Keep executives and employees motivated to see their jobs in a customer-centered context, and to actively contribute to the company's CX excellence goals.

DO THIS: Establish accountability processes for CX excellence. Involve executives in reviewing and providing constructive feedback to teams#39; strides in improving CX. Create closed-loop processes for issue originators to prevent recurrence, and drive action and closed-loop communication to resolve customer issues systemically. Incentivize cross-organizational collaboration for customer experience breakthroughs. Enable grass-roots ideas for customer experience improvement and innovation to be piloted by CX leaders. Set up organizational learning capabilities for customer experience excellence.

NOT THAT: Don't rely on the HR department to do all this: their career background and frame of reference usually make this assignment a stretch. Instead, create collaborative arrangements between your CX leader and various HR leaders to re-work what#39;s already going on from a customer-centered perspective. Don't resort to escalation and shaming rather than prevention and organizational learning. Refrain from touting heroes and retroactive heroics, in favor of rewarding cross-organizational collaboration and teams' proactive achievements. Don't create busy-work for employees for the sake of “engaging” them. Instead, make sure employee engagementcontributes to CX excellence in terms of making improvements and using creativity for novel ways to increase mutual value for the company and customers.

Customer experience governance is one of the FIRST things you should tackle in setting up your CX endeavors — or overhauling them, or updating them for the new fiscal year or quarter. It's actually a quite exciting component of CX management, one that requires a lot of strategic thinking and creative solutions.

Notes:

1. 1. Customer Experience Governance is part of Organizational Adoption and Accountability, one of the six domains in the body of knowledge advocated by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). (ClearAction offers a CCXP Exam Prep Course.)
2. 2. The concept of "Do This, Not That" is borrowed from the popular book "Eat This, Not That", where the weaknesses of common practices and myths are brought to light and sensible replacements are recommended.

https://clearactioncx.com/customer-experience-governance-do-this-not-that/

The Difference in Transactional and Complex Sales

Transactional sales tend to have a lower price point, lower complexity, lower risk, and fewer stakeholders who will be affected by a decision to make a purchase.

• Low Investment: When the price point low it’s easy to make a decision because the amount of money being spent is relatively insignificant. The keyword is relative. It’s not a lot of money compared to larger, more strategic investments.
• Complexity: Transactional sales tend to be less complex. There doesn’t tend to be a lot of implementation necessary, and it’s fairly easy to execute on whatever it is you’re buying. They’re also aren’t a lot of things to consider or a lot of trade-offs. Transactional sales tend to be simple and straightforward.
• Risk: When you buy things that are transactional, there are not a lot of risks. There are not a lot of things that can go wrong. And because there are not a lot of risks, the decisions to make a transactional purchase are relatively easy decisions to make.
• Stakeholders: And in most transactional sales, there are a few stakeholders. If you’re selling something like insurance, home improvement, or other things of that nature, there may be two stakeholders, like a husband and a wife. It isn’t as difficult to gain consensus when there are only a few stakeholders.

Complex sales are different. That means your approach needs to be different. The sales tend to have a higher price point, greater complexity, much greater risk, and many more stakeholders.

• High Investment: As the amount being spent increases, the approach has to be more consultative than a transactional sale. More money is being spent, and this means greater outcomes are being pursued, and there is greater accountability for those outcomes.
• Complexity: Complex sales also come with greater complexity. There are more root cause problems that have to be sorted out. There are many different solutions that may resolve those problems or challenges successfully. There are many more trade-offs to be made in the complex sale.
• Risk: There is also greater risk. And in a complex sale, making the wrong decision can put greater outcomes at risk, and can upset a decision maker’s overall strategy and approach. It can cost more time, more money, and more lost opportunities.
• Stakeholders: And almost invariably, as a complex sale comes with the greater investment, greater complications, and greater risk, more stakeholders will be impacted by the company’s decision to change. And more complexity translates to a very different buying process, a very different sales process, and a very different set of commitments that are necessary to move the prospect from target to close.

As you think about your customers and your processes, especially the closing line you would use, it’s necessary to look at what type of sale you are making. On the continuum from transactional to complex, where do your customers lie?

The more transactional the purchase, the more transactional behaviors are appropriate. The more complex the purchase, the more your processes need to serve that complexity.