Author: Jay Mitchell

head of marketing

The 2 types of head of marketing

April 11, 2019
Jay Mitchell

There are two types of head of marketing we typically encounter in B2B organizations.

The “Marketing Communications/Demand Generation” Head of Marketing

Justin is the prototypical head of marketing. He is expected to focus on building the pipeline and to generate demand. This is his portion of the business. His background is in marketing communications and demand generation, and he can effectively employ marketing strategies and tactics to promote solutions and contribute to the brand. He takes charge of marketing at his company and decides to update the website and to run email blasts throughout the year. Whether or not these activities prove valuable and generate desired outcomes is up in the air, because he does not have much buyer insight from which to operate, nor is he working toward an overarching program or theme but rather practicing his and his team’s strengths.

The “Solution Marketing” Head of Marketing

Shauna is another kind of head of marketing. Her background is in solution marketing. She has perhaps had some product and/or sales experience — most definitely she has had experience in building relationships with buyers and clients. She focuses less on the direct activities and campaigns to build pipeline but rather looks to the overall themes, vision, messaging to unite her teams and to engage in meaningful ways with target buyers. Her concern is not the nitty gritty of marketing activities but the overarching picture of the business and where it is going.

The Power of Combined Head of Marketing

The majority of marketing departments have just one of these roles accounted for in its head of marketing. And while these two roles can work together to generate big results without a formal framework, the best companies we have worked with over the decade that generate sustainable revenue performance recognize the need for pairing a solution marketing head with a marketing communications/demand generation head.

Check back next week or follow Mereo on LinkedIn to learn how one company implemented this head of marketing partnership — and the impressive results that followed.

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sales qualification

A new — and more effective — sales qualification framework

April 4, 2019
Jay Mitchell

When it comes time for marketing and sales to determine the most qualified leads, many turn to BANT. The BANT framework has its origins within IBM and it is meant to be an easy and fast way to determine which buyers are a good fit and which are not, breaking down into Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline qualification attributes.

Yet, however valuable a framework is to work from in terms of consistency and unbiased thinking, today’s modern buying journeys mean the BANT framework no longer prioritize its steps in a meaningful way. Its first focus is on budget. If the buyer does not have a budget, the seller will never move on to the other three steps to qualify the lead.

And yet, what buyer has a budget for a need they have not recognized yet? How often does a buyer earmark a budget for a solution they do not understand or have not even heard of?

The BANT framework no longer cuts it in today’s market. It causes an obvious but common disconnect between buyers and sellers. And most importantly it fails to align with today’s buying trends.

There is better qualification criteria

The Mereo qualification criteria consists of AAAA: alignment, appropriateness, authority and action.

  • Alignment: Does the prospect align with the target buyer and organization profiles?
  • Appropriateness: Do you have a solution that serves the specific needs (recognized or not) that the prospect has?
  • Authority: Does the prospect have the buying authority to act on those needs and your solutions? This is where the budget and decision-making come into play, as the buyer may not have a designated budget for addressing the problem, but they have the authority to create the needed budget – for example, shifting that from a lower priority.
  • Action: Is there a sense of urgency to solve the issue? Is the need big enough that the prospect will act, and act now?

While this may have similar elements to the BANT model, the AAAA qualification framework repositions those elements in a way that better aligns with today’s buying journey.

And beyond determining these four attribute, the framework includes a specific scoring model – think Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) – for each attribute to truly turn the qualification criteria into a repeatable and effective science.

When it comes down to it, if the need is great enough and the solution will serve them in a meaningful way, a budget will be created to fund the transaction.

For more information on the Mereo demand progression framework, read on here.

 

Demand Progression



{Top Sales Magazine} B2B Buyers Need Sellers to Know Their Pains

April 1, 2019
Jay Mitchell

Today’s modern buying trend puts little stock in the B2B seller. However, with a reframed strategy of “Seek to Serve, Not to Sell™,” B2B sellers can provide solutions that deliver true value, build relationships — and land long-term sales.

Though a B2B buyer’s tools, resources, control and journey have drastically changed in our modern world, the large majority still crave one thing from their sellers: compelling, relevant value.

B2B buyers navigate in a world where their consumer brands are present in many platforms of their day-to-day lives; these brands offer up information that tells their consumers, “We know who you are. We know what you really need.”

And a buyer, be that a consumer or a B2B prospect, rarely believes they need the product or service your B2B organization hopes to push, regardless how much you wish otherwise. Rather, they desire a seller who knows the specific and real pains they are suffering and can provide support to overcome those business problems.

This is a straightforward and noble concept. Yet the major challenge presents itself when we start looking to the prevalent habits and trends of B2B buyers, which reveal a gap that is widening between buyers and sellers.

The Modern B2B Buying Trend

According to a recent study conducted by Aberdeen Group, B2B buyers seek-out sellers who can sharpen the buyer’s competitive advantage and provide an appealing long-term solution vision, among many other things. Likewise, 65% of buyers still see value in discussing their situations with salespeople, according to a recent CSO Insights study.

Yet, 30% of the time buyers are not engaging sellers until after they have identified and clarified their needs — and another 26% are not engaging with sellers until after they have identified a solution (CSO Insights).

Uncovered in this same CSO Insights study, though, was a massive number of buyers — 90% — who noted they would be willing to engage salespeople earlier in their buying process, that is if the salesperson could provide specific value.

The gap between buyers and sellers remains in large part because of this reality: B2B sellers are not offering what their target B2B buyer finds as valuable.

Finding Value in B2B Buyer Pain 

A seller who “Seeks to Serve, Not to Sell™” begins first by understanding how to deliver relevant value to their target buyer, long before there are dollar signs associated with the relationship.

This translates to a buyer’s pain: What business problems are keeping them and their organization from reaching their goals? What regulations does this target buyer have to navigate through that is hindering their business? What market conditions are they facing?

Read more in the April issue of Top Sales Magazine…

 

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buyer profile

The often overlooked insights the target buyer profile can provide

March 28, 2019
Jay Mitchell

B2B marketing teams align with sales, solution marketing and more through the target buyer profile.

At Mereo, we call the target buyer profile the Power Profile™, a tool companies employ to align on key organizational characteristics and demographics, ideal organization attributes, and buyer personas.

When you achieve a common profile off which an entire organization is operating, that is huge all on its own.

Yet there is a subtlety in the buyer profile that could be missed — an opportunity to make B2B marketing efforts even more effective and purposeful. And that amounts to the details within the buying journeys.

That is great the organization knows the target buyer.

But it is even better if they understand how these target buyers actually make their decisions.

These target buying journeys can prove insightful and allow marketing to be more surgical with its efforts. With these, marketing can more effectively pinpoint their audiences, know the geographies and industries on which to focus and take it a step beyond with knowing the “watering holes”, media and messaging with which to engage them on appropriate parts of their journey.

Another important distinction to note: The buying journey within the buyer profile can vary between solutions, even for the exact same buyer. A buyer most likely will spend less time researching upfront for a solution that is low cost and has low stakes for the buyer’s operation. On the flip side, that same buyer may spend months researching options for a different solution area online before they are even ready to engage with any salesperson.

Are your target buyer profiles comprehensive and inclusive of buyer information that will truly help you better serve them? Learn how Mereo helped OKI win an unfair share™ of the market through solution marketing.

 

OKI SOULTION MARKETING OUTCOMES

b2b marketing

B2B marketing activities alone are not enough

March 14, 2019
Jay Mitchell

B2B marketing often gets tunnel vision by just focusing on its individual activities. From the demand generation pushes, whether those are email blasts, newsletters or articles, to marketing communications efforts with social media, press releases, trade show booths and more, a B2B marketing team can have many activities cooking on the fire at once.

Yet, just because a marketing team is undertaking many activities does not mean these efforts will be valuable. In fact, a lot of waste can be generated in marketing, through time, effort and output.

Messaging can lose consistency. Demand generation investments can reach-out to the wrong audiences. The differentiation may be lost in the mix of things.

B2B marketing is not about the individual activities. It is about the bigger picture, and more importantly, the overarching goals each activity and campaign is working to achieve.

The Mereo PCA Framework Ensures B2B Marketing is Valuable

Time and again at Mereo we witness talented B2B marketing teams working with valuable solutions that just are not meeting the mark. Sales pipelines are not there, up-to the extent marketing should be contributing. Sales people are not well enabled. Leadership’s goals are not being met.

While there can be many reasons for this, including a lack of a Power Profile™ or messaging vision from solution marketing, often when we dig deeper, we find the root cause to be that they are focusing on the marketing activity- and campaign-level while failing to step back and look at the greater picture.

To combat these issues, we created the Program/Campaign/Activity (PCA) Framework at Mereo. This framework allows B2B marketing teams to see what and where their activities and campaigns are contributing.

  • Programs: These are the overarching themes the company is striving for. This is the leadership vision, the objectives and goals. Ideally these themes are grounded in a combination of the marketplace challenges their buyers are encountering and the differentiators their solution offers.
  • Campaigns: These comprise multiple activities that align with a theme or multiple themes at once. Think thought leadership, demand generation, speaking opportunities that are package together with a greater combined meaning. For example, the pre-event, on-site event and post-event marketing activities and sales prospecting activities orchestrated into a cohesive campaign.
  • Activities: Activities are the individual items within a campaign.

Campaigns and activities roll up to the programs. Campaigns are a nesting of activities, while campaigns can run across multiple programs.

PCA Framework in Action

A past Mereo client was doing well with its activities and campaigns. We will sponsor this webinar, they told us. We are running this email blitz. We are posting these white papers.  

Yet, the company had not defined its overarching programs for which the activities and campaigns would be contributing. Through a series of working sessions with leadership, the programs were defined. And many of the programs have continued to guide the company’s marketing efforts going on 18 months now, with refinements made along the way when appropriate. The outcome has been a steady uplift in market awareness and a pipeline lift that has driven quarter-after-quarter growth (especially in subscription revenue – the focus for the company).

If your B2B marketing team is stuck in the activity and campaign rut, contact us to learn how to develop, implement and integrate the PCA Framework into your company.

 

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Sales Pipeline

Whose responsibility is the sales pipeline anyway?

March 7, 2019
Jay Mitchell

When the sales pipeline dries up, the blame more times than not is placed solely on marketing and the market awareness and demand generation campaigns employed — or lack thereof. While marketing may have some fault in a lack of steady or valuable leads, the truth is that this shortcoming is both the fault of marketing and the sales teams.

In fact, through our experience across a broad base of clients, we have found marketing to hold the power to generate just 15% to 20% of the sales pipeline through its efforts. That means sales is directly responsible for more than 80% on average of pipeline development efforts.

The trick here is for marketing to do its job well, while sales follows up on the marketing department’s work in valuable ways. I am talking about sales and marketing alignment, a long-time issue for many companies.

The Pipeline-Generating Ingredients to Put into Play

Consider sales and marketing alignment as an army for hire looking to find the right buyers to support and the right ammo to support them with. There are three components this entails — and they do not all fall to marketing.

  1. Marketing leads market awareness, with big-picture oversight and messaging: public relations pushes, thought leadership content, industry events, etc. These efforts rarely directly translate into qualified leads but instead are the air cover that is setting up the market for the sales troops.
  2. Marketing should take advantage of additional cycles for demand generation: Promotions, email blasts, Google ads, etc. In order to be effective, these efforts need to be targeted and centered around the ideal buyer profile.
  3. Sales must put the thought leadership into action, through insightful engagement with buyers with whom the sales team already has a relationship. Sales has their boots on the ground and face-to-face with buyers. Without them taking marketing’s ammo, all efforts will fall short and the pipeline will halt. For example, say marketing has created a newsletter that contains thought leadership articles directed at a target buyer. Sales can leverage that newsletter by calling up a prospective buyer and engaging them in a conversation such as: “Did you see our newsletter yet? You have not. Well, there is this article in there that I think you would find very valuable. How about we do lunch tomorrow, and I can give you the highlights.”

This is marketing’s work in action — and it can be achieved only by sales.

Ensuring Beyond Sales and Marketing Alignment That All Efforts Are Aligned

Even by putting the above ingredients into play and by engaging sales to take a direct approach on generating the sales pipeline, these efforts can lead to little demand generation or the wrong demand generation.

For the top-performing organizations, sales and marketing — and often product teams as well — need to align on big-picture items such as:

  • Ideal Buyer Profiles
  • Buying Journeys within Those Profiles
  • Territory Coverage Model
  • Value and Differentiation Messaging

For example, the buyer profile should inform marketing where to run demand generation, either in geographic or industry coverage, so there is not a major awareness campaign targeted at Midwest manufacturing companies when they should be targeted at Northeast medical device companies.

The overall takeaway for maintaining a steady sales pipeline is follow-through. If you would like to learn more about how to align your sales and marketing teams to do just this, contact me. Or explore more about Mereo demand progression strategies.

 

Read More on Demand Progression

 

 



To grow, be stagnant or contract — which do you want for your B2B?

February 7, 2019
Jay Mitchell

There are three things you can be doing: growing, remaining stagnant or contracting.

It is always better to be growing.

In business. In service. In strength and knowledge.

If you are stagnant, you will begin contracting quickly. And unless you are contracting strategically — selling off parts of your business to make the overall business more profitable or lessening your life load to do one thing really well — you will experience loss.

While all this is true, growth may be out of your hands. Macroeconomics may not support the growth you want for a number of years. The growth in your personal life may be stalled by an obstacle from a family member or friend, from a missed opportunity or unknown.

Yet you continue on and you adapt. And you read up on how to strategically grow in your B2B business.

 

Uncover 3 ways to experience healthy revenue growth



Seeking to serve translates to revenue growth almost every time

January 31, 2019
Jay Mitchell

When we talk revenue growth and revenue performance, it is easy to focus on business and leave out the why. Why you joined or started the company. Why you spend 60-plus hours a week devoted to your role. Why you have helped develop and position your solutions to solve real problems and help others prosper.

I am talking about your customer, your target audience. And while focusing on the customer may seem like apples to the oranges of your revenue performance, in fact every single strategy for growing your business will be successful only if you have your customer front and center in your rationalization.

Seek to Serve, Not to Sell™

When you want to explore cross-selling, the question is not what products you can push on your customers. It is: What other problems are my customers facing that my product portfolio can address? What status quos can I help them break free from with these other offerings they have not explored?

When you are looking to invest dollars into your business to shift or expand your sales team, you do not do so because it will benefit your business. You instead look at through a different lens: How can I distribute my team to best serve our target customer? You consider: How can we expand our product portfolio to solve problems our customers are still experiencing? What other industries can our solutions provide value?

When you merge with or acquire another business, you do not do so because it would make your company look good or because you will be larger. You do so because, together, you can help your customer even more. You offer a joint value proposition that has stronger benefits all around.

They Prosper — You Prosper

When you are thinking about investing money back into the company as a way to grow in revenue, think of it as investing in your customer, on your customer’s behalf. Because when you continue to be committed to knowing who your customer is, partnering with them for their success and finding new ways to serve them — be that cross-selling, merging or acquiring a new company, or developing new products/heading to new geographies/hiring better people, or a host of other strategies — your revenue will grow as a result.

 

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{B2B News Network} In an age of diminishing accountability, here are two things true leaders must do

January 28, 2019
Jay Mitchell

A Harvard Business Review report found that one out of every two managers fails at accountability. In fact, accountability is one of the most universally neglected leadership behaviors today – across all functional disciplines of companies.

Why is this happening?

There is no one answer, but many leaders do not want to come off as a tough boss, an unreasonable boss or a micro-manager. They often set up goals and share the goals, let their employees run with their projects to work toward these objects and then — no follow-up or follow-through.

If the CSO did not make their numbers, there are no questions or pushback. If the CMO did not rally their team around sales enablement strategies like discussed, there are no retributions. Salespeople who lose a sale get a “this is not ideal” conversation but no valuable conversations about what happened and why — and how they should move forward.

The Risk of Little Accountability

A workplace with no accountability is akin to a child in a home with no rules. If bedtime is not dictated to nine o’clock, kids will stare at screens long into the night. They will do what they want and what they think is best for themselves.

Similarly, employees doing what they want can create disconnects and mixed messages, which work against your objectives. Without leadership checking on their progress and effectiveness, they will fall into what is easy, into a place of complacency. There will be no ingenuous solutions to obstacles. There will missed opportunities. And your company and all your employees will realize the risks of no accountability in tanking revenue performance.

Accountability mainly involves two key things:

  1. Keeping a pulse on the metrics and data in regards to goals: This means you must rally your employees around realistic goals and have a system in place for measuring these goals. You will need to decide your cadence or review and stick to it. But be sure the numbers you are looking at matter — that they ultimately are helping move your company forward and are  having a real impact. As the saying goes — “You cannot expect what you do not inspect.”
  2. Diving deeper to understand the context of the performance: Reviews usually include numbers in charts and graphs, and while they can be telling of overall performance, they often do not let on to the entire story. Maybe sales are missing their mark because the sales team is understaffed. Perhaps something personal is going on for an employee with poor performance. Your people matter, and as a leader it is vital you take the time to listen to them and respond accordingly. 

Read the full article at B2B News Network…

 

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b2b revenue growth

The greatest barriers to your B2B revenue growth

January 24, 2019
Jay Mitchell

Even leadership with the best intentions of revenue growth can face a tough road ahead. Read on to shine a light on potential obstacles you may face as you work to grow revenue.

Internal barriers to revenue growth.

Inside a business, many things can go awry for revenue growth, but one of the most-frequent offenders is the politics of an office. Departments will argue over whose responsibility it is to lead revenue growth and see to it that goals are reached. Is that marketing’s job? Is it sales’? Well, we know for a business to realize its potential, these barriers and silos cannot exist. For example, say sales does take the lead on revenue growth, but then they need information or supporting materials from marketing to pull off the plan. And marketing comes to the game late and says it is a no-go. That is a recipe for missed marks and lack of growth.

Another major issue is the mindset of your leadership and the status quo holding them back. Are you willing to invest to grow? Are you willing to invest in headcount or in market research or in product strategy to spark that growth? Or are you accepting bare minimum growth?

It is near-impossible to grow consistently without investing.

External barriers to revenue growth.

The marketplace can be your No. 1 outside obstacle to growth. Maybe the market share does not exist for your growth. Maybe the market is not growing as fast as you would like it to. But the competitive landscape is always on the move. While growth may seem far off, it may be a year or two of slow growth before the market is ready for your goals.

And while I called out mergers and acquisitions as a key strategy for healthy growth in a previous post, these can also become an obstacle. Is the other business even willing to be bought? Do you have a plan after the merger or acquisition takes place? Remember from my previous post, even well-meaning strategies for growth can have the opposite effect. There are a number of other things to be aware of too, including your geographies and the regulatory environment. The outside influences are plenty.

While revenue growth can sometimes fall victim to internal and external barriers, it is important to focus on what you can control and the opportunities available to you at present, in this marketplace, with today’s buyers. There are many other avenues to explore to uncover healthy revenue performance. If you would like to discuss these avenues further, contact me.

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