Making the Most of Your Marketing Funnel #rdm12

The impact changes in the consumer marketplace and technology are having on the marketing funnel and how marketers can adapt were major themes in early sessions of the Revenue Driven Marketing Summit hosted by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA.

New Technology Empowers Customers, Creates ‘Hidden Sales Cycle’

Trip Kucera, Senior Research Analyst, Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy for Aberdeen opened today’s program with an introductory talk about what marketing is experiencing today. “There are new technologies, new mediums and new targets,” he said. “You’re engaging with empowered customers in both the B2B and B2C marketplaces. “

In response, Kucera said marketers are “digitizing processes from the top of the funnel to the topline. There is much more data, and more buzz around Big Data but probably more action around predictive analytics.” In addition, Kucera said a “hidden sales cycle” has entered the traditional funnel of lead generation, lead management and opportunity management. This hidden cycle, which often occurs later in the buyer’s journey, consists of influences like social media, communities, content and peers. “You need to put your listening ears on,” advised Kucera.

Turn Your Funnel into a Pipeline

Following Kucera’s remarks, Russell Fujioka, VP of Enterprise Solutions and Business Marketing, Dell, urged marketing and sales executives to move beyond current best practices in order to reshape their funnels into free flowing pipelines. “If you’re at best practices right now, you’re probably behind,” stated Fujioka. “If you haven’t met a mathematician lately, you need to go hug those folks.”

Fujioka said there is so much data now available, tools alone cannot do enough to uncover actionable information. “Algorithms can determine cause and effect,” he said. “Some tools can’t answer why certain things work. But there are some people at MIT that probably can.”

Fujioka said that by changing its marketing model from quickly providing customized hardware to delivering full-scale IT solutions and developing ongoing customer relationships, in three years Dell has increased marketing-led revenue by 125% every six months and increased the growth of social media-driven dollars in the marketing pipeline by 20% every quarter, among other results.

Fujioka also focused on the funnel and how marketers can alter its shape from a typical “cannoli” (he gave a nod to the world-famous Mike’s Pastry in Boston’s traditionally Italian North End neighborhood) to a more streamlined “pipe.”

“The key part is the fulcrum,” he said. “What are the pressure points, amplifiers and things getting in your way? If you keep filling the left side with fuel and your win rate doesn’t improve, you won’t be more successful but will spend more money.”

In addition, Fujioka said marketers must closely analyze the right side of the funnel. “Those things that made it through got there for a reason,” he said. “Predictively analyze why they did.”

By properly analyzing what happens in the fulcrum and why some leads are converted, Fujioka said marketers can create an “aspirational” funnel where targeting is so good the lead-to-success ratio can wind up being “something like two to one instead of 10,000 to one.” And in the future, “the right side will be wider.”

Fujioka gave two final pieces of advice to marketers seeking to create an aspirational funnel. One is to create the position of vice president of customer success. “If you don’t do that, you don’t have a chance,” he said. The second is to remember that word of mouth always has been and always will be the strongest influencer on consumer decisions.

“It doesn’t matter what the audience or product is,” he said. “The difference is we now have tools to amplify word of mouth so instead of telling two friends who tell two friends, you can go on LinkedIn and pretty quickly spread the word to 25 million contacts.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

7 Key Activities For Getting Innovation Right

These days innovation is everything--and yet it’s nothing if it doesn’t succeed in the marketplace. Sure, innovation is about generating great ideas. But a great idea alone is not enough. It must have the legs to get over the obstacles that innovations inevitably confront.

The real trick is building something people are compelled to acquire, getting it into their hands in a form they can put to use, and generating the cash flow needed to grow. Getting innovation right means not just creating something new—it requires successful delivery of that new product or service.

Experience working on hundreds of projects in some 60 organizations has taught me that seven key activities will lead to successful innovation. Putting any one of these into practice will put you ahead of the competition. Bring them all to bear and you will systematically uncover potential, capitalize on opportunity, and generate traction that drives success in the marketplace.

1. Discover Inflection Points
A positive inflection point is a game changer that has the power to propel you forward. Expert innovators are able to sense the potential in inflection points before they take place, and then ride these dramatic shifts toward four strategic targets: growing your base, increasing the offerings your customers buy, generating loyalty, and moving you up-market.

2. Build Capacity
Systematic innovation relies on the ability to contain and the three inherent stresses of a successful innovation environment. Strong innovation leaders recognize this and intentionally cultivate the people and the environment that provide a strong foundation. The three stresses are:

A. Pressures of everyday operations – just keeping the doors open brings its own special set of challenges that include everything from suppliers dropping the ball to irate customers to unplanned successes that require your attention.

B. Movement and stress that comes with new ideas, products and services – although necessary for sustainable growth and profit, innovation is by definition not business-as-usual. When it courses through your organization it demands attention and creates counter-forces that can wreak havoc if you are not ready for it.

C. Market forces: sometimes rapid, always unpredictable - every business owner knows the market can shift on a dime or a headline. Positive inflection points are sometimes generated in response to these changes in market conditions. For innovation to thrive, you must have the capacity to provide both the stability required to weather change as well as the flexibility to jump at sudden advantage.

3. Gather Business Intelligence
The best innovation rises from a sea of information about products, services, customers, competitors, market conditions and internal capabilities. Business intelligence is the data that supports your ability to make strategic decisions. It could be information about products, customers, competitors, the market or internal capabilities—or all of the above. Effective innovation requires intelligence to make smart choices that take into account each of these areas.

I have been conducting business intelligence for my executive clients since 2000. I find it surprising that so many have little or no intelligence efforts in-house, let alone the ability to exploit this resource. It’s a stark absence. They cannot act on their information because they have none or what they have is haphazard, built upon conversation and hunches only. It is a sad state considering that much of this valuable input is readily available for a negligible cost.

4. Shift Perspective
In order to see new opportunity you must be able to get out of your own box. Successful innovators question their own assumptions and try on alternative and helpful points of view.

Shifting perspective is essential if you are going to get innovation right. Your current assumptions are constraining your thinking, whether you’re aware of that fact or not. In this chapter I will show you how to challenge those assumptions by applying four techniques for shifting perspective that should put you in a new relationship to everything you thought you knew. From this new perspective, you’ll find it easier to get innovation right.

Your clients, competitors, strategic partners, and industry observers each have a sense of the value your organization provides. But is it the same value proposition you and your marketing team have worked so hard to create and articulate? Maybe not!

5. Exploit Disruption
Successful leaders learn to identify the opportunity embedded in adverse conditions. It can come from anywhere. If ignored or mismanaged, it throws business into disarray. But what if you could take the forces behind these intrusions and turn them to your advantage? That’s what the masters do. Instead of being waylaid by adverse conditions, they use them to get the upper hand. You can and you must become an expert in exploiting disruptions. Don’t fight change but use it to your advantage.

Market fluctuations are normal, including fast, painful declines and long, confusing morasses. Rapid fluctuations are particularly disruptive. The market plunges, a sexy new competitor moves into your space, technology changes too fast to keep pace, customer expectations slam you. We've all been there. Welcome to life in the 21st Century. Learn how to put disruption on your side.

6. Generate Value
Value is what causes people to reach in their pockets and spend. Skillful innovators understand what drives value and how to generate it. Value is at the center of everything. With it, you can hobble along in other areas and still score a goal. Without it, you are doomed to eventual failure regardless of your other accomplishments.

Value has been at the basis of commerce since the beginning when we first went beyond producing goods for our own use and began to use them for trade. Value is what we want, what compels us to pay or barter. Value is what drives all the activity tallied daily in the world’s markets. Value is the holy grail of business – you must keep your eye on it 24/7.

7. Drive Uptake
Every stage of the innovation process holds opportunity to engage the community of people who will be most interested in your offerings. Innovation leaders intentionally drive this uptake, or market acceptance, for maximum effect. There is nothing more gratifying or necessary than seeing your offerings purchased and put to use. Uptake is customer acceptance of a new product or service. Without it innovation is an empty shell, a wasted effort. With it, new ideas come into their own as they are taken up and applied by the people who most desire them – your customers.

Innovation is the successful introduction of a market offering that profits everybody involved, both you and your customers. Innovation happens when a new product or service creates a return in the market that far exceeds the time and money it takes to develop and execute. When a new offering is accepted and embraced, generating the resources that make it possible to support and grow its place in the market – that is innovation.

Seth Kahan is a change specialist who has consulted with CEOs and senior managers at over 60 organizations including World Bank, Shell, Peace Corps, and 30+ associations. This is an excerpt from Seth Kahan’s forthcoming book, Getting Innovation Right: How Leaders Create Inflection Points that Drive Success in the Marketplace to be published by Jossey-Bass in early 2013.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

SharePoint and Yammer May Eventually Make a Good Pair; Too Bad Google is Going For a Straight Flush

About this time last year many of my articles focused on the weak competitive position of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors. The rapidly shifting marketplace was predicted to force some to evolve and some to die through the introduction of strong products of cloud based offerings of Jive, Drupal, Salesforce, Google+ and eventually Facebook. When the cards fell, this introduction would eventually raise the stakes of the employee-experience/intranet space to spur a reinvention of the intranet from the ground up.

Since then…

Since the Prediction…

Drupal has developed more momentum around predictable cost models without proprietary license fees. A mix of professional services and PaaS offerings from the newly formed Wunderkraut and Drupal Gardens/Acquia combined with a strong pipeline of development staff make a good pair and an Ace kicker.

Salesforce has significantly increased its mobile capabilities this year. Combined with a strong marketing foothold into sales and IT and a high level of brand awareness, Salesforce looks very well positioned with an above average three of kind and is showing signs of going all-in as it tries to be the prime driver for the most relevant player in defining the future of cloud services for businesses.

Microsoft recently released SharePoint 2013 and is in the process of integrating its not-too surprising acquisition of Yammer.  Microsoft is busy preparing its long term strategic offering roadmap that integrates the social, search, messaging and collaboration offerings from Yammer, Bing, Outlook.com and its crown jewels SharePoint and Office. Microsoft's oft cited atomistic approach through agglomeration will help them go forward with a flush. One of the most interesting messages out of Microsoft is its recent positioning from the SharePoint team. The articulation that SharePoint 2013 has been designed to not need customizations to its interface is a ridiculously clever product strategy message. From a product differentiation perspective what this means is:

• Microsoft has decided that the PaaS/SaaS model is not only acceptable, it is desirable.
• The argument that SharePoint is highly difficult to customize visually and behaviorally is moot.
• Microsoft believes there is limited to no value in marketing its product as "fully configurable".

It remains to be seen if Microsoft has created an experience that can transcend individual corporate nuances. What is clear, is that Microsoft believes that there are other competitors who have potentially bigger hands than they are holding.

In late 2011 Jive made the ultimate statement in the confidence of their hand and went public. JiveWorld12 is rapidly approaching and we will begin to see how they frame their value proposition and advance their product set.

Facebook seems to be holding pat with a full-house combining its elite social network status with what has been a demographic defying and highly successful drive for consumer adoption. While the house may be full, the cards are not that valuable (let's say 7s over queens), at least not to stockholders given their recent stumblings. 

Google's Bold Play

Google has upped the ante and the stakes significantly with its opening up the Google+ product to enterprises. Google now has rounded out a serious suite of enterprise products and can continue to leverage its ace of spades in the hole. No matter how many research engagements for intranet users I lead, see or participate in, the number one request is to "make search work like Google". A powerful and simple search engine would magnify and capitalize on the over-reliance on governance that has encumbered every other product. Whether Google can capitalize on this within a closed intranet environment is unclear, but given that the experience searching in Outlook is both slower and more painful than Gmail, I'm not going to be the one who expresses doubt in their cards.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com