Archive
Publish or Perish- The New Paradigm for B2B Marketing? (Part 1 of 2)
I caught up with a long time friend and CMO, Dario Priolo a few weeks back and got to discussing best practices with him on B2B sales/marketing for software. He markets web-based learning and training solutions, and I think is really on top of innovation and cutting edge trends in this area so I value his opinion and approach to leveraging social media in the B2B space (check out his blog here).
While we talked about several themes, one of the most important ones that we kept coming back to was getting the organizations we work with to think like publishers.
Now if you are in the business of selling enterprise software or solutions, you may ask yourself, “what does publishing have to do with my business?” The conclusion that Dario and I kept coming back to in our conversation- Everything.
Consider the following:
Prospects are educating themselves. 90+% of decision makers have done some sort of web research on existing solutions before they talk to anyone at a vendor. Decision makers are armed with the information that you provide and with materials that are being created by your competitors.
Awareness marketing is the norm. Given the self directed nature of the modern day buying process, it is imperative that the people looking for the solutions that you offer can not only find you with minimal effort, but also find information that is useful to them. To do this, you must create relevant and timely content that is useful to a broad range of constituents. In sum, you are creating for a variety of audiences and needs.
Product knowledge is now easier than ever to share. The proliferation of social media tools and their integration with how we regularly communicate with one another means that your content will reach more people in the purchasing process. Your information isn’t static and doesn’t remain in the hands of the one person that found you on the web. How you present your product/service moves and makes its way to other stakeholders in the purchasing process that you cannot control. Further, the opinions of your prospects and users are now a part of the dialogue.
SaaS changes everything. In on-demand models, product knowledge is increasingly driven by trial. Long term profitability is driven by retention. The role of the content that you produce and manage extends far beyond getting a foot in the door. It is a meaningful part of maintaining an ongoing relationship with trial and paying customers.
It is critical to think carefully about who your audience is, what content you produce, how you distribute it and how to ensure that these consumers of your information continue to pay for this content with their time. In sum, B2B marketers of software and technology need to think like publishers. Sounds basic I know, but most of the B2B companies I see out there don’t do this very well. Does yours?
Erasing the Stigma of Enterprise Software
I read an interesting article last night (thanks to @JHaughwout) reporting that Andreessen Horowitz (Silicon Valley VC) is bulking up its capabilities in enterprise computing and solutions. There were a couple of great points made in the piece:
1) many VCs have shied away from investments in enterprise solutions because
- Sales cycles are long
- IT purchasers are a difficult sell (are a pain)
- The companies they fund compete with industry stalwarts such as IBM
2) there is a great divide between the quality and usability of B2C software and that of B2B solutions
Why is the elegance we find in consumer applications so blatantly missing on the enterprise side? As the author of the article points out, our experience at home increasingly raises the bar for those who want to play in the enterprise side. People will demand solutions at work that are as functional as those they use at home. Companies who get this will not only be highly differentiated, but will be able to bring a new set of evangelists and advocates for their solutions.
We believe that this “consumerization” of the enterprise space is a very important trend. It is driven by the proliferation of Saas models, infrastructure on demand, outsourcing and increasingly efficient marketing and distribution methods. Its why you will see more content from us on successful tactics used in B2C social media and how these can be applied to the B2B/enterprise world.
Through my experience with small enterprise software companies I have lived through the painful truth of the points above, but currents in the competitive structure of the enterprise software space that suggest that they may not be the status quo for long.
Link to the article:
Is there something unique about services?
In many of my past operating roles I have been responsible for driving growth in services businesses. Across all of these experiences, as the companies I worked for tried to scale, they have come across the challenge of customization.
Some months back, I came across a very interesting thought via the Harvard Business Review in an article by Frances Frei. Basically, she suggests that services are different from other business types in that quality and cost of what they deliver can be driven by customer behavior. Specifically, she states that customers can “wreak havoc” on quality and cost if they don’t behave as planned.
A compelling point. Frei notes how a slow customer might impact delivery times in a fast food line. Think about this in the context of a call center or business process environment. How do tech support handle times and first call closure rates get impacted when customers who finally speak to a representative are irritated due to the fact that they can’t find exactly the right option they are looking for on an IVR menu? How does this fit with the service and cost metrics that they are tasked with delivering?
Indeed, the large numbers of customer tastes and variables and their impact on the delivery of the product is what makes service businesses particularly tricky. Back to the fast food line- forcing an indecisive customer to order quickly (to improve the wait time for other customers) is not an experience that is likely to create high levels of satisfaction. So for services, the challenge is how to effectively configure people and processes in a way that can accommodate not only thousands of different preferences and tastes but a similarly large number of behaviors.
One area that Frei states is important to actively think about is how customers can help you provide better service. An example here is self-service kiosks for airport check-in. Customers are asked to do more activities on their own (reducing variability of behaviors) before they ever reach the airport, which then streamlines the processes and interactions that need to take place when they are actually on site. Taking these tasks away from employees at the airport reduces the pain associated with the variability of things like when people decide to arrive, when they decide to check in, how many bags they wish to check, etc. So in essence, each person can create a check in experience that fits with their needs and behaviors and so doing helps reduce the variability for everyone else.
The core insights that I am driving towards here are these: 1) technology and process innovation is a powerful lever for services business to create customization where it was previously too difficult to do so and 2) how we prepare our customers for the service transaction makes all the difference in how the eventual exchange will take place. These are salient point that many service providers overlook and don’t account for when they think about structuring and improving their offerings.
If interested you can access the Frei article here: http://bitly.com/scULD.
