Rethinking the Value of BANT (It's Not as Outdated as Some Suggest)

Last fall, I published a post here titled Why BANT No Longer Works for Qualifying Leads. In that post, I argued rather strongly that BANT (the acronym for Budget-Authority-Need-Timeframe) is no longer an effective way to qualify sales leads because of changes in how B2B buyers make purchase decisions.

My post was neither the first nor the last discussion of BANT to appear in the blogosphere. Here are a few of the blog articles that have been published this year.

• Why BANT is Bunk for Today's B2B Buyer by Ardath Albee
• Banning BANT:  Redefining Quality Lead Criteria and Handling Moot Objections by Allison Tetreault
• All Real Salespeople Love Sales Leads (but there is a tiny caveat) by James Obermayer
• BANT is Dead - Find the Authority by Mike Damphousse
• Lead Scoring:  Don't BANT On It by Sarah Hums
• BANT Isn't Enough Anymore:  A New Framework for Qualifying Prospects by Pete Caputa

As you can tell from these titles, the weight of opinion in the blogosphere is clearly anti-BANT.

While I stand by what I wrote last fall, I also now believe that my criticisms of BANT were probably too broad and that the BANT criteria are still relevant and useful for evaluating sales leads if they're used at the right times to answer the right questions. In the typical demand generation process, there are three major points at which you need to evaluate the quality of a sales lead.

Qualification of New Leads

The first is when you initially acquire a lead, and the issue is whether the lead should be added to your nurturing program. BANT criteria have little role to play in this decision. At this stage, the only information about the lead that you're likely to have is a name, a company affiliation, and a job title. Company affiliation and job title may allow you to infer something about potential need, financial ability to purchase, and buying authority, but that's it. For this decision, the primary criteria should be that the lead is affiliated with an organization that fits your company's target market and has a job title that indicates a reasonable connection with the products or services you sell.

Identification of Sales-Ready Leads

The next point at which you need to evaluate lead quality is when you are deciding whether a lead is ready to engage with a sales rep. A modified version of BANT should be part of the criteria you use to make this decision. For example:

• Need - A sales-ready lead will have acknowledged the existence of a need that your product or service can address.
• Authority - A sales-ready lead will be a member of the buying group that will make the purchase decision. The lead doesn't need to be the classic "economic buyer" or have sole buying authority, but he or she should be a member of the decision-making group.
• Timeframe - A sales-ready lead will be actively evaluating possible solutions for the recognized need. Your lead may not have a firm schedule for making a purchase decision, but he or she should have acknowledged that addressing the need has become a priority for his or her organization.
• Budget - A lead doesn't need to have an established budget to be considered sales ready. As I wrote in my earlier post, research by DemandGen Report has shown that between 70% and 80% of business buyers evaluate potential solutions, build a business case for immediate adoption, and then obtain spending approval. However, you should be fairly confident that the prospect organization has the financial wherewithal to purchase your product or service.

Identification of Sales Opportunities

The third point at which you need to evaluate lead quality is when you are determining whether you have a legitimate sales opportunity. By sales opportunity, I mean a potential deal that has progressed far enough to be included in your revenue forecast. For this decision, the focus of lead qualification is on the prospect organization rather than on an individual "lead" within the organization, and the BANT criteria are particularly relevant. For example:

• Need - To qualify as a sales opportunity, your sales rep should have confirmed that the prospect has a need that your product or service can address and that all members of the buying group have acknowledged the need.
• Authority - Your sales rep should have identified and established relationships will all members of the buying group. In addition, you sales rep must understand what process will be used to make the buying decision and what role each "buyer" plays in that process.
• Timeframe - To qualify as a sales opportunity, the buying process must have progressed to the point that the prospect is committed to making a purchase decision within a defined period of time.
• Budget - While it is not essential to have a specific budget line item for the proposed purchase, your sales rep should have confirmed that the prospect's buying group has access to sufficient funds to make the purchase and the ability to commit those funds when the purchase decision is made.

BANT should never be the only criteria used to qualify sales leads. As noted earlier, BANT is not appropriate for qualifying early-stage leads, and it provides only some of the criteria for identifying when a lead is sales ready. However, BANT is not nearly as useless or outdated as some of us may have thought.

How to Avoid Lead Genocide

Several days ago, I came across a great blog post by Jill Konrath. If you're not familiar with Jill's work, she is a well-respected sales consultant/trainer and the author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies.

In her post, Jill describes an experience with a provider of CRM software. You can read Jill's post to get the full flavor of the experience, but I'll provide an abbreviated version.

Jill received an e-mail from the CRM provider offering an ebook on the social sales revolution. Jill registered to obtain the ebook because she was interested in the topic. She had zero interest in acquiring a new CRM solution.

Just a few minutes after downloading the ebook, Jill received an e-mail from the CRM provider suggesting a "brief 10 minute call" to answer questions and "explain how our different products and services could bring value. . ." This call would help "shorten your evaluation process" and provide "exactly the information you need to help make any comparisons or decisions."

Exactly 34 minutes after this message, Jill received a second e-mail. The second message indicated that the sales rep had been unable to reach Jill by telephone and asked Jill to "let me know if it makes sense to connect." Two minutes later, Jill received a third e-mail asking her to answer nine questions regarding her CRM environment, including what she wanted her CRM system to do for her business, how many users she would have, and what other solutions she was evaluating.

Jill's post provoked numerous comments, and many of the people who commented said they had experienced something similar. One person said that she called this kind of marketing lead genocide rather than lead generation. I've had several experiences similar to Jill's, and I suspect many of you have also.

Practices like this are the epitome of bad marketing. In some cases, these aggressive practices may be the result of an honest, but mistaken, belief that just because a prospect has downloaded one white paper or ebook or attended one webinar, he or she is actively evaluating a potential purchase and is ready for a sales-level engagement.

More often, though, these kinds of practices result from an erroneous belief by sellers that they can push or drive or advance prospects through the buying process. The reality is, prospects control the buying process, and they determine how quickly they will move through the cycle. As I wrote in an earlier post, the only way you can consistently accelerate the buying process is to eliminate the friction that slows prospects down. Anything else is, at best, wasted effort, and it will usually do more harm than good.

To avoid the kind of marketing malpractice described in Jill's post, resist the urge to treat a prospect's first interaction with your business as an invitation to begin a late-stage sales conversation. And remember that, while you can facilitate your prospects' decision-making process, they ultimately decide when and to what level they will engage with your business.

Passing the Baton Without Missing a Step- Sales Enablement, Part 3

 

This is the third of three posts that are discussing the role that marketing plays in helping the sales team sell - what is usually called sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed what sales enablement is and why it is an important issue for most B2B companies. The second post discussed one of marketing's primary sales enablement responsibilities - providing the content resources that will help sales reps advance sales opportunities.

In this post, I'll explain why effective sales enablement also requires marketers to provide information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without a loss of momentum. In essence, marketing and sales need to work together like the runners in a relay race. Here's what I mean.

As I wrote in my last post, business buyers don't distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. We now know that most buyers are performing research on their own before they are willing to meet with a salesperson. So by the time a potential buyer meets with your sales rep, the buyer will probably have visited your website and accessed several of the content resources you offer.

These self-educated buyers have little patience for "starting over" with a salesperson. They expect their sales rep to come into the initial meeting with a basic working knowledge of their business and industry. Just as important, today's buyers also expect their sales rep to know what has already transpired in the relationship. They want the sales rep to step in and provide new insights that build on what has already occurred and help advance the decision-making process.

To make the transition from marketing to sales without losing forward momentum, marketers must do more than simply provide contact information when they pass a lead to sales. An effective lead hand-off should include significantly more information, such as the buyer persona assigned to the lead, a description of the content plan for the relevant buyer persona, and a list of the content resources developed for that buyer persona.

An effective lead hand-off will also be accompanied by an activity history detailing the prior contacts between the lead and the selling company. The activity history should include the following kinds of information:

• Outbound marketing offers sent to the lead
• Outbound marketing offers the lead has responded to
• Website pages viewed by the lead
• Content resources accessed by the lead
• Summaries of any person-to-person communications between the lead and representatives of the selling company
• The prospect's lead score

Delivering this information isn't as overwhelming as it might first appear. Marketing should have developed a content plan and content resources for each buyer persona for each stage of the buying process. So, this information should already be available. Your marketing automation software should be able to capture most of the lead's activity history and transfer that information to your CRM system when the lead is passed from marketing to sales.

Don't misunderstand me. This type of lead hand-off does require additional work, but it will also provide significant benefits to the sales team and the company.

• It reduces the amount of time that sales reps must spend on lead research.
• It eliminates the need for sales reps to guess about what content resources to use.
• It reduces the need for sales reps to create or customize content.
• It improves the ability of sales reps to continue prospect relationships without losing momentum.
• It helps improve sales pipeline velocity.

The changing dynamics of B2B demand generation require a coordinated effort by marketing and sales. That's why sales enablement remains one of marketing's most important responsibilities.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 2 of the sales enablement series here.

Create Content that Helps Sales Reps Sell - Sales Enablement, Part 2

Business buyers do not distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. As they work through their decision-making process, what really matters to buyers is the relevance, quality, and credibility of the information they receive from prospective vendors. They couldn't care less about whether the information comes from the marketing department or a salesperson.

To maximize results, what B2B companies need is a demand generation process/system that can address buyers' needs at every stage of their decision-making journey. I call it managing demand generation "from curiosity to close."

Marketing and sales play distinct roles in the demand generation process, but marketing is well-suited to help make the selling process more effective. This role of marketing is usually called sales enablement, and marketing has two major sales enablement responsibilities.

• Content - Marketers must provide the content resources that will enable sales reps to advance sales opportunities.
• Information - When a lead is passed from marketing to sales, marketing must provide the information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without loss of momentum.

This is the second of three posts dealing with sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed why sales enablement is important for B2B companies. In this post, I'll discuss the content aspect of marketing's sales enablement responsibility. My next post will cover the information component.

Sales Enablement Content Needs Improvement

Recent research by Richardson, a sales training firm, paints a mixed picture of marketing's performance on the sales enablement content front. The Richardson research consisted of a survey of over 400 sales representatives and sales managers. Here are a few of the significant findings.

• 54% of sales reps and 65% of sales managers say they understand their company's content marketing strategy.
• 65% of sales reps and 74% of sales managers say that the content their company publishes is valuable to their customers.
• Only 52% of sales reps and 43% of managers say that the content their company publishes helps improve sales effectiveness.
• When asked how their company's content could be improved to better support sales efforts, 59% of sales reps and 57% of managers said "improve content relevance to our customers." Fifty-one percent of sales reps and 65% of managers said "create a stronger link between the content and the solutions we sell."

Two Flavors of Sales Enablement Content

There are two basic types of sales enablement content. The first consists of "normal" marketing content resources that are distributed to prospects directly by sales reps. Marketing is responsible for developing content resources for all buyer personas for all stages of the buying process. This will necessarily include those stages that occur after marketing has passed a lead over to sales.

These later-stage resources are designed for prospects who are actively considering a purchase. To borrow the terminology used by SiriusDecisions, these are prospects who are "exploring possible solutions," "committing to a solution," and "justifying the decision." When late-stage marketing content resources are distributed by sales reps, they become sales enablement content.

The second category of sales enablement content consists of various "tools" that are specifically designed for use by salespeople. This category includes, but is not limited to:

• E-mail message templates
• Sales presentation slides (with accompanying scripts or notes)
• ROI calculators
• Total cost of ownership calculators
• Sales proposal templates

While I contend that marketing should take the lead in creating these kinds of content resources, marketers need to involve sales reps at every stage of the development process, and they need to pay close attention to the "real-world" intelligence and insights that sales reps can bring to the process. Getting salespeople to buy into these resources is critical because they will have no value if they aren't used.

In my next post, I'll discuss the kinds of information that marketing should provide to salespeople as part of the lead hand-off process.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 3 of the sales enablement series here.

Kill the Friction Gremlins to Accelerate Buying Decisions

In a recent survey by CSO Insights, almost three out of four respondents (73%) said that their average sales cycle for new customers requires four or more months to complete. B2B marketing and sales professionals know that reducing the length of the buying/sales cycle will produce substantial benefits, but this is not an easy task. The only truly effective way to accelerate the buying process is to reduce the friction that slows prospects
down.

When it comes to accelerating the buying process, B2B marketing and sales resemble the sport of curling. Curling is a little like shuffleboard, but it's played on ice and involves sliding a large polished granite stone toward a target painted on the ice. The playing surface is prepared by spraying water droplets (called "pebble") on the ice. Because of the friction between the stone and the pebble, the moving stone will turn or "curl" to one side or the other.

After one team member "throws" the stone toward the target, two other team members accompany the stone as it moves down the ice and guide it toward the target. The catch is, these players aren't
allowed to actually touch the moving stone. Instead, they use brooms to sweep the ice in front of the stone. Sweeping temporarily melts the pebble and reduces the friction between the stone and the ice, and this changes both the speed and the direction of the stone. Therefore, sweepers affect where the stone stops, but they do so indirectly.

In B2B demand generation terms, friction is anything that slows a potential buyer's progression through the buying process. Like the sweepers in a curling match, one your primary jobs as a marketer or a salesperson is to reduce friction. You would like to be able to directly lead your prospects through the buying process, but in today's B2B buying environment, attempting to push prospects through the buying process on your schedule just doesn't work - at least not very often.



The friction gremlins live everywhere in the buying process, and some of the causes of friction are beyond your control. For example, a change in the prospect's business or financial condition, or a change in the composition of the prospect's senior management team can delay or stall the buying process.

The good news is, you can address many causes of friction with the right marketing content and selling skills. Most causes of friction fall into one of two categories - friction that relates directly to your solution or the problem or challenge it addresses, or friction that accompanies any significant organizational change.

Friction Related to Your Solution

This type of friction usually results from a lack of information. To keep moving through the buying process, potential buyers need the right information at the right time, and if they don't get that information, the buying process can stall. For example, a potential buyer's progression can be slowed or stopped if he or she:

• Doesn't understand or appreciate the costs or negative ramifications of the status quo
• Doesn't fully understand how your solution will improve the status quo
• Perceives that the purchase of your solution will entail substantial risks
• Doesn't have an accurate picture of the ROI that your solution will produce

Change-Related Friction

Change-related friction is usually caused by internal prospect issues, and most of those issues have little to do with the selling company or its products or services. Every prospect organization will have a unique mix of change management issues, but there are four causes of change-related friction that arise in most organizations. The buying process is likely to stall if the principal buyer:

• Doesn't understand how the proposed change will affect the existing organizational "system" (people, processes, and technology)
• Hasn't identified who must be involved in the decision to change
• Believes (or other stakeholders believe) that the problem or need driving the consideration of change can be addressed using internal resources
• Hasn't identified the issues or concerns that must be addressed to get buy-in from all necessary stakeholders

How to Reduce Friction

Both marketing and sales are responsible for reducing friction in the buying process, but marketing's share of the job has grown because of changes in buyer behavior. With business buyers delaying interactions with salespeople until later in the buying process, marketing content must be a primary tool for reducing solution-related friction. In fact, marketing content is often the only effective tool for dealing with the solution-related friction that arises in the early stages of the buying process.

Because change-related friction is unique to each prospect, sales must assume a large part of the responsibility for reducing it. Even here, however, marketing content can play an important role. For example, a white paper or ebook that describes how to build a business case for your type of solution can help your potential buyer identify all of the stakeholders who must be involved in the decision to change. A white paper or ebook can also be used to discuss why an internal "home-grown" solution isn't the best alternative for most companies.

You can't completely eliminate friction from the buying process, but the best way to speed up buying decisions is to kill as many friction gremlins as possible.

Photo Credit:  pop culture geek via Flickr cc

Identifying the Questions Your Prospects Need to Answer

At the most basic level, successful B2B marketing and sales depend largely on having solid answers to four questions:

• Why do companies and businesspeople buy products or services like those we provide?
• How do our products or services create value for our customers?
• What differentiates our products or services from those offered by our competitors?
• How do our prospects make buying decisions?

Of these four issues, many B2B marketers and salespeople have the least understanding of how prospects actually make buying decisions. In the 2013 Sales Perforance Optimization survey by CSO Insights, only 9.6% of respondents said that their ability to understand their customer's buying process exceeded espectations.

Over the years, marketing and sales professionals have developed several models to describe the B2B buying process. Some still use the Awareness-Consideration-Evaluation-Purchase model that's been around for decades. The SiriusDecisions model depicted below is another widely-used representation of the B2B buying process.

Models can help us understand the buying process, but all buying process models have two important limitations. First, they inevitably make the decision-making process more linear and less complicated that it actually is. And second, buying process models don't contain all of the information you need to design effective demand generation programs or develop relevant and compelling marketing content.

Because of these limitations, I use a different approach when I work with clients on demand generation/content marketing programs. What we do is identify the questions that prospects will need to answer to feel comfortable making a buying decision. These questions are developed for each relevant buyer persona, and they are also formulated with a specific product or service in mind. These critical questions are part of what Ardath Albee called a "buyer synopis" in her great book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.

To illustrate how this works, the table below shows some of the types of questions that would likely be included in any buying process for a complex product or service. For this example, I've collapsed the six-step SiriusDecisions buying process model into three broad buying process phases - Discovery, Consideration, and Decision. The questions in this table are general, and when you develop buying process questions, you'll want to include several that relate specifically to your product or service.



Developing an extensive list of buying stage questions helps you understand how your prospects think whey they're evaluating a prospective purchase. Just as important, it helps you design effective demand generation programs by enabling you to pinpoint the issues your marketing content resources need to address to move prospects through the buying process.

Will Your Marketing Content Help You "Make the Cut?"

I'm not a big fan of professional golf, although I do watch at least part of the four "major" tournaments that are held each year. As I was watching last year's US Open, it occurred to me that B2B demand generation and professional golf have something in common.

As most of you probably know, professional golf tournaments typically consist of 72 holes, with contestants playing four 18-hole rounds over four days. After 36 holes (two rounds) are completed, the tournament field is reduced by eliminating the players with the worst scores. The "cut," as it's called, can sometimes eliminate almost half of the players. To have a chance to win a tournament, the first thing a player must do is "make the cut."

One of the truisms in golf is that you can't win a tournament on the first day, but you can lose it. Because the scores are cumulative, a bad performance on the first day can put you so far behind that it's all but impossible to catch up. A really bad performance on Day 1 may cause you to "miss the cut" and not even have a chance to play in the final two rounds.

For B2B companies that have complex and lengthy sales cycles, demand generation resembles a professional golf tournament. The buying process can extend for several weeks to several months and typically includes multiple buying stages. At several points along the purchase journey, prospects make decisions about which potential suppliers to consider. If your company doesn't "make the cut" at any of these decision points, you won't be in the game when the final buying decision is made.

The critical point here is that prospects are increasingly making these decisions before they've had a person-to-person interaction with anyone in your company. According to research by the Corporate Executive Board, SiriusDecisions, DemandGen Report, and others, the average prospect is 50% to 60% through the buying process before he or she meets with a sales rep.

So how do prospects decide which potential sellers to consider? To a great extent, these decisions are based on what prospects learn about and from a potential seller when they take initial steps to get information about the products or services they may be interested in purchasing. This is what Google has called the Zero Moment of Truth.

Most of this early research is performed online, via web searches, anonymous visits to company websites, reading or viewing online content resources provided by prospective sellers, reading online user reviews, and, increasingly, interacting with peers via social media.

This new buyer behavior means that what is said about and by your company online plays a critical role in your demand generation success. While you can't control what others say about your company, you can control the quality of the content you publish. If the content you provide demonstrates that you understand your prospects' problems and that you have the requisite expertise to help solve those problems, your odds of beginning a meaningful sales conversation with those prospects will be a lot higher.

What about your marketing content? Will it help you "make the cut" and stay in the game as your prospects move closer to a buying decision?

What is a "Sales-Ready Lead?"

One of the most important requirements for an effective B2B demand generation system is a clear understanding of who constitutes a sales-ready lead. Decribing who is a sales-ready lead is the essential starting point for defining the roles and aligning the work of marketing and sales. In an optimized demand generation system, marketing is primarily responsible for acquiring new leads and for nurturing leads until they are sales ready. Once a lead becomes sales ready, sales assumes the primary responsibility for managing that relationship.

The term sales-ready lead can be found in many books, articles, and blog posts, but it's surprisingly difficult to find a definition that's really useful. I'll offer one momentarily, but first it's important to understand what a sales-ready lead is not. A raw inquiry does not constitute a sales-ready lead. A raw inquiry is someone who has shown only a minimal level of interest in what you offer. He or she may have responded to an outbound lead generation campaign or visited your website and filled out a registration form, but that's it. The problems caused when marketing passes raw inquiries to sales have been widely discussed in the demand generation literature, so I won't repeat them here.

Sales ready is also not equivalent to ready to buy. Some people suggest that sales-ready leads are only those leads who are fully qualified using tradtional BANT criteria. In an earlier post, I discussed why BANT is no longer an effective framework for qualifying leads. The basic problem with BANT is that some of the criteria will not be met until near the end of the buying process, and in addition, it can be impossible for any individual lead to satisfy all of the BANT requirements.

A sales-ready lead, therefore, falls somewhere between a raw inquiry and a BANT-qualified lead. Here's my proposed definition:

A sales-ready lead is an individual who (a) is affiliated with a qualified prospect, (b) can make or influence the decision to purchase your product or service, and (c) is sufficiently interested in exploring solutions to engage in a meaningful sales dialog with a sales rep. In this definition, the term qualified prospect means an organization that has a need your company can address and falls within your defined target market.

This definition provides a good starting point, but I also think it's important to use some specific criteria for identifying sales-ready leads. The table below shows eleven criteria that I suggest are appropriate for most companies. The first four criteria apply to the prospect organization, and the remaining criteria apply to the individual lead.

OK, that's how I define sales-ready lead. How about you? How would you change my definition? Would you use an entirely different approach?

Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - The Content Audit

Starting a content marketing program from scratch can feel like an overwhelming task. Content marketing differs from traditional marketing in several fundamental ways, and it will require you to develop and field a very different portfolio of marketing assets.

In this series of posts, I'm describing three preliminary steps that will make the content development process more manageable. The first step is to identify your core customer value propositions because they define the central messages that your content resources need to communicate. The second step is to develop buyer personas because they provide the information you need to make your content resources relevant to your potential buyers.

The third preliminary step is to audit your existing inventory of content resources. A thorough content audit serves two important functions. First, it enables you to create a complete and accurate record of your existing content resources. In my experience, most marketers don't have a complete picture of what content resources they already have. Second, a content audit can be used to identify where gaps exist in your content portfolio, which helps you determine where to focus your content development efforts.

There are three basic steps involved in performing a comprehensive content audit. The first is to document basic information about each of your content assets. The second step is to associate or "map" each content resource to one or more of your identified buyer personas. In the final step, you map each content resource to one or more buying process stages on a per buyer persona basis.

To collect and organize this information, I use three spreadsheets, and I've provided example versions below.

Basic Resource Information

The spreadsheet below shows the basic information that I collect about each content asset. Most of the information required for this spreadsheet is self-explanatory, but I've included an "Instructions" row in the example.

 

Buyer Persona Map

The spreadsheet below is the tool I use to associate specific content resources with buyer personas. When mapping resources to buyer personas, the basic question you ask is whether a resource contains content that will appeal to a given buyer persona. Does the resource focus on the specific problems and challenges facing the buyer persona? Is the resource targeted for the persona's job function and industry.

 



You should be able to associate most content resources with at least one buyer persona, but there may be some resources that are so generic that it's just not reasonable to link them to any buyer persona. If you complete your buyer persona map and have any buyer personas with no (or very few) assigned resources, you obviously have a significant gap in your content portfolio.

Buying Stage Map

The final step in the content audit process is to associate your content resources with specific stages of the buying process. When mapping content resources to buying stages, the basic test is whether the resource contains answers for the major questions that a potential buyer will have at that stage of the buying process. The spreadsheet below is the tool I use to perform this step.

In this step, I find it easier to create a separate spreadsheet for each buyer persona. For illustration purposes, I've used a buying process that contains three stages - Discovery, Consideration, and Decision. To create a buying stage map, first select a buyer persona, then go to your buyer persona map and identify all of the content resources that you have assigned to that persona. List these resources in your buying stage map and link each resource to one or more buying stages. Repeat this process until you have a buying stage map for each of your buyer personas. If you don't have content resources for each buying stage for each buyer persona, then you've identified gaps in your content portfolio.

A content audit won't eliminate the work required to develop the content you need, but it will help you prioritize your content development projects.

Read Part 1 of the content marketing series here.

Read Part 2 of the content marketing series here.

Read Part 3 of the content marketing series here.

Three Things To Do Before Hiring More Sales Reps

When B2B companies need to increase sales, managers will usually consider hiring more sales reps. This thinking is understandable because many B2B companies have long relied almost exclusively on their salespeople to find and win new business. Today, however, simply putting "more feet on the street" isn't likely to produce the volume of new sales that managers are looking for, and even if it does, the cost of those new sales is likely to be unacceptably high.

I've written before about why B2B companies should no longer rely exclusively on salespeople to generate new sales leads. Business buyers have fundamentally changed how they make buying decisions, and these changes require a new approach to B2B demand generation.

So, before you invest in more sales reps, there are three other steps you should take.

Step 1:  Improve Lead Acquisition Marketing

If your marketing programs aren't producing at least 40% - 50% of your qualified sales leads, it's likely that you aren't investing enough in lead acquisition marketing or your marketing programs aren't as effective as they need to be. Marketing must play a larger role in generating new sales leads because in the current environment, business buyers are less receptive to traditional sales prospecting techniques, making such  techniques far less effective and efficient.

For most B2B companies, effective lead acquisition marketing should include a mix of inbound and outbound marketing programs. In both cases, persistence is an important key to success. In today's environment, marketers must assume that multiple contacts will be required to entice a potential buyer to respond.

Step 2:  Implement a Sound Lead Management Process

Research continues to show that most new sales leads are not ready or willing to engage with a salesperson. We also know, however, that most "qualified but not ready to buy" prospects will eventually buy from someone. Once a new lead is acquired (meaning that the prospect has identified himself/herself and indicated some level of interest in your product or service), the big challenge for B2B companies is to build the relationship with the prospect until he or she is ready to make a buying decision.

A lead management process encompasses all of the marketing and sales activities that you use with prospects "from curiosity to close." The objective of a lead management process is to prevent valuable leads from "falling through the cracks" and out of the marketing/sales funnel. While a comprehensive lead management process includes many components, the three core elements are:

• A lead nurturing program that provides prospects relevant, primarily non-promotional information in multiple formats and through multiple channels. The primary objectives of a lead nurturing program are to support prospects throughout the buying process, establish and enhance your credibility, and maintain "mindshare" with prospects until they are ready to have a serious sales conversation.
• A lead qualification system that defines appropriate buying process stages and provides a mechanism for estimating where each prospect is in the buying process.
• A selling process that's designed to identify legitimate sales opportunities and convert those opportunities into closed deals.

Step 3:  Add a Lead Development Representative

Rather than adding more outside sales reps, hire one or more lead development representatives to support your demand generation efforts. Lead development representatives have two primary responsibilities:

• They provide the "human touch" components of your lead nurturing program. In this role, their objective is to use multiple conversations to build rapport with prospects in ways that automated, content-based lead nurturing cannot accomplish.
• They play a major role in the lead qualification process, and they can be primarily responsible for determining when a prospect meets the criteria to be considered a sales-ready lead. When that occurs, the LDR may also be responsible for arranging the first meeting between a prospect and your sales rep.

Lead development reps can perform these functions more efficiently that regular sales reps, and they enable your sales reps to devote more of their time to working with fully qualified prospects who are in the later stages of the buying process.

Hiring more sales reps may be necessary to achieve your growth objectives, but take these three steps first to ensure that you're getting the most out of your existing sales force.

Closing the Credibility Gap in B2B Marketing

The dictionary definition of credibility is the quality or power of inspiring belief. Credibility with prospects and customers is critical to the success of any business. Credibility creates trust, and it is one of the attributes that elevates a B2B company from "potential vendor" to "trusted advisor."

It's now clear that marketing content plays a leading role in B2B demand generation. In many cases, a prospect's first impression of your company will be based on the content you publish. To be effective, marketing content must be relevant and credible to the intended audience.

The relevance of marketing content is primarily determined by what the content communicates. Does it discuss issues that are important to the intended audience? The credibility of a content resource is primarily determined by how the resource communicates the message.

All B2B marketers face a credibility challenge, at least to some extent. The reality is that business buyers have a built-in inclination to distrust marketing content. The credibility gap was clearly shown in recent research by DemandGen Report. In the 2012 Content Preferences Survey, participants were asked to identify the kind of content they gave more credence to.

• 52% of respondents said peer reviews/user generated content.
• 33% said content that is authored by a third-party publication or analyst and sponsored by a vendor.
• 12% said co-branded content.
• Only 4% chose content that is branded directly from a vendor.

How to Close the Credibility Gap

Credibility is important for all kinds of marketing content, but it's absolutely critical for content that is used to reach prospects who (a) are in the early stages of their buying process, and (b) are not familiar with your company. Content credibility is essential in this situation because many of these prospects will decide whether to begin or continue a relationship with your company based solely on the credibility of your content.

For these early-stage prospects, the most effective way to establish credibility is to use brand-agnostic content. Brand-agnostic content is content that does not directly or overtly promote your company or your products or services. To create engagement with early-stage prospects, the first requirement is to demonstrate that you are a reliable source of relevant, accurate, insightful, and (mostly) objective information. If your content overtly promotes your company or your products or services, many early-stage prospects will tune you out even if your content also provides valuable information.

Recent research shows just how widespread the dislike of promotional content is among business buyers. In the DemandGen Report survey mentioned earlier, 74% of respondents said that solution providers should "curb the sales messages" in their content resources. In a 2012 survey of technology buyers by UBM TechWeb, 77% of respondents said the biggest mistake technology vendors make is to include too much marketing "fluff" in their content resources.

When prospects enter the consideration/evaluation stage of their buying process, they will want and need to learn more about your company and about the specific features and capabilities of your products or services. That's where promotional content is both necessary and appropriate. Before that, however, promotional content may do more harm than good when it comes to creating engagement with potential customers.

Using brand-agnostic content will undoubtedly be counterintuitive for many B2B marketers. But in today's environment, the reality is that you can sell more by "selling" less.

How Much are Your Sales Leads Worth? - Part 2

In my last post, I discussed why B2B marketing and sales professionals need to have a clear and accurate understanding of lead value. I also described the first two steps of a four-step process for determining the value of sales leads - estimating the lifetime value of a new customer and calculating the maximum amount that you should invest to acquire a new customer. In this post, I'll cover the final two steps of the valuation process and describe how to use this data to determine the value of sales leads at any desired stage of the demand generation pipeline.

To illustrate how this process works, I'm using an example of a company that provides marketing asset management (MAM) solutions to corporate customers. So far, we have calculated the customer lifetime value of a new MAM customer ($135,000) and the maximum amount the company should invest to acquire a new MAM customer ($117,000).

Identify Lead Stages and Conversion Rates

The next step in the process is to decide what lead stages you want to use in your lead value model and identify the rates at which leads convert from one stage to the next. To be absolutely clear, the "lead value" we are calculating is equal to the maximum amount that a business should spend to acquire or develop a sales lead at a given lead stage. With this approach, the value of a lead is a function of two factors - the maximum amount you should spend to acquire a new customer and the rate at which leads at a given stage convert to become customers.

To illustrate this process, lets add some facts to the example we used in the last post. Companies define lead stages in a variety of ways, but one of the most widely-used frameworks is the demand waterfall developed by marketing and sales research firm SiriusDecisions. We'll assume that our hypothetical MAM company uses this framework to describe its lead stages. The table below shows the major stages that are included in the SiriusDecisions framework.

Stage
 Customer
alue
This table also shows the rates at which leads "convert" from one lead stage to the next. These conversion rates were developed by SiriusDecisions, and they describe the conversion rates of an average-performing B2B company. The table shows that 4.4% of inquires will become marketing qualified leads, 66% of marketing qualified leads will become sales accepted leads, 49% of sales accepted leads will become sales qualified leads, and 20% of sales qualified leads will become new customers. Your conversion rates will differ those shown in the table, and it's critical to use your rates for calculating the value of your sales leads.

Calculate Lead Value

To calculate lead value, you first need to determine how many leads are required at each of your lead stages to produce one new customer. These amounts will depend on your lead conversion rates. For example, the above table shows that the conversion rate for sales qualified leads to new customers is 20%. Therefore, it takes 5 sales qualified leads to result in the acquisition of one new customer (1/.20). Likewise, the table shows that the conversion rate for sales accepted leads to sales qualified leads is 49%. So, it takes 10.2 sales accepted leads to produce 5 sales qualified leads (5/.49). This also means that it takes 10.2 sales accepted leads to produce one new customer.

Once you've determined now many leads are required at each lead stage to produce one new customer, calculating the lead value is easy. You simply divide your maximum allowable investment for one new customer by the number of leads required to produce one new customer. As the above table shows, the value of sales leads for our example MAM company are as follows:

• Sales Qualified Leads = $23,400 ($117,000/5)
• Sales Accepted Leads = $11,466 ($117,000/10.2)
• Marketing Qualified Leads = $7,568 ($117,000/15.5)
• Inquiries = $333 ($117,000/351.4)

This model clearly demonstrates that leads increase significantly in value as they move through the demand generation pipeline. In our example, a late-stage Sales Qualified Lead is about 70 times more valuable than an early-stage Inquiry. This dramatic increase in value provides strong justification for investing in effective lead nurturing programs that will move prospects through the pipeline.

I've recently published a white paper that explains the process for calculating lead value. If you'd like a copy of this paper, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

How Much are Your Sales Leads Really Worth?

Every day, marketing and sales professionals in thousands of B2B companies make significant investments to acquire and develop sales leads. The ultimate objective is to grow revenues and profits by winning new customers. Unfortunately, these investment decisions are often made without a clear and accurate understanding of how valuable leads actually are. When marketing and sales leaders don't know the true value of their sales leads, they can invest too little and miss out on profitable new revenues, or they can invest too much and acquire customers that are unprofitable.

Knowing the true value of sales leads is particularly important for B2B companies with long and complex demand generation cycles. In these situations, the purchase decision is the end result of a buying process that contains multiple steps and often extends over a period of several months. Demand generation investments must be made to acquire new leads, and additional investments are required to move those leads through the revenue pipeline. To manage demand generation spending effectively, you need to know the value of leads at various stages of the process.

Determining the value of sales leads is a four-step process. In this post, I'll discuss the first two steps, and I'll cover the last two steps in my next post.

Estimate Customer Lifetime Value

The first step in determining the value of sales leads is to estimate the value of a new customer for your business. Customer value establishes the ceiling for how much you should invest  to acquire a new customer because new customers will contribute to profitable growth only if the value they create exceeds the costs you incur to acquire them. For this purpose, value means customer lifetime value, which can be defined as the present value of the total profits that a company expects to earn from a customer over the full duration of the customer relationship.

There are several methods for calculating customer lifetime value. One of the more simple formulas is:

CLV = m(r/(1+i-r))

where CLV = customer lifetime value
                m = annual gross profit
                 r =  customer retention rate
                 i = discount rate

We can use a simple example to illustrate how the formula works. Suppose that your comany sells marketing asset management (MAM) solutions to corporate customers. The average new MAM customer produces annual gross revenues of $100,000 and an annual gross profit of $30,000. Your customer retention rate for new MAM customers is 90%, and your discount rate is 10%. If we insert these values into the formula, the calculation would be:

CLV = $30,000(.9/(1+.1-.9))
CLV = $30,000(.9/.2)
CLV = $30,000(4.5)
CLV = $135,000

On these facts, therefore, each new MAM customer that you acquire is worth $135,000 to your company.

Calculate the Maximum Allowable Investment

As I noted earlier, the value of a new customer sets the ceiling for how much you can spend to acquire that customer without diluting company profits. However, when customer acquisition costs are equal to customer lifetime value, your company will not earn a return on your acquisition investment. Therefore, it's important to determine how much you can spend to acquire a new customer and earn an acceptable return on your acquisition investment. I call this the maximum allowable investment.

The formula for calculating the maximum allowable investment is:

Maximum allowable investment = CLV/(1+ROI Threshhold)

In this formula, CLV is the customer lifetime value, and ROI Threshhold is your minimum acceptable ROI on demand generation investments. If we assume that your ROI Threshhold is 15%, the maximum allowable investment would be calculated as follows:

Maximum allowable investment = $135,000/(1+.15)
Maximum allowable investment = $135,000/1.15
Maximum allowable investment = $117,391.30

So, in this example, the most you should spend to acquire a new MAM customer is approximately $117,000.

In my next post, I'll discuss the final two steps in the process for calculating lead value. I've recently published a white paper that explains this process in greater detail. If you'd like a copy of this white paper, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

The Least Understood Aspect of B2B Buying

At the most basic level, successful B2B marketing and sales depend largely on having solid answers to four questions:

• Why do companies and businesspeople buy products or services like those we provide?
• How do our products or services create value for our customers?
• What differentiates our products or services from similar offerings provided by our competitors?
• How do our prospects make buying decisions?

If you have accurate answers to these questions, you can develop relevant and compelling marketing content and have valuable sales conversations.

Of these four issues, most B2B marketers and salespeople have the least understanding of how prospects actually make buying decisions. In the 2012 Sales Performance Optimization survey by CSO Insights, only 12% of respondents said they have a thorough understanding of their customer's buying process. Understanding how your prospects buy is important because it directly impacts marketing and sales performance. CSO Insights says that a theoretical sales organization that moves from "needs improvement" to "exceeds expectations" in its understanding of the customer's buying process would increase its "win" rate from 42% to 58%.

The reality is, the B2B buying process is a complex thing, particularly when a major solution-type purchase is on the table. Most of the models we use make the decision-making process appear to be less complicated than it actually is. For example, the SiriusDecisions model that is shown below is a great high-level representation of the B2B buying process. I've used it several times in this blog to illustrate various points. However, the SiriusDecisions model doesn't really reveal the complexity of the process. There's a great deal going on in those steps called, "loosening of the status quo" and "committing to change."

What our models don't make clear is that the B2B buying process is really a change management process when a major solution-type purchase is involved. The buying process we are familiar with occurs within a change management process that is rarely understood well. The diagram below illustrates this point.

The issues involved in the change management process relate almost entirely to the prospect organization, and most have very little to do with the selling company or its products or services. However, unless these change management issues are resolved satisfactorily, no purchase will be made. Every prospect organization will have a unique set of change management issues, but there are four issues that arise in most buying organizations.

• How will the proposed change affect the existing organizational "system" (people, processes, and technology)?
• Who must be involved in the decision to change?
• Can the problem or need that is driving the consideration of change be addressed using internal resources?
• What issues or concerns must be addressed in order to get buy-in from all necessary parties?

Sharon Drew Morgen, the author of Dirty Little Secrets: Why Buyers Can't Buy and Sellers Can't Sell, and What You Can Do About It and Selling with Integrity: Reinventing Sales Through Collaboration, Respect, and Serving, has written extensively about the relationship between change management and the B2B buying process. If you want to learn about this topic in detail, get your hands on one of Ms. Morgen's books.

From a marketing perspective, the important point here is that you need to provide marketing content that helps prospects work through their change management issues. Some examples could include:

• A white paper or calculator tool that helps prospects understand the true cost of their status quo
• A white paper that describes the challenges involved in developing an internal solution
• A case study that demonstrates how your solution can be implemented with minimal disruption of existing operations

For marketing and sales professionals, the important thing to remember is that helping B2B prospects buy is really about helping those prospects change.

What Makes Marketing Content Insightful?

For the past several months, the Corporate Executive Board has been advocating a new approach to selling, one that is based on the premise that what business buyers really want from potential vendors - and by extension their sales reps - is fresh insights about how to improve their business. The new approach was described in a book by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon titled The Challenger Sale that was published in the fall of 2011.

In a recent post at The Sales Challenger blog, Mashhood Beg outlined CEB's view of what constitutes insight, and more particularly commercial insight. To define these terms, Beg compared them to some of the other types of information that are used in sales messages. These various types of information are illustrated in the following diagram.

CEB defines five types of information.

• General Information - The full "universe" of information that is available to potential buyers. General Information may or may not be credible or relevant to a particular prospect.
• Accepted Information - Accepted Information is information that is both credible and relevant for a particular prospect. Accepted Information does not teach a prospect anything new - it just confirms what the prospect already knows.
• Thought Leadership - This type of information is credible and relevant, but in addition, it teaches prospects something new - something they would not have learned elsewhere.
• Insight - According to CEB, Insight is information that disrupts a prospect's status quo. Think of it as Thought Leadership with a kick. Insight introduces prospects to new ideas and simultaneously highlights the disadvantages (costs) of their status quo. The idea is to cause the prospect to feel a sense of urgency to act.
• Commercial Insight - CEB describes Commercial Insight as information that points a prospect to one specific potential supplier. In other words, Commercial Insight introduces new ideas to a prospect, highlights the disadvantages of the prospect's status quo, and argues (either expressly or by implication) that one specific supplier is better suited than others to help the prospect address the issue or problem.

In CEB's view, Commercial Insight is the most powerful kind of information for sales messaging because it emphasizes (again, either directly or implicitly) the unique or superior capabilities of your company.

From a marketing perspective, I have a couple of concerns about the emphasis that CEB places on Commercial Insight. First, marketing content that qualifies as Commercial Insight may also be fairly promotional. Promotional content can be appropriate for prospects who are in the later stages of the buying process, but the same content may well be a turn-off for early-stage buyers. Second, if it's not really well-crafted, marketing content that qualifies as Commercial Insight may come off as biased and, therefore, not completely trustworthy. It takes a good bit of skill to create a content resource that points to your company and retains an "objective" look and feel.

For these reasons, I contend that most marketing content should strive to qualify as Insight, but not necessarily Commercial Insight. Marketing content, particularly content that is intended for early-stage buyers, should provide new ideas and highlight the disadvantages associated with current practices, but it shouldn't try too hard to point to a single company.

Why You Need More Than Case Studies

Customer case studies are one of the most popular types of marketing content used by B2B companies. According to research by Eccolo Media, case studies are the fourth most widely consumed type of marketing collateral (behind product brochures, white papers, and video/multimedia files) and the second most influential type of marketing collateral (trailing only white papers). (Eccolo Media 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Report)

Case studies are potent marketing tools because they're good at performing several jobs.

• They help establish your credibility.
• They educate prospects about the benefits of your product or service.
• Most importantly, they can help lower a prospect's perception of the risk associated with purchasing your product or service.

Because case studies can do so many things well, it's easy (and tempting) to conclude that they're the only type of marketing content you need. That's understandable, but it's wrong.

To market effectively, you need content for all parts of your prospects' decision-making process. That's because the questions that your prospects need to answer change as they move through the buying process. The diagram below depicts the six steps of the B2B buying process suggested by marketing and sales research firm SiriusDecisions. These six steps can be grouped into three buying process phases - Discovery, Consideration, and Decision.

During the Discovery phase, a potential buyer becomes aware of a problem or need and recognizes that the negative effects of the status quo make change a priority. For this to happen, prospects need answers to several questions, including:

• Why should I change, and why should I change now?
• How is the problem or challenge adversely affecting my company and/or industry?
• What will happen if I don't change?
• What events or circumstances would force me to address this problem or challenge?

Once a potential buyer has committed to addressing a problem or need, he or she will conduct research to identify possible solutions. During this Consideration phase, one of the most important questions a prospect will have is:  How have companies like mine successfully dealt with this problem or challenge?

Customer case studies don't do a particularly good job of answering Discovery-phase questions, but they excel at answering one of the most critical questions that will arise during the Consideration phase of the buying process. This means that case studies can be great lead nurturing tools, but not necessarily great lead acquisition tools.

So, by all means, make sure that your company has several well-written and compelling case studies. But also keep in mind that you need other types of content (white papers, etc.) for effective lead acquisition.

Do You Have Marketing Content for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt?

Most B2B marketers are naturally positive people. Professionally, they have an innate predisposition to focus on what's good about their company and its products and services. Most marketers are less comfortable dealing with any perceived "weaknesses" of their products or services or with the challenges that companies face when using them. So, most marketers have a built-in tendency to minimize, gloss over, or simply ignore those issues.

That's a mistake because fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) are part of every significant buying decision. In The Buyersphere Project, Gord Hotchkiss wrote, "B2B buying decisions are usually driven by one emotion - fear. Specifically, B2B buying is all about minimizing fear by eliminating risk."

Ardath Albee, author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale and the Marketing Interactions blog, includes a stage called "Step Backs" in her description of the buying process. This is where the concerns and fears of the buying group rise to the surface and stop (at least temporarily) the forward momentum of the buying decision. I agree with Ardath that a step back stage is probably present in most B2B buying situations, but I also contend that FUD permeates the entire buying process and can appear at any stage.

Your prospects' fears, uncertainties, and doubts usually involve concerns about your product or service or your company, and about their ability to do what is required to reap the full benefits of your proposed solution. Throughout the buying process, members of the buying group will be asking themselves or each other questions like:

• Does the proposed solution provide all of the capabilities we need?
• Will the proposed solution work as promised?
• Is the supplier financially stable?
• Will the supplier be able to meet our needs as they change and evolve?
• What if our employees won't buy into and use the proposed solution?
• What if we can't successfully implement the proposed solution?
• What if we can't reengineer our business processes to maximize the benefits of the proposed solution?

There's no way to eliminate FUD from the buying process, so your only choice is to deal with it. Marketing content can play a major role in alleviating FUD. You probably already have content assets that address FUD indirectly.

• White papers, webinars, and product/service specifications can reduce the FUD that's related to your product or service.
• Analyst reports can show the financial stability of your company.
• Customer case studies can show how companies have successfully implemented and used your solution.

You also need marketing content that directly and intentionally addresses FUD. This is especially important when the FUD involves your prospects' internal capabilities. For example, consider creating a few "expanded" case studies that describe customers' experiences in greater detail than your "regular" case studies. Describe the problems your customers faced in implementing and using your solution and how they solved those problems.

You should also consider creating a group of content assets (call them white papers, tip sheets, or whatever) that describe how customers can avoid the most common (and/or most serious) implementation problems and accelerate their ability to reap the full benefits of your solution.

How do you determine which FUD issues to address?

• Ask your salespeople.
• Talk with customers who achieved quick success with your solution - and with some whose path to success was more challenging.
• If possible, interview some prospects who chose not to buy from you and find out why.

Remember, you can't stop your prospects from feeling fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But you can provide your prospects with content that will make the FUD easier to handle.

Finding the Gaps in Your Marketing Content

Do you have all of the content you need to effectively market and sell your products or services? If you're like most companies I work with, there are probably a few "gaps" in your content. It's important to close these gaps as quickly as possible, but first you need to know what specific types of content are missing from your inventory.

To find the gaps in your marketing content, you need to perform a content audit, and the basic process for an audit is shown in the following diagram.

If you'd like to learn more about creating buyer personas, defining buying process stages, and identifying buying stage questions, please take a look at our white paper titled Two Powerful Ways to Make Your Marketing More Relevant. (To get a copy of this white paper, just send me an e-mail at ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.) In this post, I want to focus on mapping existing content assets to buyer personas and buying stages.

The purpose of content mapping is to link each of your content assets (white papers, case studies, etc.) to one or more buyer personas and one or more buying stages. The mapping process is easier if done in two stages.

Map Assets to Buyer Personas

The first step is to create a buyer persona map that links your existing content assets to buyer personas. When mapping assets to buyer personas, the basic question you ask is whether an asset contains content that will appeal to a given buyer persona. Does the asset address issues that will be relevant to the buyer persona? Is the asset targeted for the persona's job title and industry? Does the asset focus on the specific problems and challenges facing the buyer persona?

I use a simple spreadsheet to create a buyer persona map. The first column of the buyer persona map contains the title or a brief description of the asset, and the second column is used to identify the asset type (a white paper, a case study, etc.). An additional column is used for each buyer persona. Each content asset is entered on a separate row in the map. The example below shows what the beginning of a buyer persona map would look like. In this example, no content has been mapped to Buyer Persona 4. If you complete your buyer persona map and have any buyer personas with no assigned assets, you obviously have a major gap in your content.

Map Assets to Buying Stages

The second step in the process is to create a buying stage map that links your content assets to specific stages in the buying process. When mapping assets to buying stages, the basic test is whether the asset contains content that answers the major questions that a potential buyer will have at that stage of the buying process.

In this step, you'll need to create a buying stage map for each buyer persona. Once again, I use a simple spreadsheet to create the buying stage maps, and a highly simplified version of a buying stage map is shown below. The first two columns in the buying stage map are the same as those used in the buyer persona map. In the buying stage map, an additional column is used for each stage of the buying process. To create a buying stage map, first select a buyer persona, then go to your buyer persona map and identify all of the assets that you have mapped to your selected persona. List those assets in your buying stage map and link each of those assets to one or more buying stages. Repeat this process until you have a buying stage map for each of your buyer personas.

When you complete this mapping process, you'll have a clear picture of where the gaps in your marketing content are and what kinds of content you need to fill the holes.

More Work is Needed to Maximize the Potential of Content Marketing

Last month, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs published B2B Content Marketing:  2012 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends. This report is based on an August 2011 survey of almost 1,100 marketers, and it provides a great snapshot of the current state of B2B content marketing. CMI and MarketingProfs performed a similar survey in 2010, so some year-to-year comparisons can be made.

In many ways, this survey confirms what we already knew - that content marketing is now a core component of an effective B2B marketing program. Consider just a few of the major survey findings:

• Nine out of ten B2B marketers are using some form of content marketing.
• The top content marketing tactics (by usage) are articles (79% of respondents), social media other than blogs (74%), blogs (65%), eNewsletters (63%), and case studies (58%).
• Comparing 2011 to 2010, the use of blogs and videos both increased by 27% and the use of white papers grew by 19%.
• Companies are spending about 26% of their marketing budgets on content marketing efforts, and 60% of respondents said they will increase spending on content marketing in 2012.

Overall, the survey results show just how vital content marketing has become for B2B companies. But some of the survey findings also reveal that B2B marketers still have work to do to realize content marketing's full potential.

For example, when survey participants were asked to identify their business goals for content marketing, 68% cited both brand awareness and customer acquisition, and 66% selected lead generation. Only 39% of survey respondents identified lead management and lead nurturing as a primary content marketing goal. In fact, lead management/nurturing was the lowest ranking goal identified by respondents. This result may be due in part to the characteristics of the survey respondents, but I suspect it is primarily due to the fact that many companies have not implemented lead nurturing programs. Therefore, many marketers don't fully appreciate the essential role that content plays in effective lead nurturing.

The CMI/MarketingProfs survey also reveals that more work is needed to make marketing content relevant to potential buyers. When asked about how they segment or tailor their content, 57% of respondents said they use profiles (job titles, personas, etc.) of decision makers, and 51% said they use company characteristics (size, industry, etc.). However, only 39% of respondents said they tailor content for specific stages of the buying process, and 12% of respondents do not tailor their content in any way.

For content to be truly compelling, it must answer the questions that are most important to buyers at a specific point in the decision-making process. And, those questions change as buyers move through the buying process. So, the most compelling content is designed for specific buying stages.

The use of stage-specific content is one defining characteristic of an effective content marketing program. The CMI/MarketingProfs survey asked participants to rate the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts on a scale of 1 to 5. Forty-five percent of those respondents who rated their efforts as "effective" or "very effective" (4 or 5) said they tailor content for specific buying stages. Only 29% of the respondents who rated their efforts as ineffective (1 or 2) said they use stage-specific content.

If you're thinking about beginning a content marketing program, this survey is a great resource for learning about what is working. If you're already using content marketing, this is a great tool for benchmarking your efforts.

Five Ways to Improve Your Marketing in 2012

Bloggers love lists, and we're told that blog posts with titles like, "Five Secrets to. . ." or "Four Sure-Fire Tactics for. . ." are appealing to readers. Bloggers who write about business also seem to share another characteristic. About now, many feel compelled to make predictions about the new year. When you combine these inclinations, the results are lots of blog posts with titles like, "Six Game-Changing Marketing Trends for 2012,"

I'll leave the prognostications to others, but I will offer a list. I have five recommendations for improving your marketing efforts in 2012.

Before you do anything else, develop a marketing strategy.
You've heard this one before, so I won't repeat all of the reasons that strategy is necessary for success. At its most basic level, marketing strategy is a simple thing for most B2B companies. First, you need to identify all of the significant ways that your product or service can create value for customers and identify the kinds of companies that can obtain the greatest value by purchasing and using your product or service. Second, you need to determine the best ways for communicating your value propositions to potential buyers. This step includes the selection of marketing tactics and channels and the creation of marketing messages. Companies tend to spend most of their time and attention on step two, but step one is even more important. I discussed the "value identification" aspect of marketing strategy in an earlier post titled How to Make Difficult Marketing Questions Easier to Answer.

Shift primary responsibility for lead generation from sales to marketing.
I've explained my rationale for this recommendation in two earlier posts - Stop Depending on Your Salespeople to Generate Leads and Why Marketing Should Take the Lead in Lead Generation. I don't contend that traditional sales prospecting doesn't work at all or that you should completely abandon it. I do contend that traditional sales prospecting is an inefficient use of resources and that you should strive to become less dependent on it.

Increase the number of leads acquired via inbound marketing.
There is little doubt that inbound marketing has become the tactic of choice for lead acquisition. Buyers now control the buying process, and they are performing research and gathering information about products and services on their own, usually via the Web. Therefore, traditional outbound lead acquisition techniques such as direct mail and e-mail don't work as well as they once did. It's just good sense to make yourself easy to find when a prospect begins looking for the kind of solution you provide. Research firm SiriusDecisions says that 80% of new sales leads will come from inbound marketing by 2015. Your objective for 2012 should be to substantially increase the number of leads and the percentage of total leads acquired via inbound marketing.

Develop and implement a sound lead management process.
Consider these facts:  (1) Acquiring new leads is becoming increasingly difficult. (2) 50%-75% of new leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (3) Up to 70% of these lukewarm leads will eventually buy from someone. Put these facts together and one thing is clear - leads are valuable and must be managed with care. An effective lead management process will address several key issues, including lead nurturing, lead scoring, and marketing and sales alignment. A well-designed lead management process will enable you to maximize the sales you obtain from your pool of leads.

Implement a content marketing program.
Having and using the right kind of content is now essential for B2B marketing success. By "the right kind of content," I mean marketing content that is:

• Primarily educational and non-promotional
• Customized for the types of buyers you sell to
• Customized for where the potential buyer is in his or her buying process

I've discussed these requirements in a white paper titled, Two Powerful Ways to Make Your Marketing More Relevant. If you haven't already seen this paper and would like to get a copy, just send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

That's my list. Do you have other plans to improve your marketing in 2012?