B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner: Recent Episodes
Pam Didner
Do you want to fulfill your true marketing potential? In “B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner,” you’ll learn actionable strategies and tips around digital marketing, sales enablement, MarTech, demand generation, and more.
As a B2B Marketing consultant, author, and global speaker, Pam emphasizes that marketing should leverage sales as another marketing channel and sales should use marketing as a hidden salesforce.
In each episode, she shares her personal stories, templates, and frameworks that you can immediately put into action to help you support your sales relationships and make you look like a rockstar!
For more information, visit pamdidner.com.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. I haven’t done a lot of episodes lately. That’s because I was busy writing a novel! Yes, I’m writing a novel. I will tell you more little later in a different episode.
However, for this episode, I have a special guest for you, Agnes Fotino O’Connell, a Director of Sales Operations & Demand Generation for HMI Performance Incentive.
We met at the B2BMX Conference in February. Agnes came to my workshop, and we hit it off right there. At that time, I was talking about sales enablement. Agnes told me that’s something she’s been doing for quite some time now.
So, I invited Agnes to my podcast to talk specifically about a couple of things: how to better support sales and how to align sales and marketing for demand generation success.
Pam Didner: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. Yay. I haven't done a lot of episodes lately. That's because I was busy, I don't know, writing a novel! Yes, I'm writing a novel. I will tell you more little later in a different episode, but today I have a special guest for you and she is a Director of Demand Generation for HMI Performance Incentive. And she is Agnes Fotino O'Connell. Hey Agnes, so happy to have you here.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Pam, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Pam Didner: Yes, and we met at the B2B MX in February. Agnes came to my workshop and we had a great time. We hit it off right there, and at that time I was talking about sales enablement, and Agnes told me specifically that that's something that she has been doing and also is doing it.
So that's why I invited Agnes to the podcast to talk about specifically couple things, how to better support sales and also better supporting sales through demand gen. Before we get started, Agnes, talk to us about your job and also what does your company do?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Yeah, sure. HMI Performance Incentives is a leading incentive strategy company, helping companies with a broad spectrum of needs and challenges, motivate both their direct and indirect sales teams, customers, et cetera, to meet sales goals, increase loyalty, change behaviors, and everything else that you come to know and love about customer loyalty and incentive strategies.
Pam Didner: If I'm not mistaken, I think the incentive program that you set up is very much tailored for channel partners, such as the wholesalers working directly with their distributors and the dealers and the value-added resellers, assisting integrators. It’s basically kind of like a channel marketing tools and then that you use that to incentivize and a lot of channel partners to reach the sales goal. Can you give us a very specific example about that?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Yeah, sure. We might work with a large wholesaler. Let's say they were in the building material space. They're a company that's trying to go after the contractor or the dealer, and we'd help them do a couple things. One, we'd help them create a customer loyalty program that might go after what we call the “middle 60” of customers, that group that is always with you, you know what to expect out of them. And then might also help target their top 20% of their customers--the customers that bring 80% of their business, typically.
And we might put together some form of group incentive travel trip for those top customers, helping build a moat about around them, helping them diffuse from competition taking them, and again, help grow that middle 60 to do more than they've historically done with them.
Pam Didner: So it is whatever your customer want to incentivize and you build a program and you are able to track the performance and then be able to, uh, award whoever reached that specific target.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell You're spot on, Pam, for an incentive marketing agency.
Pam Didner: Very, very good. So then talk to us now, you have told us specifically in terms of what your company has done. Your role is a Director of demand gen, and I remember when I was talking to you and you said you've been on the sales side, you've been on the marketing side.
Before I talked to you about demand gen, can you talk to us a little bit about being on the sales side, being on the marketing side for any B2B marketers would like to supporting sales? Do you have any specific tips, trick, or advice?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: I think you have to just really understand what's important to the sales folks at a myriad of levels. Right. And Pam, I actually think you gave some really amazing advice during your workshop at the B2B MX on. About, you know, finding your sales advocates, right? Finding those folks who are gonna help you make an imprint, make a case study of what you wanna accomplish as a marketer.
You really have to go put your trust in sales’ hands and help-- really help them help you get the job done. So what I like to say is, you know, go find that top salesperson and make them your advocate. Show them how your campaign--whatever you wanna roll out as a marketer--is gonna make them successful. Get them on board, and then go find someone maybe more in the middle, right? Someone who's meeting and exceeding their KPIs, uh, but is maybe not a rock star. And then onboard them onto your plan. And then when you have, you know, those two or four, six people on board, you're gonna be pretty untouchable with whatever you try to roll out to your sales work.
Pam Didner: So the bottom line is really, really get to know them. And it started with a small group of people might be your ally. Build your own tribe try first and show them what kind of value you would add, and then take it from there step by step.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell As marketers, we talk so much about trialing, right, and piloting and looking at data. And I think a lot of times marketers forget to do that internally. You know, we only tend to look at doing that externally, and it's kinda like, “Hey, take a moment, pause, pilot internally, see what the reaction is, and then go run that external.”
Pam Didner: Love it. Love it. With that being said, I'm gonna touch the next topic demand gen. So demand generation is hard. I mean, I've been doing demand generation myself. I mean even actually try to build my own pipeline; that is hard. Not to mention that you work for a company and you have to sell products.
And the many B2B marketers I have talked to a lot of time, they actually have a demand gen targets like a monthly basis. It's actually very, very hard. Do you have any kinda like a holy grail or any kind of campaigns or anything that you do to actually help people to understand what they can do to better optimize their marketing campaigns?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: That's a great question and it's a loaded one at that. You know, I think right now we've moved away from a lot of what I would call short-term KPIs and we're really looking at the long tail and--
Pam Didner: So can you clarify that? Sorry to interrupt. What is the short term KPI versus the long tail? Can you be very specific about it?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: In our business, we have a long selling cycle, like hopefully most B2B marketers are experiencing right now. Yeah, we're, we're talking about 18 to 24 month sales cycles on the long end of it, really high end, high dollar value amounts.
So for me, looking at monthly MQLs is really not a great output of what we're gonna expect in that quarter. For us, we're spending a lot of our time and attention looking at thought leadership, the sorts of downloads, the sorts of referral traffic that we're getting from that. If we can get pings on how that's coming up in conversations, how people are leveraging what we're putting out, there is our best metric right now to understand. We tend to not look at as much leads per month--net new MQLs--we're really looking at is our thought leadership content creating opportunities.
Pam Didner: So does that mean that a lot of your metrics that you are responsible is tied to, say, pipeline opportunity driven?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: 100% of our metrics.
Pam Didner: What do you do to quantify that pipeline opportunity through say, referral traffic or through like a thought leadership content? Because I feel there's a gap there is in terms of like the content consumption and the leadership play, and all of sudden there's a pipeline activity, so there's a gap right there and how do you connect that gap and bring that content consumption or thought leadership play down?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: We're doing something very simple, which is capturing it at opportunity state--essentially understanding from the salesperson's perspective how and why did this opportunity turn into a deal? And we're asking them in the opportunity form to state it. And it's really interesting the amount of people that are essentially saying, “Hey, I feel like this was demand gen oriented for these couple of reasons.” So our goals are to have essentially 50% of our opportunities be self-validated from sales saying this was demand gen who helped me create this.”
And then you can start to look backwards in the customer file, if you will, or in the contact card to understand where did they first come into our database? When did they start to engage with us? And then when did they turn into an opportunity? I think the future state is really looking at those three moments in time in identifying is demand generation, at least a portion responsible for those important turns.
Pam Didner: I love you identify the three moments as when they come in and when they probably become the opportunities. So based on your experience and the working backwards. What are some of the channel, from your perspective, is most common to capture that moment that possibly can train into pipeline opportunity?
What kind of campaign tactics tend to drive to that specific point?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: For us, it's a lot of referral traffic from third party subject matter experts, and I can give you an example. If we see that a contact is constantly attending one of our subject matter expert partner’s webinars on a certain topic that we're sponsoring, it's essentially a form of intent data, right? Yeah. It's so we're able to start to aggregate, “okay, there's something here, right? Their, their ears are up, they're looking for something in this. Can we start to feed them a more aggregated, essentially marketing plan of and around that topic?” And then can we start to create a conversation essentially using ABM tied to that?
Pam Didner: Yep. That makes a lot of sense. So you actually watch data like a hawk, I assume.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Yes, we're a small team and we're feisty at that. So you know, when you have a small team--as I'm sure a lot of B2B marketers can relate to right now--data's your best friend. I mean, to go do things at scale is you have to be data driven right now.
Pam Didner: I 100% agree. So can you talk to us about what some of the tools that you use to actually unravel some of the key insights?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell For us right now, we're pretty excited about our tech stack. I think a lot of things are kind of coming back in style right now. You know, at B2B MX, we heard a lot about direct mail. We're trying to add a few different tools for that into our marketing stack right now to try and understand behaviors; we have two instances of intent data formally stood up, one at the top of the funnel and one at the bottom of the funnel using our friends at Rollworks.
We're also trying to find a partner for more of that middle intent data where we just have some listening out in the universe. We're big advocates of HubSpot. We use them for both our CRM and our marketing automation. On the send standpoint, we've just set up an integration with a very cool tool called Hand Write, which is sending out, uh, handwritten notes from our sales team after they meet in person, automated at a conference. So we're able to track that. It'll have a QR code to send them to some of our resources put on it, as well as a QR to their business card that we can track on the back end.
We're doing obviously a ton with QR codes and trying to leverage that as another source of intent data. You know, we're played around with Gong as a great marketing tool, which you know, for your listeners is an incredible sales tracking tool that listens in, using machine learning and AI to sales calls. It's a marketing tool. Yeah, it's a marketing tool. So we've started to leverage a bit of the insights that that provides us. But at the end of the day, it's really putting people right now to look at those moments in time that were training opportunities and then trying to scale those moments.
Pam Didner: So you brought up a lot of tools. A lot of marketers are overwhelmed because they feel they have to add a different tool at a different stages. And all a sudden, your Martech stack becomes pretty complicated. And I think to some extent that's inevitable. You have to use a different tool at a different time, and there's no one tool that fits all.
And also, depending on what kind of campaigns you are running and different channels, you might need to use the different listening tools, as well. So that I want to make sure everybody understand that. When Agnes was talking about different tools that she needs to use, that's probably based on the process or the workflow or the marketing channels that she is utilizing.
You have to kind of understand and to talk to the vendors and see if that actually fit your own Martech stack or your own workflow. So it may fit, it may not. But make a note of that, understand what those tools will do, and then you can make a decision if that actually works for you. So for longest time, When I listened to a tool, I said, “oh my God, Agnes, you used that tool. You know what, I probably should use it too, right?” But then later I found out I need to evaluate that tool first before I can determine if that actually applies to me. But, uh, there was a period of time I was like, “you know what? Everybody's using it, I should do.” But that's not necessary the case. So I wanna make sure you understand that? Go ahead, Agnes.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: If I can, you know, it's something I'm passionate about. I love giving people the next tool sort of recommendations. And something I'm coming outta, actually just yesterday with one of my team members is essentially a Martech stack audit.
Pam Didner: Audit? OK got it.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: We look at how are all of our systems working together, and if you don't already have a flywheel of this, I would look at it and it's gonna become, hopefully it becomes a pretty complex flywheel because your different tools will speak to one another and you should draw that out.
So just start drawing dotted lines or hard lines if it's a very strong integration. And then you'll be able to show and explain internally how everything works, which is really helpful for both your team, but also the sales team, right? To show them, “Hey, here's how everything can work together. Here's what you can use, here's what I can use, here's what we can both use.”
And then what you could layer on top of that is where different tools layer in. So, for example, you could start to augment that flywheel to show here's what we're using at a lead level. Here's what we're using at an MQL level. Here's what we're using at an SQL level. Here are tools that we use everywhere.
And then you can start a part of this maybe ongoing deck is how I do it, at least, that's updated, that are, “hey, here are some tools that are not the right fit for us right now, but I've evaluated, I understand their pricing and I understand what they can do.” And then you just put a slide in for them with some of your raw notes. That way when a gap does come up, you're not scrambling trying to go on G2 or wherever you might go for your insights, it's, “oh, I think I already did something there, or let me see if I've already evaluated that.” Flip through your deck and it's waiting for you.
Pam Didner: I love it. So do you have that flywheel you can share with us?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Yeah, I can send it out after this. I would love that.
Pam Didner: And I would actually add that to the video. Yeah. And uh, so people can see it.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell Yeah, I'm happy to.
Pam Didner: Yay. I love it. So, last question: now you've been working on the both sales and marketing side. Have you have any advice for anyone who are interested, kind of moving back and forth between sales and marketing, you know, any kind of career advice that you have for them?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell My first thought would be do both, and I truly stand behind that and I don't just stand behind, I put it in action. I've put up and stood up a program at HMI that is the HMI Sales and Marketing Excellence Program that allows young grads to come in and, and see and experience both sides of the house, everything from biz dev to field marketing, to social, to digital and so on.
But I, you know, I think it's really important your trajectory to understand how hard both roles are. It's an amazing skillset to understand what it's like to go, you know, do the role of a biz dev, making those 50-100 calls every day. And I will say in turn, you understand then, and I think have a higher level of appreciation for when you need those marketing assets at your disposal to send out how great those are to have and how to design them to be a better fit for not only the actual salespeople using them, but to the recipients.
So, do both if you can. It'll make you a, I think a more well-rounded individual going into either your sales or marketing career on whatever side that you end up. Or you could be like me and just maybe hover somewhere in the middle, if you find an organization that will let you.
Pam Didner: Well said, I really have nothing to add except I don't do two at the same time, but try each one of them in different time. So you really don't want to be Michelle Yeoh. Like be everywhere, anytime at the same time (laughs).
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: I couldn't agree.
Pam Didner: So one last fun question. So what show are you binge watching right now?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: I've been watching a bit of “Top Chef,” but the really old seasons of Gordon Ramsey, which has been fun and “Hell's Kitchen.” But I'm, I'm reading some really good books right now, Pam, if you're interested.
Pam Didner: What is it?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: I'm rereading Thinking Fast and Slow, which I think it's the best. And then for a fun book, reading, When Life Gives You Lululemons.
Pam Didner: Love it.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: What are you reading, Pam?
Pam Didner: Oh, I'm reading (laughs) . I'm reading a drama. This is very dark. Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects. My God, it's so dark. After I read it, I was like, “you know what? I'm actually getting a little depressed.”
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Maybe a light book after thus, huh?
Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. But that was like, I'm reading right now. I'm actually reading more and more fictional. I got away from the business reading in the past two years. I guess I just need to take a break after 10 years. It was like, you know, “I'm done. Lemme read some fictional book.” Anyway. Hey, Agnes, it's wonderful to have you. You share a lot of insight and by the way, it was so wonderful, so wonderful to meet you at my workshop. Such a great, great addition to have you at my workshop. We had a great time, right?
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: We sure did. Cannot recommend going to both B2B MX—I’ll give them a bit of a shout out cause that was a really excellent conference--but also if you have an opportunity to get to one of Pam’s. workshops. It was incredible. Truly lucky to sit in her grace there for like two and a half, three hours. You don't get a lot of those opportunities to learn like that from a marketing expert. Amazing Pam.
Pam Didner: I actually pay Agnes to say that. (both laugh) Just kidding. Just kidding. But I'm actually doing a workshop, a very similar one about sales enablement and how the marketing sales op, Biz op, even, uh, marketing ops, how what you can do to better support sales in a changing environment, Ignite Chicago on May 23rd. So if you are interested, check that out or reach out to me. And by the way, bring any questions, uh, to the workshop. I do answer them. Seriously, I do.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell: The entire time. She answers them the entire time. It's amazing.
Pam Didner: Alright. Hey Agnes, it's wonderful, wonderful to have you here. Wish you best of luck and keep us posted about all the stuff that you are doing and come back next time.
Agnes Fotino O’Connell Thanks Pam, I appreciate it.
Pam Didner: If you want to see Agnes’ flywheel, look in this episode's show notes or visit my website at pamdidner.com/podcasts, episode 226.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! I’m Pam Didner. What can I say about 2022? I can sum it up in one word: Great!
The great pandemic, the great resignation, the great relocation, the great retirement, and the great stock market crash. Somehow, all of that led to the great reshuffling of our lives. It was exhaustingly great.
I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast! I need to do an episode of my experience living in North Carolina one of these days. If you are a listener and a native in North Carolina, reach out and talk to me about North Carolina. I’d love to learn about and understand this state a whole lot more. One of my 2023 new resolutions is to drive around in North Carolina, Charlotte, the Outer Banks, Asheville, Blue Ridge Mountains and more. I can’t wait!!
I think we all agree that we are somehow go back to a sense of normality in 2nd half of the year. I was on the road for 8 weeks from September to December, speaking at conference, visiting clients and seeing friends and colleagues at different cities. Love to see people in Zoom, but hugging people in-person, it’s just lovely! If you’re not a hugger I completely understand. But it’s also been wonderful to continue having thoughtful and inspiring conversations here on the podcast.
For this final episode of 2022, I'm going to highlight some episodes I think are especially helpful for my B2B peeps and listeners. So let's get started!
As I mentioned earlier, I love to travel. So I thought today I'd take you on a trip with me. It's a sales journey of sorts; but this one includes some special stops along the way. At each stop an expert guest of mine from the past year will share tips and tricks to help you improve your sales and marketing chops and to reach more ideal customers.
This journey begins with a conversation I had with Carla Johnson back in February. Carla is a marketing and innovation strategist, keynote and author. For her book REThink: Innovation, Carla interviewed her clients to unlock how innovation happens and can continue happening. What she found boiled down to the five steps of what she calls the “Perpetual Innovation Process.” The steps are observe, distill, relate, generate and pitch.
What I loved about our conversation is that Carla has found a way to demystify innovation. It’s not solely about geniuses coming up with ideas no one has ever heard of before. Everyone, I mean everyone, is capable of innovating, says Carla, and they can learn from other industries. Like how McDonald’s studied Formula 1 pit crews to help their drive-thru teams work better and faster. Carla shared another example from the B2B world:
Carla Johnson: - I have a great friend named Tim Washer and Tim is a comedian. And he's worked with some of the best of the best Conan O'Brien. He was a writer for Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, you know, that level of comedian. So he worked, he was a Creative Director at Cisco. And he had a new product launch to do. And you know, like a technology company, you don't think of them as doing amazingly creative and innovative product launches. It's usually an executive or an engineer talking about, you know, the features and all of the new things that customers can do because of this product.
But Tim said, “let's do something really different and innovative.” Then he happened to be in a comedy club in New York City one night and the comedian Ray Romano was on stage and Tim kind of sat back in his chair and he really observed the whole audience, not just Ray as a comedian and a performer. But he said, as he watched it, he observed how Ray moved on the stage and he observed the body responses and how people began to lean in as Ray went through his routine and Ray talked about things like family and in-laws and kids and, and all of these things that people could really relate to in a short amount of time, but all through humor.
And as Ray got people to laugh, in the audience everybody's emotional wall started to go down. And so as Tim looked at that, all of these things that he observed, he distilled that into patterns--patterns of being able to build relationships very quickly with people that most likely Ray didn't know, and then talking about things that were very familiar. Doing it with humor. And it was this laughter that got people to lower their emotional walls and be willing to hear things that they normally wouldn't hear. So it was those patterns that he related into his work.
Now the next step is generate and generating ideas. So now when Tim went to generate an idea for this product launch, he said, “how can we use humor to talk about something that everybody knows, but in a way that gets them to laugh and lower their emotional walls?” And that's how he used humor to do a video for the product launch, which happened to come out right around Valentine's Day. And so instead of having an engineer talk about how fantastic the ASR 9000 router is, he made it into a Valentine's Day video that talked about the ASR 9000 router being the perfect Valentine's Day gift. And you think about putting this router right up there with diamonds and jewelry and flowers….
Pam Didner: It certainly stands out (laughs)!
Carla Johnson: Exactly, but because he was able to tell the story of what he observed, the patterns he noticed, how that related into the work, how that generated his idea, that was his pitch. The pitch is actually to go back and walk through each of these steps and you have a natural story structure to it.
That’s Carla Johnson. Love her! To learn more about innovation and how teams can move on if they get stuck in the process check out the full episode. I’ll put a link in the show notes.
So, building off my conversation with Carla, let’s say your company has come up with a fantastic product, service or upgrade. Your marketing time has come up with great messaging, collateral, and a plan. Now, it’s time to get the word out and sell it to your customers.
In today’s marketing world, a big part of advertising is digital ads. Of course there are a lots of options: FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it. Back in June, I reached out to AJ Wilcox, to talk about his specialty: LinkedIn ads. He told me he likes LinkedIn because you can target your pay ads to people with specific job titles, at specific companies, in specific regions. That means you can target your ideal customer.
But when AJ and I spoke we agreed that’s only one part of the equation. Pay ads (on ANY platform) campaigns also need to be set up to help you learn more about customers. So that means avoiding one-and-done ad campaigns.
AJ Wilcox: It's really important on any channel to make sure that you generate enough data, that you can tell whether or not something's working. And if you go in and just spend the very minimum that you can on LinkedIn, which is $10 a day...
Pam Didner: Don't bother.
AJ Wilcox: If the $300 in a month, that'll give you a handful of clicks; you will not be any closer to finding out if it's a channel that works. So what I recommend is if you're going to approach LinkedIn Ads, don't do it with less than about a $5,000 per month budget. And so many small businesses can still afford that, but I'm assuming some listeners will be like, "Man, I don't have that." So if that's your case, as well, what I would recommend is just make sure that you are set to spend $5,000 before you shut it off. So if your budget is only $1,500 a month, great, just make sure you are running it for at least three months before you make the decision to cut it or increase.
Pam Didner: The other question I want to ask, which is kind of on top of tha,t as well. If you do have $5,000, how long should you run? Of course, you're going to say as long as possible, but minimal level?
AJ Wilcox: Yeah, for me, advertising is very much a linear process. You're going to spend money; you're going to get impressions. And then those impressions are going to turn into clicks. And then a certain percentage of those clicks will turn into conversions. And then a certain number of those conversions can become sales qualified or marketing qualified leads. A certain percentage of... I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but for me it depends on what level of surety, the level of confidence that you want.
Pam Didner: Got it.
AJ Wilcox: If you just want to find out, what is my cost per lead from this channel going to be? Yeah, you could spend for two, three months and go, "Oh, looks like my cost per lead is— .”
Pam Didner: Okay. I got some baseline. Yeah.
AJ Wilcox: Yeah, exactly. But if your goal is to find out what is my ROI from LinkedIn Ads?
Yeah, you're going to have to look at how long is my sales cycle and how long does it take us to nurture these leads to close? And maybe you're going to be in this for two, three, four years before you have statistical significance around that data. So it really is up to you, but I would say if you are running against Facebook ads, hands down, Facebook ads is always going to be a lower cost per lead because the cost per click was cheaper. But when you follow that into your CRM, you look further down the sales cycle, you're going to find that, wow, because LinkedIn's targeting was so good at getting the right people, even though we're paying more for it, by the time you're looking at your cost per sales qualified lead, or your cost per proposal sent, or your cost per closed deal, all of a sudden LinkedIn looks really good compared to Facebook. But so many people were scared off by it because of the initial high costs that they never gave it a real chance.
I was speaking with AJ Wilcox who specializes in running LinkedIn pay ads. He also shared some dos and don’ts about setting up campaigns in LinkedIn, so be sure and check out the full episode.
As we continue on this year-end episode of B2B Marketing & More, let’s continue on our journey to: sales! You know I’m all about effective Sales Enablement and helping sales and marketing teams work together. Having worked along side-by-side with the sales teams for many years, I know there are some particular challenges they face—especially if they’re tasked to bring in more contracts.
So back in March I checked in with Ryan Staley, a long-time sales professional and the CEO and founder of Whale Boss to talk about what it takes to land a deal. In the conversation I asked him about common mistakes sales teams make when they approach a potential customer.
Ryan Staley: One of the things that a lot of companies where people focus on are sales reps or sales leaders is like, “Hey, the ROI for the company is this. They're going to save millions of dollars are going to do this.” But one of the things that they forget is, okay, how is that individual person evaluated? Like what kind of KPIs are they evaluated with? You know, at the end of the year, when they sit down with their boss and you're just finished, are they going to get a bonus or are they going to get demoted? And did they hit on what they were supposed to? So that's the tangible business side of it.
But then also it's like, what does that solution going to do emotionally for that person that you're selling to? Because logic is how people make decisions. Emotion is what creates action. And so those two kinds of triggers are key things to look at when you're trying to work and sell. So I would say that's number one. Number two is just ask really, really good questions. Okay? That's one of the advantages that sales has over marketing.
We can physically talk to the people, versus like looking and getting feedback from communities and social. You can actually talk to the people and ask them specific, tangible questions on the outcomes they want, what's bothering them, all those details. So I would say just being a ninja at asking really, really good questions that are thought provoking and that make people question thoughts that they've had previously.
Pam Didner: So what if you’re trying for a corporate client and you can’t get in there for the one-on-one to ask questions? and have to go in cold?
Ryan Staley: So there was a deal that my team was working and the reps were full cycle. And so they had a prospect. Um, they didn't have like an SDR team or we didn't have any marketing support. So they had to find a way to get into these really, really big Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 companies. One of the companies that are trying to get into was Walgreens and Walgreens is like Fortune 10. So they're even bigger than big. Right? Well, what happened was Walgreens has recently merged with Boots--this was maybe four years back. They just merged with Boots and their CEO and chairman identified in their press release that one of the number one priorities and outcomes from the merger is gain quote-unquote “synergies”; where they're going to get $500 million in synergies from merging the companies. And what they were saying basically is they're taking $500 million out of the business in costs. So one of the levers we hit on to get in there was to link to that initiative that the CEO was talking about—
Pam Didner: Because it's top down, it's coming from the management. It’s top down.
Ryan Staley: Exactly, exactly. And so, so that's a good example of how to hit on that. You could look at 10K's. You could look at other financials if you want on that; the letter to the CEO in the annual report is great. Obviously that doesn’t scale for small-to-medium sized companies but for big, big deals that’s what I would recommend.
Ryan Staley is founder and CEO of Whale Boss. When we spoke he also shared ways to develop rapport quickly with a potential client, so check out the full episode.
Connecting to potential clients through a sales team is one way to reach new customers or re-establish past relationships; but another approach I like is marketing through thought-leadership. It may not be as direct and immediate as pay ads, but it’s a long play which is sensible with B2B companies with a long purchase cycle. Use content to influence your customer’s point of view about specific products or technologies.
When I thought about addressing this topic in the podcast, I knew I had to talk with Erika Heald. She's a founder and the lead consultant at Erica Heald Marketing Consulting, where she helps SaaS startups, specialty food companies, and many others. She told me, too often, thought leadership can feel like a “one-way blast of information coming from a brand.”
Erika Heald: For me thought leadership is when you're putting those unique perspectives from leaders within your company out there in the public on a regular basis through various types of content. So it can be everything from blog posts, to eBooks to public speaking engagements, podcasts, all of these different avenues.
But the key is people who are subject matter experts and having a point of view. And this is for me where I see the biggest kind of issues come up because frequently--and not to disparage PR agencies--but frequently you will see thought leadership as a couple of slides in a PR presentation, as you know, “oh, hey, so for this month, here's the thought leadership” and it's a couple of catchy headlines with your CEO's picture next to it. And it's like, “well, that's all great, but they're not necessarily thought leadership.” A lot of times they're tied into the PR campaign or what have you, but they're not really focused on that human being and their experiences and sharing them with people in a meaningful way. And from my perspective, you have to have that involvement with that thought leader and have that unique perspective and point of view that they're willing to share. If they're gonna just tell you everything that you already read in HBR that month, that is not going to work because people want something authentic and real.
Pam Didner: If they know specific topic or field, very, very well, they can help other people to learn or provide some insights that say other companies or competitors cannot provide. That's also a sense of a thought leadership. Is that correct?
Erika Heald: 100%. You know, thought leadership is not limited to your C-suite. If you're only putting your CEO out there or the other folks who sit on that same floor--you know, if you have a physical headquarters anymore. Realistically, some of your best thought leaders are going to be those folks with deep subject matter expertise that know a lot about your customers or who used to have jobs that are the same jobs that your ideal customers have. They're going to be those people who deeply feel the pain and the challenges that your customers have everyday. Those folks are gonna be fantastic thought leaders and have so much to offer out there. So I definitely encourage folks to look a little bit more widely at who could be part of their thought leadership programs.
That was Erika Heald. If you struggle to identify thought leaders, Erika has some good tips in this episode. We also talked about how to juggle when multiple teams play a role in communicating thought leadership. That’s a tricky one, so check out the full episode.
And again, links for all the episodes I featured today are in the show notes.
Thanks for taking this journey with me today. These experts have some fantastic tips and tricks to help you and your company innovate, advertise, sell and educate. I’m always here if you have questions about B2B sales and marketing, so don’t hesitate to reach out. Happy Holidays and see you on the other side in 2023. Take care. Bye!
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. My guest today is Chris Carr, founder and CEO of the digital marketing agency Farotech.
Tune in to learn how to boost content promotion, and improve your digital marketing with programmatic advertising.
If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Welcome, and thank you for listening to B2B Marketing and More with Pam. My guest today is Tracy Niehaus.
Tracy is the board member for MPro, Marketing Professionals in MHI Association and MHI for Material Handling Industry Association. She is also a Senior Marketing Director for Vanderlande, a Dutch company with a 75-year history.
In this podcast episode, Tracy shares important steps to help you create an account-based marketing strategy.
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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Welcome to another B2B Marketing and More episode. My guest is Jeremy Shere. He is the founder and CEO of Connversa Podcasting and the host of the B2B Content Show.
Jeremy is an expert in this field and has been doing podcasting for a long time. Today we talk about the do’s and don’ts of B2B podcasting and how to showcase value add if you want to use a podcast as a content marketing channel.
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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Pam Didner: Hi, welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. Yay! Today I actually have a special guest. Stacey Danheiser is the founder and CMO of SHAKE Marketing Group and also a host for Soar Marketing Society, which is a community on Mighty Network. So if you are interested in joining, check that out. She has worked with many companies, at the same time, being in the CMO positions. Now, she is a mentor and also created many marketing training programs for B2B Marketers. So Stacey, welcome.
Stacey Danheiser: Hi. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Pam Didner: Yay! So I have a couple of questions for you.
Stacey Danheiser: Sure.
Pam Didner: I know that in your program, you are talking about the skill sets that's needed for B2B marketers, and I work with many B2B marketers and me included, for a long period of time, we tend to focus on hard skill sets, like search engine marketing, email marketing, event marketing, yet soft skill sets are so important. So what is the number one soft skills, from your perspective, that marketers should possess?
Stacey Danheiser: Yes. Well, we're gonna go into competencies a little bit more, but from a skill perspective, absolutely, I would say marketers are expected to be amazing communicators and very high creativity. In fact, creativity happens to be, I think the number one in-demand skill year after year, and so marketers that are only focusing on the hard skills aren't necessarily taking the time to become creative, which is really what the business needs marketers to be.
Pam Didner: You know, that's actually very interesting. Before you answered the question, you mentioned about competencies, and from my perspective, competencies and skill sets are very similar. Do you actually have a different definitions for that?
Stacey Danheiser: We like to talk about skills as what you need to do to be successful in your job.
Pam Didner: Okay.
Stacey Danheiser: So if you're a social media manager, then you obviously need to know how to use social media. You need to know about content creation, right? You might need to know about how to create ads. That's kind of what you need to do. Competencies on other hand, are more about the behaviors and how you do your job. So how do you show up as a social media manager? It's the things that aren't often talked about and you might not necessarily see them in a job description as to what it will take to be a successful person in that role.
Pam Didner: When you were talking about it, the only thing I can think of is like the softer skill set.
Stacey Danheiser: Exactly. It's maybe what we would traditionally call a softer skill set, but it's also leadership.
Pam Didner: Yeah.
Stacey Danheiser: It's what somebody is looking for to promote. If you have two marketers and they're both really great at SEO, that's the skill, which one do you promote? Do you promote... And if they have equal skill sets in that area, you end up promoting the one that is showing leadership capabilities and competencies beyond just the skills that they need to be successful in the job.
I wanna take a step back maybe, and introduce you to the framework, 'cause we did a bunch of research on well, what are these competencies that today's modern marketers should have to be successful in their role? And so it all started a couple of years ago, when we did research, we started noticing a trend that... If you looked at the websites and Twitter feeds and LinkedIn feeds of companies that are operating in a similar industry, they all started to sound the same. Everybody was pretty much copying and pasting each other.
And so we wanted to know why was this happening? And you could go into... This is, I think, where the creativity piece evolves from, right? Because companies wanna stand out, they want to feel like they're doing something different or bringing something different to the world. But we were really interested in why this is happening from a marketing perspective, and what we found is that it's not because marketers didn't know what to do, it's because there was a skill set gap or a competency gap happening within the marketing function.
Stacey Danheiser: So people were getting into these roles, had high demands to get something out there fast. Well, what's the fastest way to do it? You go and you look at what your competitors are doing. You scrape their story from their website and then you put it onto your own, changing some of the words and making it sound slightly different. And so what emerged from that research was a set of competencies that we call the VALUE framework, because it's an acronym that spells value.
Pam Didner: What are these five?
Stacey Danheiser: Yes, so the first one is visionary, which is the ability to look ahead, to use your imagination, to have your pulse connected to what's happening in the market, and not only your industry, but your customer's industry, so that you can see ahead and build strategies. The second one is A for activator, which is the ability, not only to get things done, which marketers traditionally rate themselves very high on, but also the ability to collaborate and get buy-in and say no to ideas that may not work for the business. The third one is L for learner, which is not only just staying in touch with your own career path and the upskilling and reskilling required to just be a marketer, but also what are you doing to learn about your competitors, your market, your customers, and even your business and your company products and your company priorities.
The fourth one was U for usefulness, and this is really the ability to connect the dots from, on one side of the bridge, what the customer cares about and values, to the other side of the bridge, which is what your company sells. How are you leading your customers over that bridge, and you really can't be useful to customers if you don't understand both sides of that equation. And then finally, the E is for evaluator, which is the data analytics side and the ability to objectively look at your marketing activity, look at what's happening and to be able to analyze it and make decisions based on that, and this one requires a little bit of political savviness as well, because as we know as marketers, there's a lot of opinions that are being thrown around internally and pet-projects that come up from the CEO or the head of product, and so this is really being objective and being able to analyze the data and make sense of it so that you can use it to make decisions.
Pam Didner: Got it! Those are, I would say, a lot of competencies or the skill set that people need to possess, and it's a journey. It's a multi-years type of effort. Obviously, you have written a book, talk about it. For these five different competencies, is there one more important than the others? Or is there any way to learn the competencies at once?
Stacey Danheiser: Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. So the book is called Stand-Out Marketing, and we are just in the process of launching a self-assessment tool so that somebody could go on and figure out where do they have the biggest gaps across the five. I've done the polls for other audiences, and typically, the one that seems to be rated the lowest as of now, kind of trending amongst marketers... What do you think it is?
Pam Didner: Vision?
Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, it's visionary.
Pam Didner: Either vision or evaluating?
Stacey Danheiser: Yep. Yeah, if you think back to a few years, there's been this push for data-driven marketing, data-driven marketing, data-driven marketing, so I think you're starting to see more people sort of comfortable in that role of thinking ahead about what data do I need to collect.
Pam Didner: That makes a lot of sense. I like that. Yup.
Stacey Danheiser: But what... I think the gap is around sort of this visionary piece, and this is really... If you look at the CMO tenure and the turnover in the marketing position and the frustration with the CEOs, it's that marketers aren't really tapped into business priorities and able to connect to suggesting marketing activity that aligns to the business, and so this requires a lot of strategic thinking and permission to give yourself time to think strategically, versus what I think a lot of companies tend to do is, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that there's a bunch of steps in foundation that we have to build, but let's just go execute, and let's put something out there and let's see how it does."
And what ends up happening with that kind of approach is that sure, you get results, but you're kind of sporadic about collecting that information, versus being intentful and purposeful about where you wanna focus. So to answer your question, we have a self-assessment tool that we're building that will help somebody identify those. The second piece of that, like which one is the most important, really depends on the organization. So...
Pam Didner: I like that answer. Yeah.
Stacey Danheiser: It does because there's different stages of companies, there's different sizes of marketing teams. And I would take a holistic approach to it. When I work with organizations, kind of looking at the skill sets on the team, if you have a strong team of activators and you have nobody doing the evaluation and nobody doing the visionary piece, well then that's the gap, and that's what you should be focused on, is filling that gap.
Pam Didner: True. True.
Stacey Danheiser: Whether you're upscaling somebody or potentially bringing on a new hire in that area, that's kind of how the prioritization would work, and so these can all be learned. It can.
Pam Didner: Yeah.
Stacey Danheiser: Each chapter has an explanation of what the competency is. There's some exercises and self-assessment that you can do to figure out how you would score yourself, and then there's suggestions and ways to get better for each of those areas as well.
Pam Didner: So Stacey, I love your answer and I want to do a quick summary actually, for my audience very quickly. Granted I ask a very specific question. I say, "Hey, these are the five skill set. Which one should we go first?" And Stacey basically said, determining down your gap, and there's assessment that you can do. And then you can determine with your individual assessment where maybe you fell a little short or maybe the area you have the biggest strength.
From my perspective, there are two ways to work on this. You can work on to improve the areas that you need improvement, or you can even continue to work on your strength and make your strengths shine. But doing assessment, I think, is very, very important. So your answer is wonderful. Doing assessment and actually using your assessment to determine the gap and what you want to do next. With that being said Stacey, is there any specific link that people can actually do that assessment? Is that assessment free at this time?
Stacey Danheiser: It is not ready. However, you can go sign up. There's a... Can I share a link?
Pam Didner: I will add that into the show description and as a part of my podcast and also the video.
Stacey Danheiser: Yep, great.
Pam Didner: Fantastic. So with that being said, I actually have a couple more questions. You mentioned about strategic thinking. I'm using myself as an example. I was a CPA and I was incredibly operations-driven. And strategic thinking was never my Forte, ever. For 10, 15 years of my career, I'm always incredibly focused on how. When I took on a strategic type of role to create a global marketing plan for an enterprise, I remember I struggled tremendously the first two years. [laughter] I have colleagues like came to me and said, "This is a bunch of tactics. It's not strategic enough, and I was like, "What does that even mean, to be strategic?" And took me a long time to actually understand that.
You brought a very good point in terms of for marketers to understand the business imperative and also the business goals of a company, and that's how I start when I started thinking strategically, is understand the business goal, the revenue goal, what are the sales people trying to do, what are some of the key things we want to accomplish? And then understand it, internalize it, then take that and try to incorporate it as a part of my marketing strategy. That's how I see as a strategic thinking. What is your thought on that? Can you provide additional insight?
Stacey Danheiser: Yeah. I love that. That really is strategic, is knowing why you're doing something. So I spent 14 years in corporate marketing working for five different Fortune 500 companies so...
Pam Didner: We can talk about that (laughs).
Stacey Danheiser: Yeah.
Pam Didner: Both of us have been in the corporate world for a long time.
Stacey Danheiser: For a long time. So I have, yes, a lot of stories about the marketing planning process, but what I've found, and this is still happening pretty prevalently, is that depending on the marketer and how strategic they are, a lot of people start with how, right? "Here's what I need you to do. I need you to go build a website." "Okay, how are we gonna do it?"
Pam Didner: "We need to do an event." [laughs]
Stacey Danheiser: "We need to do an event." "Okay, great. How do we get started? And let's go build out the tactics." But it's stopping yourself before you jump to that level and asking the question why. Why are we doing this? What do we seriously want to achieve? And how do we know if we've achieved it? What does success look like for this program? So I think a lot of companies, and especially back in my day in corporate, we did a lot of events, because we had always done events. Of course, we're gonna show up at this trade show because that's just what you do. But...
Pam Didner: And sales has been asking for it. And because sales want the events to happen, it's a trade show, so and they can get leads and therefore we do it. Yeah.
Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So it's the marketer, starting to think strategically, is stopping and saying, "Why? Why do we wanna do this? What are you trying to achieve?" And you'll find, this is really interesting, it seems like a lot of people are making assumptions that these answers are understood, but when you actually pause and ask that question to the person making the request, half the time they don't even know. They'll stop and they'll say, "Oh, that's a really good question. What are we trying to achieve with this? How will we measure the success of this?"
And so it really forces people to sort of think through the request that they're making and maybe events are not the answer. Maybe there's a different way to come up with the outcome that people are looking for, rather than spinning up a whole bunch of work that's going to take six months to come to fruition. So...
Pam Didner: Yeah.
Stacey Danheiser: That would be kind of number one is to just get in the mindset of asking that question, why? The second thing that I think helps to start thinking more strategically, especially as a marketer, is what I would call the customer-focused mindset, and I think this is missing in a lot of organizations that are very inward-driven. They sit in a group around of sales people and products people and executives, and they all speculate about what the customer may want, and the reality is, marketing should be owning customer research, and marketing should have their pulse on what the customer needs or wants, or values, or expects.
And unless you're in an organization that's budgeting for customer research, which I've found most B2B organizations are not, then your avenue for getting input from customers is either you need to build your own relationship with customers and ask these questions directly as a marketer, or travel along with the sales team, and build the respect and relationship with the sales team so they start inviting you along to have these conversations directly with their customers.
And so this will help you be a more strategic thinker because you'll have another data point which is, "Here's what my company wants to do, I have their goals and I understand what we're trying to achieve, but what do my customers want and how do I... Like I said earlier, kind of bridge the gap between the two." And so forcing yourself to always be thinking about the customer, and is this really adding value to their world, how is this gonna help us, how does this help the customer? That's definitely a piece that helps you think more strategically, and then kind of along with the research piece, and I know that there's maybe an unpopular opinion about how much time to spend with competitors.
But reality is that we have ended up in this sea of sameness because marketers have not focused on what the competition is doing. So said in another way, we know that customers are looking at 10 or 15 pieces of content. They're looking at multiple vendors, and so putting yourself in the shoes of the customer would then help you as a marketer see that is what you're creating contributing to the noise, or is it truly differentiated and helpful and educational and really progressing the customer's journey along a little bit further. So I advise for marketers to spend time doing that competitor research because that helps them ultimately create something more useful.
Pam Didner: And I 100% agree with you in terms of marketers like us in addition to do our job, which is... We have a lot of jobs we have to do and tactics and deliverables, but also understanding the competitors is very critical, which is apt to in terms of connecting different thoughts, and that's one thought that you should connect and to contribute in terms of the thinking strategically.
Stacey Danheiser: Can I add one more thing just real quick, that I have a very strong point of view on, for marketers as well to again, think strategically. So it's not just understanding how your customers buy, and the buying process, and the decision-making process they go through, but it's also about understanding the sales process and so...
Pam Didner: Exactly, the topic. I love the sales part of it. Sales Enablement!
Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So this is very interesting because again, I spent a lot of time in corporate marketing, and when I... I started my career in B2C, and I realized that we didn't really have a sales team. We were the sales team, the marketing engine was sales. We had big budgets to support that as well. So when I switched over to B2B, I was pretty surprised at how one, little my budget was. [laughter] Marketing didn't have a very big influence in the company. It was the sales team that really owned a lot of that influence. And so I realized very early on that I needed to build a relationship with my sales team if I was going to be successful in my role as a marketer.
Pam Didner: So true.
Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So one of the first things I did, we had an annual sales training, so there was product training that the sales team had to go through, and then there was sales methodology or process training. And so I'm asked to attend both of those, and I remember when I showed up to the sales methodology training, the trainer said, "Why is there a marketer in here?" And I said, "What do you mean?" He's like, "I can't remember the last time we had a marketer in the sales training." And it was true. All the sellers are looking at me like, "Why are you here?" And I said, "We all want the same thing. We're both trying to get customers."
Pam Didner: Yeah.
Stacey Danheiser: "If I understand how you guys are doing your job, then I can help you and figure out where I can fit in."
Pam Didner: You can do a better job supporting them. Yes.
Stacey Danheiser: Yes. And not only just supporting them, but also the customers, and like I wanna know each of the touch points that the customers need to help them make that decision. So we started working together once they knew that I understood the sales process, and I read sales books, and then from that point on I attended sales methodology training at every company I went to because I was really interested, and I wanted the sales team to develop a really good working relationship, and speak the same language so that we knew it wasn't marketing versus sales, it was marketing and sales, and how can we work together? So that's another piece that I would add for marketers to think more strategically is really understand the sales process.
Pam Didner: Okay. So for folks who are listening, that was coming directly from Stacey. I did not even prep her to say that, and that was also one of the major reasons that I wrote my second book, Effective Sales Enablement. And that whole book is really about how marketers, especially B2B marketers, can do to better support sales in addition to your point, understand customers.
Very nice. Lovely. Lovely. This is awesome. So after they listen to, say, this show, or this podcast, and that's assume they also did the gap analysis, and understand what they need. What are one or two like very easy, quick actionable suggestions that you have so that they can continue to hone in these five competencies on regular basis?
Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, there's so many. Let me see if I can narrow it down here. I think I would prioritize... I mean, one thing in our research for the book and how we came up with the five competencies is that we interviewed business and marketing and sales leaders across the US and the UK. So this is not just coming from a marketing standpoint, this was really coming from business leaders who are leading large global organizations. And the one thing that was very interesting to me was about going back to the learning bit, which is a lot of companies had budgets for their marketing teams to use for learning...
Pam Didner: To attend conferences, to take classes. Yes.
Stacey Danheiser: Yes, and the one thing that we heard as a barrier was my marketing team is not using it.
Pam Didner: Really?
Stacey Danheiser: So we have a budget, nobody comes to me and asks me to use it, or I think there's maybe one person on our team who ever finds something and asks to attend. So that was interesting. And I started to look into why, and it went back to these long list of things to do, that marketers are notorious for having. And so learning was de-prioritized. Way, way down on the list, and so I would say prioritize yourself.
Nobody, especially if you're working in an in-house agency or a corporate job, is going to come and tell you what you need to go learn. It's really up to you, and this is like your own personal growth and your own development that you get to own, so make that a priority, and if it's 30 minutes a day, spend reading about your industry, spend reading about something that your customer is doing, learning more about your product. There's so much to learn. But that would be one piece of advice that I think everybody has full ownership of, is blocking off 30 minutes a day to learn and replace it... And this was the thing, "Well, I don't have the time." Well, I guarantee that there's probably 30 minutes in your day that you're spending scrolling mindlessly on social media or sitting in a meeting that you might... That you don't need to be in. [laughter]
Pam Didner: That is so true. That is so true. Or when you are driving, you can always turn on the podcast.
Stacey Danheiser: Yes.
Pam Didner: Any kind of marketing-related podcast, or any kind of like know-how type of podcast.
Stacey Danheiser: 100%.
Pam Didner: I do agree with you. Yes.
Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, so that would be my one thing. And then two would just be, if you don't already have a really good relationship with your sales team, go sit with the seller.
Pam Didner: So true. So true.
Stacey Danheiser: And really, you can even ask them like, "What's one piece of advice that you wish marketing knew, or what's one sales book that you think every marketer should read?" So that you're starting to build that knowledge base and build a better relationship with the sales team.
Pam Didner: Sounds like a jam (laughs). So spend some time to learn something new every day and also build a better relationship, or start having the relationship with your sales team. Excellent. Stacey, thank you so much for coming to my show. Can you also tell us, remind us one more time in terms of where we can find your book and as also where people should go in terms of finding more about you.
Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So first, I'd love to connect on LinkedIn, Stacey Danheiser, and then my company website is shake, S-H-A-K-E, M as in marketing, K-T-G.com. And there, you'll find my books. I have a new playbook program that I'm rolling out, the assessments, of all of our tools and resources are on that website.
Pam Didner: Very good. Thank you so much for coming to my show, Stacey.
Stacey Danheiser: Yes, thank you for having me. It was awesome chatting about one of my favorite topics, B2B marketing. [chuckle]
Pam Didner: Yay! Take care everyone. Bye.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another SOLO episode where I answer a common B2B marketing question people always ask during my sessions and workshops.
That question is: what is the difference between ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and Buyer Persona? Then, the next question is when and where to use an ICP and Buyer Persona?
In today’s episode, I will:
- Cover the differences between the two
- Give specific examples of when to use ICP and buyer personas
So, what are the differences between ICP and Buyer Personas?
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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Pam Didner: A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Christina Del Villar is our guest today. She's the author of the book called Sway. Does that sound cool or what?
Christina Del Villar: I think so.
Pam Didner: And the book is all about marketing strategy, revenue and growth. Woo-hoo. Like me, she is also a B2B marketer. So welcome, Christina.
Christina Del Villar: Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited. I know, Pam, you and I could talk B2B geeky marketing for hours.
Pam Didner: Yes, yes, yes.
Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Pam Didner: So the topic we want to talk about today, and we want to get some insights and wisdom from Christina is how a marketer can better talk to the C-suite so they can understand us so much better. And marketing tend to be very complicated, and many marketers have a hard time helping their C-suite understand marketing's impact. So, Christina, do you have any suggestions in terms of what marketers should do, go about communicating with C-suite?
Christina Del Villar: I have so much, and it's interesting because I feel like marketers in general do a bad job marketing ourselves, right?
Pam Didner: What? That is not true.
Christina Del Villar: I know. I know. It's-
Pam Didner: I'm completely offended.
Christina Del Villar: Well, maybe you're amazing at it. There's some people who are amazing at it, but-
Pam Didner: Trust me, I'm not.
Christina Del Villar: Right. But I think that's the key issue that we have as marketers is really understanding, first off, that we are speaking a very different language than the leaders of our companies are speaking, right?
Pam Didner: Yeah.
Christina Del Villar: We are in our day-to-day, our minutia, and really trying to help the company overall. But then we have a really bad way of articulating what that is to leaders. So basically, whenever I go into a board meeting, I have one slide, and it shows the revenue that we brought in for our company. And it usually is all of the revenue that the company brought in, because we had an impact in that, some way, shape, or form, along that entire customer journey. And we'll start with that number, and then we can have conversations about it. And so that's where I start.
Now, obviously, not everybody's going to be going into a board meeting. And so how do you talk about it? How do you phrase it? And how do you think about it? And I think that one of the key things that we need to do is really start understanding that we own revenue. We are the ones who are bringing in the revenue, and we need to start talking about it from that standpoint. I know you talk a lot about data and AI and how all that's playing into it, which I think is amazing. And we need to take that and really talk about what it is that we're doing, the value that we're bringing, the impact that we're having from the standpoint of revenue.
Pam Didner: That's great. I love that, but I know a lot of marketers, they have a hard time quantifying the revenue contribution.
Christina Del Villar: Yeah.
Pam Didner: So what are some of the specific steps they need to do from the get-go to make sure they capture that?
Christina Del Villar: There's the component of the data itself, like you're saying, and that actual revenue number, and then there's the attribution, right? And that's where we often have trouble with that. And so I like to take it a little bit further back and think about the entire customer journey and all of the things that marketers are doing as part of that customer journey. Like, starting with a product, what do we do with product and the product team to help them build a better product, think about features and functionality, look at pricing and bundling? We are involved in all of that when it comes to product. And again, we are involved so many different ways across that customer journey: sales, obviously marketing, sales enablement, and then even customer support and success. Again, we do a lot with B2B, so we're talking long-term contracts, multiyear contracts. And how can marketing help customer support and success ensure that we can reduce churn?
So these are all areas that marketers actually already have a hand in. We just need to recognize that more and then help others in the organization understand the contributions we're making across that customer journey. Therefore, when we say, or when I go to the board meeting with my one slide that shows all the revenue we brought in for that quarter, and it's all attributed some way to marketing, they have a better understanding of what I mean by that, right? So I can say, "Well, by increasing our price and talking to product and increasing our price or changing our bundles, which allowed us to contribute more value and charge a higher price, this is how marketing contributed to revenue from that standpoint." From a sales enablement standpoint, what content, how did we help sales sell better, sell faster, sell bigger deals? Right? We can show that because now people understand all of the different ways that marketing has played in these different roles.
And then from a customer success standpoint, again, when you're talking about churn, are we helping customer success build how to videos, or do webinars, or have FAQs on our website, or manage the knowledge base? What are we doing as marketers? Which, again, we're already doing all of this, we're just not thinking about it in terms of how it really is contributing to the overall number that we're looking at, which again is usually that revenue number.
Pam Didner: Number one is to expand a marketer's influence, kind of like when I call it upstream.
Christina Del Villar: Yeah.
Pam Didner: Like, as a part of product development, as a product, the bundling package, if you are selling SaaS-based platforms or whatnot. And understanding in terms of how the pricing work. And if you actually have external data or some insights to actually share that information, bring that in.
Christina Del Villar: Absolutely.
Pam Didner: And so that's on the product side. And on the sales side is obviously sales enablement. What can you do to actually support them? One of the easiest way to support them is actually share the content with them, especially for the long purchasing cycle. And content is one way of doing it. And also, if you understand their sales stages and along the different sales stages, what can you do to actually support them? But I think in order to do that, you have to understand what their needs are. Would you agree, especially on the sales side?
Christina Del Villar: Absolutely.
Pam Didner: You have to understand what they do, what they need, then you tailor your support specifically for that need.
Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. And I know we do that in marketing with our own roles. We're trying to get better at it from a sales and a sales enablement standpoint. And then from the product standpoint, I think it's important to consider sharing things in context, right? So like when we're talking about why we need this feature or function or why we want to bundle it this way, or why we need to maybe listen more to our customers and manage an advisory committee, whatever that looks like, we need to put everything in context so they understand what it is that we're trying to accomplish and how we can help them.
And I think that goes very much to sales as well, right? There's so many times when we're like, "Okay, here's a script," or, "Here's a case study." Right? We don't really explain how to use the content that we're developing and, like you're saying, at what stage we should be using it, right? Like, "This is a perfect piece for when you're nurturing it. If you have a really long sales cycle that's 18 months, at 12 months, this is a good piece to use." We need to help them understand how to use that content as well.
Pam Didner: Understood. Another thing I would like to get your thought is obviously for marketers, a lot of things we do, especially the money we spend on, tend to be for campaigns and outreach. It doesn't matter if it's inbound and outbound, right? And it's driving leads, build that brand awareness and drive demands. And a lot of information we receive or checking, in terms of marketing, the performance, is based on the past campaigns we have run. And you said that's lagging indicators.
Christina Del Villar: Yes.
Pam Didner: Yes. In a way, because, well, that's shared the results of the campaigns we have run in the past six months, right?
Christina Del Villar: Right.
Pam Didner: And if that's lagging indicators, and you mentioned leading versus lagging indicators, can you talk to us a little bit more about that? Well, I am being measured by how many leads I brought in. Of course, that's going to be lagging. How can I put myself a little bit more proactively upfront?
Christina Del Villar: Yeah. And I think that this is another problem that marketers have, because if you think about it, first off, again, we are in our day-to-day minutia, right?
Pam Didner: Yeah.
Christina Del Villar: So we're like, "Oh, web traffic increased today. This is great." It really doesn't mean anything to our CEO. It may not even mean anything to your CMO, right? Because they're trying to understand, "Great. You have that, and that's nice, but how is that going to help us get to our goals?" Right? And so these lagging indicators, again, we as marketers, we need to have that. We need to measure that. We definitely want to show ROI for the campaigns that we have, no question about that. But if we're talking about leading indicators, we're talking about, how is this now going to predictably have usually revenue growth or growth of some kind? What is this going to lead us to? And so this is why it's really important. So if you think about, let's just take an example, right? Let's say you have 20,000 visitors to your website this month or this quarter. So if you go into a meeting and you say, "We had 20,000 website visitors," there's no context around it and it means nothing.
Pam Didner: Nothing.
Christina Del Villar: It means nothing to leaders, right? So a good way of saying it, but it's still talking about still lagging, is to say, "We had 20,000 visitors, which is a 10% increase." So now they're like, "Oh, okay, you spent some money and now you've increased by 10%." So, that's a good way of talking about it. But a better way would be to say, "We increased our target audience website visitors by 10% because we knew what they were looking for, and we created content and delivered specifically for that audience." So, that's a better way of saying it.
But best, combines the lagging and the leading, would be to say, "We increased our visits by targeting our audience and increased it by 10% due to our campaigns that we knew we were going to do. And we expect that this will lead to 20% more pipeline and 10% more revenue." Right? We don't really talk about it, but everybody in the company is trying to get to predictability, right?
Pam Didner: Yeah, true.
Christina Del Villar: That is how you can say, "This is what we're expecting." And so if you can bring more of that leading into your conversation, it helps them frame it, like, "Okay, I know what you spent your money on. I can understand the ROI, and I can understand what your expectations are going forward."
Pam Didner: Actually, we can take one step further, if you will. And I like the way you expand it, right? It's not just about 20% growth, but you talk about 20% growth in relationship to how you're going to help the sales, how it's going to help the business objective.
Christina Del Villar: Right.
Pam Didner: And also that you really narrow it down to a target audience. We can also expand it a little bit more, take all your points, if you will. Sometimes if you use IP sniffer, you can see which account or what companies that actually come to our website. If you actually do a little research and not just look into the aggregate number of 20,000 traffic, but you can also say, "Out of this 20,000 traffic, these two, three account is actually account that we want to go after." Guess what? Some of them actually come to our website. So I think call that out will also help tremendously.
Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. Or to your point, even if, again, because we're in B2B so we have multiyear contracts, usually if we see that even one of our customers is on our site, and so that might mean that not everybody in that particular company knows that they already have the solution, or maybe they're looking for something else from our solution. So it's a good opportunity for the account managers to go take a look and see what's happening, or customer success, to hopefully either reduce churn or help when it comes time to renewal as well.
Pam Didner: Yeah. All this, honestly, Christina, I agree with you, but it does require some work on the marketing side. You actually have to analyze and go behind the data to understand what the data is trying to tell you and then find the nugget.
Christina Del Villar: Yep.
Pam Didner: And that's work. I always tell B2B marketers, like, "The job is not that easy." A lot of people say, "Oh, there's a lot of blog posts out there, say, 'Oh, B2B marketing make it simple.'" I was like, "Seriously? It is hard work."
Christina Del Villar: I think I was at a Starbucks one time, and I don't know how it happened, but the barista was like, "Oh, what do you do?" And I said, "Marketing strategy." She's like, "Oh yeah, that seems really easy. Maybe I'll get into that." And I was like, "Many degrees, 30 years of pain, a lot of drinking." Right? Yeah. And I think that somebody once asked me like, "If you were to tell a marketing person or somebody who's interested in marketing, what's the one thing they really need to focus on?" And that is understanding data. If you're afraid of it, you don't want to touch it. There's so many things that marketers could do better, and one of them is literally owning the technology, right?
Pam Didner: Yeah.
Christina Del Villar: I know your book about AI is really important and critical. It's not just about AI and how it's used in marketing right now and how that will help you become a better marketer and help your company succeed both professionally and from a business standpoint, but it has to do with marketers understanding that we can use this technology to do our job better and show that influence and impact and value that we're bringing. But that means owning the technology. I can't tell you how many times I've come into a company and it's like, "The IT owns Salesforce and my marketing automation tool." And I'm like, "Well, what does IT know about the data I'm trying to extrapolate?"
Pam Didner: A lot of time they probably can own it in terms of maintaining the tool.
Christina Del Villar: Sure.
Pam Didner: But in terms of what the tool will do, that part of it needs to be owned directly by the sales side. And then you also need the administrators and developers. A lot of time you still have to do some custom coding-
Christina Del Villar: Oh, absolutely.
Pam Didner: ... to make sure the tool is useful for you.
Christina Del Villar: Yeah.
Pam Didner: Yeah. I mean, that's work. Again, that's work.
Christina Del Villar: It's work. It's work. And I think that's one of the reasons why I've been so successful and my teams because I push two things. One is, "We own revenue, period, whether you like it or not," and, "You need to understand the data." I've had people on my teams who are like amazing, amazing writers and content producers, and they're not going to get the data. And that's okay. Then I'll supplement with somebody else on the team to help.
Pam Didner: But I always encourage marketing of, oh, skill set or facets, if you will, that they make an effort to understand other fields of marketing.
Christina Del Villar: Right.
Pam Didner: Say, if you create content, you know what? Well, try to understand email marketing. Well, if you understand content, well, try to look at Google Analytics and see how your content is performing. Right? You need to somehow get out of your specific job roles and responsibility, do a little bit more of that. Yeah.
Christina Del Villar: Right. And again, like you're saying, really understand it, because I think whether it's your own marketing teams or whether you're expanding and working more closely with product or sales, having that understanding and going back to the context really helps you do your job better and present, going back to the original question, present what it is that you're doing in a way that's understandable for that audience. I mean, we do it. That's what we do as marketers. We create for a specific audience. So we should do that internally as well.
Pam Didner: Well, that leads to another question, internal communication. And obviously, one of the key models of the marketing is to understand your audience, understand your audience deeply. Obviously, that also apply to internal communication with C-suites. It is actually for the marketer to frame their discussions or their takeaways around the CEO, COO, CTO, and CRO, if necessary. So can you give us an example in terms of how to frame that discussion, say, if you want to talk to, say, COO and the CTO?
Christina Del Villar: Yeah, yeah. And you should. And it's interesting because as a marketing leader, you know the suite, we talk to the CEO, the CFO, the CIO. Every CXO that's out there, we talk to them. But it's important for everyone in your marketing organization to feel comfortable speaking to those folks, or at least to having that knowledge to present. Because I've been in meetings where it's not like a board meeting, we're not presenting results necessarily, but the CEO might turn to the person who just did an event and be like, "Oh, well, what's our expected revenue?" And they're like, "What?" And then they look at me. I'm like, "No, no." You need to own your campaign and know what it is and feel comfortable talking to them. And I think, again, it goes back to really understanding, at the end of the day, what it is that this person is seeking. Again, know your audience. So the CEO, or let's not even talk about the CEO, let's talk about a VP of sales, they're concerned about pipeline and revenue and making sure that their team meets their numbers and their quota, right?
Pam Didner: Yep.
Christina Del Villar: So, that's what you need to be speaking to them about. When I was working at a company, one of the sales team complained that, "Marketing just talks about all the great stuff we do," and it's meaningless to them. And so I thought about it, and I'm like, "Yeah. No, I get what you're saying. We're like, 'We're great. This is what we did.'" And he said, he's like, "It makes sales look bad when you have..." Because I had this big chart up, like, "We brought in 50,000 leads this month."
And then unbeknownst to me, the CEO's like, "Well, marketing just brought in 50,000 leads. What are you doing with them?" Right? Not even realizing that we haven't even given those to sales yet. Right? We're still nurturing them. They're still with us. They're not qualified for sales yet. So we were giving this misimpression to the CEO. It was making the sales team look bad. So we had this monthly meeting that we would have with the sales team, and we would always start off-
Pam Didner: Make sure you're on the same page. Yeah.
Christina Del Villar: Yeah, yeah, right? And we were about to go into this meeting, and it was right after this conversation I had, and I told the person my on my team who presented, I'm like, "Flip our slides." He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Start from the back. Start from how much pipeline and revenue we brought in. And then if we ever get to how many website visitors we have, it doesn't matter, right? Because this is what's going to engage sales to have an interactive conversation about what's working and what's not working." So he's like, "Okay." So he literally flipped the slides around and we started with, "This is the pipeline we brought in, and this is the revenue we brought in." And we never got to how many website visitors we had, because it didn't matter to them. They wouldn't understand.
Pam Didner: It didn't matter to them anymore. Yeah.
Christina Del Villar: Right. And so that's what we're talking about here. Think about who you're talking to. And again, I've had this happen so many times. You're walking through the hall, and somebody's like, "Hey, blah, blah, blah." It's not scripted, it's not a planned meeting, but people want to know what's going on. And so you always have to have these nuggets in your back pocket so you can talk about it. But again, you need to talk to them in a way that's meaningful to them.
Pam Didner: Yeah. I do agree with you. On the sales side, I 100% agree, even with the CRO, chief revenue officers, talking about the sales revenue and the pipelines are very important. And CEO cares about that a lot too. If I talk to a COO, I usually focus on processes. What kind of processes that we are doing, especially on the Martech Stack. On the CTO side of things, if they really care about all the tools that we are using, and I always talk about in terms of how tools are performing, right? There's no tools are downed, and Salesforce, or the CIM, or marketing automation tools are running very nicely. And another thing I will bring into COO and the CTO's attention, it's usually about processes and also how the tool's usage.
Christina Del Villar: Right, yep.
Pam Didner: What's the tool's usage? And to make sure that they understand that part of it. But most of the time I do agree with you, the key things that everybody cares the most tend to be a revenue and growth impact.
Christina Del Villar: Right, right. And that makes sense, because if you think about what your overall corporate objective is, it is usually a revenue number, right?
Pam Didner: Revenue, yeah.
Christina Del Villar: Right? Even if it's an IPO, maybe you're looking at revenue, maybe you're looking at EBITDA, maybe you're looking at number of accounts, or you're going to look at some of the things, but, at the end of the day, you're really looking at that revenue number. And I think the other thing, to your point, that's really important when you're talking to that COO, CIO, CTO, they want to understand, because some of that, oftentimes that budget will come from their budget or they-
Pam Didner: Exactly. To support it.
Christina Del Villar: Right?
Pam Didner: Yeah. Especially in a big enterprise. Yeah.
Christina Del Villar: Where they're putting resources. Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times people are like, "Well, I have this list of all of your... Do you use all of these tools and technology?" And it's like, "Yes."
Pam Didner: "Do we need it? Do we need tools?"
Christina Del Villar: "Do we really need Salesforce? Do you need that?" Right.
Pam Didner: "Yes, how did you use that in the past two years?"
Christina Del Villar: Right. To be fair, there are times when I'm like, "Oh yeah. Okay. We should probably leverage that more or get rid of it." And that's great. It's good to do that kind of an audit. But again, we need to help them understand how these tools are helping us do our job better, and again, getting us to that ultimate corporate goal that we have.
Pam Didner: Understood. So what is one thing that marketers need to do when preparing their communication or presentation to C-suite? If you actually have one advice, what would that be?
Christina Del Villar: Yeah, I would say keep it short.
Pam Didner: I love that. I like that.
Christina Del Villar: I know, right? And it doesn't need to be a fancy, pretty slide. Again, I literally just throw up a number. It's like, "4.5 million this quarter," right?
Pam Didner: Five million. The font size, 78.
Christina Del Villar: Right? Keep it super simple, because what you want is you want them to take that away immediately and then you still need to have that backup material, because they're going to ask more questions about it, which is fine. But I would just say keep it simple and keep it to the point, and again, what it is that they're looking for, right? If the CTO is trying to understand how you're leveraging the technology and, "Do we need all these licenses?" then start with that. If the CEO wants to understand what revenue is happening, talk about that sales pipeline, right? Product really wants to better understand how people are using their product. And marketers tend to have that information because we own all the tools that people are communicating with, whether it's chat or-
Pam Didner: Certainly.
Christina Del Villar: ... things like that. Right? So there's definitely ways that you can consider it. And if you don't know, simply ask them, like, "What motivates you?" Right?
Pam Didner: Just ask.
Christina Del Villar: I know. Have a conversation. Just ask, right? Just ask. It was funny, I had a conversation with an engineering team. I basically made them come to a marketing brown bag once, and they were just like... The fact that they even showed up was great, but they were all on their phones, eating their lunch. And at one point I was like, "Look, this is the role you can help my team. We need data about how our customers are using our products. And we need to get some information on case studies." And suddenly this one guy pops up and he's like, "Oh my God, we have 10 years of usage data. Would that be helpful?" I'm like, "Ah-
Pam Didner: Yeah!
Christina Del Villar: ... yeah. That would be freaking amazing!" And they got all excited about it. And so then they felt like they were part of our process. They were total geeks about the data, so they were deep diving into it. And again, just helping them understand how they can help you and you can help them, and helping them really understand what it is that you are doing and how they can help you as well as you helping them.
Pam Didner: Very nice. Very nice.
Christina Del Villar: Yeah. It was super cute.
Pam Didner: How can people find you?
Christina Del Villar: Yeah. You can find me at christinadelvillar.com. Also, my book is on Amazon, Sway. And I'm on LinkedIn. I love connecting. I love talking about this. I know you do as well, so happy to always chat with people and be their mentor, give advice, just commiserate, whatever.
Pam Didner: Excellent. Well, Christina, it's wonderful to have you. Thank you so much for coming to my show.
Christina Del Villar: Yeah. Thank you.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. For this SOLO episode, I want to address an important question, but it’s not something discussed widely.
That’s right, today’s question is how to improve your emotional intelligence.
In this episode, I will answer questions like:
- What is emotional intelligence?
- Why is it important?
- What can you do to improve it?
So, what is emotional intelligence, also known as “EQ”?
Here is my own definition:
EQ is the ability to see other people’s points of view and make an effort to modify your actions to reach a resolution during conflicts or disagreements.
It’s a more business-setting definition.
Here is a definition from our BFF, Google:
EQ is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict.
So, possessing a high EQ allows someone to be able to communicate with others from an empathetic perspective and defuse conflict in a positive way.
Once you understand the definition, it’s easy to see the benefits of having a high EQ.
It can help you:
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Build better personal relationships with others
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Defuse conflicts and find compromises
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Enhance team morale
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Be a better version of yourself
How can you increase your EQ?
- Work on listening intently
It’s not about hearing what others say, it’s about listening earnestly and attentively. Sometimes there are underlying messages that others try to communicate, but they are either too polite to say things bluntly or unable to find the right words to explain their points of view.
You need to listen carefully. The best way to be sure you understand is to paraphrase what you’ve heard back to them. Use words such as “Ok, let me try to understand…”, “Here is my understanding…”, and “Let me paraphrase…”
By regurgitating, you subconsciously open up your mind a bit, and your brain takes a mental note of a completely different opinion.
At the same time, you show others not only that you are willing to listen, but that you “understand” them. The willingness to listen is a way to show compassion and empathy. Listening intently is the first requisite to improving your emotional intelligence.
- Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes
Yesterday, I watched a 2019 movie called The Best of Enemies on Netflix; the Taraji Henson and Sam Rockwell film is based on a true story that happened in Durham, NC, in 1971. An unlikely friendship was forged between Civil Rights Activist Ann Atwater and local Ku Klux Klan leader CP Ellis.
Honestly, the Rotten Tomatoes review is only 52% and the audience score is 76%, so take that with a grain of salt, but I think the message of the film is useful to our discussion today.
The backdrop of the story is that a Black elementary school was caught on fire, leaving students with nowhere to learn.
The city council made a finding that the school was still usable which was not true so NAACP helped to file a lawsuit and asked for the students to be allowed to temporarily attend the local white school while the fire-damaged facilities were being rebuilt.
Rather than the judge making a decision, he decided to bring proven mediation expert Bill Riddick to help the town come to an agreement about what should happen.
Bill used an approach called charrette which invites everyone to have their say. He asked Ann and CP to co-chair the charrette, and through the open discussions, they narrowed down the issues they needed to discuss. The townspeople were broken down into different groups to brainstorm and hammer out different resolution points. Then, they would regroup as a whole each night for the wrap-up.
They also selected 10 people, 5 people from each side, for what they called the Senate. The Senate would vote on all resolutions on the final night of the charrette.
Many things happened during the course of the film to shift CP’s mindset, but a pivotal moment came when he took a visit to the fire-damaged school in the summer, typically a season of leisure for children, where Black students were still attending school to try and make up for the lost time. It was then that he began to have a real change of heart.
Spoiler alert: He cast a pivotal vote for the resolution of school integration. At the end of the movie, you can see the real Ann Atwater and CP Ellis sharing their own stories.
Walking in someone else’s shoes always has some profound impact on all of us whether we agree with that person’s point of view or not.
You don’t need to agree with them, but you need to be able to see where they’re coming from and why they do certain things or think in certain ways. Sometimes, learning to accept differences is one way to move forward. Other times, making a pivotal change is a way to move forward.
Ultimately, your level of emotional intelligence directly equates to your level of empathy. It will affect your ability to healthily resolve conflict and form and maintain relationships, both in your personal life and at work, so it’s well worth examining where or how you can make adjustments and improve.
Honestly, I am not a very emotional person, aka, I am not very sympathetic at times.
My take on life: it’s tough (life is tough so deal with it!), and as humans, we often just have to deal with it. Although plenty of people share that viewpoint, it doesn’t mean that everyone is on the same level, so I need to remember to check myself in order not to come off as an ass.
We all deal with hardship differently, so it’s important to be sensitive to others’ coping mechanisms.
I’ve become more sympathetic over time, but I won’t lie, it’s taken patience and practice! Life experience and interactions with a wide array of people have taught me a few things such as putting myself in other people’s shoes.
I’d like to end this video with a quote from Brene Brown:
“Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone.’”
There is no right or wrong way to improve your emotional intelligence, but a good starting point is to start listening intently, be open-minded, and imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Take care, bye!
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. For this episode, I want to address an important question, but one that is not widely discussed. That is how to overcome Imposter Syndrome.
How many times have we wished that we were someone else because their lives are just seems so much better than ours? Growing up, I always wanted to be someone else. It took me a long time. I mean, long time to overcome Imposter Syndrome. So now I want to share with you what I did so that you can be your unique self with full confidence as well.
Here are several things I've done to overcome those intrusive thoughts and negative feelings.
1. Don't believe everything you see on social media.
Honestly, social media has exacerbated Imposter Syndrome for everyone. Everyone's life seems so perfect on social media and their accomplishments appear larger than life. I want to tell you to take what you see on social media with a grain of salt. Don't get too caught up in someone else's photos and their happy lives. Remember that a photo or a video conveys one moment at a time.
No, one's life is perfect every single minute, every single day. Someone may show off great travel photos, but you don't know if they charge credit card or take on debt to pay for these trips. Some may post scenes of a great time partying on the weekends. Great! But you don't know what their other days are like.
If people are happy on social media, be happy for them. But remember that you don't know what their real lives are like. They have daily struggles, just like every one of us. There's a statement I have seen many, many times on Facebook: “We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't even like.” (laughs) So true. That pretty much sums up what social media is all about. Once you see through that, the feeling to keep up with the Jones will recede a bit.
2. Learn to love yourself. (I mean, really love yourself!)
You can be self-critical, but never be self-loathing. Be aware of your own strengths as well as areas for improvement. Pat yourself on the back when you accomplish something, but don't be yourself up when you make a mistake; acknowledge mistakes and do better next time, then head up, walk like a winner. Or like what the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel says “Tits up!” I cannot believe I said that!
It took me a long time to like myself, a long time. When people complimented me, I would make self-deprecating jokes and brushed off the compliments until someone told me, “Pam, don't put yourself down. Just say thank you when someone praises you and enjoy the moment!” I agree with that wholeheartedly.
Remember that we are all screwed up to some extent; every one of us! Learn to love yourself, because if you don't no one else will; or if you don't, how can others love you?
3. You need to earn your confidence.
The key here is earn. I've come to realize that to overcome imposter syndrome, you need to be confident. Confidence, in general, doesn't come naturally to most of us. You need to earn it. One way to gain confidence is to be very, very good at something that people will come to you for advice about. When you see people respect and appreciate your recommendations and ideas, you'll feel like, “huh, I'm pretty good.” And that's a good way to build confidence over time.
For me becoming an independent consultant and a speaker has helped me tremendously. I mean, tremendously to build my confidence. When I tell people I didn't usually speak up at any meetings for like 10, 15 years and was very, very shy, nobody, nobody would believe that they were like, “Pam, you shy? No, it doesn't compute.” (laughs)
I become more confident by slowly building my B2B marketing expertise and knowhow. Once you have a skillset that you can use to help others, you start tapping into your full potential. You become unique and you become, you.
4. Never stop learning AND exercise.
This is another way to overcome Imposter Syndrome. You continue to enrich your mind and your wellbeing. If you feel good about yourself mentally and physically, then you start liking yourself. When you start liking yourself and have a unique skillset that you can call your own, you start recognizing your worthiness. If you start realize how good you are, you want to be you, not someone else!
Bear in mind that Imposter Syndrome comes and goes. It will never completely go away. And that’s just part of being human or being alive; there will always be moments when you are going to feel the other side of grass is green. When you have these thoughts, you need to turn “love yourself switch” on and tell yourself that you are worth it. Don't be shy. Say that out loud.
So quickly recap. Here are my four top tips to overcome Imposter Syndrome.
- Don't believe all the wonderful photos that people post on social media. It doesn't mean their lives are perfect.
- Learn to love yourself. If you don't, it's harder for others to love you
- Earn your confidence by being very, very good at something. Anything.
- Continue to learn and exercise.
I mentioned this earlier in the episode that when I was growing up, I wanted to be someone else. I think that had a lot to do with I didn't like myself and I didn't think I was good enough. And I learned to love myself in my late thirties. Seriously! Can you imagine, not liking yourself with 30 some odd years? So don't do that to yourself. It's a torture.
I gained confidence when I started to be good at something. Then in the past 10, 15 years, I also learned to take care of myself by managing my own stress, even though I work long, long, long hours. And I do yoga every day and I help tremendously. I've slowly realized I'm pretty good the way I am. Maybe that realization also comes with aging. When you start getting older, you're just like, “ah, I don't care.”
So how do you overcome Imposter Syndrome? I'd love to hear from you and if you really like my podcast, feel free to subscribe on your favorite listening platforms. Take care. Bye-bye.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and more with Pam.
I have a very special guest, AJ Wilcox. AJ specializes in paid ads for LinkedIn. He is a LinkedIn Ads Fanatic, host of The LinkedIn Ads Show, and founder of B2Linked, the Linkedin advertising agency.
You can guess, that AJ is here with us to share many practical tips for running LinkedIn ads.
In this episode: * What kind of ads work best on LinkedIn? * How to run LinkedIn ad campaigns * Why are LinkedIn ads not converting? * How much budget does a company need to run Linkedin ads? * How long should businesses run paid media for a specific channel? * What are LinkedIn's different ad options and formats? * What is recommended length for a Linkedin video ad? * How can businesses avoid making the most common mistakes?
Quotes from the episode: "LinkedIn allows us to target people by who they are. So if you look at it with LinkedIn, you can ensure that every single one of your clicks and leads comes from an ideal prospect."
"You need to set expectations, especially realistic expectations with your salespeople and also with your management when you rent paid media ads. And a good chunk of it is building awareness, not necessarily driving the conversion."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Pam Didner: Hey, big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam. Yay. Today I actually have a very, very good friend joining me, Robert Rose, Chief Strategist of Content Marketing Institute. And I have known Robert for at least, I would say, 10 years maybe. We have known each other for a long while.
Robert Rose: Yeah. It's been the better part of a decade, for sure. Yeah.
Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. Welcome to my show and I have waited so long to actually have you. Shame on Pam! (laughs)
Robert Rose: I'm so excited to be here. I'm long time listener, first time guest. I'm super happy to be here. Thank you.
Pam Didner: Excellent. And today we are going to talk about our favorite topic, which is buyers, the B2B buyers. And obviously in the past several years, there's a term called empowered buyers, especially the B2B buyers. And they have all the information at their fingertips, AKA Google search, so they are armed with so much knowledge on hand. And many of them are very, very good at consuming, doing research on high quality content pieces, to make sure that they have enough knowledge to source the right technology. Does that mean they are totally in control and they are incredibly knowledgeable about the technology and the platforms they need to buy? What is your thought on that?
Robert Rose: Well it's something that we've been noticing more and more over the last few years because our business isn't the only one doing content marketing. Our competitors are doing it, everybody's doing it, in some cases. And what has come to pass is that in many ways, businesses have this belief that there's this asymmetric relationship between them and buyers and buyers are showing up on their door, and that's true. The stats that we see from Forrester or Gartner, the other research firms that say 70% of the buyer's journeys done before a sales person gets a call and people don't like cold calling and all that stuff. It's all true but the question underneath it is what's important, which is why. And the key there is there's research to actually to show this, which is buyers aren't feeling terribly empowered these days.
And the question is because we have to remember that the selling and marketing process is not the only one that changed. The buying process changed as well. And in many cases, those buyers, they're not doing this because they love it. It's like asking me to go buy a new something for my car engine. I hate cars. I don't want to get into a car, but I'm going to go research it and learn about it so that I can actually buy the best one. In many cases for B2B, that's the exact same thing. One CMO told me one time, he said, "Look, we're going out and buying this enterprise marketing technology, but I got no interest in learning and becoming a subject matter expert in this stuff. I hate this. I don't want to do it, but I have to do it because my boss, the CEO, wants us to put this committee together so that we buy the best purchased product that we possibly can."
And so many times what happens is that our buyers are showing up and all we're doing is pouring more research on them and basically not adding any value to their process because they're just trying to check a box that they did all this research. It's the equivalent of saying we've got buyers showing up on our doorstep and they want to learn how to play chess and we continually give them more research on why chess is such an important game and they'll have fun playing it. They're like, "Yeah, I get it, enough." And we just need to be more helpful. Instead of teaching buyers why to change, we need to be teaching them how they can change more easily.
Pam Didner: So with that being said, how do we know what they want and how can we be helpful to them in a way that they need it?
Robert Rose: We can start listening a lot more. Is what we can do.
Pam Didner: That is true. I 100% agree with that.
Robert Rose: Look, we're marketers, so we are trained. There's that wonderful, active listening idea. And the idea is that we're waiting to speak. Are we really listening or are we just waiting to speak? And most marketing or sales enablement teams, they're pretty much just waiting to speak. It's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear what you're saying, but how many licenses do you really need?" And so we can listen a lot more in terms of hearing what the intent is of the buyers that are showing up, what are they really looking for? When they ask or when they come in and download a piece of content, how many B2B companies do you know that treat every single download of every single piece of content exactly the same way?
Pam Didner: Same. They assign the score. You download this piece, you get 30 points, you download that piece, you get 40 points.
Robert Rose: Exactly MQL is triggered and all of a sudden it triggers an email saying, "How many licenses or what would you like to buy today and can I schedule a call with you?" And instead, if we start listening for the contextual signals, because what we're putting out with all of our thought leadership and with all of our marketing content are signals that can get tripped. And so if we look and say someone downloaded a White Paper entitled Everything, I Need to Learn About the Introduction of My Industry versus How Do I Implement the Best Solution for My Need, those are two very different signals and we can start responding in appropriate ways instead of treating both of those customers exactly the same.
Pam Didner: I completely can relate to what you are just sharing with us in terms of that the lead score or the content score related to the download, even you assign a specific point or a score associated with someone downloading it, but don't use that number as, "Oh, you got 85 point, therefore we should do this." Even though they download a specific piece of content and you have to do some research to understand where they're coming from, what else they do, try to identify their intent or possibly their interest before you actually determine how you want to respond to that, so that sounds like the automation workflow is not going to work very, very well or you have to use certain kind of algorithm to attest or discover what that intent is. Is that correct? You have to do it manually or you have to use some sort of tool to help you out.
Robert Rose: We all have a tendency to want to over automate things that don't necessarily need to be automated, but there are ways certainly to think about this from a marketing automation perspective. I think the key thing is not to just look, you said it very well, it's not just looking at how many things that they downloaded and assigning a score or even looking at exactly what they downloaded and assigning a score. One of the things that we need to look at is the context of how those things happen. In other words, the order is important. So if someone comes in and downloads the paper that I just mentioned that says, "How do I implement X kind of solution," and then goes and downloads the, "What do I need to learn about this particular industry?" well, that's two different ideas, rather than if they came in and did the reverse. One is I'm learning and then I need to know how, and then the other is maybe I need to just check off a box and get to the how, but then I'm really confused by everything and I'm coming back to learning the why.
And so really understanding the context of what the customer is doing and what they're actually asked ... One of my favorite things to do, and so few B2B companies do it, is instead of gating a piece of content with your email address, why don't you gate a piece of content with just, "Why do you want this content?" Just ask. Just say, "What are you looking for?" "I'm just looking to learn. I'm trying to get as much research I'm trying to figure out what's best for me." Get insight and listen. Even if you only did that for one out of every five visitors, just start to get an insight and listen more than simply just waiting to speak.
Pam Didner: I like the idea, even if you gate the content, that you ask a very simple question. Obviously, everybody wants to get the first name, last name and email address.
Robert Rose: Right. Well, they want the email address, because that's, for some reason, we've started to equate that with value.
Pam Didner: I guess it's probably another thing to check off the box. Guess what? I got another lead.
Robert Rose: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So many companies, they have this algorithm set up to where somebody downloads something and immediately, trips up an email to say set up a thing with a... It happens to me all the time. I go to some site and I download a white paper.
Pam Didner: Oh yeah. Honestly, I'm the guilty one. I set up that process myself, somebody subscribe and I actually have a three email over three weeks. The first one you just welcome them and then share with them some contents. And the second one is basically say, "Hey, these are the top five popular most downloaded blog post." And then the other one-
Robert Rose: That's right. That's what you should be doing, but it's the company that I go to, I'm looking at you, Gartner, when I go and I download something that's available on Gartner and not five seconds later, do I get some sort of sales email saying basically-
Pam Didner: Sound like an automatic email, hundred percent.
Robert Rose: Automatic email saying basically. And if you think about it, the minute that I've downloaded a White Paper is actually the worst time to email me and actually try and sell me something. It's the worst time because I haven't even read the thing that I've downloaded yet. I haven't even experienced it yet. And you're already banging on my door saying, "Hey, can I sell you something?"
Pam Didner: Hello, I need to talk to you now.
Robert Rose: If you could pick the worst time to try and sell somebody something, it would be the 5 or 10 seconds after they've downloaded this thing you wanted them to download, but yet we do it. It's the first thing we want to do.
Pam Didner: Yeah. In general, I want to wait for a little bit, two or three days down the road, even when I do a workshop. Even for CMW, I will send a thank you note, but usually I send that right away, 24 hours, because I just say, "Hey, thank you so much for coming to my workshop," and that's about it. And then I have a call to action. "If you need to talk to me, feel free," and that's the end of the conversation. And I don't usually do a lot of pounding, like, "Hey, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me." But whenever I get a chance, I always have a call to action. "Yeah. It's a complimentary. Schedule a call with me," so yeah, but I hear you. You don't want to be right there that minute.
Well, now we are looking ahead, which is the post-pandemic. Based on what you have seen, and also some of the research that's been conducted by Content Marketing Institute, what should marketers do differently, now it's completely different era?
Robert Rose: There are a couple of things, I think, that have been accelerated from the pandemic. And the first is we were just talking about is the need for different kinds of content. There's a statistic that I read. It was a few, maybe a month or two ago, that talked about how B2B organizations really pivoted and started doing much more of their sales enablement online and in live video versus getting on a plane and showing up and doing PowerPoint presentations at the foot of the table or taking their customers to golf or whatever it is. And what the report said was basically that companies have really found success with that. They've really found that it's better, in many ways. And so I think that's one of the things that's changed post-pandemic that will continue to be there, which is a real press on the need to create digital experiences that are video-based, that are sales-enablement oriented.
And so I think there's a real opportunity for marketers and sales people to really work together to start to create these very interesting, engaging, and thoughtful video experiences that are really sales enablement practices over and over again. And I think a lot of that has to do with the real move here to create so much more digital content in a world, where the physical aspects of this, our attendance at conferences and our attendance at being able to see people in restaurants and being able to go and fly there and do all those things, right now is really limited. And so this move for a more direct to customer digital experience is such an important part of this.
And so that means that content marketers, the thought leadership, the resources, all of those kinds of things, are starting to merge a lot with other elements of content that are more sales oriented. And so I think that expansion and that importance of that as a strategy is probably the biggest thing to come out for content out of the pandemic.
Pam Didner: When I was speaking, actually, at private events and they asked me a specific trends that they need to pay attention to, especially looking ahead for next two or three years, I say something similar, but use a slightly different term. It's the increased digital touchpoint. In the past, you can take care of that through any kind of physical interaction, but that is not just replaced, but also there's increased number of digital touchpoint that you have to add as a part of the purchase journey.
Robert Rose: That's a great point.
Pam Didner: And I agree with you. I have seen that as well. And I also have encouraged a lot of sales professionals. It's very interesting about sales people. When you put a salesperson in front of a prospect, they are charming, they know what to say, they know how to do it. But if you put the salesperson in front of a camera, they freeze. They're like, "I don't know what to say."
Robert Rose: That's such a great point. Yeah.
Pam Didner: And so one thing I feel that the sales professional that needs to possess in the future is the ability to look at a green dot, like green dot on that digital camera, and still feel incredibly comfortable in talking, just like you are talking to prospects.
Robert Rose: That's such a great point.
Pam Didner: Do you know there is a tool called Loom, L-O-O-M?
Robert Rose: I've heard of it. Yes.
Pam Didner: Loom. Yeah. Basically, it's a SaaS-based platform that you can download to your laptop and you can click on Loom and then you can do recording like this. You can say, "Hey. Hey, this is Pam. It's so good talking to you, blah, blah, blah," and then you can hit done. And then you can do a very quick trim in and you can trim the front, you can trim the end, and then once that's done, they give you a video link, very similar to YouTube. So you can just add that link or you can add that video directly to your email, a very quick download and it's readily available and if you don't want to add that video into your email, you can just add a video link and that people can watch it. It's wonderful. And it's also very, very good at doing a live demo. For example, I say, "Hey, Robert, you know what? I know you are interested about this. Let me show you how to do it." And then you do it and recording yourself. It was actually wonderful tool. Yeah.
Robert Rose: Yeah. I've seen a couple of it. Yeah. It's great for email. Yeah.
Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. No, I 100% understand. And I do encourage a lot of sales professional. I say, "You know what? You look gorgeous. You know you are, so now you just get yourself comfortable in front of camera. Okay? Then you are perfect. All right?" Am I crazy?
Robert Rose: Yes, but we knew that already.
Pam Didner: All right. So this is wonderful and I actually have one last question. So what show are you binge watching right now?
Robert Rose: It's hard to binge watch anymore because they're all dropping once a week now, instead of dropping the whole season at a time.
Pam Didner: I know. That really just annoys the heck out of me. Yeah.
Robert Rose: Yeah. The last binge watch where we watched two seasons' worth of shows in two weeks was “Yellowstone.” I just finished all four seasons.
Pam Didner: Oh my God.
Robert Rose: It's so great.
Pam Didner: Is it by Kevin Costner? Yeah. I think that show is. Is it?
Robert Rose: Well, first of all, he's dreamy, but ...
Pam Didner: I know. That's why I say. He age so well. Oh my God. I love him. I love him. I have not watched that show. It's on my list.
Robert Rose: Oh, you should watch it. It's “The Sopranos” as cowboys is what it is. It's just so great.
Pam Didner: Really? Oh my God. What about the scenery? The Yellowstone, Grand Teton ...
Robert Rose: Oh, it's beautiful. It's beautiful to watch. And it's great. If you like cowboys and westerns it's really fun. And then of course, what I'm watching right now is all this new Star Trek stuff because, of course, I'm a nerd that way.
Pam Didner: “Picard,” are you watching the ...
Robert Rose: Oh yeah. I watched all of it. I watched all of “Picard.” I'm in the “Strange New World.” Anything Star Trek, I'm all over, so that's my favorite thing at the moment.
Pam Didner: Very good. Excellent. You know what, Robert? It's so good talking to you and I'm so happy that you finally came to my show and we talk about what empower buyers, how to be helpful to them. And also we talk about some of the digital touch points that is going to probably continue to increase post-pandemic and how to use video as a means to actually engage with your prospect. Very, very good. So happy to see you, Robert.
Robert Rose: Great to see you.
Pam Didner: Take care. Bye.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. In today's episode of B2B Marketing & More, I explain how to set up an efficient and cohesive martech stack. I’ll guide your thinking approach and break down key steps that you can take to tackle this hairy issue.
In this episode: * What makes martech Stack complicated * What is the best way to navigate the martech stack * How to plan your martech budget * How to build a martech stack * Why and how to include paid media in your marketing
Quotes from the episode: "Knowing your business objectives and the marketing channels you want to use, and the success metrics you’re looking for will all go a long way on Martech Stack building. "
"You can grow your business organically to some extent. However, at some point, you will hit the ceiling. If you need to grow, you need to do paid advertising, which means paid search, paid ads, or even paid sponsors."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a special guest today: Erika Heald. She's a founder and the lead consultant at Erika Heald Marketing Consulting, where she helps a lot of SaaS startups.
Today we are going to talk about B2B thought leadership, in the context of the B2B marketing specifically. What makes it important for marketers and companies and why do they need to be aware of generating thought leadership.
In this episode: * What is the biggest misconception about thought leadership? * How should marketers start to craft B2B thought leadership strategy for their company? * What are the challenges for big enterprises? * How to find the right B2B thought leadership opportunities within the company? * How can B2B marketers and subject matter experts create thought leadership content? * What is the best way to position a thought leadership pitch to the management?
Quotes from the episode: "You start by thinking about who in your organization is not afraid to speak their mind, even if it might ruffle some feathers. You want to find those who are okay with sometimes being the one who says the not so popular opinion out loud in public and is willing to talk about it."
"If you're willing to put in the time with your Legal and Compliance partners and share why you want to change something or where you're coming from, a lot of times, they will figure out how to help you get towards where you wanted to go."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode, B2B Marketing & More. I have a very special guest today: Janet Driscoll Miller. Janet is the author of Data-First Marketing. She is the President and CEO of Marketing Mojo, specializing in digital ads, SEO and analytics.
Today Janet shares data-first marketing tips, and how to put data at the beginning of what businesses need to do.
In this episode: * What is data-first marketing and how it is different from data-driven? * How can marketers become data-first focused? * How to create multiple personas? * Basic data-first marketing tips for marketing and sales * How to plan the process to track data during a marketing campaign? * How to assess the effectiveness of the data-first marketing effort? * Data-First marketing book templates. * What are some of the common mistakes encountered when harnessing the data? * How should marketers consolidate and analyze data in a holistic way?
Quotes from the episode: "In data-first, we're talking about how you make sure that you have accurate reporting from the very beginning. That you're tracking everything correctly to understand how you're impacting those business goals throughout the lifecycle of a campaign."
"You want to make sure that everything is consistent. So come up with a plan for your organization to approach tagging and have a standard. And then, when you do that, that makes it a little bit easier to ensure that the tagging is done consistently across the whole organization"
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. In today's B2B Marketing & More episode, I'll answer the following question: What’s the best way to integrate sales and marketing efforts within a large company?
After this episode, you will think about alignment differently, and you’ll have some actionable ideas as to how you should approach this challenge.
In this episode: * What makes sales and marketing alignment difficult. * How to resolve sales and marketing integration challenges in a large enterprise. * Two approaches to aligning sales and marketing in an enterprise. * How to establish clear and open communication.
Quotes from the episode: "Sales and marketing integration is always hard. It’s even harder in a large enterprise because there are too many cooks in the kitchen."
"Close and clear communication is essential, and be prepared to be nimble when you work with sales."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. It's time for another solo episode. Today's topic is all about building better communication with sales and setting up clear expectations. And after listening to this episode, you'll know exactly what you need to do to navigate the process with ease.
In this episode: * How to appropriately contact and interview the sales team members * What to consider when reviewing the list of priorities * How to get buy-in from sales and management * What's next after you get buy-in from your colleagues * How to provide timely updates * Best practice to update SLA regularly
Quotes from the episode: "There is no blanket solution for working with sales. You can look for best practices, but it's usually hard to implement best practices as is. You need to know what nuggets you can take from best practices and apply to you and your team."
"Create a presentation, show what you will do, and get buy-in. Sales like to see what you can do for them NOW. So you need to have a couple of things to show that you will jump right in."
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You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a return guest this time: Darrell Alfonso, a global marketing operations manager at Amazon Web Services, martech instructor and speaker.
I interviewed Darrell back in 2020, about marketing automation and what makes it a must-have for modern marketers. Obviously, many things have changed in the past one and a half years. So I invited Darrell back, and we're going to have a little chat about marketing automation and some of his changes in both professional and personal life.
In this episode: * What are the emerging B2B marketing automation trends and technologies during the pandemic? * What are data unification platforms? * How can marketers use CDP (customer data platform)? * CDP suggestions and what makes them different for B2B marketing automation. * How to achieve the delicate balance of standardization and personalization? * What is the role of data in hyper-personalization and how to use it? * Two strategies to personalize for people with multiple job functions and roles? * How to use artificial intelligence and algorithms to identify customers' intentions?
Quotes from the episode: "One thing that's important to explain is that the goal is to take the data from different sources. So your CRM, customer database, marketing automation platform, and advertising tools may be used."
"All the cool things that you want to do in marketing take a lot of work. And it takes a lot of things that aren't that glamorous. But the result is worth it."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. It's time for my monthly solo episode. Today I want to talk about the fundamentals of product positioning.
It's not a popular topic, but marketers need to understand what must be done to position their products. My product positioning tips will help you with content marketing, copywriting for social media, understanding your products, and overall marketing communications.
In this episode: * What is product positioning? * What is the difference between product positioning and the messaging framework? * How to position the products?
Quotes from the episode: "Segmentation can get complicated quickly when you constantly add new product lines or serve different sets of customers. When your company is growing, you offer more products. Over time your segmentation would get messy. You will need to reevaluate your segmentations. "
"The purpose of a name is to evoke a visual in a person's mind. Therefore naming or not naming your product is a strategic decision. However, you should always have a short and differentiated description to explain your product."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
Today I have a special guest - Kayla Graham. Kayla is the Operations Manager, wears multiple hats and is responsible for a company called Content Callout. She also does a lot of day-to-day internal operations, covering external-facing operations at the same time.
Our key focus in this episode is on startups, marketing and sales alignment, and how to optimize it for startup companies.
In this episode: * Who should startups with limited budgets decide who to hire first? * When building a marketing team, is it better to outsource or have it in-house? * How to build brand awareness with a limited budget? * What are the must-have tools for marketing and sales to achieve business goals? * What makes marketing and sales alignment difficult in a startup? * How can marketing and sales achieve long-term collaboration or process? * How to plan, prioritize and de-prioritize tasks? * What are the most common sales and marketing alignment challenges, and how should startups address them? * How to integrate necessary tools?
Quotes from the episode: "When we're doing B2B, people don't want to connect with the machine. They still want to connect with a story. Yes, they want a solution that works. Still, ultimately they want to connect with the story behind that and the authenticity. "
"I think that marketing, especially in a small company, is split up over so many tasks that it becomes hard to support their own internal sales team when a lot of their efforts are focused on external factors."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam!
Meet my guest, Vidhya Ravi, a UX Design Researcher at Cash App who transitioned into UX research from marketing several years ago.
In this episode, Vidhya is going to share how her diverse background in marketing and strategy helps her shape perspective and work in UX research.
In this episode: * What UX stands for and what do UX designers do at Cash App? * How to work with the product development team to develop features and user requirements? * How to bring personal experience to the front and the whole product life cycle? * What are the most common and effective approaches to design? * How does a group of UX designers work together and share the insights with the product team? * What tools do UX designers use to drive the brainstorming? * Best practices for marketing people to work with and get to know UX designers? * How can marketing and UX designers improve their collaboration? * What are the key design elements sales and marketing people should be aware of?
Quotes from the episode: "We spend time using different research methodologies to better understand our customers and our users. So that includes an understanding of them, attitudinally, understanding their mindset, understanding their behaviors. "
"One thing that marketers can do that would be really helpful is building relationships with people on the UX side. Even if they're not working together, understand what they do, their work, the design challenges they're facing. Because they have this in-depth understanding often driven by UX research of the customer currently using the product and many things regarding value proposition or what features are working well for customers. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
My guest is a sales professional, Ryan Staley, the CEO and the founder of Whale Boss. Ryan is a fantastic and high-performance salesperson, he helps founders and revenue leaders implement 7 and 8 Figure sales operating systems in less than 3 months.
Today, we talk about the essential characteristics of effective salespeople.
In this episode: * What are the tips and tricks to capturing big clients? * How to understand your customer and focus on the company's needs? * Cold calling tips: how to reach out to the prospects you don't know and get them interested in having a conversation? * In what ways sales engagement was changed by pandemic? * How can salespeople adapt to the new circumstances? * What is the best way to start a conversation with a prospect? * How can B2B marketers better support sales? * What are the characteristics of effective salespeople? * What are some of the salespeople's pet peeves that marketers should be aware of?
Quotes from the episode: "Cold calling could fit in a lot of different buckets. That could be social interaction that can be picking up a phone, that could be texting, that could be emailed, that could be direct messaging. And so there's a lot of different channels that you do to make that a reality."
"One of the cool things that you could do is try and connect with that person emotionally about something, every single call you have with them. What I look at is a bit like layering in finding a little more about the person, a little deeper, every single communication touchpoint that you talk to them live."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. We are going to talk about innovation today. My guest today is Carla Johnson. She is a marketing and innovation strategist, keynote speaker, and author of ten books.
In her latest book RE:Think Innovation, Carla breaks down the exact process that the world's most prolific innovators use to consistently come up with great ideas.
In this episode: * Definition of innovation. * How is innovation different from creativity? * What is perpetual innovation? * What are the five steps of innovation? * In which step of innovation do people spend the most time and why? * What are the different types of innovators? * How can people regularly work on enhancing their innovation skills? * What is the best way to encourage innovation in B2B business?
Quotes from the episode: "I define innovation as the ability to consistently come up with new, great and reliable ideas. It sounds like a very simple definition, but each of those words is important."
"Our attention gets narrowed into these very small tasks or digital devices all day long. Still, creative, especially innovative people, are highly observant of the world around them."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hi, a big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Today I answer the question that we often don't discuss openly. How to break the bad news in business with a proper presentation deck.
A young marketing manager asked me how to share the results of paid social media campaigns with her management that didn't go well and put a deck together. So here are three approaches to use to help you maintain that respect you have as a subject matter expert.
In this episode: * No Sugar Coating approach * Everything is Relative approach * Mixed News approach * Presentation flow tips * Key elements of a good presentation
Quotes from the episode: "You need to explain the logic surrounding the initiative's benefit and tell the backstory. But when you are talking about the outcomes, you should also explain the root causes of the outcomes."
"There are usually bits of good news and bad news to pull from. Can you identify three good news examples and three bad news examples? I guarantee you can do that."
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You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I had fantastic conversation with Steve Kearns, Head of Blog and Social Media Marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. He shares a lot of his experience, including lessons learned in a blog migration and I captured a big chunk of it in Part 1. And now here’s Part 2 and we're going to talk about social media marketing and also blog writing and more so stick around.
Pam Didner: So what social media channels are you using in addition to LinkedIn, of course?
Steve Kearns: We've had a, a bit of like a story journey in terms of figuring out what social media platforms we should leverage, especially organically. Because my team handles organic social media; we're currently across LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. So those are really the four platforms that we want to take advantage of.
Pam Didner: Facebook is not one of your options. Can you tell us why?
Steve Kearns: Yeah. And this is, this is a conversation that we've gone back and forth on internally quite a bit. So, there's two things here. The first is looking at the context of different platforms and what those platforms are going to do for us. So right now, our channel mix, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube are all vastly different content platforms.
Pam Didner: Completely. I'm actually on all platforms and many people would tell me, “Pam, you should focus on one,” but the thing is, I'm a consultant. And the B2B marketing consultant, I need to know old platforms. So I test the waters all the time. And, uh, I also know that doing the video platform is very different than say writing blog.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. Yeah, so you know, one of the things that, that we've, we've tried to really focus in on is making sure that we can communicate in very different contexts in each of, on each of those platforms--so video on YouTube, obviously. We do a lot of graphic content on Instagram. That's really top of funnel. Uh, on Twitter, we have an opportunity to have a little more of a conversation with our audiences and, and have that news style programming. And then on LinkedIn, you know, that's really our bread and butter channel when it comes to showing that we can be a best in class use case for marketing on the platform.
So, you know, in terms of your question, Pam around, why not FaceBook, I think there's so much overlap on Facebook between the use cases on Twitter, the use cases on LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera, that we didn't feel that we needed to add another platform to the mix. Um, you know, there was also a, a kind of a conscious decision around, we want to make sure we're investing primarily in LinkedIn.
Like Facebook, Facebook, Google, Twitter, I mean, they're all key advertising competitors of ours. We want to make sure that--not so much that we don't see the value in marketing on Facebook; we absolutely do. It's more of, “okay, my team has 40 hours a week to spend on doing social marketing.
Pam Didner: Yeah, you want to prioritize.
Steve Kearns: I want them to be spending 30 of those hours thinking about, uh, you know, how we market on LinkedIn.
Pam Didner: On these four channels.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, I would say one of the, the interesting things about my journey at LinkedIn is looking at how much more robust LinkedIn and our LinkedIn Pages experience has been over the last five years. So when I first joined the social marketing team five years ago, we were primarily using Twitter because our platform didn't have the capabilities that now has to be as dynamic, you know, in terms of capability to have events, streaming capabilities--you know, just the, the page manager experience to be able to have those two-way conversations as a brand. Now you can do all of that on LinkedIn.
So it gives us a really clear mandate to say, we now have all of the tools we need to build a brand on LinkedIn first. And you know, now my team is taking advantage of that, which is a really, I would say, positive, exciting transition that we've made away from doing marketing first on another platform. So now we're doing marketing first on our own platform. And that for obvious reasons makes a ton of sense.
Pam Didner: That, strategically, that makes a lot of sense to me, give me that on the corporate world for a long time. And so another question I would like to ask you, given that the four channels that you mentioned--LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube--do you have a set frequency in terms of publishing for each channel?
Steve Kearns: Yes. So for each channel, each has its own set of frequencies. So I would say on Instagram, it's about three times a week. Uh, Twitter is I believe about once a day and then LinkedIn is going to be two to three times a day.
YouTube is more, as needed, as we have new video series that come out in a future state, we would get much more advanced with YouTube where there's actually a ton of SEO value you can drive with YouTube.
Pam Didner: This is just another monster that you have to master.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. Like there could be a whole full-time job dedicated to the sort of suggested like the linking and back-linking you can do and YouTube videos, like next, your content suggestions, et cetera. We don't have the bandwidth to do that currently, so we're more uploading. I'm kind of saying, here you go. But I think that's definitely a future goal of mine, if the team continues to grow.
Pam Didner: So you touched this a little bit and I have to come to that realization myself, as well, the copywriting or even script writing—I call script writing for YouTube, especially on the video--they are all very, very different. You cannot do one-size-fits-all type up a publishing anymore. Even you write one blog post the way that you write copy needs to be very different for different channels.
So talk to us in terms of, uh, how do you manage that in terms of like for one blog that you have to write a different copies for different channel, how do you manage that? It’s so massive from time to time. Given that I do it myself and I know how much work that is. Is it any tips and tricks to make that easy?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, I will say it's incredibly time-consuming. I mean, I can talk about how I've done it in the past, that was scalable and then how we do it now as a much larger company. So, you know, what we've done in the past is I think even going into this role many, many years ago, it was well-known that you need to play into the context of each social platform when you're creating content. So you don't want to, I mean, you're physically unable to write an essay on Twitter. You can't, you, you know, there's a character limit on LinkedIn.
There's context limitations on Instagram--you know, Instagram is primarily a visual platform. So what I focused on in the past is taking the, I would say most valuable components of let's say a blog post that we have to offer--so if that's things like compelling statistics, compelling quotes, several bullet points of information in terms of key takeaways--and then it's taking those, um, and then kind of fitting them into the character counts or character limits for each platform. So that's, if you are a one-person show, what I would typically do is I would take like a paragraph of the most valuable information. I'd start with that text paragraph.
Pam Didner: Pare it down.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. And then you start highlighting parts, pieces, and parts of it. And then that is a message that ends up across your different platforms. It's not the same exact message, but it is very similar. So now what we do at LinkedIn and we're, we're fortunate that we were able to have access to the resources and the size of the team that we do have to be able to, to go a layer deeper is that we will actually take those--you know, it's the same concept in theory, or you take those tidbits and pieces of information from the blog that are most valuable--but what we're doing now is we're actually going and we're working with our design teams, our copywriting teams to create bespoke assets for each channel.
Pam Didner: That is wonderful. Isn't nice to actually have budget? (laughs)
Steve Kearns: Oh yes. Well that was going to be my follow-up as I was like, it's very expensive to do that. Um, you know, even like, and we have pretty big budgets at LinkedIn when I see the amount of hours it takes to design something specifically for, you know, if you look at a design statement of work, you'll have previously used to just be okay, your blog assets and your infographic, and then you would drop the link into social. Now, if you look at one of my campaigns, you have—
Pam Didner: You customize everything.
Steve Kearns: You have, you know, LinkedIn asset 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, same with Twitter asset 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Instagram. And then your bill is, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.
Pam Didner: Yeah (laughs). You can do on a smaller budget, but still it's very, time-consuming.
Steve Kearns: Absolutely. So it's really looking at, and I think what we're really excited by now is we have that ability to take, uh, I'll give you a really quick example: so we have a content piece that's live on our blog right now that looks at the engagement trends of Generation Z. So we've recognized that Gen Z is one of the largest buying cohorts or will be one of the largest buying cohorts in B2B moving forward, because they're entering the workforce. They're now going to have influence on buying decisions.
Pam Didner: In 10 years, they're going to be on management staff.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. So the question is how do you market to them? How do they like to be marketed to in a way that's different than Millennials? And the answer is they're very different than Millennials in terms of their value set--. What they believe. So we have all of that data, you know, that's proprietary data to LinkedIn--their behaviors on the platform, how brands are messaging to them, are they doing it successfully? Whatnot.
So we've taken all of that data. We've put that across our blog. And then I'll just give you the LinkedIn example, we've then taken that data or snippets of that data and we've launched flipbooks. So it's literally like PDFs that you can flip through, like a book on LinkedIn. They're directly uploaded into the feed. And, you know, instead of just saying, “Hey, go to the blog to read all about this,” people are actually getting that experience in the social feed--which, you know, again, if they're only spending three seconds looking at it or giving three seconds of their attention, which would even be generous in this kind of climate, they're still able to understand what we're talking about. They develop an understanding of what it is we care about, or we're trying to say at LinkedIn, and, you know, it deepens the relationship with the brand. It deepens their understanding of our campaign, our message, even if they don't get the chance to go to the blog.
So we hope that we're providing like unique kind of content consumption experiences on our blog, on our social media handles. And then within our social media handles on each platform specifically.
Pam Didner: So that leads me to my next question: how do you measure your team's success?
Steve Kearns: There's a couple of core KPIs we look at. The first bucket I would categorize these into is around engagement. The second bucket we'd categorize these into is around performance. So let's talk a little bit about the engagement bucket first. So we're fortunate that at LinkedIn, even though we are a B2B marketing team, we market on behalf of a very large brand. So one of our core KPIs is making sure that we're inspiring the kind of trust, the kind of brand love, the kind of bonds that people need to have with a social media brand the size of LinkedIn. We know that like that that's good Brand Marketing 101 is to build those trusted relationships with our audiences. So what is the KPI that we track there? Um, we're looking primarily at our engagement data. So we like to benchmark against number one, industry standards--so B2B marketing industry standards-- then also looking at like competitive benchmarks.
So what is the benchmark? If we can source that data? Our key competitors like Google and Facebook, Twitter, whatnot. Yep. And then it's looking at very granular metrics, like for our blog time on page, page views, sessions, unique sessions, unique page views; on our social platforms is looking at engagement rate. All of those to us are indicators, you know, even though you can't put a direct revenue goal against any of those metrics—
Pam Didner: That’s the thing I want you- I'm so happy you brought that up. So you cannot put in a direct revenue goal associated with it. And I'm so happy you acknowledge it because a lot of times the content marketing effort, unless you have the backend integrated deeply--like for example, somebody comment on something and then you can link back to your CRM and show that this is a LinkedIn customers and then the salespeople can actually go talk to them or whatnot; unless you have a backing integrated like that. It's almost impossible to track the content marketing's effort directly linked to a revenue generation.
So if you cannot link it directly to it, and a lot of the data that you are tracking, it's kind of like a secondary data, how do you communicate that with the management?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, so it's, um, it's a good question. And it's an ongoing conversation that we are having with our leadership. It's really a lot of education and I imagine this is easier at a large brand than it is at a smaller brand.
Pam Didner: Yes, very true by the way.
Steve Kearns: Just by the nature of the resources we have access to. And I think the, the long-term thinking that we have to have as a market leader versus being focused on those short term KPIs, um, which are like, hey, if I need to make payroll the next month and I need to, you know, meet the demands of my customers—
Pam Didner: You have to bring the leads.
Steve Kearns: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, luckily we've gotten to a stage where that is equally as important, but, um, you know, we also need to make sure that we're sustaining trust and, you know, bonds with our customers.
Pam Didner: I will say your key objective, if you will--and correct me, if I'm totally off--is really you focused on top of funnel. You tried to build that brand awareness. You tried to build that trust that the B2B companies that can associate with LinkedIn. To me it’s the brand equity and also the trust and the thought leadership. It’s not necessarily focusing on the bottom of the funnel, if you will.
Steve Kearns: Absolutely. In terms of the way we communicate that to our leadership. It's again, that education journey around what is the importance of brand? and what is the importance of building these connective bonds and this connective tissue with our customers? Because at the end of the day, you have to--and this is the beauty of being a content marketer--is you should be a good storyteller if you're a content marketer, is that you need to go and tell a story to your leadership team to say, “even though this is not giving you a lead--and you know, there is some content and there's some content marketing efforts. And I'll talk about that second bucket in a second that are delivering leads and generating demand, but for this engagement bucket, when someone picks up the phone and calls your customer, one of your sales reps, calls your customer, are they going to pick up? are they going to trust what they're hearing from your brand? And if the answer is no, like chances are, you don't have a very strong brand and you don't have a very strong reputation with your customers. And a lot of what that, you know, a lot of how you establish that trust, that reputation, those, you know, those connective bonds is through some of this top of funnel.
So, you know, to relate that back to the metrics we're looking at, goes back to that, that old phrase and I'll probably butcher it, but it's like if a tree falls in the forest and you know, no, one's around to hear it does it really make a sound? Yeah, we can publish posts all day--we have the resources, we have the people-- but if we're not getting the engagement?
Pam Didner: It doesn't matter.
Steve Kearns: Yeah, it doesn't matter. So we're just wasting our time. We're spinning our wheels and we're adding more noise into an already crowded social media landscape. So, what we've done in in the past couple of years is really look at how do we actually reduce our publishing cadence so that we can put more energy behind one or two posts a day that are going to really resonate. Um, because you know, I don't have to explain the network effect of social media to anybody, I'm sure, who's listening—
Pam Didner: Quality over quantity.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. In the same way that it's really hard to get someone to answer the phone or to book a meeting with someone, it's also really hard to get someone to engage on social media and say, you know, especially when your cohort of, of, uh, of, of target audience is marketers; We're curmudgeonly people as marketers are trying to like—
Pam Didner: (laughs) It’s very hard to market to us!
Steve Kearns: That's our world. And, what we try to tell our stakeholders too, is like, look for someone to stop what they're doing and to comment, or to add value and kind of create this two-way conversation with the brand, that is just as valuable in some way, shape or form as them picking up the phone or the answering the phone call and then, you know, further engaging or responding to an email from a rep because again, it's them taking their time and them electing to say, “Hey, this struck a chord with me and I am going to engage with the brand.”
And over time, you know, again, everybody in B2B marketing knows about the seven touch points it takes—
Pam Didner: Yeah, it’s a long play, a long play.
Steve Kearns: Yup. And especially when you look at SaaS marketing-- ads marketing is a little bit more cyclical and a little bit more immediate--but in a lot of B2B marketing, the buying cycles are so long that you do need to create that long-term play.
Pam Didner: I do agree. So I know that there is a LinkedIn Sales Solutions. Do you work closely with them?
Steve Kearns: Yes we do. So we actually used to be organized in conjunction with them, as well. So my previous role before I stepped into this role was leading blog and social marketing on behalf of our marketing solutions business and our sales solutions business. So I know that that side of the business very well, as well.
Pam Didner: So do you provide content to them or you are primarily just a marketing solution? Do they actually try to take advantage of some of the content that you created?
Steve Kearns: So we're primarily focused on creating content for our core audience, which are going to be marketers and our core revenue stream, which is going to be marketing solutions, but you know what we've done in the past and what we continue to do is, you know, we meet with them pretty regularly to figure out what are those cross crossover stories that we can tell? So for example, one of the stories that we've found a lot of pickup with is the storytelling around diversity, equity and inclusion. So, you know, we have very different worlds or revenue streams at LinkedIn.
We have our talent solutions business, which also encompasses our learning solutions business. When we said from a B2B perspective at LinkedIn, let's think about equity and let's think about diversity, equity and inclusion as a topic--as a business topic is something that we want to invest in more heavily and invest in content creation on behalf of--the talent story is very different from the sales and marketing story.
Pam Didner: 100% agree. It's because recruiter is a completely different persona if you will, than just sales and marketing.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. So that's where we found a lot of pickup, you know, in terms of crossover stories. The sales and marketing conversation for DE&I is actually very similar because, you know, then it focuses on your practices. So, you know, it goes beyond hiring and it looks at what are inclusive sales practices? inclusive language you could leverage on sales calls? How does that translate to marketing? Uh, you know, what does that mean for marketing creative? In the B2B space, how do you work equity into the buying cycle and the buying process to make sure that you are not alienating people because your organization is kind of not up to snuff when it comes to really being progressive in terms of looking at making equity a priority?
So we've partnered with them on, you know, a number of different research pieces, core narratives, uh, to make sure that we're saying, “Hey, we understand that sales and marketing sit in a very similar wheelhouse-- they all, they also diverged quite a bit—but we want to make sure that if there are stories that do have that crossover that we tell them in a, in a cohesive makes sense.
Pam Didner: Makes sense. So I actually have two personal questions I would like to ask you. Obviously, in terms of career development, you have a fairly solid career path, right. Um, uh, Viacom to Sony to actually LinkedIn. Do you have any advice for young and aspiring marketing professionals?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say, do the things you say you're going to do. It's very simple, but you'd be surprised--you know, this is specifically for folks kind of just getting started or wanting to break into marketing--you'd be surprised how few people do that.
Pam Didner: Don't be a talker. Be a doer. And keep your promise.
Steve Kearns: Right. Exactly. Because if you look at one of the phrases that we use at LinkedIn is “trust is consistency over time.” So I think that applies to business that applies to your career. And, you know, when you think about like, I'll give you the example of the, the blog migration which we, we talked about earlier, that was a project that was passed over probably several times until they gave it to me. And they gave it to me because they knew that even if it was going to be stressful, I had a track record at LinkedIn to do the things that I said I was going to do on the timelines I said, I was going to do, them.
Pam Didner: People know you will get that done.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. And that is worth its weight in gold. That is why, you know, if people move on in their careers, they're going to call you to hire you. They're going to consider you for projects and promotions. And it's really simple advice. Don't over-commit yourself and be sure to follow through on your commitments.
Pam Didner: I love that. I absolutely loved that. That's also one of the advice I do. I mean, it's for me to be independent consultant, right and for clients to continuously come to me for advice, same thing: I have to, I have to deliver what I said. I'm going to deliver. This is not going to work. So, yeah.
And uh, the other question I would like to ask you is, so what show are you binge-watching right now. And what do you recommend it?
Steve Kearns: Yeah. So I am actually on the final episode of “Succession.”
Pam Didner: (gasps) You know what, Bryan Collins, who I interviewed earlier mentioned “Succession.” as well. My son got me into it. The writing is fantastic. I mean, they swear like a drunken sailor and, uh, but the writing is incredibly snappy and short. The conversation is so short and you somehow have to really pay attention and listen to it. Would you agree?
Steve Kearns: Oh absolutely. And for, and for those of us in business, I think it's just, uh, it's, it's a really fun show to watch because, you know, we're fortunate at LinkedIn that, that's not how we work (Pam laughs) in any way, shape or form, but you know, it's like that old boys' club corporation of years past. It's really good television.
Pam Didner: Yeah, I think so too. I think how they shot the scenes and it's incredible. I love it too, but I, I really, I hate every single one of them. They are awful people, but just the way they interact with each other, the writing, and also how they shot the whole film, that really, really got me into it.
Steve Kearns: Well, it's, it's interesting, Pam, you mentioned that because I've done a little bit of reading--and this goes back to kind of storytelling and in the importance of storytelling and how many things you have to think about--is that they've actually designed the show through set design, costume design, their scripts, whatnot to intentionally make those characters, unlikable, to make their lives seem awful. You know, even though they have all this money and access to all this power, their wardrobes, aren't very, you know, exciting or colorful. They're the homes they live in aren't super decorated, or they don't feel homey and familial. And you know, all of that is supposed to signal to the audience that, you know, “Hey, it's not actually that great being this wealthy, this power. " So it's just interesting, the like levers they've pulled to get that message across.
Pam Didner: And get that experience. And also the visual cues, you know, to actually help us to make that connection in our mind in addition to what they said.
Steve its wonderful, wonderful talking to you. You have so much to share. And I mean, I enjoy every single guest, but I enjoyed this episode, uh, substantially more because I was a content marketer and I was doing the global role for a long period of time. So everything that you share with me just resonates with me. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insight. It’s wonderful, wonderful to have you.
Steve Kearns: Thank you for having. So he's great to have these conversations and connect with other really brilliant B2B marketers. So really appreciate your time and for having me on.
Pam Didner: Awesome.
I had a great time talking to Steve Kearns, Head of Blog And Social Media for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Our conversation lasted well over an hour, so I split it into several episodes. Part 1 explored how to consolidate country-specific blog sites into a global one. If you are working on global content marketing, you should definitely check it out. Part 2 is about social media marketing and how he goes about doing it.
In this bonus episode, Steve shares how his team evaluates internal and external blog submissions and he also creates content that will rank higher on SEO, and more. Let’s get started.
Pam Didner: How do you manage your writing staff? Are they in-house or outsourced? And do you have any suggestions to the listeners in terms of how to manage the writing staff for enterprises and also for small businesses?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I'll give you a quick overview as to how my team is structured. So I'm focused on leading the strategy kind of cross-functional relationships dot-connecting across, you know, the blog function, social media marketing function, and the web content marketing function. And then within my team, we have dedicated subject matter experts for each of those channels, so to speak. So I have a blog editor-in-chief whose sole job is to focus on running the day-to-day and really setting the vision for the topics we're going to talk about--the content strategy on the blog specifically.
So that is her name's Tequia Burt and she's been working in the B2B marketing space. She's incredible. Incredible. Um, so Tequia is now focused full-time on, uh, delivering sort of that day-to-day operations, but also content strategy and vision for the blog. And she works with a number of different partners across our business, both internally to source internal submissions --so where you'll have different stakeholders across the business, submitting content to her saying, “Hey, I want to write about X, Y, and Z. Is this a fit for the blog?” And we've actually pre-empted those submissions with what we're calling a style guide, because otherwise you, you get into a situation where the tail is wagging the dog with stakeholder submissions. We say, “Hey, here are the six things--six is an arbitrary number--but here are the six things that we talk about. And here are the six things that our audience wants to hear about. Here's a breakdown of what our audience demographics look like. Here's who visits the blog. Here are the here's the traffic data, here is the volume of subscribers we have access to” just so we give our partners a full picture of what it is they’re writing for, who it is they're speaking to et cetera, to make sure that we're actually getting productive submissions. So that's one lens.
Pam Didner: The submission is that external submission or a combination of internal and external submissions?
Steve Kearns: A little bit of both, I would say more toward internal, but that can also account for external as well. So really anything that's coming through other marketers in our organization or folks externally, that's going to go through that like style guide or submissionesque process where we inform folks who are writing for the blog. “Hey, this is what we're looking for. This is what good looks like, provide them examples, give them like image guidelines”; just like make it a really easy experience for them to be able to submit something that's optimized for the blog.
And then I would say the other lens that we look at is Tequia works specifically with an agency to produce all of our SEO-driven content. So, you know, we, you know, again are working with, with experts in the B2B marketing field to look at what are the keywords that our business wants to go after? And then also, you know, what topics among our target audience have the highest search volume?
So it's kind of triangulating between those two topics to figure out well, the other 50% of our blog content is going to be focused specifically on making sure we're ranking in Google effectively. Um, you know, one of the things when I first took over the blog that I was shocked by was that we weren't actually ranking for some things that we really should be ranking for, like on page one. So things like, um, like “how to market on LinkedIn?”
Pam Didner: Yeah, you should own that (laughs)
Steve Kearns: Exactly. So that was one of the mandates as we went into the migration, we said, well, part of the problem is that we've created ten different content pieces about how to market on LinkedIn that are all diluting the search volume and the search traffic. So what we need to actually start doing, and this is something that I say over and over and over again, to, to our cross-functional stakeholders is you need to take one blog post that you turn into like a power page and you update that periodically, so you continue to remind Google that that is the page that deserves the authority, and that becomes your primary page for which you funnel the majority of your traffic.
You can always link them off to sub pages, to microsites, to webinars, to, to advertising platform directly, but it's, again, consolidating that information, updating that information regularly and, um, you know, really making sure that we're, we're giving the search engine, the roadmap to prioritize our content effectively. So that is the other 50% of the content is focused on that like more. search engine optimization-focused content.
Pam Didner: So let me summarize very quickly. It sounds like your whole editorial in terms of managing your content there are two buckets, if you will. One is on internal, external submission, obviously that needs to align with the four pillars and 21 topics. And then the other one is you really, really honing on some of the things that say LinkedIn Marketing Solution well need to own, or some of the content that from your perspective, that really needs to rank on the first page of Google. And for that, you will be very, very specific and, um, you customize the content. Granted is still very much relevant to users' needs, but you will write a specifically for SEO, but the writing that kind of posts is you'll have to hone in in terms of SEO optimized type of content.
Another thing I would like to ask specifically is in terms of the updating and refreshing the blog post, given that you have so many blog posts right over thousands of them, how do you manage that? How do you determine which one to refresh and update and to do you look, what kind of data do you look at?
Steve Kearns: Yeah. So we've just, we've actually just started our like refresh and SEO optimization workflow, um, because we wanted to do the migration first and then once we had the infrastructure in place, we said, okay, let's turn our attention to SEO. So the direction that I gave my team was--and this is a lot of guidance that, that came from, from our agency partners, as well as like--well, let's focus on the stuff that's on fire right now. So what is on fire posts from 2016 or 2017 that talk about how to advertise on LinkedIn. That is where the majority of our search traffic is going to, and they show outdated screenshots, they talk about products that don't exist anymore, a complete mess. So we wanted to make sure that we dealt with those posts first.
So in this first wave of optimizations, which you'll actually see re-publishing across our blog in the next couple of months, you're going to be seeing a lot of posts that focused on how to advertise on LinkedIn, uh, posts that are focused on key search terms like demand generation, lead generation, content marketing, social media marketing. Etc. And those are going to be us taking our highest traffic posts and bringing them into the modern age. That is top priority because you know, again, you have to look at like, what is the most critical thing to prioritize. Then once we get past that wave of posts and there's probably say top, top priority, about a hundred posts, you know, secondary priority, maybe 250 out of all of them.
Pam Didner: That makes a lot of sense to me too. I mean, it's in general, you really follow that 90-10 rule or 20-80 rule, like 3000, 10% of them. Yeah. How many of them? Yeah.
Steve Kearns: And then you can get to a point where, you know, right now we're being reactive, but then we're going to move into a phase where we become proactive. So once we get to a place where our highest performing content, you know, over X number of page views is all recent, i.e.has been updated in 2021 or 2022, then we can move to, okay, you know, it's like similar to what we talked about of our, um, you know, topic tagging structure on the blog, you know, looking at specific pain points and then looking at specific advertising products and creating a power page for each of those needs.
Pam Didner: When you say power page, can you be a little bit specific? Is that mean that you actually had the landing page of its own or a power is still a blog page, but it's a long form. How do you define that?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, so the latter, definitely. You hit the nail on the head, Pam. Really just, it's a longer blog post that's going to be updated periodically. So that's like a phrase we use at LinkedIn, but I'm glad you asked me to define it because that could totally be, be confusing for someone who doesn't work in the context of, of the LinkedIn corporation.
So, you know, we really look at these long form blog posts that we're going to be updating periodically time over time--usually it's going to be on a quarterly or a bi-annual basis. And you know, what we want to do there is we want to make sure that every single time someone is searching for a B2B marketing keyword or a B2B marketing pain point or objective, or if they're searching for one of our products specifically--if they don't necessarily know that you know what their objective is, but they know they want to use LinkedIn sponsored content--in either of those unique instances, they're going to have one microsite page they land on, and one blog post that they land on. So that you, again, you know, are like, uh, coalescing that organic search traffic around one page on the microsite one page on the blog. And what that allows us to also do is say, okay, maybe that's only a hundred pages and we have to make sure that those 100 pages are near perfect.
Pam Didner: They are solid. Yeah.
Steve Kearns: And we have to make sure that the reporting and tracking is right on those pages. We have to make sure that they're updated consistently and that's a much easier charter for my team and for cross-functional teams than, okay you have 6,000 blog posts that are sort of updated.
Pam Didner: Yeah, you are fantastic. I love it. Very, very useful. And you go down to kind of like the detail part of it, to tell people how to do that. I think that's very critical. A lot of people tend to focus on high level, but really the B2B marketers or people who listen to my channels, they kind of want to know the know-hows.
Steve Kearns: Right. 'cause I, you know, a lot of the folks I imagine are probably sitting there and, and, you know, in a similar position that I would be in to say, “okay, you've just been tasked with doing this thing. So how do I do it? How do you, what do you think about what are the dependencies?”
Pam Didner: Very good. That’s a wrap! I’m so glad for Steve to share his knowledge and insights of managing global content. It is not easy. I hope you enjoy the 10-minute bonus episode. Again, if you haven’t checked out part 1 it’s about global marketing through and through. Look for Part 2 about LinkedIn Marketing Solution’s social media outreach. I highly recommend having a listen. Take care. Bye!
Hello, from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Steve Kearns, Head of Blog and Social Media Marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.
Today's episode is about scaling global business with a centralized content strategy. We had such a great conversation while recording the show, so I decided to break it into two parts. So, if you want to scale your content across regions, stay tuned for Part 2, to hear more of the business nuggets.
In this episode: * How does LinkedIn make money? * How can a brand consolidate several regional marketing blogs to a global marketing solution destination. * Why should a business centralize global content? * What does the centralized content strategy look like? * How to balance global efforts with content specifically tailored for cultural and language differences? * What is the right way to do the migration and what are the important steps to make it efficient and successful? * How to perform a proper content audit? * How to level centralized content strategy with SEO? * What is the role of a local content team in regional initiatives? * How to use content hub? * What content metrics to use and track content performance?
Quotes from the episode: "One of the challenges we have, especially at a large company, is that when we migrate from one platform to another, that then throws off the tracking on everything. You essentially lose visibility for a given time."
"We tended to give priority to the visual appearance, the user experience of the blog, because at the end of the day if that's a mess, it doesn't matter what we're tracking."
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You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hi, a big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. This episode is rather special. It’s episode 200, and I can’t believe that I have published 200 episodes of the B2B Marketing & More podcast. All without any sponsorships… If you are a regular listener, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I don’t always hear from you, but I know you are out there working hard. Keep up the good work.
Speaking of keeping up the good work, some of you reached out to me in January and asked me if I have any recommendations on how to ensure new job success. So, in today's episode, I share three things that you must-do if you start a new job.
In this episode: * How to be opened minded and remain curious. * Why it's important to set up as many 1:1's as possible and how to do that. * How to understand AND use processes, workflows, and dashboards.
Quotes from the episode: "When you meet, introduce yourself, have a list of questions to ask them. Have them share their challenges and issues, and then you can see what you can do for them."
"There isn’t a huge difference between a new job and an existing job. What matters is how you view your job and how you go about your day. Your attitude counts."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hi, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest today is Bryan Collins. He was a full-time copywriter at Sage, and now he's a nonfiction writer, and host and director of Become a Writer Today podcast.
Today, we talk about copywriting, keywords, technology and how all those elements influence content marketing and modern business writing.
In this episode: * How to strive to be a better copywriter if you cannot afford to hire someone? * Which website should the small business owners or anybody looking for good copywriters go to? * How to fit different content formats into your content marketing strategy, and why does it matter? * Where does SEO fit into the writing process and modern business writing? * What prep work needs to be done before someone starts writing? * What is the role of Artificial intelligence in content writing, and what are the experiences with the tools. * How to create content that will stand out or breakthrough the crowd? * Which approach is better for writers, focus on one channel or have that omnipresence on multiple channels? * How well should digital marketers and writers know SEO? * What are some of the KPIs to measure the success of a copywriter or content? * How to use lead measure and lag measure to analyze your goals?
Quotes from the episode: "Even if AI could produce a great article for you, it's not going to tell you where it fits in the customer journey and all the supplementary content or the call to action. So that's where hopefully you fit in, or I fit in. "
"Marrying copywriting with SEO is a match made in heaven because you can see exactly what people are searching for and the real words they use and put that into your copy, which every copywriter should do. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello from Portland, Oregon. For my first episode of 2022, I want to do something slightly different. I invited my team to be part of the podcast and the video. Yay!
Meet Gretchen Kilby,she's a podcast editorand Iva Ignjatovic, my social media manager. Both of them are the invisible hands that put my podcast together. Today we talk about our content creation process, and how to start a B2B podcast. Gretchen and Iva, welcome. Glad to have you!
In this episode: * What are the essentials for starting a B2B podcast? * How to choose a podcast format? * How to get a sound quality? * What is a strategic process before starting a podcast? * How to find a good podcast editor? * What are the B2B podcast branding basics? * How to do podcast rebranding? * How to maintain quality for listeners and for SEO?
Quotes from the episode: "And a big thing I will say is that not everybody can edit content. It's a skill that takes a lot of time. Also, I've seen many relationships break up because it wasn't clear either what the editor could do and was capable of or what the host wanted. So I think that's an important conversation to have." - Gretchen Kilby
"We looked at data. I don't get the sense that people often look at data. They go with their guts, you know, like, "oh, I have a feeling that this is going to work." We looked at that and made that composition of what you wanted to pursue in the next stage and what the data told you to pursue." - Iva Ignjatovic
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
It's hard to believe we're almost at the end of the year. So much has happened. I thought it would be helpful to identify some of the business growth trends and the marketing topics that stood out and that will definitely keep on trending. That also gives me a chance to revisit some of the wonderful conversations on this podcast with my guests.
In this episode: * Felix Krueger is the CEO of Krueger Marketing. His company focuses on sales enablement and Account-Based Marketing for B2B enterprises. Felix talked about the changes in sales and marketing content that have been necessary to meet a more virtual world, and how we can find the balance between the hybrid, which is face-to-face communication and the virtual. * Many of you know Ann Handley from her work as a Chief Content Officer of Marketing Profs and her book, Everybody Writes. When we were talking about writing, we extended our conversation to email marketing because she was able to capture over 25,000 email subscribers in less than one year. Ann suggests that we should use our newsletter a little bit differently. * Lee Odden is the CEO of Top Rank Marketing, and he helps B2B brands with influencer marketing. Lee has a very specific point of view when brands want to be perceived as thought leaders and show their expertise and why it doesn't hurt to partner with an influencer in that specific area. * Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of PR 20/20 and the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. Paul talks about Artificial Intelligence and what will AI do for sales and marketing.
Quotes from the episode: "The whole experience of sitting in a room with a salesperson for one hour, going through 30 slides, having a face-to-face discussion and back and forth involving other stakeholders - that experience has gone. And I think it's gone for good. What happens now is that one experience that you used to have, is more decentralized now." - Felix Krueger
"As much as I love social media, I also think it's not the best way to nurture relationships. A far more effective, especially in B2B, is through the email newsletter. Many B2B companies are afraid. They have this sense of a template, a templatized approach to their email newsletter versus just blowing the whole thing up and rethinking it." - Ann Handley
"Creating a great experience obviously is a theme in B2B marketing for customers, but creating a great experience, not just for customers, but for influencers as well, is super, super important, because if they're inspired to share, it's just going to be that much more successful." - Lee Odden
I would argue that most marketers will never know nor care what unsupervised and supervised learning is. Nor will they care about the eight common machine learning models of clustering and linear regression. What they need to know is what is AI capable of doing to identify and prioritize use cases internally. They need to know who the go-to experts are, the data scientists who can help them prepare the data properly and ensure that there's no bias built-in." - Paul Roetzer
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hey, big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and more.
Today, we talk about ABM and how to scale Account-Based Marketing with my guest Danny Nail, Account-Based Engagement Manager at Microsoft.
In this episode: * What is account-based marketing * Is ABM successful and effective if we need to do a more one-to-one approach or one-to-many? * How to choose the right marketing tactics for ABM outreach? * Who do ABM activities should belong to? * How customized content can support account-based marketing? * How to scale account-based marketing across different verticals? * What are the challenges, and how to resolve them? * How to scale account-based marketing on a small budget? * What is a sales responsibility during the ABM planning and implementation? * What are common success metrics or KPIs for ABM?
Quotes from the episode: "There's nothing wrong with having some kind of template guidance. But it needs to be guided, and it shouldn't be something that's set in stone."
"Your budget needs to last at least the sales cycle, whatever your sales cycle is. And then, you need to make sure that that budget can cover the number of accounts you're trying to cover. So if you're only trying to cover one account for a quarter, you may have enough budget to do that."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
Today's episode features some of my previous guests and a topic that comes up in almost all my podcast conversations: How can sales and marketing teams work together? The answer isn't that simple because so much has changed with the pandemic in the past two years. At the same time, there were also many changes in digital marketing and the corporate culture within the businesses is different from company to company, from industry to industry.
In this episode: * John Nee is the Principal and President of Act1 Partners and has worked many years helping marketers and salespeople better collaborate and support each other. John shares expert tips on what marketing departments can do to better support sales. * Alex Low is a Managing Consultant at PA Consulting in London and an advisor for the social media management platform Lately. He does a lot of work around business development and sales transformation. Our conversation was focused on expert tips for social selling, and how to align marketing and sales. * The reality is both sales and marketing need to work together - on the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. Mark Emond is a revenue marketing expert and the President of Demand Spring, and he shares insights that will help you sync marketing and sales collaboration.
Quotes from the episode: "The single greatest thing they can do is try to put themselves in the shoes of the sales force. I don't think there's any better way to do that than to go on sales calls. Do some ride-along sales calls, get on conference calls in this virtual world that we now live in and engage as much as possible with the customer and the prospect to learn how that sale happens." - John Nee
"So you have a marketing person, a Demand Gen person, a content person, and you need to achieve that number by the end of the year. Go do it work together as a team, and figure out the best way to generate those conversations." - Alex Low
"If you don't have motivation coming from above to drive a new way of doing things, the desire to change the behavior is not going to be there." - Mark Emond
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Paul Cowan, CMO of FreshBooks, a SaaS-based platform, accounting software used by many small businesses and freelancers.
Today we talk about how to bridge the gap between marketing and product experience.
In this episode: * Why is there a gap between marketing and product experience? * What happens when the user experience doesn't live up to the marketing hype? * How to provide value for the customers? * How can businesses ensure that the product experience addresses their target audience's biggest painpoint? * What does it take to bring features into a product in real-time? * How to gather feedback and perform testing? * How to differentiate from the competition * What defines a good customer support process? * How can a business carve out a unique market area? * What is the role of the marketing team in product experience?
Quotes from the episode: "I think the last thing within the tech world is the return to the creative messaging. I think in this kind of race for features and promoting features, we've lost sight of what a brand represents and making sure that's articulated to customers."
"One of the guys on our web team went and helped daycare-hang drywall in his local area. It's things like this that we have focused on as an organization. Focus on these grassroots ways to help owners, whether through those initiatives or the philanthropic type of activity or just core-support services. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Yes. I moved to Raleigh from Portland a couple of weeks ago. So now I'm doing my recording in Raleigh. So if you are ever in Raleigh, reach out to me. Let's have a cup of coffee.
My guest is Jharry Guevara, a Business Development Manager, Marketing Director at VOIPRIng Network and Zoho Business Software Platform Architect.
Today, we are going to talk about what does it take to make a successful career transition.
In this episode: * What is the right way to make a career transition? * How to break into an industry with a high barrier of entry? * What are actionable tips people can follow when deciding on a career change? * What are the most important things to consider when changing careers? * How can you diversify the skillset you have within your field of choice? * How should you introduce yourself when seeking new employment after changing careers? * What are the challenging aspects of making a career transition? * What is the hardest thing about switching careers? * How can people make better decisions about their careers?
Quotes from the episode: "The more I kept those 10,000 hours in mind, the more hours I put in, the more I started growing as a person. So, that was a very complicated transition. But after I made up my mind, I started looking for side jobs and side gigs."
"One analogy I like to look at is almost like playing an instrument. You learn how to play the instrument by copying somebody else's notes. But after a while, you understand what a good note is and what is a bad note. And you'll be so good that you could be able to mix the notes based on your flavor. So that's the same thing with this whole journey."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today, I have an exceptional guest, Amy Higgins. Amy is a Director of Content Strategy at Salesforce.
Today, we are going to talk about planning and creating an editorial calendar and editorial strategy for an enterprise.
In this episode: * What makes the content management and editorial strategy process different in an enterprise? * How to ensure feedback from everyone involved in planning and creating an editorial calendar and editorial strategy? * How does the team size impacts editorial planning? * What s the best way to learn about what the audience wants and how much content they can consume? * How to manage a mix of content topics, and how to get feedback from everybody? * What is a good pace of editorial management, creation and how often to refresh content? * How to do proper research for content editorial? * When collecting data, why it's important to observe both the aggregate level and individual content pieces? * What are the planning stages and step-by-step processes before creating an editorial? * If you have a lot of content to manage, what is the best way to track every piece of it? * What kind of tool should be used for SEO, and how? * When and how should businesses optimize their current and past content?
Quotes from the episode: "You need to understand what you currently have in the market: What's resonating with people, what are people clicking through, what are they engaging with, what do they like, and most importantly, what do they not like?"
"I'll give you something that many people go wrong where they target, going to write this article, and it's going to target this keyword and only this keyword, and you have to think about natural language."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Melissa Romo, a global head of content, social media, and customer efficacy at Sage. Today, we are going to talk about how to build a strong brand community, and how to use it to drive organic traffic. Melissa, welcome, so happy to have you.
In this episode: * Find out more about the Sage community and how did the company got started? * What is the role of a third-party platform in community management? * What are the benefits of the invitation-only brand community? * How can brands grow strong communities organically? * What does a strong brand community look like? * When a community is invitation-only, what are the selection criteria? * Should communities use paid media to drive awareness and membership or stick with organic growth? * How does that paid media impact the quality of the users or the audience? * What are some of the challenges brands encounter while trying to grow their communities? * Once established, how can a strong brand community be used as marketing and sales channels? * How to leverage content for the community? * How to customize and localize content for the global community? * What is the role of gamification, and how can brands use it to engage customers and community members? * How to launch a community within the enterprise or a fast-growing SaaS space platform company? * What kind of budget and resources do companies need to get started? * How should marketing professionals prepare for the future of community management?
Quotes from the episode: "When people trust you, they don't see you as a roadblock. And once you've built that trust, then you can come in and be a little more prescriptive about what you think is the right thing to do. The relationship building is just what you have to do. And you will get nowhere if you're in an essential leadership role and don't build the right relationships."
"There are all kinds of tech that enables us. But we have to remember the human side of marketing. It doesn't matter what tech is introduced. You're you still go back to the person. At the end of the day, [marketing] has to involve some kind of human connection."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon! Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. I have a fantastic guest today - Kristina Jaramillo, and she is the president of Personal ABM. Kristina is also the co-host of the Stop The Sales Drop podcast.
Today we talk about where marketers can better help sales boost revenue.
In this episode: * What are some of the biggest challenges when working with sales? * How can marketers help sales define the problems at hand? * Regarding trends, what can marketers do to help the sales in the middle of the purchase funnel? * What is the course of action if companies want to be incredibly successful with ABM implementation? * Why is it important for sales reps to have their social media presence in order, and how can marketing help? * How to get to know the sales team better and how can marketing help sales boost revenue. * How should marketers structure their impact? * What should success metrics look like on the marketing side? * How should marketers quantify the marketing's contribution to sales and sales revenue? * What is the number one thing marketers need to do if they want to start or initiate ABM with the sales team?
Quotes from the episode: "There has to be a stage check-in all the time on their top tier accounts. The middle of the funnel and the end of the funnel focus should be on the top tier accounts. And whoever owns it just needs to be a team player with everyone else."
"Sales needs more help in the middle to the bottom of the funnel. I think the marketing's got top of the funnel nailed. It's marketing's job and their duty to create content, create case studies, create an article, whatever it is, to push that further so that they can have that very personalized approach."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a very exciting guest: Ramon Ray. I actually met Ramon like literally four or five years ago at South by Southwest. And then we got connected on social media channels, but we never met in person until, well, now we are still not meeting in person!
Ramon's with me on Zoom and he's a founder of a SmartHustle.com. And I'm going to ask him how to hustle intelligently. He's an author, writer and even producers. By the way, he started four companies and sold two of them. All right! So he deserves to have a conversation with us. So Ramon, welcome to my show.
Ramon Ray: Hey Pam, thanks for having me here and good to reconnect with you after so many years. But I'm so glad you're still in the flow and groove of what you do and I am, as well. So it’s an honor to be here and share this time with you and your community. So thank you, Pam. I appreciate it.
Pam Didner: Thank you so much. And you talking about smart hustle and I would like to ask you, and personally, I need that as well: how do we hustle smartly? I know that's probably not right adjective but can you give us a definition of that?
Ramon Ray: Everybody, Pam, I think that we get it's a given except for a few people are in the hustle. They work hard. All of us try to wake up early. We do everything we can, we're always working, working, working. But I think the concept of smart hustle, you know, what do they say? Work smarter not harder. Yeah. We've heard that many times before, but I think it's just the aspect of the strategy. How can I connect the dots?
You and I had a conversation offline before we came on. That's part of the smart hustle. Okay. I do this; somebody does that; how can we either work together or how can I support them? How can I add value to them? You know, I have a spoon, they have a teabag, huh? Let's find somebody that has water.
Pam Didner: Or a cup, for that matter (both laugh).
Ramon Ray: I think we should do the cup first before we find the water yet. Let’s find the cup first. But my point being, that's the smart, smart hustle where my passion is inspiring and educating because owners to grow their businesses. And of course, as you know, working with B2B brands. So that's what it means. It means to not just work harder, but kind of look for opportunities, create your own serendipity. It means to have an attitude of service to others and knowing that by me serving others and adding value to them, the same will be done to me.
Pam Didner: Yes. So I really liked that in terms of connecting the dots, especially that when you network with someone or you are meeting someone or even just, you know, ex-colleagues and then see what you can do to actually help them or help each other. I think that's really the bottom line that way you are talking about is that.
Ramon Ray: Correct. And that's networking. Right? I found that the big part of my smart hustle has been the power of networking. And networking is not always “here's my business card. Give me your business card.” No, that that's, that's transactional idioticy. But it's more so, “okay, let me listen.” Going back to our example: “Pam said spoon, she said teabag, she said water, but she didn't mention cup yet. You know what? I have three cups.” It's silly, but you people understand that's the listening. How can I add value? And then, you know what, maybe we can work together or loosely, whatever that may mean.
Pam Didner: Yeah. And the way I look at hustle, I tend to look at from a different perspective in terms of how can I be productive? For example, um, you know, Tim Ferris has a book, like what four work hours per week, something to that extent. And, um, even with that, I read that book, you know, years ago, even with that, smart hustle requires a lot of thinking.
Like I work all the time, 24-7, but if I really want to scale back, I need to think through what are the things I don't want to do. And I have to prioritize like a hard core prioritization. And then I also have to think through like how I can get other people to help me. So from my perspective, small hustling is actually not that easy to do. And if you want to be productive, what is your thought on that?
Ramon Ray: No. I agree with you a hundred percent and I think that it's, it's a key thing that it does take, especially depends on where you're at. It's that aspect of being scrappy. Yes. Being scrappy. But if you're just a scrappy, you'll always be kind of low level. You'll always be fighting for survival.
Pam Didner: You only focus on technical.
Ramon Ray: Yes. And fighting, fighting. You want to be scrappy. You want to be nimble, but you want to be that scrappiness where it's always a 10x, always a plus one. A scrappiness, but with thought. And I think you said that best and that's really the key. Let me consider how I can do something. Yes. But always understand leverage. And not leverage in a bad way. I think, to your point, you're right. Let me think. “Okay. I need to do this action today. Is it worth me spending time with this?” And to underline what you said, Pam, saying no to things is important, as well.
You can't, I mean, I I'm pulled--I'm sure you are--a thousand different ways. I'm asked to do free things, fee things or not. So every moment is an evaluation. “Okay. Is this the best use of my time? Or should I just do this? Because this person's awesome and I want to just serve them.” That's fine too. But at least that you went into it thinking.
It's kind of like them, as I tell when I'm out with my friends, I'll just say, when my wife and were like “Honey, where do you want to eat at?” “Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know.” And we're driving and I’m like, “Sweetheart, we need to decide soon because in two minutes there's no more restaurants.” So by not deciding the decision is made for us. That was a lot packed in there, but being thoughtful, learning how to say no, and also as best we can making some decision, uh, proactive about it so you can have some control of that.
Pam Didner: Yeah, I do agree. I do agree with that specifically. And, um, you know, I've been hustling just like you, both of us are working for ourselves and, uh, we have our own company. In every single moment, we have to make a decision in terms of how we want to use that specific hour or the time.
And. I always feel like I'm trying to do too much, you know. As a content marketer, for example, I started writing blog and then I will like, “oh, I need to try a different format.” So I launched my YouTube channel. And I was like, “oh my God, I need to understand a little bit about podcasts and launch a podcast. All of a sudden I have three different formats of content I need to produce. And I think over a period of time, I end up overwhelmed myself. (And I started a webinar, as well).
When 2021 started, I kind of gave myself a goal that what are the things can I pare down that I should not do it. And I also take into account in terms of, okay, what is the business impact if I'm not doing that. Right? Webinar was actually very good for me to gather a lot of leads, but I was not able to spend time to nurture those leads. Right. So I decided, you know what, maybe I should not get more leads. Maybe I should just focus on the existing pipelines that I have and continue to grow that. So a couple of months ago, I decided not to do webinars anymore. So I totally understand.
Ramon Ray: What I like about that Pam was the aspect of deciding--Seth Godin says this quite a bit--to what extent do you want to scale? Which I think is important because I think as the small business owners we are, I've been on a similar journey to learn what can I do? Now, I have a team of five, but I also have to think what do I want people to do at my size that's revenue generating because both of us doing content for ourselves, ironically, Pam, I've taken back a lot of the content doing that I do for editorial. Now for our clients, I've expanded enough that I can have other people do it. But for myself, I realized, you know what, me paying somebody even 500 a month, a thousand a month to promote Ramon, since I don't have a clear dot to the revenue.
Pam Didner: To connect to the revenue or the next stage! How are you going to nurture it? Does that make sense doing it?
Ramon Ray: Correct. I'm like, you know what? I think this is, even though I'm the cheapest person, for this stage, it's better that I just do a lot of that from that's my own brand myself, unless I can prove, “oh, every time Ramon does a silly video, it generates $10,000.” That's another story; but I don't have that proof yet. So I agree with your journey and I think that's the smartness of it. What should I be doing? What should I delegate to others? Or what should I not do at this time? Or never? Smart.
Pam Didner: So, you know, speaking of growing revenue, do you actually have a framework that you can help either small business owners or the marketing professional in terms of what they should do to grow revenue--either, you know, through marketing efforts or working with sales or working stuff on their own?
Ramon Ray: Yeah, for sure. And it's probably not as smart as a framework as you can do. However, from my limited experience, I think, and I would talk to the small business owners, but also talk to many of your audience--those were the B2B marketers leveraging the power of content. Here's what I've seen in my experience. I think that a) What is it that your audience really wants? That's one that's important.
Pam Didner: So you have to understand your audience well, and you have to define your audience. I, 100% agree with that. Do you know how many small business owners I talk to from time to time or they come to me and ask specific questions? I always ask “who is your target audience?” And, uh, I would say 85% of them cannot articulate that very well. They try to serve everybody.
Ramon Ray: Something like “we're targeting female founders” is a favorite one I hear. And I get it. I understand it. But female founders, can you at least tell me, are they South American? Are they US-based? Are they in retail or are they in manufacturing? At least that, so I think who are you serving?
But I think also Pam, the hard thing is to break through the noise because everybody is doing content. Pam's doing it. Ramon is doing it. New York Times is doing it. Inc Magazine is doing it. So I think that that's point number two, really which is where are you going to hone in on that you do best; that's two.
And I think three Pam now what's that funnel that nurturing that you can do to educate them until going directly to sales until they're ready to make a purchase? And I think that's the best we can do to build up that fan base--to build up that funnel of people who see you as a thought leader.
Of course direct sales is important, but I think those were in the content game--oh, and I must say Pam as well—please, content should be interesting. I'm not saying if you're, if you're dealing with children who have cancer, there, you may not want to have it “ha ha ha.” But for our tech people, right, sometimes they're so straight-laced, they're so serious. They're so on brand it’s boring!
Pam Didner: It’s hard for us B2B marketers to break out of that mold. I'm the guilty one as well, but I always advise my client if you cannot make it interesting, of course you need a good writer to make that happen. And the one thing is make it relevant, make it useful. At minimal, you know, don't do self-serving content, but make it relevant to your target audience. Even you just do a show and tell about your product. Well, you know what? You don't actually have a creative or funny way to say it, but at least tailor that communication or the contents to address the audience’s pain points and challenges.
Ramon Ray: Yes. And Pam remember the customer. So many of the brands I work with, they have amazing customers, but I think they have a challenge either finding them, identifying them, getting permission to use their stuff.
Pam Didner: Yeah. Getting the permission to actually use the logo or even have a case study created.
Ramon Ray: And in the case study, even that, have it a little loose it's okay to say, you know, to have fun with it. But you're right. I think the customers, that's the story, shine a light on them. And then we as businesses, we look less at the product to some degree we do, but oh, I'm an accountant, they're an accountant. They use their product to grow 10%. Let me have a look at it. So I think that's kind of some way to consider that as well.
Pam Didner: Yeah. So creating interesting content is always incredibly challenging. And another thing that comes to play in terms of content is the creative. And I also have come to realize on the B2B side, if you want to create a campaign that's creative and also try to break through the clutter. It does take time. It does take time to plan in it, to also execute it. And the problem is marketers. We don't have. Like we are always under the press deadline. “We need to get the blog done. What? We need to turn in around in 24 hours so legal can review it and approve it. Goddammit!”
Ramon Ray: Legal! Pam, legal! Always slowing us down, Pam! Continue on, but I just have to say legal people (sighs). Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.
Pam Didner: Yeah, but because of that, I think a lot of time on the B2B side, our hand are tied. Like there's so many review process that you have to go through. You know, even you have a creative idea, sometimes you have to pare that down whole lot more, just in reality that your management might have an issue, your salespeople might have issue, your PR team definitely. Or the legal team might actually have something to say.
So I understand where you're coming from, at the same time, I also understand the reality on the B2B side, especially enterprise. There’s just a lot of factors they have to take into account before they can actually finalize the content.
And by the time that so many people approved it, all of a sudden the content is not fun anymore (laughs).
Ramon Ray: Yeah. So, but I dunno, Pam, there seems like a business opportunity for you, Pam. What we, you know, fun. We use that word of course liberally, you know, it didn't have to be a comedian. But Pam, I think that is one thing I'm, you're on the marketing end as I am of all these things-- telephone services, cable services, computer services, all the stuff that we use as consumers or B2B, even airlines, whatever. And a lot of it is just. Blah. So at the same, so that's one, I think, way there is anybody willing to kind of break through the clutter. Is anybody willing to kind of, uh, you know, I, I, they have to be cautious. There's so many ways to offend people nowadays, you know, but it's just, that is a key point.
Pam Didner: I totally agree. Yeah, exactly to me is just like, there's a fine line that B2B marketers, they have to walk. Yeah. And trying to find that fine line. From my perspective, I always tell my clients at minimal, can you address your target audience’s pain point and challenges? Start it from that. That should be the very beginning, you know? And then from there, how far can you take it? That's a creative discussion.
So, um, working with marketing in terms of creating the content and also grow revenue is actually very hard for marketing--especially when you do top of the funnel marketing outreach--to quantify or determine what is the conversion, or how does that impact, you know, your sales contribution. Do you have any suggestion in terms of what we should do? If the marketing people all focus on top of the funnel, how do they quantify in terms of their contribution to sales?
Ramon Ray: It's very tough, Pam, extremely tough. But I think the best thing that could be done--any many people try this--is to have the tightest tracking you can. I think that's what I've learned from some of the best companies, a webinar just by itself is okay. But I mean, and it's a pain because influencers like me, right? we don't want to use your tracking all the time. We just throw up and say, “go to grass.com” and you're like, “no, Ramon go to grass.com/question mark slash this.”
So it's hard, but that's really the best way. Because if you're able to track every piece of content you put out, your smart analytics team can then say, oh, this went to it. But here's the other thing that happens. And I'm getting a little out of my comfort zone, but I know you can help me with this. The thing about last attribution, I worked for a software company once and it made me so pissed off Pam, because I'd be like metaphorically. I'd be like, “wait a minute. I went to the webinar and what the appetite I did Ramon does, but then six months ago—“
Pam Didner: --at the last attribution. But you are the first attribution that people come in to and you’re not getting credit for that.
Ramon Ray: Yes! “You're giving it to Don because he closed the sale, but you forgot what we did six months ago, three months ago, two years ago.” And I know who can say. So I think that's the thing with these campaigns. Payment's hard, but I do know one thing, I think for sure, we know, year to year, quarter to quarter if you see your social engagement higher; year to year, quarter to quarter, you see more fans, more followers, more Facebook, more watch time. I know marketers won't like it; you want to see direct proof. But that is some indicator that clearly people are paying attention, if that makes sense.
And I'll give credit--again if I have competing clients, forgive me, but credit where credit is due--HubSpot years ago, they were the leaders in marketing automation. I think many of us even, I hadn't even know they were a software company, Pam, because they were the leaders in the SEO website tracking and things like this. So giving them credit, HubSpot is an example of using a massive amount of content for that. So I got to give them great.
Pam Didner: Yes. I agree with you. And, um, I think the couple of things that you said resonate with me tremendously and I’ve been preaching, but I'm using a slightly different terminology. So you mentioned about that if you want to try and get, especially top of the funnel and also the purchasing cycle is very long, you need to make sure that you have a very tight tracking methods or the process. The terms I've been using is “backend integration.” Basically, if you really want to track it from the top, you know, from the very beginning when people come to your website or even from the time that they register for your webinar, if you want to have the tracking mechanism in place, you need to make sure your marketing automation tools are very much connected with a CRM or any other tools that you are using for different marketing channels; those tools needs to be somehow connected otherwise, it has no way to track it. And that's actually very, very hard.
I think a lot of marketers they feel sure is that they cannot do that very tight tracking. In order to do that, their back end needs to be integrated. And at the end of the day it’s about MarTech stack—how you build that stack and how they are all talking to each other.
Ramon Ray: For sure. And Pam, can I add one more thing? I just wanna add the value of things looking good. Another thing that I see some marketers make is the mistake of, and I want to be careful calling out tools here cause I know there's a lot of competing people who listen, but I'll just call out a tool because it's so famous, Zoom. Many marketers use Zoom for their webinars and things, but I noticed they leave the default. So one tip is when people go there, put images, put graphics, put your logo, make it look pretty. Sounds weird, but I've been to many webinars, Pam, where they just kind of they say “we're having a webinar with our executive,” but they don't put the guy or the gal’s face. They don't take the time to make it look good. So I just wanted to add that, that when you're doing something like that, make it look legit, make it look good.
Pam Didner: Yeah. You need to, when you create a registration page--doesn't matter if it’s on the Zoom on the landing page, attention to detail. Right? Use the opportunity to promote your brand and use the opportunity to have a logo there, you know, to get people's attention or even have the image of your events. I got it. Yeah, you’re totally right.
Ramon Ray: When people have me and Pam for the next webinar, we charged them what Pam, a hundred thousand dollars or so? (Pam laughs)
Pam Didner: You charge them $100,000. I charged them, I don't know, 50 bucks.
Ramon Ray: Have our faces there to cause human face. So that's just a small tip, but I've seen too many times, people either afraid or too cautious of that. But GAP does it; Nike does it. Yeah. It's the face.
Pam Didner: So, you know, what you are talking about, I think there's another term that I use on the B2B world is your “customer experience.” Right. If you actually going to promote your webinar and, uh, when you are promoting on social media channel and make sure your copy is very compelling, make sure your image is great; but when they register, come to your website, make sure they get exactly the coherent, seamless experience, and then you'll have exactly the similar logo and image and the, when they log in to listen to your webinar, provide a similar as seamless experience, as well.
Yeah, I hear you. So there's a couple of things I want to just summarize, uh, before I let you go. There's one thing that you mentioned, I really like in terms of like what B2B marketers, especially for long purchasing cycle, they can leverage the content to drive traffic to the website. Once you do that, you need to find a way to nurture them. Right. Not just like, okay, get them and get them into your database and you let it go. And then you move on to the next campaigns.
Really try to understand your audience and then find a weight and a very single focus in terms of building your nurturing campaign to nurture them to the point that they can be qualified as a lead. And I liked that a lot. And I think that is one thing that marketers tend to overlook, including myself. We like to get a lot of leads, but we are not necessarily spending time to actually try to make an effort to nurture them. So I really liked that. And that's one of my biggest takeaway by talking with you.
And also, uh, deliver that seamless customer experience-- it doesn't matter what kind of promotion that you aren't doing, just make sure you pay attention entrance of a customer experience. Awesome. Awesome. Anything that you want to add?
Ramon Ray: Yeah. Just to say, Pam, it's, it's been a delight to meet you and see you soar and work with you. I'm so excited and I'm so excited we can get reconnected today. And I just encourage my specialty of course, is the small business. B2B is a big category, but for the smaller businesses is my region. So I encourage the marketers listening to you, small business is very. It's different than of course the enterprise--you sell one thing and you get money. We're very fragmented, but I think it's a, it's a great market and we, small business owners need you. We need the products and services you're providing. So Pam, it's been great being on your podcast and thanks for letting me shine with you today. Thank you.
Pam Didner: Yes. Yes. So how can people find you?
Ramon Ray: Best way is Ramon ray.com R A M O N R A Y.com. Let me know how I can serve you or team up with Pam and do something together. We're here to serve you.
Pam Didner: I would love that. So, this is fantastic. It's wonderful talking to you, Ramon. I hope that we will see each other soon, like in person.
Ramon Ray: I hope so, indeed. Let's make it happen.
Pam Didner: All right. Take care.
Hello from Portland, Oregon! Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today I have another fantastic guest - Kevan Lee. Kevan is a product-led growth and SaaS leader and the head of marketing at Oyster, a distributor HR platform helping companies take care of the global teams.
Today we are going to talk about growth hack strategies for startups.
In this episode: * How did Buffer ramp up its marketing and increased the number of users, readers and visitors? * What is the system behind the high content production? * What is the role of proper keyword research and optimization in content success? * How can high-pace growth hack strategies keep the momentum over a more extended period? * What tools should startups use, and business in general, to optimize their content? * What are some growth hack strategies for startups and SaaS companies in the different business stages? * How should sales and marketing work together in a startup? * Is your business sales-led or product-led, and why should businesses care? * How should marketers make a transition to support different business models? * What tools should startups use for marketing automation and CRM, and should they integrate them? * How can marketers measure the success and also a contribution to sales when it closes the deal? * What is a daily routine of an effective leader, and why does it matter for business? * What are the two books that marketers must read, primarily when they work in a startup environment?
Quotes from the episode: "The strategy we took is to pitch something as if it was already written. And so we'd say we have written three things on these topics. Would you like them? And if they say "yes," then we go and write them real fast and get them over."
"We have a couple of different ways that we do [to measure the success and also a contribution to sales when it closes the deal]. We have different pipeline targets that we measure at the top and then through the different stages. From lead to meeting to the opportunity to closed one, we have insight into each of those stages and how well we're moving people along."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Today I have a very special guest, Mark Emond. Mark is a long time IBMer, Founder and President of Demand Spring – a B2B revenue marketing consultancy.
Today we are going to talk about sales and marketing alignment.
In this episode: * What does Demand Spring do, and what is the company about? * Based on the current stage of sales and marketing (and how they work together), what are some of the challenges B2B marketers tend to encounter? * What processes and tools should a CMO use to align sales and marketing? * In what ways a suitable platform can improve and influence sales and marketing alignment strategy? * What’s next for marketers when they reach the MQL target? * What does it take to create a seamless sales and marketing alignment strategy? * Can marketers do sales and marketing alignment bottom up and without top management support? * What is the critical role of sales and marketing alignment? * What is it that salespeople and marketers still control in the world of empowered buyers?
Quotes from the episode: “The buyers using digital channels, using the content available through digital channels, are self-educating through the buyer journey. They’re engaging interdependently in a non-linear manner with marketing and sales. They’re the ones calling the shots.”
“To me, the heart of a good sales rep or a good marketer is solving people’s problems. It’s finding solutions to people’s problems. I think having people who are more educated about what they’re buying is a good thing. Because then you can have a true dialogue and discussion.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest today is Tim Hughes. I met him when I was in London, probably four or five years ago.
Tim is a CEO and Co Founder of DLA ignite, and author of two books about social selling and sales-marketing alignment - you can check them out on Amazon. He is also #1 Global social selling pioneer and innovator, and a speaker.
Today we talk about social selling as the new business necessity.
In this episode: * How has the buying process changed? * In what ways buyers' behaviors have changed? What are some of the specific changes that marketers and sales professionals need to make? * In what ways is being on social is different from doing social? * How can content help with social selling? * What is humanizing content, and how to use it? * How can a business pick the right social media channel? * How can brands use their networks without abusing them? * What is the role of employees in social selling, and how can companies empower them? * What makes social selling challenging for corporations, and how can they overcome those difficulties? * How to share and use corporate content on social media?
Quotes from the episode: "First and foremost, social selling doesn't take as much time as cold calling does. And it doesn't take as much time as email. So for a start, you have efficiency savings. Some people think that somehow social selling is some sort of shortcut. It's not. But the problem with cold calling is that nobody answers the phone, and nobody responds to emails with email. With social, you can connect to people, have conversations."
"We often see that people don't have a strategy in place. So understanding, why are we doing this and for what reason? Also, we can be empowering people in human resources. We can be empowering the CEO, but what we need to be doing is having a voice on social and empowering our people to be part of that conversation."
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You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
Today, my guest is Amanda Milligan. Amanda is Marketing Director at Fractl, a marketing agency that helps brands build high-quality backlinks and brand authority through content marketing. Amanda is also a host of Fractl’s Cashing in on Content Marketing podcast, and Head of Marketing at Stacker.
Today we talk about content marketing and brand authority through earned media coverage.
In this episode: * What is earned media, and why should B2B brands care about earned media coverage? * What makes publishers care about non paid content, and what makes them pick up the specific article and give it earned media coverage? * How can B2B brands approach writers and pitch the idea of the content that could be beneficial for both sides? * What is Tangential content, and what makes it different from usual content? * What is the role of data focus on decision making and creating the perfect pitch? * Fund Rocket Case Study: The complete process * What are the benefits of earned media coverage? * How to utilize visual assets to boost results? * What are the best practices in pitching and promoting content for earner media efforts? * What is the role of personalization and automation for a successful earned media coverage? * How can small businesses utilize earned media efforts and stay on the budget?
Quotes from the episode: "There are a lot of tools you can use to find writers. You can use tools to help you, and some will give you templates. But we are all about personalization. Even if you're sending the same project to multiple people, you're leading into it differently based on who they are."
"Subscribe to everything that writer does, follow them on social, get a sense of their beat, and ask yourself how you can contribute to that. How can you contribute to those conversations? Offer something different and have those writers in mind that you're going to customize something for."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Today, I have an incredibly special guest - Scott Brinker. Scott is the VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, Editor at chiefmartec.com, and Program Chair of MarTech Conference.
Today we talk about Martech in practice - MarTech trends, opportunities and challenges.
In this episode: * What are the biggest trends of 2021 in terms of marketing technology development? * What makes the digital marketing side so fragmented, and how can marketers navigate the landscape? * How should marketers evaluate MarTech as a whole for a company without getting overwhelmed? * What makes change and martech implementation difficult and slow? * What can marketers do to pitch to management to invest in MarTech? * Why should marketers evaluate their MarTech stack regularly, and how to do so? * What are the marketing technology predictions for the second half of 2021 or even 2022? * What kind of no-code platforms or tools can marketers use in their work?
Quotes from the episode: "I'm very excited about this whole movement that people call 'no code.' And when I think about no code, I don't just mean things that don't require code anymore. I think of that category much more broadly as a new generation of tools. Tools that use a great UX and great AI engines to make it easy for ordinary people to build things without waiting for someone in IT or an agency to build it."
"The fact that marketing is continually evolving in what it needs to execute and how it needs to reach people is tough because of the pace at which that evolution is happening; it's really hard to keep up with."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam.
My guest today is Matt Brodie from Brodie Agency, a digital marketer, and he does all paid advertising. In 2020 he decided to branch out on his own, and that’s when he started his agency.
Today we talk about paid media, and what does it take to run successful Facebook ads.
In this episode: * What are the most common misconceptions about Facebook ads and paid ads in general? * How can businesses, including small businesses, achieve their goals with paid Facebook ads? * How can marketers leverage different optimizing objectives to run Facebook ads? * What makes running successful Facebook ads difficult? * What is the proper approach to Facebook ads, and what is the hidden reality businesses should pay attention to? * How can businesses and marketing departments use Facebook ads to perform research and testing? * What is the role of the copy and design in terms of running successful Facebook ads? * What are the benefits of hiring a professional to do paid ads? * How important is the budget size for successful Facebook ads, and how should businesses advertise on a small or limited budget? * What is the optimal time for running a Facebook ad? * How can Facebook ads be used for sales, and how for awareness campaigns? * How can marketers learn about pay media, and where should they start their journey?
Quotes from the episode: “If you’re not selling something in demand, no ad will magically make it work if people don’t want what you have to sell. People have to want what you have to offer.”
“It’s not necessarily so much that you require a large budget as you require the acquisition of data. There is a correlation inherently with that, between how much budget you need versus time. If you’re working with a small budget, it’s going to take longer to build data, and then it’s going to take you longer to optimize.”
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Today I welcome a very special guest, Kyle Roof, the founder and Lead SEO of High Voltage SEO, co-founder and SEO instructor at Internet Marketing Gold, and inventor of PageOptimizer Pro. Kyle is joining me today to share expert tips that will help you increase your organic page ranking.
In this episode:
- Why is SEO important, especially in the realm of digital marketing?
- What is the difference between adding keywords and content optimization
- How to connect SEO to keywords, pages, and personas
- What are the minimal requirements that anybody managing a website needs to consider in terms of search engine optimization?
- What are the specific areas on the page that Google likes?
- Basics of changing and not changing URLs
- What are the basic requirements for marketers to do SEO?
- What is the biggest problem with SEO?
- How to choose the right SEO agency?
- What is a good relationship between a client and an SEO agency?
- How to do SEO for the content that is not text-driven?
- What are some common KPIs that clients should track?
- How to broaden the number of keywords?
- How often should businesses update, refresh or add new content to your website?
Quotes from the episode:
"It comes down to understanding that SEO is a probabilities game. Put yourself into the position for the best opportunity for success. No SEO professional will be right 100% of the time, but the idea is that the most successful ones are 70 to 80% of the time."
"One thing that I do is that I run tests on Google's algorithm, and I'm continually running tests on the algorithm to see what is or is not a ranking factor and which factors are the strongest. And what's interesting is that SEO basics stay relatively the same, and they are still also the strongest factors."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Marketing leaders and managers often ask me how to lead a marketing team, especially new first-line managers. However, even very experienced marketing directors ask for advice when they have to respond to unfamiliar marketing disciplines.
That’s why in today’s episode, I talk about leading a marketing team and making that team efficient and motivated.
In this episode: * What are the tangible and intangible elements of leadership? * What makes leadership challenging and demanding? * How to set clear goals and objectives, and how to use them to lead the marketing team? * How creating a statement helps managers to lead effective marketing teams? * What is the role of collaboration and what makes it efficient? * How to clarify roles and responsibilities? * How to define performance indicators on both individual and project levels? * What should leaders do to motivate, encourage, and inspire their teams?
Quotes from the episode: “Org structure, roles and responsibilities minimize confusion and avoid duplication, as well as stepping on each other’s feet.”
“Marketing is hard. Encourage your teams to learn from the mistakes, share the mistakes, and you will all grow together as a result. ”
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Today’s guest is Tommy Walker, founder of WalkerBots Content Studios, content strategy consultant responsible for starting a Shopify Plus blog and former Global Editor-in-Chief will QuickBooks. Now, as a consultant, Tommy shares the knowledge that he gained over the past 15 years with other brands.
Today we talk about the content marketer’s journey.
In this episode: * How to turn a blog into a content marketing asset * The process of determining and planning an editorial calendar * How often should businesses change the structure of an editorial narrative * How to include other team members and departments into editorial planning * Learn more about the Four Act Structure of content editorial * The importance of evaluating published and old content, and how to do it. * How to work on content without having all the information * What are some best practices and critical messages to apply and include in content such as a case study, podcast or video? * What is content ROI, and how to quantify and measure content success? * How many website visits does it take for a person to actually convert to a customer? * Examples of reusing and repurposing content. * What is the process of creating an industry report? * How should enterprise marketers manage the content?
Quotes from the episode: “When you’re thinking about the big [content] piece, what are the smaller things you can create that are modular and put that out there? Something I learned years ago is to create soundbites within your content. What are some tweetables that you can put out there? ”
“Content marketing is not a solo sport, it is very much a team sport, and it’s not just on the content team. If you need to work with other parts of the company to get what you need to be done, try to understand their working cadence and how you can fit into their day so you’re not bashing heads when it comes to their day to getting stuff created.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! I’ve been reading many books about writing screenplays lately because there are many talks about bringing storytelling into content marketing. I thought I might also go to the sources and dig in on how to write a screenplay and how to tell stories effectively.
The three books I was reading are: Story by Robert McKee, Screenplay Writing 434 from Lew Hunger, and Save the Cat from Blake Snyder.
In this episode: * Content must have a good sense of what it’s about and who it’s for * The importance of structure * Know your characters, and dig deep into your character development * How screenplay writing relates to B2B marketing writing? * How to apply screenplay structure to B2B Marketing? * What is the best way for marketers to focus on what they want to say and how to say it? * What can screenplays teach us about creating a customer journey? * How to create a one-liner to express the essence of your brand?
Quotes from the episode: “Another thing I’ve discovered is that every scene, every movement, and every word matters. Everything in a movie is intentional and purposeful.”
“The structure of a screenplay is your foundation before you can create scenes and dialogues. The structure of your marketing is your marketing plan, processes and tools.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam! My guest today is Lee Judge.
Lee is the co-founder and CMO of Content Monsta, specialized in digital content marketing and production. Lee is also a fellow speaker. I’ve often seen him at a different speaking circuit, talking passionately about content and content marketing.
Today we talk about social media video content.
In this episode: * How to overcome the fear of being on camera and live video? * How to get started with Linkedin videos, and what are some of the best practices? * The list of tools to make good video content, from recording to editing. * When to use scripts and how to use them. * What is a cam link, and how to use it? * Learn more about Wirecast and OBS and what are the differences. * How to become and appear more natural on camera? * What are some business benefits of TikTok video content? * What if businesses need to create video content for multiple platforms – benefits and drawbacks * When to use a teleprompter, and what are the benefits? * How to set up the workspace for creating video content?
Quotes from the episode:
“I’ve practiced over time, learned how to read a script, and you wouldn’t know that I’m reading a script. When I first tried to do video reading a script, and I watched myself, I realized there are specific little nuances – that make a difference – that I wasn’t doing. So I had to learn, watch them on video, and make sure that I smiled and raised my eyebrows and be natural.”
“If you’re going to be a digital marketer and present yourself well on camera, you need to present yourself just as you would dress up to go somewhere. Whether you’re at home or in your office, how you sound and how you look, not just how you look physically, but how you show up on camera, it’s going to be very critical moving forward.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam! I have a very, very special guest today, Bernie Borges.
Bernie is a Vice President of Global Content Marketing at iQor, content marketing strategist, and a co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of Vengreso. Also, he’s a host of the Modern Marketing Engine podcast with over 300 episodes.
Today we talk about account-based podcasting and why businesses need it.
In this episode: * What is account-based podcasting? * What is the process for an ABM podcast? * Is there such thing as a perfect frequency of podcast episodes, and what are some of the biggest takeaways from doing an ABM podcast? * What are the sales and marketing benefits of the ABM podcasting approach? * How can businesses use their strategy and goals for more successful podcasting? * Two schools of podcasting postproduction, what are the recommendations in terms of editing a podcast? * How to measure the success of ABM podcasting? * Future trends and the next generation of podcasts and podcasting. * Pros and cons of building presence using a third-party platform
Quotes from the episode:
“If someone is trying to get it [podcast] off the ground, or they’re not quite sure where it’s going, take some time to think about what do you want to achieve with your podcast? And then just put a plan around that and ask people what they want, then filter that advice.”
“In the context of account-based podcasting, the way that we measure success is, are we building relationships? So we’re measuring success by how many opportunities are we creating as a result of our podcast?”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hey, a big hello, Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Yay! I have a very special guest today. Tyler. I actually love his name. Tyler Lindley. Tyler is senior sales instructor and SDR coach at Vendition. Let's find out what SDR is. Okay? Vendition is a sales training company.
Tyler also has his own podcast “Sales Lift” with more than 40 episodes. So you should check that out. So let’s get started. Welcome Tyler.
Tyler Lindley: Thank you, Pam. I'm going to bring you on my podcast and have you do that intro every single episode. (Pam laughs) That might just be my new episode forever.
Pam Didner: More than happy to do you intro and outro but I think I am going to scare people away.
Tyler Lindley: I loved it. I love it. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Pam Didner: Oh my pleasure. So, SDR. I heard about SDR. Can you explain what that is? And also, you know, people talking about inside sales and outside sales. Can you also explain that as well so we on the same page before we move forward?
Tyler Lindley: Yeah, certainly, certainly. So yeah, SDR for those that don't know is basically a sales development rep. Um, so if we think about what a sales development rep is, a sales development rep is someone that is qualifying, uh, prospects. They're doing a lot of prospecting, a lot of top of the funnel activity, basically sitting in between marketing and sales. So if we’ve got full cycle sales--
Pam Didner: Oh, that’s a very tough, tough spot to be in. (laughs)
Tyler Lindley: [00:01:44] Yeah. It's a tough role to fill. It is it is an interesting place to be. Um, just, because obviously marketing and sales and the alignment there is really important. And the SDR is actually a physical group of people that are signing up to be in between those two groups. So, uh, um, so very brave group of, of folks that do a lot of cold calling and prospecting and it's, uh, definitely a fun adventure being an SDR, for sure.
Pam Didner: So, how is that different than inside sales and outside sales? Can you be a little bit clear about that one too? I have my own definition, but love, love, love to hear yours.
Tyler Lindley: So yeah. Inside sales and outside sales, um, I guess the main difference is inside is typically done indoors. Uh, but it is, it is sales.
Pam Didner: We don't go out.
Tyler Lindley: They don’t go out! Yeah, really a lot of sales is now inside sales, where, you know, used to, when you think of outside sales, that was a lot of field sales where you had higher value accounts, you needed to develop relationships. So you were investing a lot more time and energy to go meet with clients in person. Uh, with inside sales, it's kind of the new model that get popularized by tech and software companies, where a lot of sales is happening just on the phone, on the computer. There's very, very little travel if any, happening at all. So everything is done remotely.
And as we know, with the big changes with COVID last year, you know, a lot of teams that were outside were forced to move inside. Uh, so now inside sales has become almost the default. Um, although as things continue to loosen, I'm sure, you know, some of those folks that were doing outside before will go back to that model, but I think you'll also see a lot more folks, you know, maybe that moved inside to inside sales model will likely stay there in the future just because it makes maybe more logistical sense for them. And maybe they saw good results.
Pam Didner: So, is it fair to say that the role of SDR is kind of like a subcategory of inside sales to some extent?
Tyler Lindley: To some extent, yeah. If we think about SDR, the reason the SDR role was created was because we decided to separate the prospecting and the top of the funnel activities. From the kind of moving people through the full sales cycle and closing, we decided to bifurcate those roles. Um, and the reason being is that it's two different skill sets really. It's a different skillset to do prospecting. It's high volume. The messaging really matters a lot. You don't have to have a ton of product knowledge because you're not having very in-depth conversations.
Whereas when you move to an AE role, a closing role, you really need to have a lot more product knowledge. You need to learn how to manage a lot of different stakeholders. You've got to learn how to drive to the close, overcoming objections, getting through purchasing negotiations. I mean, it's a very different skillset.
So the roles were bifurcated because it kind of just makes sense to do them separately. And then what happens is a lot of SDRs will graduate into an AE role, assuming they're successful.
Pam Didner: So you mentioned that SDR is sitting between sales and marketing in that very, very cushy chair, which is between you and all the sales and the marketing department. Then the next question I would like to ask you is should SDR be part of sales or marketing? What is your thought on that?
Tyler Lindley: It's a good question. I think it really depends. It depends on the structure of the organization, depends on what's the value of a customer? I mean, and, and how many leads are we talking to? A lot of folks have moved to an account-based model and account based marketing model. And in that kind of a model, you know, it might make sense for the SDRs to live under marketing because they're doing a lot of the nurturing, a lot of the qualification that is really just an extension of your marketing efforts. So we've seen some folks pull SDRs over to the marketing function,
Pam Didner: Especially on demand gen side of things,
Tyler Lindley: Yeah. Especially. Yeah. And if you're doing it, yeah. A lot of inbound. If you have a lot of inbound leads, you want to make sure that that speed, the lead, the speed of the SDR getting on the phone is very, very important. So sometimes it can make sense for that to live in marketing and more of a campaign-based environment versus in sales.
Now the flip side of that is that this is actually a sales role. This requires you to get on the phone. This requires conversations, soft skills, things that are probably better nurtured under a sales leader. Um, that's what I think the best model is to actually have an SDR leader that is specific to the SDRs and that leader, I think, can work on the alignment between marketing, the marketing leader, the sales leader, and, and bridge that gap, I think a lot easier. So for me, it depends. It can go in either marketing live under marketing, live in or sales, but yeah. At the end of the day, the SD R team needs their own leader. Um, because it is such a unique role that's sitting in between those two groups.
Pam Didner: Yeah. And the based on what I have seen so far, and you can comment on that as well. Majority of SDR tend to be part of sales organization. Would you agree?
Tyler Lindley: I would agree. Yeah, I would agree. And it also makes sense more SDRs, I think become full cycle sales reps—AEs--than they do marketers. It doesn't mean that you can't become a marketer as starting as an SDR, but it's a more common path to stay in sales than to move to other parts of an organization. So it definitely, I think more likely than not is, is housed under sales, but you could make an argument for it to be housing or marketing depending on the circumstances.
Pam Didner: Got it. So now we talk about, you know, the roles and responsibility. And the next question I would like to ask is the process. So, um, now obviously, uh, SDR can be part of the marketing organization or sales. In terms of the setting up the structure and process for outbound prospecting and also campaigns, what do you think is ideal process that put a marketing and SDR together and working together in terms of nurturing and also following up?
Tyler Lindley: Yeah, I think that the SDRs the, the, the messaging that marketers are using to, to generate interest, to attract good fit potential prospects should be the same exact messaging that the SDRs are using as well. I think there needs to be alignment in that messaging and it needs to be cohesive to where you couldn't really tell if a message is coming from a marketer or from an SDR.
Pam Didner: There’s that seamless digital experience, right? So your customer experience, it doesn't matter what content you are using, what email you're using. It should be very seamless.
Tyler Lindley: Very seamless. The only difference is the SDR can potentially add a little bit more context, a little bit more of a human-centric element because it's an actual individual. So they should be taking the messaging from marketing that might be a more of one-to-many message and contextualizing it for that specific client. However, it should be the same message. We should be speaking the same language across marketing, all the way to the SDR all the way to account executives, customer success, across all of your revenue-facing parts of the organization should see be the same.
And the SDR plays a pivotal role because they're, they're the first person that's, that's really contextualizing that first specific account. I'm taking this maybe more broad messaging that marketing created, and I'm making it specific to this person at this account. Why is this relevant for them? or what is relevant for them? We have all of these different things that we can talk. What is Susie, who is the VP of Marketing going to care about? versus Jack who's the VP of sales? You know, what is he going to care about? How can I contextualize my message to make it relevant to that individual in that company?
Pam Didner: Got it. So messaging should be consistent and seamless. And obviously there's a training element of that to make sure that the marketing and the sales--including SDR--are trained in terms of messagings and have that consistent talking point along the way. And who should take the lead? If you actually have inbound leads that's coming and, uh, who should kind of take over? Do you think the marketing team should do some sort of pre-qualification first? or should that be directly just passed to SDR and the SDR can take it and run it?
Tyler Lindley: It depends on how fast that SDR can respond. Because as we know, inbound leads, the rate of drop-off and those converting, when it takes longer and longer to respond, it just continues to drop off. If the SDRs can't respond in real time--if you don't have a dedicated resource to be able to respond in real time,--then marketing should likely they should likely take a lead in terms of just doing some initial qualification. Now, do they need to do full qualification? No, but they should at least be moving the process forward immediately and maybe scheduling a call for that SDR.
Now if the SDR can be a dedicated resource that can respond in real time, that's great. In my opinion, it's hard for that person to always be available, 24-7. Likely it's something you should maybe automate to some extent and then have the SDR manage the actual initial conversation, um, that should potentially be automated in terms of scheduling.
Pam Didner: You know, you brought a very good point, too, you know, in terms of who should take what? And I think having a huddle meeting between say the demand generation team and SDR on regular basis probably doesn't hurt. They probably should get together like a Monday at 10 o'clock. Day 11, whatever, right early week, and kind of review the leads that came through the week before and kind of review that, maybe divide and conquer.
“Hey, you know why these are the four leads you should take over and start looking into it. There's a five things. Five leads. I probably can just do a prequalification or making a call.”
But I do agree with you in addition to all that, the communication, a weekly huddle meeting that having automation, uh, set up life, for example, there's auto responders, but make that, um, the, the email itself a whole lot more personal, uh, will be great. And having a certain kind of automation set up, I think is very important that will help both teams, but having a huddle meeting on a regular basis from my perspective is also truly beneficial, especially when I was in the client, on the corporate world, having that kind of meeting, just talking things through and before we move forward to a next week. And I think that was that that's actually efficient. What is your thought on that?
Tyler Lindley: Yeah, I agree. And I think that huddle meeting should start with more of a service level agreement about the definitions of an SQL and an MQL.
Pam Didner: I totally agree.
Tyler Lindley: I think it should, it should start with what is our, you know, requirements, the business, how quickly are we going to respond to leads? If it's going to be a human driven resource, like how quickly are we going to do that? Just to make sure that everything is being followed up on. Every lead or prospect is getting the same experience regardless of when and how they're coming into the funnel. So I just think there needs to be alignment for a foundation set for that meeting to happen. And then I do agree that that always needs to be updated. We need to always be communicating about what are we seeing, right? What are we understanding?
Like these SDRs are actually talking to customers. Listened to the gongs, listened to the conversation, relay the feedback. I mean, we have so much information. We're drowning in information right now, but, but are we actioning on it? Are we actually using that information to make positive change? And the SDRs could do that in two directions. They can do it backwards to the marketing team to talk about the demand gen or they can do it forwards to the AEs, closing the deals. And that part of the process, they really are bridging that gap, truly bridging the gap. They are the bridge. Um, so if you have an SDR team, treat them as such and, and meet with them regularly instead of just complaining and, “oh, man, this is not going well. They're not qualifying right. These leads are terrible, yada yada yada,”
Pam Didner: What?!? I love complaining. Complaining is so much easier than doing the real work. Come on! (both laugh)
Tyler Lindley: I mean, complaining is fine. It's going to happen naturally, but at least complained together, complain with each other--like SDRs complain with the marketing team, complain with the AEs because then you'll at least hopefully learn something that can affect change. Um, so that would be my 2 cents.
Pam Didner: Do you think SDRs do any kind of cross-selling and, uh, and up-sale with existing customers or purely just focused on new logo?
Tyler Lindley: I think SDRs should only. Prospect into existing logos if you know that if that logo, if it's maybe a dormant,
Pam Didner: Really big company is a very big company. They have a totally different division that, you know, product division, not doing totally different things, ok.
Tyler Lindley: Initially. Yeah. Potentially. Or if the, you know, the account has gone dormant and we're trying to reignite that account. I think that that should be owned, honestly, at that point by either the AE or even the customer success team because of that relationship; because we need the SDR focused on the top of the funnel and we need them focused on net new accounts.
So I would lean for them, not that we can't teach the AEs and the CSMs how to prospect back into those existing accounts, but I think the SCR should kind of stay in their lane and focus on net new.
Pam Didner: Got it. So with that being said, obviously the marketing and SDRs on the front lines and they actually have a lot of information in terms of what customer feel about the products sometimes. So what do you think the process should set up? Should SDR provide the feedback, the product feedback directly to the product team? Do you think there's a value to that? Or that's something that needs to be done say you do a survey, you kind of follow up with, uh, the outside sales team that actually have a more in-depth knowledge or AE to provide that information.
Tyler Lindley: Yeah. I think you need to be learning it from both groups, because if you think about SDRs, they are both qualifying and disqualifying. So they are both learning the reasons for and the reasons people against people, you know, exploring your, your product or your solution further. So I think that there's a ton of value there in helping to go back and define your ICP to go back and define your target buyer, your different personas. Like, yeah, maybe we've got the perfect product, but we're just going after the wrong person in the organization, you know, wherever you're talking to the sales team, but we need to be talking to enablement or marketing. All of that information is contextual and it should be shared back across the organization--should be shared back to marketing should be shared back to product. Because all these things are related. I mean, your product, the messaging, and then all of the messaging that you're, you're marketing your enablement, your sales development team, your AEs, your customer success, like these are all related messages.
So in my mind, the most effective revenue organizations are ones that are sharing across that spectrum. Anything that they're learning because they might learn.
Pam Didner: You can share that back to the product team.
Tyler Lindley: Yeah, you might learn something after someone's been a customer for five years from the customer success team that would impact, you know, product. But it might be something after a five minute conversation from someone who's not even a customer, they're just a potential prospect. So I think regardless of where you sit, all of that should be shared back to the product team and the ones closest to the actual prospects should be relaying that message.
Pam Didner: Understood. Well said. When SDR is working through the potential prospects and the conversion rate tend to be pretty small and they got a lot of disqualified leads or even loss opportunities. So what do you think that marketing should do with some of those disqualified leads or loss opportunities? Do you think it’s their job to actually kind of really try to revive the opportunities or this is something that the SDR should kind of take a second look?
Tyler Lindley: So I think it's a shared responsibility. I think that the nurturing can happen from the marketing team or the SDR team. I think it depends on the value of the accounts, the amount of like, what is your total addressable market? You know, how many people are actually in your pipeline at a given time? If you have a very small addressable market, then a really valuable exercise for both marketing and for the SDR team to be trying to reignite those accounts, because there's not an unlimited number.
Now, if you have a different product, maybe a lower, lower value product where you have a large total addressable market, I would then put that in marketing shoes to try to reignite, um, those type of accounts, um, making it more of a low touch, automated, automated, reignite fashion there. Uh, so I think it really depends on how big is your total addressable market? What's the value of a customer? And can we justify that being done by the SDR, that person, which is a lot harder to scale than having marketing do it in a potential automation. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it really does depend.
Pam Didner: So you bought a good point. I actually have additional insight I'd like to add to that specific question. There's another angle from my perspective, which is I talked to my client in terms of how to address disqualified leads or loss opportunities is determined by the causes of the loss opportunities or disqualify. Is it because of lack of budget? Is it because the timing is not right? Or is it because the feature doesn't, it doesn't work at this time. So because of different causes, and, uh, depending on the causes, you can also create different kind of nurturing while you can determine if you want to nurture or not. Does that make sense? Yeah, so I think the product part of it is really important, but the other one is the causes of disqualification.
Tyler Lindley: I totally agree. And you've got to set up the, the engine to be able to put those causes, identify the causes. Let's make it a dropdown select option, make it very easy for the SDR to display.
Pam Didner: I agree. Totally agree. (laughs)
Tyler Lindley: “Because of this reason…” Do not make it a fill in the blank cause you'll get a bunch of garbage,
Pam Didner: You’ll get like a million choices. That’s it!
Tyler Lindley: Or you can't do it. Yeah. Give them five choices, the drop down select and then, yeah, based on what they answer, you could then determine maybe this bucket. We want to reignite with the SDR team, these we're going to do with marketing. But make it simple and easy to know what you're going to do with each group.
Pam Didner: 100% agree. I think the biggest takeaway from today's episode, they are couple number one is the, uh, the close collaboration between sales and marketing, especially SDR and, uh, demand gen. And the second thing is have a process in place and keep that communication going. And I, 100% agree with you. Service level agreement is key, especially in enterprises.
Another one is basically looking to if what any kind of disqualified leads and also lost opportunities and have a conversation with the SDRs and determine what the causes are. And also the products itself and then a set of a processing trends of if you want to nurture them or not. So those are great, great key takeaway, Tyler. You are fantastic!
I'm going to ask you one more question. It’s a silly question and I have two of them and you can choose one to answer. Number one. What is the most useless talent that you possess? Or you can choose to answer the next one. Did you have a ridiculous go in your life?
Tyler Lindley: Um, Those are great questions. Uh, let's see the most useless, useless talent. I would say the most useless talent I possess is, um, the ability to buy a lot of technology things, kind of like we discussed the other day, Pam. Buy a lot of technology may not need it all, but, uh, but just buy it. And try to figure out the use case for it sometimes after the fact. So some have some buyer’s remorse, uh, from time to time because. I like shiny new things in terms of technology. And, uh, and sometimes I, I either look at the return policy or try to figure out what am I going to actually do with this after the fact. So I guess that's a very useless skill and a very expensive one at that. (both laugh)
Pam Didner: Well, you and I are the same thing. You and I will talk in about, um, just Tyler and I have a prep call and we will talk in about. How should I say it nicely? How much shit we have. (both laugh)
Tyler Lindley: Way too much.
Pam Didner: The, the A/V, you know, equipment, like I have three different microphones really. And I also have a lavalier microphone And then I have audio interface. Oh my God. And then I have webcams that we will talking about like the different, uh, equipment or the, the stuff that we buy, just, uh, just to set things up, especially for virtual communication is insane.
Tyler Lindley: Exactly. And we tend to buy more than one. Yeah, you need to know what that other mic sounds like.
Pam Didner: Tyler it’s wonderful, wonderful to have you on my show. It's fantastic. And, uh, I love all the insights that you share. I hope that you will come back again!
Tyler Lindley: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. If folks want to find out more about me online, check out the sales lift.com or Tyler lindley.com. I'm also active on LinkedIn. So just search me, Tyler Lindley, and I'd love to come back someday and chat, chat, more sales and marketing with you, Pam. Thanks so much for having me on.
Pam Didner: Sounds good!
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Today I have a special guest, David Fortino, Chief Strategist for Netline. David is specialized in audience development, and retention with strength focused on the B2B market.
Today we talk about a specific B2B Content and Demand Report that he managed for the fifth year in a row: the 2021 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report. For this report, David's team analyzed 4.3 million gated content at Netline.
In this episode: * Learn more about Netline and what is it that they do. * The biggest takeaways from the report. * Trends in content consumption. * What are the most popular content formats? * Trends in webinars and communication with the audience. * Breakdown on webinar audience registration and attendance. * How to reach a C-suite audience with content? * What is first-party consumption, and why it's better than third-party consumption? * How to use technology to collect accurate data from gated content and the challenges? * How can marketers incorporate security, predictability, and simplicity in their content? * Lessons from COVID and how they affect marketing. * Is there are a way to narrow the gap for content consumption? * The role of automation in content marketing and customer experience.
Quotes from the episode:
"If you want to educate a C-suite person, the best thing you could do is distill things into an ultra-fine brief, with quick-hitting topics and talking points."
"COVID taught us that there was a necessity to move faster than we felt comfortable moving. And because of that, nothing could be produced in the way and the level of depth and refinement that maybe we would have typically felt comfortable doing or needing to do."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! My guest today is Anthony Gaenzle. Anthony is a marketing and business Leader, owner of Anthony Gaenzle Marketing.
Serving in marketing leadership and multimedia roles for over 15 years, he has helped both established companies and startups achieve significant growth by providing marketing and business strategies that positively impact each company’s bottom line.
Today we talk about how B2B marketing pros can build relationships that drive business success.
In this episode: * What is a definition of partner marketing or partnership marketing? * How can businesses scale or minimize some of the work and become more efficient? * What are some specific processes or tools that people can use in the relationship-building process? * What are some of the criteria that marketers can evaluate in terms of partnership marketing? * Partnership and relationship-building case study of a health care software company * What makes collaboration time consuming, and why it’s all worth it. * What are the biggest challenges for a successful partnership and collaboration? * How should businesses do co-marketing, improve collaboration and communication? * What is the role of partnership and relationship building in social selling and digital marketing? * What tactics should people use to build a relationship online?
Quotes from the episode: “It’s not the same game as maybe 20 years ago when one person was making all the decisions. You have to go through five different layers and convince all those people in different ways why this partnership makes sense. And then, once you’ve convinced them and signed it, you have to get together and determine the best avenues for exploring collaboration.”
“Everybody can add different value to everybody cause everybody has different goals, and you need to assess that first. Once you begin to build that relationship, another vital pillar is to be genuine. Don’t come up with some crafty marketing scheme. Go in there, genuinely wanting to develop the relationship.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! My guest today is Leo Odden. Lee is a good friend, a CEO and Co-Founder of Top Rank Marketing, an excellent and fast-growing B2B marketing agency. He is also a speaker and the author of the book Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.
Today we talk about B2B influencer marketing and the best practices.
In this episode: * Different influencer marketing definitions and what does it mean from a B2B perspective. * What questions should brands/businesses answer before launching a B2B influencer marketing campaign? * Do brands always have to pay to engage with external influencers? * What are the different types of influencers, and who are the "prospect influencers"? * What is the role of internal influencer and subject matter experts? * How can an enterprise or any B2B business start with influencer marketing? * What kind of tools can businesses use to find influencers? * How to collaborate with influencers and create a great experience for them? * What are the biggest mistakes in implementing B2B influencer marketing? * What are the three biggest takeaways from the first-ever B2B influencer marketing report?
Quotes from the episode: "Many people think about influencer marketing and are now starting to look at it from a B2B lens and see it through how B2C works. B2C influencer marketing is almost exclusively paid engagement."
'There are many different things that you can do, but keeping that love alive, showing appreciation and building genuine relationships is an incredible investment in everyone's success when it comes to B2B influencer marketing."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! My special guest today is Felix Krueger. Felix is the CEO of Krueger Marketing. His company specializes in sales enablement, Account-Based Marketing for B2B enterprises, and he recently launched his podcast, The State of Sales Enablement.
Today we talk about how to make sales content a competitive advantage.
In this episode: * The role of content in sales enablement. * Definition of a sales enablement from a sales perspective? * The evolution of content in the context of sales enablement and collaboration with marketing. * What is the significant difference between marketing content and sales content? * How can a content marketer support the sales team? What should they pay attention to? * How the current pandemic changed sales and how salespeople build relationships with the customers. * In what ways pandemic changed the content use. * What are some of the content formats that tend to be a whole lot more popular right now? * How can sales fight the distractions of remote work and the new landscape of buyers working from home? * How can content help sales in online communication? * What industries are impacted the most with the new digital communication, and how they make the transition? * What are some of the quick content wins that marketers can use to achieve when collaborating with your sales team?
Quotes from the episode: "The buyers have changed because a lot of people started working from home. Suddenly, they have all kinds of different distractions. Because people began communicating on their terms, which is often not real-time, buyers have had an increased need for content."
"There is a big opportunity for [tech] companies to utilize content to deliver a more personalized experience to different roles. Also, if you think about penetrating organizations as a sales team in terms of account-based marketing, you can use content to do the networking."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! I have a super, super special guest today – Ruth Stevens.
Ruth is a president of eMarketing Strategy, B2B marketing consultant, author, keynote speaker, and educator. She is also an adjunct professor at NYU Stern School of Business, outside director at HIMSS. She helps mid to large B2B companies improve their marketing strategies and tactics for a stronger pipeline.
Today we talk about must-have marketing skills for modern marketers.
In this episode: * Essential advice for marketing students. * Why is it important for marketers to build a personal brand? * What are the steps and specific actions to consider when building a personal brand? * What are the most common challenges that students tend to encounter in their first jobs? * How should students deal with those challenges? * What is considered the communication in marketing and with other people? * How can marketers improve their communication? * How can marketers keep up with all the new technologies? * Pros and cons of different marketing careers, and how can marketers decide which career path to pursue?
Quotes from the episode: “I suggest that they get their LinkedIn profiles tightened up and active. One of the most important tips is to focus on their headlines with more deliberation than most people do today by packing many keywords in there. Most people just put their title and company names. That wastes the opportunity to be found for various capabilities that you have.”
“Those who have their eyes open as they enter the workforce should remember that performance on the job, doing great work and delivering value is just the table stakes minimum. To really get to where they want to go career-wise is to remember that they should strive to be well-liked. They should be helpful, friendly, thoughtful, and perceived as someone we want to work with.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Today I have an excellent guest, Alex Lowe, from the UK.
Alex is a Head of Enterprise Strategy & Operations at Lately, Founder and CEO of Beyond Sales, and the host of The Death of a Salesman podcast. Alex works with and mentor, startups, to scale up business and beyond to help with their go-to-market strategy and execution.
Today we talk about social selling strategy for sales teams, what works and what doesn’t.
In this episode: * Definition of social selling and what’s wrong with the popular business terminology * What makes salespeople socially awkward online and what can they do about that * In-person vs written communication skills * How to build social into sales and marketing strategy. * The universal three principles of social selling strategy * How to select and share corporate content? * What should salespeople share on social media? * How to pick and tie the right social channel(s) with social selling strategy? * What to do when social selling doesn’t work? * What are the post COVID changes in sales and the digital envoronment? * How can the marketing team help with social selling? * What is the future of social selling?
Quotes from the episode: “Build a relationship, draw them into your network, get that conversation out of social as quickly as humanly possible into this environment that you are in, in a one-to-one environment, hopefully in a face-to-face physical environment. Then you go on your merry way in terms of your sales process.”
“The thing about social selling actually, for me, the most effective social selling is referral selling. It’s using your social networks to get an introduction to someone, to start a conversation. That then has to be recorded in a CRM.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon! With the fast deployment of vaccination, many of us marketers are gearing up for the full reopening and getting our team members back to the offices. Today I want to share the five trends that I think you need to pay attention to when you rework your plan and get ready for your post-COVID marketing efforts.
In this episode: * VIrtual communication and in-person interactions. * Event marketing evolution. * Content marketing and content prioritization. * Changing strategies and marketing execution. * Protocols and process changes to keep your customers safe. * Digital customer experience as a product. * Sales and marketing alignment in a fast-changing world. * Process and workflow optimization as a competitive advantage.
Quotes from the episode: “Modify your customer journeys and beef up your offerings online and on your websites. That means your budget for digital marketing and the website should not go down. It should go up.”
“The key post-COVID is to determine which content to update and refresh because you might have a lot of content you need to prioritize in a repurposing refresh and the update.”
“When digital marketing becomes complicated, marketers tend to get overwhelmed. To overcome that, understand processes and steps, how things are done, and how data moves from one point to another.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! My guest is Katie Robbert, the CEO & Co-founder of Trust Insight, a digital marketing consulting firm.
Today we talk about Artificial Intelligence, how you can take advantage of AI and implement it in your organization.
In this episode: * Definition of AI and why is it important? * What makes machine learning important? * What are the talents and skillset to consider before implementing AI? * How to evaluate if a company is AI-ready, and where to start? * Third-party tool vs in-house project? Which one is better? * How to evaluate AI platforms? * What should companies learn from other AI initiatives? * Get familiar with a Mark Off chain model. * The role of quality data for successful AI implementation. * Will AI take our jobs?
Quotes from the episode: "It takes a lot of planning. You can't just wake up one day and be like: "Let's introduce Artificial Intelligence to my team." There's a lot of planning that goes into it. And when we're talking about implementing AI within an organization, that step is often skipped over."
"AI is really good at repetitive tasks. Your job as a marketer is to continue to learn, grow and be comfortable with AI taking those repetitive tasks because that makes room for those more valuable responsibilities that AI can't do - customer relationships, insights, and decision making."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hey, a big hello from Portland, Oregon! Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have an exceptional guest today, incredibly special. Shelley Wagner.
Shelly is the Chief of Staff for Intel's Client Security Division and a certified coach from the very prestigious Systematic Coaching Program. She's been a coach for more than 15 years, a passionate and collaborative change agent with extensive experience leading organizations using value-centered leadership and coach-based management.
Today we talk about coaching, mentoring, and how can people decide which one they need.
In this episode: * Why are there so many different explanations of a coach ad coaching? * What is a definition of a coach? * How is a coach different from a mentor? * Where do people who advocate or sponsor fit in? * How to approach someone to ask for mentorship? * In what ways can people define or discover if they need a coach or if they need a mentor? * What is an "informal" mentor? * What happens if a manager suggests coaching on mentorship? * How can someone become a mentor or a certified coach? * What is an excellent way to find a great mentor? * What are some career tips for marketers who would like to explore a career in coaching or becoming mentors?
Quotes from the episode: "When talking about coaching versus mentoring, there are some similarities, but there are some differences. A mentor is like a wise advisor. Often, they're almost always more experienced than you because they're imparting their knowledge to you. They support and encourage."
When you think of your development, what's my learning edge or what I want to work on, a coach is someone specifically who is going to gauge a coaching objective, which is going to be goal-oriented."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I'm your host Pam Didner. I'm a B2B marketer through and through, and I know that our work can be complex.
Today, I'm doing a solo episode, and I want to answer one specific question from one of my community members: "How do I put a content marketing plan together?"
In this episode: * What is content marketing? * What are the different types of content? * Why should businesses care about content marketing? * What is the purpose of the content marketing plan? * How to build the winning content marketing plan? * What are some of the critical elements you need to incorporate into a successful content marketing plan? * What are the benefits of content in addition to monetization, growing revenue, and gaining followers? * How can businesses decide which content they should create? * Ten questions any content marketing plan should answer.
Quotes from the episode: "There are many benefits of content. One of them is that you control the narrative. You have total control over what you say, when and how. Also, use content to showcase your thought leadership, optimize for search and increase inbound traffic."
"Content marketing in the digital world is complicated and messy. Just acknowledge that. Knowing how to put the plan together is a core capability that you need to have to think strategically and connect different thoughts."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon! Today, I have an excellent guest, John Nee, the President and the Principal of Act 1 Partners.
With over 20 years of success as a marketing executive and business leader for fast-growing companies, John founded Act 1 Partners, a strategic marketing and experiential firm. The company is based in Portland, Oregon, and they have clients nationwide. They help businesses know their market, tell their story and live their brand through many different modules that they have primarily based around branding and strategy.
Today, we will discuss my favorite topic, sales enablement, and the marketing and sales alignment.
In this episode: * Why is it so essential for B2B marketers to work with sales? * What is the one thing marketers must do when they engage with a sales organization? * What are the challenges of marketing and sales alignment, and what marketers can do to improve the collaboration? * How can marketers improve the collaboration with sales, even change salespeople's behaviour? * What can help marketers to understand what they can do to assist the sales team better? * With everything being digital, where is the handoff between marketing and sales now? * What is the role of technology in supporting sales? * What are some low hanging fruits that marketers can do to support sales? * In what ways a product affects marketing and sales alignment?
Quotes from the episode: "Good salespeople are the ones who are open-minded and are willing to learn and try new things. It also pays to have some successful salespeople who have relied on the marketing materials or marketing campaigns to be successful."
"Although marketing automation tools are very powerful and critical for what marketing needs to promote the brand and build awareness and generate demand, that handoff between the leads that come in through marketing automation and how they're managed in a CRM is critical. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Today, I have a fantastic and fabulous guest, Kerry O'Shea Gorgone, Educational Content Director at MarketingProfs.
Kerry is a lawyer, content creator, educator, speaker and host of the Marketing Smarts podcast. She is also Consigliere, Co-Host and Showrunner for Chris Brogan Media, and co-host and producer of Punch Out With Katie and Kerry talk show. She's been helping businesspeople learn what they need to know so they can do the things they want to do.
Today we talk about the legal aspect of marketing.
In this episode: * Apart from non-disclosure agreements, what are some other instances that legal needs to get involved in marketing? * The role of transparency in influencer marketing. * What are the legal ramifications for live streaming and copyrighted material? * What is the role of technology in content monitoring and copyright protection? * How to properly (and safely) do live streaming? * How can marketers control their environment when they create content. * What is the setup, process, must- do's or don'ts for the people interested in launching a podcast or a YouTube channel? * Examples of resolving the unexpected bloopers while creating a show, podcast or live stream.
Quotes from the episode: "In influence marketing, there is a lack of understanding that disclosure is even a thing you need to do. People don't understand that in some cases, an influencer has been paid to partner with a brand and promote their services."
'When you're live streaming, be aware of what you have in the background, be aware of it and music that might be playing. And speaking of backgrounds, make sure you don't have any trade secrets or personal information of your customers or anything like visible anywhere behind you."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Today, I have a fantastic and fabulous guest – Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs. Author, speaker, and the most important title – my favorite title – writer.
Ann started as a reporter for the Boston Globe, doing a bunch of news reporting and features. Features are really where her heart was because you can tell a story in Features in a different way than you can with a straight news report. She worked in journalism for a while, then started a company called ClickZ.com, which was one of the first sources of interactive marketing information. In 2000 Ann joined Marketing Profs, a training and education company, and the rest is history.
Today we talk about content writing and everything in between. You should check out her book Everybody Writes.
In this episode: * What should writers, new or experienced ones, do to get started or improve their writing? * Why should marketers in their writing focus on the message, and how to do that? * How can marketers properly communicate and use the specific key points in their email marketing? * What are the secrets of successful B2B email marketing * What makes newsletters interesting, and how to tell a better story? * How can B2B marketers crystallize and internalize the storytelling elements in their newsletters? * What is the key to getting out of the writing comfort zone? * What makes writing so important and how it can help thought leadership, and leadership development?
Quotes from the episode: “We hear a lot of times “leaders are readers.” But I would say that “leaders are writers” because if you can articulate your ideas clearly and in a way that that will connect with others, then it’s an excellent foundation for any great career.”
“We focus on what we want to say and all the amazing things we want to talk to our audience about. But in my opinion, that’s the wrong way to think about an email newsletter. It’s not about the news. It’s about the letter. It’s about that opportunity you have to speak directly to one person at one time, and that’s a very powerful place.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode, B2B Marketing & More. I have an excellent guest, Greg Matranga, the VP of Global Marketing at Infinity QS.
Greg got started in marketing while still in college, as the PR guy for his local County fair, the Antelope Valley Fair and Alfalfa Festival, the 10th largest in California. Greg also worked on two congressional campaigns while he was still working and worked on the media relations side. From there, he got into high-tech marketing during the .com era.
Today we talk about how to rebuild a marketing team in a legacy company.
In this episode: * Learn more about Infinity QS, what they do, and how they rebuilt the marketing department. * How to start rebuilding the marketing department from the ground up? * The role of talent management in rebuilding the marketing organization? * What marketing skillsets should a business look for? * What is the right approach with the management, and how to get their buy-in? * With the rebranding and the right people, what is the next step in processes and tools? * In what ways rebuilding the marketing department affects content creation? * What is the best way to present the results? * How to use rebuilding to redefine effective conversions and build on the demand generation? * In what ways can digital marketing be used to gain results?
Quotes from the episode: "We moved methodically, and we didn't try and do everything at once."
"I didn't have the legacy knowledge about the company or the legacy brand messaging approach. So I was able to come in completely immersed in this new messaging, which made a big difference for us moving forward."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Today, I have another fantastic guest - David Meerman Scott.
David is a marketing and business growth speaker, advisor to emerging companies, author of 12 books, including "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" and "Fanocracy" (PR and WSJ bestseller). Last year, pretty much during the pandemic's peak, he also published an ebook called "Standout Virtual Event".
Today we talk about how to create a standout virtual event.
In this episode: • What does it take to create a stand out virtual event?
• What are some of the key elements that event managers should pay attention to when creating an online event?
• In what ways virtual presentations are different, and what should speakers do?
• Learn more about "theatrical" and "cinematic" types of experience.
• How to manage big virtual events and make connections with the audience?
• How to create and use the script for the virtual event?
• What are some features and platform considerations for a virtual event?
• How can marketers sharpen up their presentation skills?
• How to interact with the audience in an online event?
Quotes from the episode: "I don't show slides through the event app. I show slides on a big secondary screen over my shoulder. Why? Because the default for the virtual event platforms is that the slides take over. People get bored. They don't want to look at slides. They want to look at human beings."
"The world is always looking for new ways to learn about what's going on out there. To learn about what your area of expertise is. But what the world doesn't need is someone to just parrot what other people are saying."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today, I have a fantastic guest. Emily Bendorf, Manager at Southwest Airlines, leads the Sales Enablement team for Southwest Business. Emily was a founding member of the Sales Operations group and helped build processes and tools to support the B2B sales organization.
Sales enablement at Southwest and on the Southwest business team is mostly focused on being the liaison between the marketing department, enterprise marketing for consumers, and then their B2B sales team. There's a sister team that focuses on training and development of their salespeople, and their team manages the sales enablement tool, their CRM tool, and all of that is within the Sales Ops organization.
Today we're going to talk about sales enablement, and how to work with the sales team. Let's get started.
In this episode: * What does it take for a company to become customer-centric? * How can companies make the transition and decide to form a sales enablement group? * What is the secret of effective communication with salespeople? * What are some common sales team requests, and how to resolve them efficiently? * How to hire and develop a great sales enablement team? * How to connect and work with management and sales enablement team on prioritization, resilience and flexibility * What approaches could be used to filter requests from the sales team? * What are some of the challenges of working with sales teams, and how to resolve them? * Looking ahead, what are the two things that sales enablement teams should do in 2021 and 2022?
Quotes from the episode: "One thing that's so fortunate about our group is that we have such a great working and personal relationship with both of [our] teams. That really sets us up for success and allows us to do our job well."
"We've really tried to balance chase and perfection. So that can be hard to do. It depends on the leaders you work for, in terms of the grace given there, but we have many initiatives and things we want to deliver to our customers."
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Today my guest is Moni Oloyede, an Operations Manager at Fidelis Security.
Today we will talk about our favorite topics: marketing, marketing operations, MarTech and how to build a MarTech stack for account-based Marketing.
Moni has been in the marketing technology space for almost 13 years, at the start of the dawn of a marketing technology platform. She is a 2020 Marketo Champion. Marketing Operations expert, a digital marketing professional and a co-organizer of DC Marketing Tech Talks.
In this episode: * What is Moni's definition of account-based marketing? * What is in-market, and how it can help business? * How to identify the right accounts and align the processes with sales? * Is it possible to build one Martech stack and support all the channels? * How to evaluate Martech and different platforms? * What is the best way to set up and build a Martech stack? * How to manage a centerpiece tech and should be responsible and involved in the process? * What is the centerpiece technology that every company should have and build on? * How to make a call in terms of what features to use at what tool? * How can business overcome the challenges of automation? * What are some Martech best practices? * What is the key to setting up the balance between the process and marketing efficiency?
Quotes from the episode: "A lot of marketers want to get in there and start adding other features onto these technologies. The number one thing I say is: use the technology for what it was meant for."
"Even though you may have a homegrown system that someone in there just loves to use if it's not performing optimally, it's wasting time."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Lindsay Baggett, a Senior Field Marketing Manager at Couchbase. Couchbase is a NoSQL database platform that works on creating the next generation of database platform.
Lindsay has been doing field marketing for over ten years, and today she will share more about what field marketing is and tips for creating a good field marketing plan.
In this episode: * What is field marketing? * How is field marketing different from account-based marketing, sales enablement or sales operations? * What are some of the planning elements that should be incorporated when creating a field marketing plan? * What makes field marketing different from the corporate marketing plan? Are they the same? Why are they different? * Get familiar with some new terminology such as "green field" and "white space". * The biggest drawback in terms of field marketing, especially in trends of scalability? * Who should be included in a field marketing process? * The top challenges of a field marketer career?
Quotes from the episode: "We're not going after everybody. We're not just about brand awareness. We're about increasing engagement within our target accounts."
"Communicate and educate yourself as much as possible with your sales team on each of their territories. Then make sure that your ideas arch back to the directors and what their strategies are for their overall team, for their particular region."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today I have an extraordinary guest, Joe Pulizzi, the godfather of Content Marketing, he began using the term “content marketing” back in 2001.
Joe started a business in 2007, and that became the Content Marketing Institute. Probably best known for the event Content Marketing World that began in 2011. Now he is a co-founder and board member of the Orange Effect Foundation, which helps deliver funds to children with speech therapy needs and speech disorder who can't afford it. He is an entrepreneur, investor and marketing speaker. Also, Joe wrote and published several books: Content Inc., Killing Marketing, Epic Content Marketing, a novel The Will to Die, and Corona Marketing ebook.
In this episode of B2B Marketing and More, we will talk about content marketing for startups.
In this episode: * What is Corona Marketing ebook about? * What marketers need to do or how can they think differently in a changing business environment? * In what ways Covid changed content marketing and strategy? * What are the content strategy lessons for Startups? * How can startups marketers make the adjustment and focus on the right content? * How to build a minimum viable audience first, keep the focus, and when is the right time to diversify? * What should be the startup team structure that wants to build a content marketing machine? * How can startups with small or no budget build their audience? * What is the future of content marketing, and what is the role of technology?
Quotes from the episode: "We've got to start actually doing strategy when it comes to content creation and communication. The strategy is all about saying "no" to things and saying "yes" to a few things and then creating really good organized plans around those couple of yeses."
"I'd rather have 10,000 email subscribers than 200,000 followers on Facebook. Not all followers are equal, so you have to make a decision. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon! Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam! Today, my guest is Douglas Burdett, the host of the Marketing Book Podcast, and the Principal of Artillery Marketing, who will share tips and insight about a do’s and don’ts of a successful podcast.
Douglas has been doing his podcast for six years. So far he has over 300 episodes. His marketing agency helps industrial and manufacturing companies to become better known, liked and trusted in an era when their customers don’t want to be sold or marketed to.
In this episode: * How to start the process of podcasting journey and how to generate ideas? * What role does a podcast play in business development? * Who should do a podcast, and what should be accomplished? * How to measure a podcast’s success and how to determine if you want to measure it or not? * What are the top three things that one must do when launching a podcast? * What people have to do keep the focus on the podcast topic, and why is that important? * How to promote a podcast, and how to get more listeners? * What elements should people look for ahead of the time to refine and change the podcast?
Quotes from the episode: “Podcasts are a great awareness building medium, but they are being misused a lot like a direct response. Don’t worry about your audience size. You don’t need everybody. You need the right audience.”
“Once you’ve published an interview much like publishing a blog post, that is not the finish line. That is the starting gun.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I have a fantastic guest this time, Christoph Trappe from Voxpopme, a video feedback platform for companies. Today he’s going to talk about content performing culture.
Christoph Trappe is a content strategist. In his role, Christoph develops, implements and measures the omnichannel content strategy including live video, podcasting, content development, SEO and conversion-flow optimization. He also has his podcast, and live stream.
In this episode: * What content performance culture is and how is that important? * What are some of the barriers to create the right culture and create the performing content? * If a business has to put the content performance team together, what kind of talent do they have to look for? * How to decide what’s more important in the battle of quality vs quantity? * In what ways setting up the right content culture apply to small businesses and enterprises? * How to educate and set up the process that people can follow? * How to build the culture that people can embrace?
Quotes from the episode: “The reality is everybody wants everything to perform. So we, first of all, have to understand what does that mean? But most importantly, we have to set up the right culture.”
“At the end of the day, you want to have the right people in the right seats with the right skill set and the right attitude and the right mindset. A big part of driving content performance comes back to having the right, the right attitude.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hey, big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I have a special guest today who will talk about collaboration.
John Moore is “The Collaborator”. The Collaborator recognizes that, far too often, Enablement efforts are failing to impact their business measurably. He is the VP of Revenue Enablement at Bigtincan, a sales enablement automation company, focused on delivering value to enablement practitioners and leaders.
In this episode: * What is a collaborator? * What all excellent sales and marketing collaborations have in common? * How to define the goal we want to accomplish? What is the difference between a goal and objective? * What are some of the challenges of collaboration between sales and marketing? How do we overcome them? * How not to turn collaboration into “too many cooks in a kitchen”? * What is the role of messaging framework in collaboration? * How can sales and marketing collaboration improve personalization efforts?
Quotes from the episode: “The revenue enablement is about preparing the entire revenue-facing team to be successful, which requires collaboration between marketing sales and customer success. But more broadly, you also have to collaborate well with product marketing, with engineering, in some cases, finance. ”
“The reality is if you look at an organization with the chief revenue officer, they’re the one who talks to the board. They want to gather all the input. Enablement plays a key role in facilitating discovery and collaboration.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big, hello from Portland, Oregon. Yay! Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I have a fantastic guest today. Brooke Sellas. Welcome, Brooke.
Brooke is a customer care expert, ‘Marketing Companion’ podcast co-host, horse and a dog mom. She is also a founder and CEO of B Squared Media. The company specialize in social media, media buy, and the key topic that we talk about today – customer care and social media.
In this episode: * Best Practice: Which brands are doing a great job on social media. * What is the ideal response time to customers on social media and how that changes if a business has office hours? * What makes taking care of a virtual customer support center expensive? * Is there a specific channel that every business should be on? * What is the role of customer support on social media? * What are the platforms that businesses could use to complement or support customer care? * How can businesses measure customer care on social media? * Is there a difference between business and customers key performance indicators? * How can businesses work with their customers’ internal teams? * What are some of the best ways to deal with negative comments on social media? * When do you hide? When do you ignore and when do you ban or mute someone? * Chatbots as part of customer care and customer service.
Quotes from the episode: “I want people to stop thinking about customer care as a cost center and think about it as the literal spine of your business; you cannot have a business without customers.”
“Some of the more nuanced KPIs on our side and also on the client-side is sentiment. Are the conversations good, neutral, are they bad? And then also share of voice; looking at our competitors and understanding our share of voice.”
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hey, big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam. Today, I have an exceptional guest, Paul Roetzer, founder of the Marketing AI Institute and the PR 20/20. And he recently launched an exciting product.
Paul is also the author of The Marketing Performance Blueprint and The Marketing Agency Blueprint, also he is a creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON) and the AI Academy for Marketers. As a speaker, he is focused on making artificial intelligence approachable and actionable, and helping change agents drive transformation through marketing talent, technology and strategy.
In this episode: * How to apply Artificial Intelligence to marketing * The new product - AI Academy for Marketers * What would the future of work look like to marketers? * Will AI take over the marketer's jobs? Will some marketing jobs be eliminated because of technology advancement? * What is the best way to learn about artifical intelligence and its functions? * How should marketers implement or even incorporate artificial intelligence into their work? * Access free and ungated use case assessment tool: AI Score for Marketers
Quotes from the episode: "In an ideal world, that's where we're trying to get to with AI tools in marketing and sales today, we want the artificial intelligence to assist the marketer, the salesperson at doing their job, in those repetitive data-driven tasks."
"What [marketers] need to do is remove the abstract nature of AI. They need not be afraid of the topic because it isn't Sci-Fi; it is actually a pretty easy thing to understand what it is and what it does."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Hey, big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a very special guest today Geoff Atkinson, and he's going to talk about SEO and a little bit of analytics.
Geoff is a former Senior Vice President of Marketing for Overstock.com, with a lot of B2C experience. Now he is the B2B world, founder and CEO of a software company called Huckabuy. His company handles SEO's technical side for their clients, such as Salesforce and SAP and many big enterprise customers.
In this episode: * Where do companies or digital marketers fall short in SEO in general? * Which better - to have an SEO manager in-house or as an outsource? * What can businesses do to fix and improve their SEO? * What is Google's intent for search and why it's an essential part of the digital marketing strategy? * Learn more about Geoff's company Huckabuy, and what makes their approach to SEO different. * What are some of the biggest SEO issues and suggestions on where and how to start resolving them? * Definition of: "structured data," "dynamic renderings," and "rich results." and why do digital marketers need to take these terms seriously. * What is happening with voice activation, and what are the current trends. * What is 2021 Google Page Experience update and when to expect it?
Quotes from the episode: "The mistake I see most companies make is that they're just throwing dollars at the solution. Instead, they should be thinking about having a strategy, executing that strategy, and making sure that it's successful, and measuring it."
"Instead of just doing keyword research, take one of the keywords that you really care about. Search, search it on a mobile device and desktop and see what the search results look like."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a very special guest today. Meet Mary Killelea, a Customer Story Strategist from Intel. She will be talking about career development and the pros and cons of working on either the agency side or the client-side.
Mary is a businesswoman, a mom, wife, and a lover of adventure. She's been working in tech and marketing for about 25 years, and she has her own business for more than 15 of those years. Before all that, she worked for Web MD Radio and did sales for Nabisco.
In this episode: * Career tips for anybody just starting in the field of marketing and where to start * What are the main differences between the agency and client-side marketing * What it looks like working for a big corporation like Intel * How working in a big company changes the perception of marketing. * How can one tell if the working environment is good for career development * What is the role of constant learning and what that really means * What are some interesting career options for marketers - both corporations and agencies * How can a marketer prepare for the specific marketing job position
Quotes from the episode: "You need to figure out which area of interests you might want to excel at some point. To have a broad base at the beginning while you're learning and understanding, it really can be beneficial to have that holistic [marketing] viewpoint."
"Just be persistent, continually evolving. Be completely open to learning. You can design your career any way you want if you have a growth mindset."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I have a very, very special guest today. Meet Stephanie Stahl, General Manager of the Content Marketing Institute and Content Marketing World.
Stephanie is an experienced content creator/editor/strategist. She joined the content marketing Institute in 2016. Before that Stephanie has been to Content Marketing World as a consumer of content because she was running a content marketing group for UBM. As a General Manager of the Content Marketing Institute, her goal is to help educate brands about creative ways to engage customers and turn them into obsessed customers.
In this episode: * How does one make the transition from in-person to the virtual event in the middle of a major crisis. * How much time and effort does it take for a team to go through the transition. * What are the biggest challenges of going virtual. * How did the team decide on how to scale the#CMWorld tracks and what tracks to scale back. * How to collect feedback from the attendees and use that guidance to adapt on-the-go. * What to do with the sponsorship packages, and how to help sponsor with the adjustments. * What should leaders do and how can they deal with their teams during the transition to minimize the team member's frustration during the process of change. * How to adapt and conduct regular team communications. * How to create the sense of a community of the physical (and virtual) event.
Quotes from the episode: "We did a lot of learning along the way, but honestly, the key was just regular communication."
"We decided that we would prerecord the bulk of the content and have live sessions within. And the reason we did that is that it doesn't matter how much planning and organizing we do, we are at the mercy of the internet."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
Today we're going to talk with Chris Dickey, a search engine marketing expert. Chris is a veteran marketing professional, and also have experience on the PR side of things. His team created the tool Visably.
Chris has been in marketing for 17 years across different professions and roles, from in-house marketing to publishers, working in agencies years. The last decade he's managing inter-operating his PR agency. Through the interactions with his clients and trying to push forward where is PR going he got interested in the intersection between public relations and search. That's where a company called Visably came out of - a software solution to scale how brands can improve their brand visibility in search with PR being one of those channels.
In this episode: • Most important SEO tips beyond 2020
• Why do people tend to fall short with SEO
• What makes SEO so complex and what can businesses do about that.
• Interesting statistics about organic search
• What are some other ways to rank higher with organic search
• How to use SEM to complement SEO
• Learn more about Visably, the free SEO tools and how it helps address some of the challenges
• How can a midsize company, startup or a small business (with finite resources and budget) improve their SEO.
• What is the role of a business value proposition for organic search.
Quotes from the episode: "The important thing for marketers to recognize is that they really need to shift the goal line from saying, 'how do I rank my, my website and search' to say, 'how do I get a better ranking for my brand in search?'"
"Good keywords are just consumer behavior. It's not Google coming up with the keywords. It's your customers coming in with the keywords."
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest today is Kelly Hungerford, a native Californian living in Switzerland.
Kelly’s been in Europe for more than twenty years. Her business experience is vast, and she’s been through a lot of different roles. Kelly worked for the enterprise, then she worked for startups, and back at the enterprise as the Director of Digital Transformation, Strategy and Services for a global oral care brand Sunstar.
In this episode: * What are the most common challenges of Digital Transformation * What is the best way to launch a digital initiative in a company? * How to set up digital transformation implementation in an enterprise * What is the role of education within a company? * What are the most important resources and how to use leverage them? * How to use a hypothetical exercise to plan for the future, prepare for disruption, and engage management in the process. * What are the elements of a digital transformation plan? * How to decide on which technology to use and enable the teams * How to make the transition and change, less stressful and more enjoyable for the groups and employees. * What are the long term benefits of digital transformation, and how to resolve the challenges?
Quotes from the episode: “One advantage to a platform and having the same UI across many different solutions is if the UI is good, it’s really enjoyable to use. And it’s a huge motivator for the team.
“If you want to sell any transformative initiative in-house, you’re not going to go out meek. You’re going out to make a big bang. Sell a vision, evangelize. Transformation isn’t incremental. The process itself is a day in, day out, but the vision has to be so big. Don’t be afraid to think big.”
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today, I'm excited because my guest and I will talk about something different; it's not what you would call a typical marketing topic.
Meet Catalina de León, a product designer from Buenos Aires, and a proud geek with over 15 years experience in the tech industry. Catalina is obsessed with transforming the digital world into a more beautiful and usable place. Catalina is a Product Designer at Feedly, Design Sprint Facilitator, and founder of Purple Bunny specialized in UX and branding workshops.
In this episode: * What is the Design Sprint methodology * How to use the best tools and methodology for our project * How to align remote teams and use Design Sprint most effectively * What are some ways to keep remote teams efficient and productive despite different time zones. * What tools to use to manage virtual workshops * How Design Sprints help bring ideas and thoughts directly into virtual collaboration. * What is Design Mindset, Design Thinking and how to use it.
Quotes from the episode: "You have a lot of methodologies, you have a lot of tools, but you always have to figure out which are the right tools for your project."
"If you're going to be doing a marketing piece or a product and you're not thinking about your audience or who's going to use it, then why do you do it? They're going to ignore it. It's not going to be useful for them."
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. A couple of months ago, I talked about The Business Benefit of Taking a Break, and someone left a comment about it on LinkedIn, which I liked very much. This year hasn't been easy for any of us, and since we are getting closer to 2021, I thought we could all learn how to take a break and make the most out it. So I've decided to do a sequel on the same topic, and I want you to hear what my guest has to say.
Meet Jen Carroll, a marketing strategist at Data Dames Marketing, a consultancy she owns together with her business partner Annalisa Hilliard. Jen has been in advertising and marketing since 1996, and she has held both in-house and agency positions - all-around content, social media and media relations. Jen also owned a freelance content marketing business for ten years.
In this episode: • How to keep the momentum in a crisis, and still enjoying the process, while adjusting a business model.
• Why it's important to step back from the content creation process to make it more intentional and targeted.
• What are the steps that Jen and Annalisa took to get to a certain point to move forward.
• How to recognize the a-ha moment and what happens when that moment leads to a different vision.
• What is the role of having a proper messaging framework setup.
• Why it's essential to face the fears, challenges and struggles before moving on with a new strategy.
Quotes from the episode: "Of course we need to cover our bills, we need to make some money, but this is not just about making a profit. We needed to understand and believe in ourselves about the value that we could bring to the table."
"I can talk about a lot of years I've spent in my life just being very busy, but not being strategic. And I think taking a break allows you that space you need."
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a very special guest today. Joining us to talk about how to win back customers and regain their trust, Jay Baer. Jay is founder of Convince & Convert, an author and a speaker.
In fact, a great, great speaker that was inducted to the Speaker Hall of Fame by National Speakers Association and has published four books. I think. I lost count. And the last one was Talk Triggers.
In this episode: * What are the new challenges for marketers * What is the role of customer experience in shaping sales * How to use the unknown to create new connections and customers' habits * In what ways 'the new normal' situation shapes customer needs and behavior * What can marketers do to adapt their budgets * How to rewire customer relationships using data and information * how can businesses adjust to an era of never seeing their customer face to face (ever again)
Quotes from the episode: "The most important thing that marketers can do is to understand that in a way that we've never experienced before nobody knows nothing about nothing anymore."
"You probably didn't see the pandemic coming, but the fact that customers are going to want everything digital and super fast and low touch and efficient like we've been talking about this for a decade."
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I am interviewing a special guest from Amazon: Darrell Alfonso. Let’s get started!
Darrell has been in B2B marketing for almost ten years. He is the Global Marketing Operations Manager at Amazon Web Services, empowering hundreds of marketers to create exceptional digital experiences for Amazon customers. Darrell is a Marketo Champion and advisor to multiple different Fortune 500 companies.
In this episode: * What is a marketing automation * How to start with marketing automation * How can businesses use automation to assist customer journey and improve touchpoints? * What are the top challenges in either implementing marketing automation or maintaining it? * The importance of understanding technology that businesses need to use * What should marketing automation managers do to quantify their impact on revenue * How can marketing automation help with obtaining high quality leads for sales * How to stay on top of new tech and business skills
Quotes from the episode: “Customers are different depending on your industry, product and service. The way that you implement marketing automation must be very custom and tailored to your organization.”
“One thing that I saw early on and why I chose marketing automation was because of how in-demand it was and how critical it was to most of the things that marketing does. “
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Today I have a special, special, guest. It’s a very good friend, Michael Brenner. And he's a CMO influencer, motivational speaker. He is the owner of the Marketing Insider Group. There's a lot of useful contents regarding content marketing, search marketing. So anything digital marketing related. Michael is also a speaker and author, former marketing leader (SAP, Nielsen, Startups), helping companies attract and win new customers with strategic content.
In this episode: * How is the B2B marketing landscape doing as a whole in the changing environment * How can marketers use the context to win new customers * What are the benefits of sales and marketing alignment and using ABM * What should marketers and brands focus on when reaching out to customers * How to shift the focus on customer retention * When making changes what should marketers do first * What questions should marketers ask what should they be doing at a tactical level for 2021
Quotes from the episode: "The best way to get profit is to focus on customers, and the best team that can lead that transformation is marketing."
"Have a plan to address those [sales] challenges, create the context for your solutions. And ask the sales team what their greatest challenges are. Quantify and create strategies to address them. That's it? Simple stuff."
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Today I have a very special guest: Jeff Coyle. I’m not going to tell you what he does. I’m going to have him tell his story, and we will be talking about AI and content marketing and AI-based content management tool.
Jeff is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer for Market Muse. He’s been in the content strategy, content marketing lead gen and search engine optimization game for about 21 years. Jeff is also one of the first people who were selling leads to B2B technology companies before people even had content, convincing large multinational B2B companies to write white papers and syndicate them.
So welcome, Jeff!
In this episode: * Learn more about Market Muse technology * How can you use artificial intelligence to create better content * What are the benefits of content marketing created by using AI technology * The importance of having content marketing not only written but to tell a story * How to use technology to produce content that is connecting with business goals * Is there a way to predict how content will perform, and quantify the content ROI * What are the innovations in content automation and technology
Quotes from the episode: “All of our natural language processing and natural language generation is all proprietary, built by us. All the models built by us. GPT3 is one of the most amazing innovations in artificial intelligence, of all time!”
“We have teams that get thousands of content groups, and they basically provide an outline or a single source of truth for the writer. So when the writer produces, they can focus on being creative. They can focus on being the expert that you’re paying them for, not doing stuff that they don’t want to do.”
-------------- If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Hello, everyone! A listener, Ron, sent me a question. He asked me, “Hey, my company doesn't have sales enablement group. Do we need one?” Well, Ron, that's a great question.
The need of sales enablement really depends on your sales team and who is doing what to support sales. Chances are, I would say that you already have sales enablement type of functions in your company, but it's really not called sales enablement. Does that make sense? Probably it's part of sales, operations, it's part of marketing or it's part of the product marketing team. They are jobs being done, but it's just not necessarily calling it sales enablement.
For example, most of the sales enablement is about training sales how to sell and to know the products or even onboard them when they start. Someone or a group of people are probably already doing that. Right? In some cases, marketers are working very closely with inside sales to supply them messaging, sales collateral, a sales deck, or email templates to enable the sales team. Maybe you have marketing people pretty much stay on top of that and doing a certain function or portion of a sales enablement job, but they are not part of the sales team.
Part of sales is about making sure that sales have necessary sales tools and the processes so they can do their jobs. And that can also be part of a sales enablement or sales operations job. Possibly somebody is already working on sales tools and sales process sourcing and also implementation.
I suggest that you check who is doing what and how the sales team is supported to determine if you need a sales enablement group. Like I said, sales enablement is defined differently by different companies. Also many companies have sales supports being done by different internal groups. Right? Kind of like a virtual team: marketing is working on collateral finance, maybe helping on sales forecast, HR is working on sales incentive. They are all doing their job to support sales.
You need to identify the gaps that the sales need help and then determine who should do it. If you can get other stakeholders to do it, great. If not, do you need to hire someone or build a team? And that's pretty much a head count and budget discussion with the management.
So I hope I answer your question Ron. Do you have a sales enablement team in your company? And what do they do? Share that with me.
If you enjoy my podcast, I’d appreciate it if you leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or my website: pamdidner.com. If you think this is useful, please share it with your colleagues and friends. I also love to hear from my listeners. Join my Facebook Community Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. I’d answer any marketing questions you had—I mean any marketing questions. You ask, I answer.
See you there. Have a great week.
I have a special treat for you today. So rather than listen to me talking, I invited a special guest to join us. Priscilla McKinney, founder of Little Bird Marketing, join us from Galena, Kansas.
Priscilla has a degree in Cultural Anthropology, and her work is at the intersection of marketing, business and market research. She is curious about life, people, places, culture and the interconnectivity of it all. Intrigued by human behavior, she asks the hard questions while seeking to understand what makes people engage, why we buy what we buy and how we justify buying it.
In this episode: * What is social selling and why it's important * Why it's essential to focus on your humanity during social selling and how to do that * Who is responsible for social selling within the company * How to create the right content, in the proper format, and make it available for the audience. * In what ways good company culture and talent management affects social selling * What is the connection between brand advocacy and social selling. * What should be the focus of social selling * How to embark on social selling, and engage with potential customers * What are the specific channels that B2B people should use for social selling
Quotes from the episode: "What I like to remind people is what social selling is not, and it is not actually taking some of the same old school slimy salesy, always-be-closing-approaches and just moving them onto social. Instead, Social selling might use the technology of social media, but it is first and foremost human, it's collaborative, and it's connective."
"Social selling understands that people are not out there having a linear experience in selling, that they go zigzag around, they need to know people and things build on each other in a far more organic way."
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. I interviewed Neal Schaffer on my past week’s podcast. What do you think? Like I said, I am planning to juxtapose the episodes of me talking for 7 minutes at a time with guest interviews. Just want to try something new.
If there are guests that you want to hear from, please send me a quick email at hello@pamdidner.com and add the questions you want to ask them. This way, I get a chance to meet new people and you get your questions answered. #winwin I am more than happy to do all the logistics to reach out.
For today, I want to talk about a topic that is not getting much of the spotlight in the marketing landscape: processes and automation workflows. You are like: “Ugh, Pam, can you talk about something that is more sexy and fun? Like how to select creative that will pop? Or what are the tips and tricks to writing catchy headlines? How to run Facebook pay ads that will convert?” Well, if you Google those topics, you’ll find many, many outstanding blogs and videos out there that cover these topics.
One thing I do want to share with you, though: you can read forever, but at the end of the day, you need to practice and implement. That’s the best way to learn. So if you have budget and don’t want to do the work, that’s OK. Once you’ve done your reading, internalize the takeaways well enough to provide clear guidance to your agencies and the contractors so that they can do a great job for you. If you don’t want to do it, you are still responsible to convey your marketing visions and ideas clearly.
Creative, design, writing, and anything content related is what you see on the front-end. I get it. We, marketers, tend to focus on the front-end and leave the back-end to IT and operations. However, for digital marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience, you need to plan out how the back-end will integrate with the front-end. So you cannot separate: “well front end is my job and the back-end is someone else’s job.”
For instance, when people click “contact us,” what is the next step that needs to happen? IT and operations cannot tell you that. That’s your job to figure it out. When people sign up for your app, what email notification should they receive the first hour, the 2nd day, and the 7th day. Again, IT and operations cannot tell you that. You need to figure that out.
How should their data be captured? That has a lot to do with how you are going to get your analytics. Will that be part of CRM, marketing automation, or the customer data warehouse? You need to make a decision about how the data will flow. You need to make sure that all these systems can talk to each other. For that, you need to get involved on the back-end to understand how data flows and what steps are manual or automated. You need to make that call.
I’m not saying you need to code, but you do need to design the customer experience.
You need to answer such question as
- When to send the registrant email out?
- When to contact the customer when they sign up for the event?
- How to further engage and nurture them after the event?
When you address these questions, you need to set up steps and process in your systems so that actions are taken when the customers act or engage. All these require some strategic thinking to ensure a smooth online experience. From on-site events or webinars, to post-event follow-up, timely email outreach, to sales engagement, you need to visualize the process and pave the journey for your customers. Then you can have someone either code it or build a workflow to connect various systems to ensure it happens the way you envision.
None of this just happens magically. It requires you to plan, think through the permutations and work on the back-end and front-end integration. I am doing that for myself and my clients. It’s tedious: testing, retesting, constantly changing the workflows, and anticipating problems. And the systems they don’t just work themselves out. Once you start going live, trust me, you run into a new of set of user issues that you don’t expect. That’s the type of tedious, detailed work that no marketers want to talk about. I hate telling you this but those processes and workflows will make or break your digital marketing.
You are like, “Pam, you are stressing me out? So, what can I do?” Well, it actually depends on your job. For some of you, you probably never have to deal with the back-end. Lucky YOU! I know some content marketers just need to write the content, upload content to WordPress and check on Google Analytics. That’s it. Great!!
I also know some event marketing managers that only need to worry about everything on-site, but nothing pre- or post- events. They have other members who will take care of that for them. Well, you know what, with no physical events at this time, many of those event marketing managers are forced to change and they need to build something online for events to work! And that something is really the back-end--sourcing the different platforms, integrating the process with a different system. It’s a lot of work!
So regardless of your current responsibilities, I strongly suggest that you make an effort to learn how marketing as a whole works in your company. Your marketing departments may run paid social, events, email campaigns, create blog posts and videos. Try to understand how everything works. Try to understand what tools are used and how they tie together (or fail to tie together.)
I encourage the marketing managers I coach to draw workflows as a way of putting their understanding of the back-end to the test. The way I see it, if you can explain your understanding in a logical flowchart, it means that you understand how things work. The biggest benefit of understanding how things work is to help connect the different dots and give you the ability to think strategically. Workflows will help you see the good, the bad, and the ugly of your digital marketing. You know where to go to get the data and you also know where the gaps are.
Yes, it’s tedious and boring, but make an effort to understand the backend. You won’t regret it.
The understanding of the processes behind-the-scenes will help you identify what you can do to improve the front and back-end together.
Again, thank you for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is one-way communication. I don’t necessarily know who you are, but your support means a great deal to me. Feel free to ask questions on my FB community: “Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.” And when you join, you can get a free Tall Starbucks on me. I added a gift card with a barcode. You can find that in the announcement page.
Again, love to hear from you. If you venture out be safe and stay healthy. Take care. Bye-bye!
I interviewed Neal Schaffer, who is a social media and influencer marketing expert. Neal teaches digital media to executives at Rutgers Business School, the Irish Management Institute (Ireland), and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). He is fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, and he is also the author of 3 books on social media. Neal recently published his fourth book, The Age of Influence, and is already thinking about his fifth book! #Amazing
In this episode: * Definition of influencer marketing * Differences between employee advocacy and influencer marketing. * How is influencer marketing different from usual social media and social selling * How to encourage the employees to be the brand ambassador, and also being the influencer of their own. * Learn more about different levels and spheres of influences * What are some specific criteria that can help companies source influencers * What should companies do to leverage influencer marketing?
Listen to the podcast, get some fresh influencer marketing tips, check out Neal’s new book and find out about the habit that he picked up that he would have never expected due to COVID 19!
Quotes from the episode: “The problem that brands fall into is when they reach out to very influential people, but maybe they’ve never heard of that company, it ends up being transactional, and it ends up being onetime.”
“I think there are a few different pitfalls that companies need to avoid. The first one is a lot of companies simply work with the wrong people.”
If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.
Hello from Portland, Oregon!
During the pandemic, many people turn to podcasting or video recording as a creative outlet. I, on the other hand, moved inward and started to focus on my mind and my emotions. I haven't completely shut down or gone off grid. I still work on my client projects. I continued to get on Zoom for business and the personal gatherings. I still create content, but only limited to my monthly webinars and the pre-committed speaking engagements.
To manage my emotion and my stress, I made an intentional effort not to worry too much, even though the business has been down. But following that premise willing too much, I took very proactive look of the overall financial health of my business and created a plan for the worst case scenario, such as what if I didn't meet my revenue goal for second half 2020. What should I do? Right.
Once I have a plan in place and I know what to do and what I can control, I stopped worrying. Now, if it happens, I have a plan. I know exactly what I need to do. Then subconsciously, I just decided to let go of that podcasting goal, that video recording goal, that my writing goal, just for a little while. Like I said, it was not planned, it just happened and I kind of went with that flow.
Speaking of focusing in where I spent a lot of time thinking, thinking about my business, thinking about where I want to be in next several years, thinking about what type of content to create moving forward. And thinking about whether I need to modify my current value proposition--and if I do, how do I pivot, what do I need to change? And I also think about the work and life balance, and I've been spending way too many hours working in the past six years. So I kind of just let my mind wander here and there without much direction.
Oh, by the way. I also think about what I want to eat every day (laughs). I'm not much of a cook, but I love to eat when I'm sad. I eat when I'm angry, I eat when I'm depressed, I eat when I'm happy I eat. When I'm with my friends, I eat. All right. And I love to try different restaurants. So when the restaurants were closed, doing COVID, man, that was hard for me.
Thank God. My husband started baking and cooking. I don't know what happened to him and I'm not going to ask, but I'm so happy he started doing that. And I am his worst critic. Like if he creates something and I was like, “Oh my God, this is not good. Can you just go back to a kitchen and fix that? Otherwise don’t come back.” No, I'm kidding. I did say that occasionally, you know, in a very joking semi-serious type of way.
But either way, I'm very grateful that he cooks and I'm just being a critic. It's fantastic. Oh, by the way, we love, we love “Great British Baking Show.” Have you seen that show? It's fantastic. We watched 10 seasons straight and you can say that I stopped creating content and then stopped consuming massive, I mean, massive amounts of content on Netflix and Amazon Prime—aka: binge watching shows. I guess that's kind of like the trends like everybody's doing. I certainly can check off binge watching shows on my 2020 list.
But, you know, even though I've been thinking a lot and thinking is nothing without execution, right. Because I can think all the time, but if I don't on it, it's kind of like a fart or thin air. So here's one thing out of this whole, let-my-mind-flow-randomly process. I came up with one idea and this is related to a podcast. So I'm thinking I've been doing the seven minutes kind of podcasting format for about three years and you'll be hearing me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Thank you so much. Moving forward. I was still sharing my thoughts and my ideas, but I like to juxtapose that with guest interviews--the length will be around 15 minutes with three to five questions. You can hear other people's point of view and we can all learn together from them. What do you think? I want to try that and to get your feedback.
All right. So you are going to hear several interviews in the next several weeks, so check it out and I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback.
Another thinking ideas that I did is I started to reevaluate my own website and I look into my current value proposition is a clear enough is anything I need to be fine. And also I need to change due to the current environment. And there are a couple of things I made changes. And they are changed to accommodate the current situation at the same time optimize for SEO. For example, I offer strategic planning, account based marketing, content marketing, and the Martech integration and evaluation, so I create a separate page to talk about what I do for each of this topic. And that that will make it very clear. It's articulate, again, my offering in a way that people can understand at the same time optimize for search.
Another thing I did is for my book page. So in the past I listed three books on one page. So that very long page. Now I broke that down into three separate pages for three different books. Again, you know, articulate my positioning a little better at the same time optimize for SEO.
Another thing I did is the speaking page, which is obviously it was tailor for face-to-face conferences and trade shows and events. Now all that has stopped. And so I changed the heading and add it online and also virtual a virtual events as a part of my offering. Again, looking into the current environment and optimize my website accordingly.
And you know, to be honest with you, many brands are changing that they are onsite rule to accommodate or comply with social distancing. And you should talk about what your stores are doing or your brains are doing on the specific situation like this. And make that very clear and does share that on your website, so you people know that you are doing everything to keep them safe. That's another form of a content marketing.
So here are some of the changes I made and by thinking and let my mind wander around. So what about you? What have you been doing in the past 10 to 12 weeks? And you're working hard. Are you hardly working? or are you enjoying your time with your family or you just want to get away from them for a long period of time? I get it. Or you’re just spending way too much time, like me watching Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Some of my friend actually went off grid. They literally just take a break away from computer and not really looking into a social media stuff. And I really admire that. So whatever you did, I hope you are healthy and safe.
Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is a one-way communication. I don't necessarily know who you are, but your support means a great deal to me. If you want to chat, reach out to me on any social media channel. Not Tik Tok top. Okay. I'm not on Tik Tok.
You can also join me on Facebook community Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you can get a free tall Starbucks on me. I place a gift card with a barcode on the side. You can find that in the Announcements page. Please use it. Right.
Love to hear from you. If you venture out, be safe and stay healthy. Take care. Bye bye.
Hello, everyone. Back in October 2019, I recorded a podcast episode. Episode 107: How to Cultivate and Expand Your Strategic Thinking. What I want to do today is to share with you an example of what I did with a client to help her explore more ideas to expand her team’s charter and scope which is one way to help her think differently and drive strategic conversation with VP of her group.
So let’s do a quick review in terms of what I shared with you in EP 107 on how to cultivate strategic thinking. There are a couple thing I mentioned--3 points, if you will.
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Think from the perspective of “why and what,” not “how.” Explain that to your management well before you go into details.
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Communicate in a way that senior managers can understand. So obviously senior managers care about costs and efficiencies. Or they care about success metrics. So whatever you discuss you need to tie with that so that they can understand how you make an impact to their metrics.
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Help senior management connect the dots. Especially in the digital world, all the back end, or technology are inter-related. For many traditional sales and marketing managers, they didn’t grow up with digital natively. It’s very hard for them to understand how the back end are connected and you need to explain it in a way that they can understand and help them connect the dots.
Now, here is an example I worked on with my client. She is a director of content for a large SaaS-based service platform company. Even though she is a director of content, she doesn’t really focus on content marketing within the agency, she more focuses on providing content marketing training and workshop for customers. So it’s kind of like a post-sales, contract fulfillment type of things that a lot of their customers when they sign a contract with this specific company, part of the contract is for the company to provide content marketing trainings and workshops for these customers. So her team is basically trying to fulfill that contract commitment.
Her manager constantly asks her on how to scale without increasing her team’s headcount. She is struggling to come up some ideas to drive the conversation with her management.
After several conversations, here is what I suggested her to do:
Option 1: (This is probably the pie in the sky) She can productize her workshop offering as a profit center. At this time she’s a cost center. And what if she can standardize some of her workshop offering and make that a paid program? So she can standardized a package and make it a certification program—she can certify facilitators and then it's a train-the-trainer approach. Because she has a proven methodology why don’t we turn that into some type of certification program, It could be a 3-day workshop to be certified trainer and then those trainers can actually train or provide the workshop for their own companies. So it’s a pay program.
So I mentioned that her and she was like, “oh, that’s kind of interesting,” I told her she doesn’t have to take a big initiative initially. What she can do is take a small step: I told her that she doesn’t need to start big on this. Start with a discovery project. Define the types of workshops that can be customized or standardized. Then she can publish a recommendation to determine if it's feasible to create a certification program or identify the types of workshops that can be standardized. Because once you standardize, your team can do more workshops to actually support more accounts.
Option 2: Continue to be a value-add part of contract agreements, but scale fast and furiously. What I am trying to say is look into workshops she’s already done. And I mentioned about standardized package. She can have her team act as a coach to work with these trainers. So the team doesn’t have to do a lot of workshops, but have the team work as a coach on the sideline and work with the trainer so the trainers can do the workshop on their own for their companies.
Basically, this can help your team scale to support more accounts. It’s a slightly different business model than option 1.
Option 3: Outsourcing. So her team is currently at full capacity and I recommended outsourcing some of the workshops to trained and experienced facilitators. And also use existing materials that she uses to train new hires to train these contracted facilitators or agency so she doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
She took my suggestions and made that part of the annual planning discussion. According to her, the chances of turning her team into a profit center is pretty slim, but she wants to mention to her management to continue to think about how she can morph and expand her offering and also her team’s capabilities. However, the outsourcing model is certainly a great option to expand her team’s to support more accounts.
I work closely with multiple clients to help them on their marketing plans and identify potential areas that their groups can expand to get additional headcount and budget. If this is something where you need help, please reach out.
For the time being be well and let’s connect again next week. Take care!
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. I want to talk about something totally different this week.
I’ve been going through a lot of changes lately on both the business and the personal levels. Well, all of us are going through a lot of changes. Heck, our country is going through massive change to try to co-exist with COVID-19 safely, and even on how to reform our policing structure after recent protests.
All of us are stressed in our own way. If you have a job and your company is doing well, your managers are asking you to take on more. If you have a job and your company is not doing well, your managers are asking you to do more with less. If you don’t have a job, you are working hard online and offline to find a job. If you are working for yourself like me, you are hustling even more to get additional businesses, because we just don’t know what else is going to happen next and how that will impact our cash flow.
And I am only talking about the professional front that we all have to deal with, I haven’t even touched on the stuff that we have to deal with in our personal lives! Many of us have children and aging parents that we care for while working full-time at home. On top of it, everywhere we go, there are new rules and new processes that we need to follow.
I went to see my dentist. You know what? it was not an easy walk-in anymore. I waited in my car until my appointment. Then, they took my temperature, I needed to wash my hands and clean my mouth with mouthwash for 60 seconds. My hygienist wore a full-on face shield, in addition to a N95 mask, to welcome me. I couldn’t even see Barbara’s smile. There is a new safety procedure for everything we do now. Everything that is familiar is eerily unfamiliar.
When things are tough, most of us want to hold on to something familiar to help us cope. Ever since the beginning of March, there has been no familiar daily routine (I’m speaking for myself now) that I can hold on to except possibly the routine of getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night. Sounds sad, doesn’t it.
Most of my listeners, I call you my B2B marketing peeps. You guys tend to be on the quiet side, incredibly professional and all about get-things-done. I’ve rarely heard any B2B marketers complain (except me! I complain A LOT!). Even when headcount and budgets were tight, you guys tend to tough it out and do what we can with what we have. I love B2B marketers.
Now, I am coping. You are, too! We are all coping.
When you are stressed or frustrated with the situation, always remember that you are not alone. Don’t get fooled by all the perfect FB or Instagram photos. Privately, they are also doing the best they can to cope mentally and physically.
But there is one thing I am completely tired of. I am tired of virtual happy hours, virtual dinners, virtual workout, and non-stop virtual meetings. I am tired of the pizza commercials showing various family members eating pizza together on Zoom—and happy! You know they’re not. I actually prefer just eating my pizza and watching Netflix. Am I venting?
This is episode 134, but it’s the first episode I’ve ever recorded in which I am not addressing a marketing topic. I hope you are OK with that.
At this point, I am longing for the day when I can meet my friends; that we can casually sit next to me, we can hug each other freely, and talk trash without masks. I am sure that day will come. While we are impatiently waiting for that day to arrive, unleash your stress and frustration and let it out. You’ll feel better and I’ll feel better for you.
Again, thank you for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is one-way communication. But I’d love to carry a conversation with you, online of course. You can do that by joining my FB community: “Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.” And when you join, you can get a free Tall Starbucks on me. I added a gift card with a barcode that you can use.
Again, love to hear from you. Meanwhile, stay healthy and be safe.
Take care.
I received an interesting question the other day: “Hey Pam, what is your approach of creating a sales enablement plan?”
Great question. I actually have a workshop on how to create a scalable global content marketing plan. So there are some similarities between creating a marketing plan and a sales enablement plan. The bottom line is certain kind of element, or what I call “the skeleton” of the plans stays the same. So let’s talk about this a little but more.
The first thing I want to get clear is the purpose and the audience of the plan. This is something you should always know. Who are you creating the plan for? And also what is the purpose of the plan? Any plan tends to be for internal communication and usage. We create a plan to get buy-in from management so that we can get budget and headcount and/or we create a plan to rally the internal and external teams so we can move toward the same direction to achieve the same goals.
And most of us create the plan to let management know what we are going to do and to accomplish the overall company goals. So, with that in mind, your plan should be short and get-to-the-point. And here are some things I would include in my plan.
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Make sure your sales enablement plan ties in with the company’s sales objectives. Let’s assume sales enablement is part of the sales operations. You need to be sure that you are able to show the connection between your objectives and company business objective. The key is to show management what you do does has an impact on sales as a whole.
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Categorize your tasks into initiatives or strategies. We all have tasks that we do. I’ve come to realize that management doesn’t want to understand the laundry list of things we do on a daily basis. Is it possible to elevate them to a higher-level strategy? For example: the task you do is customer event management. But the key strategy is to scale ABM efforts to top 50 accounts. And the event management is actually one of the tactics underneath that. So Focus on communicating your strategies and initiatives with management and nest your tasks under that. So, don’t give them a list of the task that you have to do. That would just overwhelm them. They’ll literally shut off right there. “OK, that’s way too much information for me.”
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Provide high-level key deliverables timeline. Management wants to see the deliverables you get done. Please don’t show that you are doing a campaign from April to June. Show when they will see your first campaign result; is it on 4/30 or 6/30? So show the high-level key deliverable date, not just a bar to show “oh, I’m running a campaign from April to June.”
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Identify metrics for each initiative and strategies. For key strategies, what are the key results? What are the key success metrics? For example: to scale ABM to 50 accounts. Well that’s good. Maybe your key results are 35 customer events, two ABM-specific campaigns that generate 50 leads. So you need to be very specific in how you measure success. And you make sure that your metrics can be tied to the initiatives and the strategies.
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Communicate proposed budget and headcount. Depending on where you are in terms of your planning stage, if you are at the initial planning stage you probably will need to propose the head counts or the budgets needed to do your job. But if your plan is approved, I still recommend that you share your actual spend information with your management as a part of a planning update to show them not just the results and how much money you spent (are you over the budget or under the budget. It depends on which stages of planning you are in.
That’s my suggestion to create a sales enablement plan. Tie your objectives to sales objectives. Craft your strategy and initiatives. Articulate your key measurements and provide timely report outs.
So what does your sales enablement plan look like? I’d love to showcase your plan. I would love to share that on my podcast and or video. YouTube is the place to go and find my channel by typing “Pam Didner” and I’ll mention your name and give you credit.
Be well. And let’s talk again next week.
Hello, welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. Last week, I said that I had one marketing takeaway from the pandemic. Well, I actually have two.
Let’s talk about what I said last week. I shared that it’s important to update your marketing plan when the economy is opening up. This time around, it’s important to re-evaluate your customer’s behavior changes, understand what behavior changes are permanent, and how they affect customers’ buying decisions and the usage of your products and services. Use that insight to update your buyer personas.
Another element which goes side-by-side with buyer personas is your messaging frameworks. Since the customers’ behaviors have changed, you need to review your messaging frameworks and determine if the value propositions, talking points, positioning need to be changed accordingly.
In the previous podcast, my key marketing takeaway was that you need to refresh and update your buyer personas and messaging frameworks before revising your marketing plan.
So here’s another takeaway that I want to address in this episode is the need of building a marketing continuity plan. We’ve heard of a Business Continuity Plan.
So, what is a Business Continuity Plan? I like this definition from IBM’s website.
“A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that outlines how a business will continue operating during an uncertain disruption in service.”
In the IBM’s blog post, it goes on to explain:
“It’s more comprehensive than a disaster recovery plan and contains contingencies for business processes, assets, human resources and business partners – every aspect of the business that might be affected.”
That sounds complicated!
If we have a Business Continuity Plan for our company, why shouldn’t we have a Marketing Continuity Plan?
So, naturally following the definition above, I crafted a definition for a Marketing Continuity Plan.
“A marketing continuity plan is a document that outlines how marketing will continue operating during a sudden disruption in service.
The plan should address every aspect of marketing that might be affected. The plan should contain a checklist to evaluate creative, copy, and communications in owned, earned, paid, and social media channels. It should also include key decision-makers and representatives from each marketing function. And a frequent huddle will be activated for the duration of a crisis.”
Do you like that definition? I like it very much! Of course, I created it!
During the pandemic, many marketing teams started a daily marketing huddle to ensure close communications. Key players or representatives from management, social media, PR, email, paid media, product marketing, web, content, demand gen, or data analytics work together to address any urgent issues.
The initial daily huddles tended to last for hours since many issues needed to be addressed at first. The team would discuss the current issues of the day, such as:
- Share what social media content is going out?
- Discuss currently running ads and proposed replacement ads
- Brainstorm creative outreach
- Modify talking points or messaging
- Review data analytics to see what worked or didn’t work
- Address “help needed” from team members at the tactical or execution level
- Communicate key initiatives and adjusted priorities
And over time, the number of issues declined, and meeting times could be reduced to 15 or 30 minutes.
Here is what you can do if you have a daily huddle. Take the time to observe what you did and document it. Answer the following questions
- What were the key topics addressed during the crisis?
- How did the team reach certain decisions?
- What data was needed to make these decisions?
- Who were the decision-makers?
- What help was needed at the tactical and execution level?
- What templates worked the best to communicate with upper management or to convey tactical information?
- How did we decide on budget allocation?
You can turn it—your whole process during the pandemic--into the documented marketing playbook for crisis management, which is the marketing version of a Business Continuity Plan.
Viola, now you have a documented process to help marketing move forward and faster next time. Well, let’s hope there is no next time.
If you need help creating a Marketing Continuity Plan, please reach out. On several occasions, I’ve worked with clients to modify their existing marketing processes and help document actionable marketing continuity plans so that they could focus on important priorities such as creative, marketing planning and outbound executions.
Again, if you have any questions, reach out to me via pamdidner.com
As you venture out, please continue to stay safe and healthy.
Talk to you next time, take care.
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I talked to many marketers in the past 6-8 weeks. All of us are looking forward to the re-opening of the economy. Yay! #can’twait
Update the buyer personas and messaging frameworks
In the previous episode, I talked about the need to update your marketing plan to align with the reopening. I called out that don’t revise your marketing plan for the sake of revising; you need to understand the behavior changes of your customers which leads to the need to update your buyer personas. B2B customers don’t usually change our behaviors that often so we don’t usually update our buyer personas.
However, I think it’s important to evaluate your customers especially after the pandemic. Understand if there are any behavioral changes you have to take into account. And by the way, the behavioral changes may or may not have an impact on how they use your products. And if there’s a change in how they use your project, another factor you need to look into is your messaging framework. You need to determine if your value proposition and talking points need to change or not. So, evaluating your messaging framework and buyers personas are critical pre-requisites before updating your marketing plan.
Another capability that’s important for marketers to possess is to be nimble and move quickly. You need to develop the ability to think strategically so that you can connect the dots swiftly and identify what needs to change when a crisis strikes.
To help marketers think strategically, I created the “think strategically” series for my monthly webinars from May to August. The whole four months!
In May, I did a webinar on “How to Change Your Marketing Plan Again: Continue to Plan for the Unknown.” I summarized the key points of the webinar in my blog post: Important Templates You Need to Update Your Marketing Plan. So check that out if you are interested. You can check it out on my website, pamdidner.com, and download the templates.
In June: I’d like to talk about the 7 Elements You Should Include to Your Marketing Plan
In July: I’ll touch on the topic of How to Create and Deliver Impressive C-suite Presentations
In August: It’s all about How to Sharpen Your Strategic Thinking Skills
I want to talk about the June webinar a little bit. The topic is about how to create a marketing plan. This is the topic, to be honest with you, that comes up most often during my mentoring sessions with marketing professionals. I thought I’d take a webinar to address it.
If you already have a marketing plan template, GREAT! If you don't, well, it's the time to create one. I simply want to share some critical elements that should be included in the marketing plan, and I'll explain why these elements are vital.
If you have an existing template, you can compare my recommendations with your current templates and determine if it's necessary to refine it. If you don't have one, you can check out my template as a starting point, then customize it based on your company's needs.
To me, one way to judge if a marketer can think strategically is his/her ability to create a solid marketing plan.
After this webinar, you'll be able to:
- Identify the objectives and audience for your marketing plan
- Determine the elements to include in your marketing plan
You can register for any of the webinars by going to my website: pamdidner.com, click on webinars under the Resources tab. You can see the detailed descriptions of each webinar. I hope to see you there.
Many marketers work hard to learn marketing disciplines such as SEO, content marketing, video production, email marketing and more which I call “hard skills.” However, it’s the soft skills such as how to communicate with C-suite and how to ask strategic questions that are hard to possess unless you have numerous opportunities to present in front of senior managers or have an experienced marketing coach to work with you.
I’ll share many key tips at my webinars. Oh, by the way, I recently launched the FB community, B2B Marketing and More. One thing I want to do on the Facebook community is to have some virtual face time to work with a small group of marketers on soft skills or how to use my templates correctly. I am still working through the details, so stay tuned. If you are interested in joining, just go to Facebook and look for B2B Marketing and More.
Again, if you have any questions, reach out anytime. Don’t forget to register the webinars!
Stay healthy and be safe. Talk to you next week. Take care.
Hello, welcome to another pandemic episode of B2B Marketing and More. We are finally seeing the light at the end of tunnel as many states are reopening. Yay! So, are you out and about yet? If you are, have a great time and shop until you drop dead. It’s our official responsibility to stimulate the US economy. I am just having fun with you. But definitely shop, but follow the social distancing rules and stay safe. OK?
So, from this whole drama, there is one giant, giant marketing takeaway out of this unfortunate event. It has to do how I help my clients approach marketing planning.
Many of my clients asked me if they should update their marketing plans, Well, now the states are opening, the economy is probably going back to normal and they just went through a round of marketing plan headcount and budget adjustments during the pandemic.
Now people will start spending again, plus, our company’s business objectives and goals have not changed. Can we keep the marketing plan as it is?
Well, the answer is NO. Hear me out!
For the longest time, I have always advised my clients that marketing plans needs to follow the business goals and objectives to the T. Marketing, ultimately, is about growing the company and helping sales. The business direction certainly guides marketing’s creative, outreach and its overall strategy; the whole nine yards. After strategies are set, marketing works on identifying buyer personas, creating customer journeys, content creation or what not.
But with this pandemic, it made me ponder the validity of my approach. If I think about it, this pandemic has forced all of us to live our lives differently. Everything we’ve taken for granted, like giving our loved ones a hug, going to school, meeting friends for happy hour or going to a graduation ceremony, was completely taken away in a moment.
It has had a huge impact on us mentally and psychologically. Well, I wouldn’t say that it scarred us but, for business professionals who have full-time jobs and need to home-school their children, this whole situation has traumatized them. Just kidding. I have huge respect for people who were doing both. Seriously, you deserve a medal. You are like: “I don’t want a medal, I just want my kids to get out of my house for 8 hours and go to school so that I can sleep!” I get it. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
If you think about it, some behavior changes are permanent. For example, face-to-face customer meetings may be reduced to virtual calls. Less face-to-face to calls and on flight travels. And the physical demos may be moved to online demos.
Our buyers may use different options to communicate with us and the features for our products may be different as well. Therefore, buyer personas need to be updated with our customers new preferences.
Before updating your marketing plan, you need to refresh your buyer personas. And by the way, this is a great standing topic to discuss with your internal teams and agency partners. Everyone will have their point of view and perspective from reading many COVID-19 posts and some have probably talked to sales and customers and will have some great insights. I suggest my clients hold several virtual meetings over virtual happy hours. Talk about the buyer persona changes. Here are some of the questions you can ask.
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What are some of the new normal behaviors for them?
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Do these new normals work for us or against us?
- Most importantly, how do the “new normal” behaviors shape customers’ purchase journeys and their decision-making processes?
If you refresh your buyer personas, you certainly need to re-evaluate your messaging frameworks. You may need to dial up different features of your products due to customers’ behavioral changes.
For example, some product features are great for face-to-face communications but, with remote work, it’s better to emphasize other features that allow quick access on the cloud through mobile devices.
So here’s is my big takeaway from the pandemic:
The refreshed buyer personas and updated messaging frameworks will guide your marketing plan changes. Business goals and objectives are important, but your marketing plan needs to reflect the changes of your customers and the talking points.
I know it has been stressful for all of us marketers. By talking to many of you, I know how challenging your situations are. Some struggle to get clear direction from management, some have lost their jobs. Some have no budget or resources to help them.
I am in the same boat. If it’s hard on the client-side, it’s equally hard on the agency or consultant side.
I created templates to help you sort out your new buyer personas and messaging frameworks. Send an email to hello@pamdidner.com I’ll send you the templates right away.
In the meantime, I mentor individuals and provide training so teams can revise their marketing plans faster and quicker. If you need help, please reach out!
If you venture out, stay healthy and be safe. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.
Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. This episode is about working with sales on account-based marketing. In the current situation, it’s even more important than ever to align with sales to demonstrate marketing’s value-add.
Yes, it’s been more than a month of shelter-in-place for all of us. I didn’t know that staying-at-home could be so exhausting… I am not going to say that we are in this together. Let’s tough it out together. Enjoy the episode. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends.
Good morning from Portland. I had a coffee with a friend yesterday and she asked me what I’ve been working on. I said that I’ve working with a client on the collaboration between sales and marketing, especially on the account-based marketing (ABM). She asked me how to get that started. Her marketing organization doesn’t work closely with sales and it makes sense that she posed the question.
First of all, ABM is a lot of work. There are plenty of things that marketing is doing keep themselves busy, especially with digital marketing integration, marketing research, most importantly, demand generation.
So here are the five steps that you can work with sales to get ABM started.
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Marketer needs to do is to make this as a priority as part of overall marketing plan. This works the best if it’s top down driven. Make sure that senior marketing managers are in conversation with VP of sales and they agree to put resource and headcount to support it. Basically this needs to be a priority between the two groups.
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Sales and Marketing agree on accounts that marketing will support. This can be existing accounts or new accounts. It’s important to agree who these accounts are. I may make this sound easy on the podcast. Trust me, salespeople spend a lot of time identify the top accounts. Frankly, there are AI-based tools out there to help companies identify key accounts to focus to maximize potential revenue. Lead Crunch is one company that uses AI to identify look-like accounts. So agreeing on accounts is also critical before you can move forward.
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Marketing needs to spend time to under these accounts. Marketers focus on personas, but sales focuses on accounts. This is something that Marketing needs to do their homework to understand account-specific intelligence such as: What kind of products are the companies buying from us? Who are the decision makers? Who are the influencers? What are some challenges they encounter? What are their pain points? Their pain points may not be the same as a buyer persona’s pain point. They may be very specific for them in terms of the technology they use. And what is our sales teams game plans to overcome that or drive the conversation with them. So all this is very much account specific. You need to study and understand that. You need to have a conversation with sales about that. Or if they have a platform they use to gather all the email exchanges or some of the information you should go there and check it out. So make an effort to understand the account. This was something I didn’t do very well, when I was supporting sales. Hindsight is 20/20!
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Recommend to Sales what you will do as part of ABM and success metrics: What are you going to do to support them? Are you running hyper-targeted campaigns for them? Are you customizing and creating specific content for the accounts? Or are you doing a customer event? Be clear on what you will do. Whatever you do, please create your success metrics. Be very clear how you want to measure it. I think it’s very important to set up expectation on your key metrics and have sales agree with that.
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Set up a process to implement your ABM effort. No matter what you do, you need a process. It takes time, effort, and money to set up a process to do them. There is no shortcut. If you are doing retargeting, you need to make sure that the back-end from CRM, analytics, content syndication, media buy, to landing pages are all integrated. If you are doing customer events and you need to scale that to 35 events, again you need a process. If you are working on customized collateral, you need a process to make sure that happens. It’s important for you to actually know what needs to be done. And again, everything in terms of ABM, it takes time just to get it started and set up the process to launch it. So be sure you allow the time to do that. And what does that tell you? You have to start your planning early!
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Ok, I covered 5 steps that you need to do get started to work with sales with ABM. The reality is that it takes a lot of time, and a lot of time going back and forth on each of the steps and especially set things up and in the implementation stages. So make sure that you have the time and effort to do it right. A lot of time we are under deadlines and we tend to skip steps or not setting the expectation or try to launch anything in haste and do not have the metrics in place. So make sure that you take your time and have the metrics and process in place when you do your ABM.
So, I hope I answered my friend’s question in terms of how to get ABM started with a Sales Team. What about you? How do you get yourself started on ABM with your sales team? If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.
If you enjoy my podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.
Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
Ok, what have we not seen in the past six weeks? Well, we’ve seen the stock market collapse and bounce back slightly; we have seen virtual proms. Sorry class of 2020, I know this is a horrible time at this point, probably no graduation and no prom. Hang in there. You guys are fantastic.
We have seen Zoom-style virtual happy hours. Even though we’re stay at home it hasn’t stopped us from drinking. Fantastic! And no, we have to line up to get into Costco or Trader Joe’s. I would never have seen that coming.
And I’d not have guessed that the no.1 most sought-out item during the pandemic would be tp. (Really?! Toilet Paper?!). I guess it makes sense. It’s kind of like a safety blankie. It kind of makes us feel safe if we pile it up, we feel like we have a control on the environment. It’s a psychological thing.
So, while working from home, are you continuing to make adjustments or starting to look ahead to the adjustments you need to make as marketers post COVID-19? Have you begun to wonder about what behaviors will quickly revert back after the restrictions are lifted and the types of behaviors that will become the new normal?
Understanding our own behavior changes will help us comprehend why some behaviors can easily be adapted and why some just can’t be molded that easily.
I always tell marketers to connect the dots--to connect the different dots that don’t seem to be related on the surface. The ability to understand your own behavior adaptation patterns can make you better relate your customers’ behavioral changes. Like I said, connecting the dots.
Questions we should ask ourselves about our customers:
- What are some of the new normal behaviors for them?
- Does the new normal work for us or against us?
- How do we need to modify our positioning and messaging?
- What types of content should we create to reflect the new normal? How to communicate our findings with our sales teams?
- Most importantly, how do the “new normal” behaviors shape their purchase journeys and their decision-making processes?
So it a way, we to all need to re-understand our customers again. It’s like a couple who has been married for 20 years. Well, now is the time to re-discover each other to rekindle that romance. Yes, rekindle the romance with our customers.
With that understanding (again, it’s about connecting the dots), you need to:
- Re-plan your overall marketing strategy
- Re-write existing messaging frameworks
- Re-document your buyers’ personas
- Re-update your editorial planning and content production schedule
- Re-communicate changes to different internal stakeholders
- Re-adjust your marketing budget and channel mix
- Re-determine your own KPIs with management buy-in
I created processes and templates for you to re-think all the elements above.
If you are interested, come to my 11:00 am PDT FREE webinar on 5/14. I’ll share the processes and templates and show you how to use them so that you can revise your marketing plan accordingly or at least use the templates as a starting point.
In addition to that, I a few updates.
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For people that signed up for “Ask Pam Anything” hours and couldn’t attend, I sent you a short email of my answers to your marketing questions. If you still have questions, please reach out. I can elaborate.
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I understand it’s been tough for marketers at this time. Budgets have been reduced or are on hold. There has been a lack of clear management direction or, conversely, constant management direction changes due to the uncertainty. If you have any questions or just need someone to talk to, please reach out ANYTIME. (I also work at night, BTW). I am more than happy to provide my thoughts and help you modify my templates for your use. That’s the least I can do during this time to help fellow B2B marketers.
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I started a FB community for B2B marketers for us to ask questions and support each other. If you want to join, please send me a quick email.
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If you and your team are doing very, very well to adapt to current circumstances, GREAT!! Please share your processes with me. Let me promote your stories and share your successes. We all need some good news and sharing is caring. If you haven’t seen the “Some Good News” episodes with John Krasinski you need to. I love John.
If there is anything I can do to help out, please send your suggestions. I’m all ears. (Well, just the two really, but I am listening. I am!)
It’s a tough time, but remember, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Ok, total cliche, but true.
Stay healthy and be safe. We’ll talk to each other soon.
Hello, this is Pam. Welcome to another pandemic episode of B2B Marketing and More.
IN this episode I am going to talk about a question I received after attending the Social Media Strategies Summit “Ask Anything” webinar. Here is the question from Lauren:
I work for a non-profit organization. In the current situation, what’s the appropriate way to ask for donations? or is it not at all?
Lauren, I love your question. Frankly, I can modify this question for salespeople: I need to reach out to prospects to build up my sales pipelines, is it appropriate to do cold prospecting or not at all?
So the truth is, we are all asking ourselves the same questions and trying to figure out what is appropriate for our own target markets and audiences. We are all looking for answers and trying to figure out appropriate actions. We’re asking what is the right thing to do, even myself.
So before answering Lauren’s question I shared this blog post with her. The name sof the blog post is 5 Media Principles Guiding Google’s Media Team in the Wake of the COVID-19 outbreak from Joshua Spanier. He made it very clear that there is no playbook for times like these, I 100% agree. So here is what he’s found is that crisis can provide clarity.
Here are the 5 principles that his media team follows and I thought it applies to marketing and sales teams:
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Context, always: You need to ask yourself: “In what instances are you comfortable putting your brands alongside news content?” “Do people care about your products at this time?” If your products can help them, how can they help at this time? Can you put it in the right context? Context is everything.
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Constantly reassess: Things change on a daily basis. You need to stay on top of it. Most of us have some sort of editorial planning. For myself, we plan our editorial 1-2 weeks in advance. I have clients plan their content planning 6-8 months in advance. Given that things change on a regular basis, what we plan one week ago may not apply now. We can pre-schedule your communications, but be prepared to make changes the last minutes, because it may no longer be appropriate today.
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Creative consideration: Given that Joshua manages the global media team, creative does matters. For all of us, both creative and copywriting matter. What we say, how we say and what images or videos we use to illustrate that our points are more important than ever. The way we communicate need to be sympathetic, respectful, and supportive. Our creative and copywriting needs to reflect that. Many B2B marketers are so accustomed to buttoned up communications (me included), but now is the time to be up close and personal.
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Constant priority changes: B2B marketers are so used to planning (I’m talking about me!). We plan our product launches months in advance. We start planning 6-8 months before our big events. Our editorial is likely to be planned out 2-4 weeks in advance. Well, you know what? Planning still matters. But we need to be nimble enough that we need to re-align with ever changing priorities from management. It’s not that they want to make changes, but a situation requires them to do that. We just need to be cognizant of that.
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Contribution and be helpful: When you are online, you’ll notice a great many SaaS-based platforms are offering their platforms for free. Many paid courses and books are free as well. Some organizations are donating their time and money to help front-line workers or fund pandemic research. All these can be talking points that you can share as a part of marketing communications, but be careful how you phrase it. And another thing is pricing changes or product offering change impact messaging, sales talking points, even content and copy we show on our websites and social media channels. It means that we need to update our webpages, and refresh or update our content everywhere. It’s a lot of work and can be overwhelming. I get it.
I told Lauren there are two principles that are critical for her to be aware of: put it in the right context and be helpful. Is there way she can think of reaching out to her donors in the right context? If she can’t think of anything on her own, can she brainstorm with her team or management? Get others to help her come up with creative ideas. Again, put it in the right context.
In this trying time, what we say and how we say it matters. I told Lauren that she knows her donors well, she needs to trust her gut on how and what is the best way to reach out at this time.
BTW, I also shared the following ‘excerpt with her. This is a response to a question on Reddit that’s similar to Lauren’s. This marketing manager is in the travel and hospitality industry which has been very heavily hit by the pandemic. What he or she said resonates with me. Here is the excerpt from Reddit user: LobsterOnTheLand
“I'm in the tourism business in Central America. The outlook is pretty grim for the short term. Realistically, no one will be traveling until next fall at the soonest - and even then tourism will be WAY down. We've decided that marketing and promoting our trips aren't the best choice right now - it won't make us look good, and no one is thinking about traveling anyway. Instead, we're doing a few other things:
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Reaching out to customers who have trips planned with us through the end of 2020 and updating them on the travel status in our country, and how their trip will be affected. It's important to keep people updated.
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Reaching out to good (repeat) customers and just wishing them well in this difficult time.
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Working on promotional content and website updates that we can use a few months from now when the time is right.
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Mostly we are just slacking off though, because there isn't a whole hell of a lot to do, and profits will be almost nil this year.”
Honestly, I don’t know how LobsterOnTheLand and his or her company is going to make it, but what he or she said resonates with me.
If you are struggling, just be aware that everyone is struggling as well. We are trying to pivot and do something different. We’ll make mistakes, but we will adapt and learn along the way.
Hang in there, my friends. Reach out if you have any questions.
Stay healthy and be well. Take care.
Hello, this is Pam. I hope that everything is safe and sound and working from home has not driven you completely insane just yet. It’s certainly added a lot of pressure to those who not only have to work full-time but also have to homeschool their kids and deal with the various aspects of home confinement. I get it. We all do what we can. In the meantime, ttay healthy and be safe.
Today I’m going to talk about something different. 52 Limited is a Portland-based marketing recruiting firm. They launched a virtual get-together that they call ‘10 minutes with 52.’ Three days a week they invite different experts to talk about various topics for 10 minutes at a time before you start your day. What a lovely idea. I was invited to talk about "Personal Branding."
Based on my experience building a digital presence for my personal brand, here are the five key lessons I shared to help you build your personal brand.
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Personal branding on the Internet is not about a logo or the name of your company. It's really about positioning.
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When you think of your personal branding statement, don't think of who you are and what you do. Think about who you are to your clients and what you do to help them. That will help you write your positioning and tagline.
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In addition to having a headline to describe what you do for your clients, make sure you have a sub-headline. The purpose of the sub-headline is for Search Optimization. If you do content marketing, for example, just say content marketing. No need to dress that up to make it fancy, like referring to yourself as a digital marketing maven. What does that even mean? That doesn't mean that you can't differentiate yourself or your offerings. You still can. You do Content Marketing for small businesses. That’s a differentiator. You can provide Content marketing audits in 48 hours. That’s a differentiator. Your Content Marketing approach is unique because you use AI to run the audit. That’s a differentiator. You can still talk about your uniqueness without using fancy terms that may hinder SEO.
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For digital personal branding, you also need to take into account digital destinations. By that I mean social media channels. How would you describe yourself on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms? What would you say about yourself given the character limitations of these platforms?
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Another consideration is your marquee banners on these platforms. What images should you use to show who you are? I understand that's a personal preference. Again, make sure you use the marquee banners as the extensions of your headline and sub-headline. Also, the images you choose do matter. Do you want to use icons, photo stocks or your own photos? Everyone does differently. Make sure that it follows your brand guide, colors, and fonts.
Really, there are many elements to consider for personal branding when building a full digital presence. It's exhausting. Seriously...
Quickly, I'll use myself as an example to talk about these 5 elements.
Here is how I describe what I do for my clients on my website.
Increase revenue through sales and marketing alignment
My subheadline on my website:
Strategic Planning/Account-Based Marketing/Customer Journey and Sales Integration
To be honest with you, I want to add content marketing, but it's getting too long, so I sprinkled the term content marketing into various pages and my blog to help SEO. So there are other ways you can do it if you can’t add certain services to your subheadline.
Here is the statement I use for my Twitter:
Accelerating marketing’s contribution to sales via strategic planning, workshops, & keynotes. Author of Global Content Marketing & Effective Sales Enablement. (So again I use a couple of keywords: content marketing, sales enablement).
Here is the statement I use for my LinkedIn:
Accelerating B2B marketers’ contribution to Sales: Content Marketing | Sales Enablement | ABM | Keynotes | Workshops| Consulting (So I use some of the keywords to describe what I do).
Ok, a quick summary to wrap this up:
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When you think of your personal branding, have fun with logo design and the name of your company. Have a blast!
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After that, think about who you are from your clients’ perspectives and what you do to help them.
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Have a sub-headline for SEO optimization on your website. Be very clear about what your offer to optimize for search
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Make sure your statements on social media platforms are consistent with how you describe yourself on your website.
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Pay attention to your marquee banners on social media platforms. The images are also opportunities to communicate who you are and what you do.
Personal branding is a lot of work in the digital era. There are many, many fronts to cover. I literally just described the beginning of a personal branding journey. Once you start on that journey, you'll have more questions. Reach out and we can chat.
Oh, by the way, I am doing "Ask Pam Anything" Hours on 4/13 9-10 am PST, 4/14 4-5 pm PST, and 4/15 8-9 pm PST.
Come and ask me anything about B2B Marketing, Career Development and other marketing topics. I'll do what I can to answer your questions and make it actionable. Come join me, simply go to pamdidner.com and click on the webinar page to register. I hope to see you there.
Stay safe and healthy. We will talk again next week. Take care!
Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. I know that it’s going to be a stressful time for all of us. I do hope that you’ll find time to relax and get a sense of normality from listening to my episodes. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends.
Hello everyone! Today is Sunday. Sunday is both lazy and busy afternoon. It’s a lazy morning and buzy afternoon kinda day. Sunday is the only day that I allow myself to sleep late and wake up whenever I want to wake up. It means that I don’t usually get up until like 10 am, so a very lazy morning of doing nothing. I love it! Then, I start working again on Sunday afternoon, like writing podcast or video scripts or recording podcast and video. Blah, blah blah!
I was interviewing a marketing director of my clients a few days ago to help them build a collaboration process between B2B Marketing Group and Sales Enablement Team. During the interview, the Marketing Director made it very clear to me that B2B marketing should reside with the Corporate Marketing Team and should be part of the marketing function.
You know what? I understand where she is coming from. Earlier this year, there was a talk that B2B marketing should be part of the sales team given that they are supporting business accounts and corporate sales. Plus, most of the marketing dollars such as media dollar and demand gen campaign budget supporting B2B marketing is coming from sales; therefore, the sales team feels that they should also own the team.
Well, I can see both sides. Marketing wants to have the B2B Marketing Team as a part of their teams and the Sales Team feel that all the B2B Marketing dollars are coming from them so B2B Marketing should be part of corporate sales.
Organizations often struggle which part of group should belong where.
Sales enablement is a great example. I was doing my research for my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. I have heated discussion with several sales enablement managers where this group should reside. Some are adamant that this should be part of sales. Several feel that sales enablement has a function of demand gen, therefore, they should be part of marketing.
In many tech companies, believe it or not, sales enablement is part of product team or business units, because subject matter experts are within these teams and many sales-centric content is created by the subject matter experts and also the content creators.
Heck, one company, recently, marked the sales enablement team as part of HR, since the core of sales enablement they did is all about on-boarding and training. This team did a great job, they were allocated to HR to help other teams to do better jobs on employee training.
Granted there is no right or wrong answer. Here is my stand on this. Where the B2B Marketing or Sales Enablement resides depends on the purpose of the team and the maturity of the company. If the company is a start-up and growing fast, everyone is nimble, it probably doesn’t matter where the team reside. The core is communication, everybody talks to each other all the time and things get done.
If the company is growing, chances you are going through growing pains at different stages, your company will go through different re-orgs to test out where the group should reside. If the sales team is growing rapidly, it may make sense for sale and marketing all stay under sales during that stage.
If the company reaches a plateau or mature stage, the sales team has a bigger sales force, the marketing team is growing, as well, it may make sense to break down to have B2B marketing as part of the marketing, and sales enablement as part of sales operations, sales training or on its own. It really depends on what you want sales enablement to do.
B2B Marketing from my perspective should stay in corporate marketing and that has its benefits. The biggest benefit is that you can leverage the corporate marketing’s resource and use other marketing resources whenever necessary.
Where does your B2B Marketing and Sales Enablement reside? Share that with me.
If you enjoy my podcast and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.
Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
Hi, everyone! I'm doing something different for this episode in light of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic in our industry. Today, I'm sharing an excerpt from a webinar I did on March 18, focused on how to keep your marketing moving in times of uncertainty. I teamed up with Ryan Lewis, a good friend of mine at Bonfire Marketing. At the end of today's episode, I will have details on what else you can learn in the webinar and how to watch it.
Before I get started, just want to let you know the sound quality may not be as sharp as what you're used to. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy the episode.
Webinar excerpt:
From my perspective, now is actually a perfect time to actually start engaging with sales. If you are working with your sales team closely, fantastic! They are your BFFs! Try to actually enhance that relationship, if you will.
And they are three things I want to talk about and just to share with you in terms what are some of the best option to actually work with a sales team as a marketer. The first one is you need to think about modifying your product messaging and positioning. The second one is about revise your content based on the new positioning which is I just talked about, and to take into account the current new formats of a virtual communications.
Obviously sales love to do face to face. Now it's an opportunity they can't. So they are forced to change and they using the new tools, and you need to understand how they are using that tools and to better help them in terms of the communication. Another one is give them some love and give the strategic account the air cover to complement the sales engagement. So with that being said, let's move on to the next slide.
And the couple examples I want to share with you in terms of modifying the product messaging and positioning that has a lot to do with the business strategy changes. For example, I'm a platinum members are United, and I got this message. And if you actually have flown United, you know that if you want to make any reservation changes, they charge you whopping $200, right? Doesn't matter unless you pay three times of airfare otherwise you have to pay the reservation change feeds and you can see the email I got was actually way before March 3, they basically said, “Hey, I know customers are looking for more flexibility as they make their travel plans right now,” which is true, right?
Everybody's canceling the traveling plans and the future reservation. They basically said “Guess what, if you book anything, anything at this time between March 3 and March 31st, you can change it for free for the next 12 months, it doesn't matter your location destination the date, you can make the changes with no change fee.”
Same thing for Loom. Loom is actually a video platform. If you haven't used them you should look into it. I love using loom to make a quick video recording to share some of the feedback I have with my say social media manager or even I want to say a quick thank you to a potential prospect. I do a quick recording on Loom and I just send it out. It's wonderful and easy tool to use.
And the full Loom, they actually have a premium version of it. They also have a paid version which is the Pro. On the free. I call it premium or a free version of it you can only record up to 25 videos. Now they actually change their free plan from 25 to unlimited, right and also cutting the price of lawn pro in half before it was $10. Now it's $5. And they change the existing free trial from 14 days to 30 days, on top of it. This is the most important part. They know that all the teachers and also K to 12, and education institution, universities are doing everything online. So they are really working hard to make sure that the tool is available for teachers and students.
If you are a marketer for Loom, this is a business strategy change. On top of it, you have to
Change your messaging, and your positioning of your product. Second thing that you have to change is the content, right? In the past, you were probably creating content horizontally that apply to all industry segments. Now with this specific direction change, you have to think through that some of the key content that you are going to create needs to be specifically tailored for teachers and students, and also K to 12, schools, universities and other education institutions. As a marketer for Loom you need to think through, “oh, now with this direction changes, I need to think through in terms of the segments I need to go after to align with the product messaging, positioning, and also the vertical that sales team will go after.
You know, what does that mean to you? Well, obviously, for me, I'm a pro member. I'm actually going to get some of my money back and apply to next year. That's great. So this is actually a very good email in terms of talking about the changes, and how the marketers modify the product messaging and the positioning changes, and at the same time, increase the pipeline. Does that make sense?
Now let's move on to the next one. And you probably said, “okay, Pam, that's great, but that's a B2C examples.” Understood. Now I'm going to share with you in terms of B2B example, Sirius XM, and a lot of you probably have it. I'm actually a member as well. Obviously, consumer is probably biggest portion and also revenue drivers. But they also have for business right here on the upper right hand corner, right?
When you click on that, this is the page that I show in terms of they obviously sell this specific product through the authorized resellers. They are working very closely with resellers and channel partners to sell this to businesses which is the right model. I see that as the right model for Sirius SM.
So with that being said, you can see that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 they have a six talking point or positioning to sell to businesses right before is probably monthly fee now is low monthly fee. Maybe in the past, they actually have a long-term contract that you have to sign. Now they have no long term contract. So there are some messages are changing, and you need to make sure that your content and your messages align with the new direction to actually help educate the resellers.
So modifying existing or creating content is actually essential. So how does that impact you? I mean, you will like “oh, yeah, you know what this? I do this all the time.” I totally understand. But engaging with sales you need to start observing and understanding how sales use to currently current online conferencing tools, right and then create a sales entry contents to align with that, and your demos video, which is interactive content that needs to be easily shareable and easily incorporated into the company's online conferencing tool.
Another thing is very, very important is while you are creating content, just don't create a content and pass that to a sales team. Is it possible that you can buy in the right context and map your content through the different sales stages. So with that being said, that's, that's one thing that you need to pay attention to.
And the last one I want to talk about is use account based marketing to provide air cover. And now is the time that you need to stay very closely with a sales team, especially about their game plans. Maybe when they started their 2020, they have a very ambitious goal to actually go after new accounts. But now, with the current situation, they probably need to make a change adjustments between the existing versus new customer ratio, and you need to understand that because that will impact your demand generation goes, okay?
Another thing is they the total sales revenue, annual revenue, they have to achieve maybe the same, but they probably make an adjustment between quarters in terms of what that revenue should be. Again, you need to understand that and then you have to modify your demand generation goal accordingly.
Another thing in terms of a sales pipeline, they are looking into the existing sales pipeline very, very closely. Whatever is in the pipeline, you probably look into it have a lot of thoughts and they are modifying and to determine what is actually the right plans to move forward. And they are going to have a multiple or more frequent sales, huddles meetings and you need to attend that just to stay close, right?
And another thing that you need to think about in terms of account based marketing is you will to find, I guess, a challenge or a difficult time in terms of how to rebalance your marketing outreach between the top of the funnel and also the bottom of the funnel accounts, communications.
And another thing that you will run into is in terms of budget discussion, right. And I was in the corporate world for a long period of time. I totally understand in a time like this, the first things that got cut is trouble budget. The second thing got cut is a marketing budget, right? So you probably have to go through the 5% budget cut reduction scenario, 10% as well. And you need to look into it and see if you can maintain and salvage some of the marketing budget. Snd one of the best way to do that is align with a sales goal.
Okay, so look into that and see if you can do what you can to make sure that you take care of your sales team and also maintain your marketing budget.
Hey, thank you so much for listening today. To see the whole webinar including Ryan's portion, visit my YouTube channel. Ryan's talks about different conferencing, interactive technologies and marketing tactics that you can leverage to keep momentum going. Really helpful information. Simply look for the thumbnail for “Everything Was Canceled. Now What?” You can’t miss it.
If you'd like to see the slides, please send me an email at hello@pamdidner.com.
Before I sign off, I want to acknowledge it's a tough time for all of us. Honestly, it's even tougher for independent consultants like me. Most of the speaking engagements are canceled and the client engagements are put on hold, which is totally understandable. However, I take this opportunity to reflect, determine the next steps and to continue to do personalized outreach. And for some of you, I understand, I totally sympathize that working from home is very challenging, especially with young children.
I hope that you do find time to relax. If I can provide assistance in any possible way, or you simply just want to have a chat like a therapy session, please reach out anytime. And in the meantime, stay healthy and be safe. Take care.
Hello, everyone. In the past several episodes, I’ve been discussing AI’s role in Marketing. As I’ve been talking about all the wonderful magic of AI, you might ask, “What’s the catch?” Well, there is a dark side. If you use machine learning as a way to implement AI, you need to make sure you have high-quality data first.
Whenever I mention data, marketers are like “WHAT?” I was like “WHAAAAT? I know, right? Data is really the marketers’ nemesis. So the quality of data: you need to define in terms of the quality of your data and also your data sources.
You need to know the quality of your data. And here’s an analogy from Wilson Peng, CTO of Appen (and I love the analogy!). He said, “If you train a computer vision system for autonomous vehicles with images of sidewalks mislabeled as streets, the results could be disastrous. In order to develop accurate algorithms or predictions, you will need high-quality training data.” And I 100% agree with that.
Amazon famously scrapped its AI recruiting tool because it shows bias against women, given they based their datasets from resumes submitted to the company over a ten-year period. And guess who submitted the majority of resumes to Amazon? Mostly men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.[1] Basically, the way that they used the dataset to train the AI—or Artificial Intelligence—is biased, therefore the recommendations that come down from the AI recruiting screening is going to go against women. So they basically said, “that’s not gonna work” and I 100% agree with that.
As a marketer we often have this love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with data. Most data tends to be scattered in different areas, sources or over different platforms. And please don’t ask me where the data source of my Google Analytics is! I don’t even know.
To work with the data and understand the data sources, it’s very important to work with IT to pull data from various different places. It’s also important to work with vendors or data scientists who actually know how to build the model and have experience to prepare and measure the quality of datasets.
Yes, AI is a lot of work. I never said it was easy, right?. So if you are responsible for AI initiatives, you need to work with IT and different stakeholders and vendors to create in-depth quality control process for data. Can you imagine marketing and quality control? That just doesn’t go together, such as creating multiple quality metrics, and actually having weekly data deep-dives, regular testing and auditing. There is no shortcut when it comes down to the quality control of your data.
Here are some suggestions to mitigate bias from the Inside Big Data site:[2] (yes, there is a site called Inside Big Data!)
1) In addition having the data, you also need to label the data; you’ll need skilled annotators to carefully label the information you plan to use with your algorithm.”[3] You need to be sure they are labeled correctly.
When internal team members label data, they will always add some bias because they have expectations about what their system should conclude. If you decide to use an internal team to label your data, make sure you also consult an outside source to help foster an objective annotations environment. So labeling is very, very important.
2) When you train your datasets, try to find the most comprehensive data and experiment with different datasets, metrics and segmentation to ensure you’ve covered the bases and also tested and see the outcomes of recommendations and compare them.
3) Check for implicit bias in the data as part of your quality-assurance process.
Once the product is live, monitor performance using the data it generates to determine whether it’s delivering equitable opportunities and outcomes for all users.
So the training data is critical for a successful AI initiative. Although the quality-assurance processes are tedious (I mean I went through it and I’m pretty sure I put you to sleep!), “Quality training data not only begets algorithms that work in the real world, it also helps mitigate some of the bias inherent in manual data annotation.”[4]
That is the role of data in AI marketing.
If you enjoy the podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.
Be well, and let’s talk again next week. See ya!
[1] Jeffrey Dastin, Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women, Reuters, Oct 8, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G
[2] Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, https://insidebigdata.com/2019/11/17/how-to-ensure-data-quality-for-ai/
[3] Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, https://insidebigdata.com/2019/11/17/how-to-ensure-data-quality-for-ai/
[4] Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, https://insidebigdata.com/2019/11/17/how-to-ensure-data-quality-for-ai/
Hello everyone! So, I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence--which is available on Amazon. Simply type “Pam Didner” or the name of the book “The Modern AI Marketer”. Download to your Kindle and check it out. Love to hear your feedback!
I mentioned in my past podcast that I wrote this book to help myself and others understand how AI fits into the field of Marketing. In the eBook, I mentioned six use cases. For today’s podcast, I want to talk about three or so that you can get a sense of it of how AI applies to Marketing.
So one specific case I want to share with everybody is the chatbot. Whenever you go to the website you will see a little bot at the bottom of the right hand corner, waving it’s hand and wanting to talk to you. So a lot of times I will try the chatbot and ask specific questions and see if they can answer them. And a lot of time they are not giving me the answer I need and I end up talking to real people, which is fine.
But there is one website which I go to all the time trying to find freelancers and it’s called Upwork. I don’t know if you use them, but if you are looking for freelancers check out that specific website. From time to time I need to change the milestones of my project or add additional money because my scope has changed. So I don’t know how to do some of that work and I will go to their support site and they have a little bot.
And I ask multiple times in terms of different questions. Interestingly enough, that specific bot always gives me the answer I’m looking for. I am very impressed in terms of how Upwork works with the bot and build the workflow and also help the bot understand and learn from the different questions that people are asking. So that’s a very good example in terms of AI use in Marketing and Communication, especially on the website.
Create a blog post or white paper
And another thing I want to share with you is in terms of content creation. For example, many publishing companies they are using home grown AI reporters. Bloomberg uses automated technology, Cyborg, to generate 1/3 of its financial news, especially company earnings reports.[1]
The Washington Post used the home-grown AI content generation machines, Heliograf, to create content for coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympics Games and the 2016 Election. The media company has been using this AI-based content creator (aka robot reporter) to cover local-specific news which the publisher can’t afford to assign to full-time local reporters.[2]
So they are using the robot reporters to actually pull the content and write the content based on the keywords and also pull from trusted sources. This works well if you know the intended outcomes of your content. For most white papers, we know what we want to say, what information we want to emphasize, and what the call-to-action should be. Given that we know the predictive outcomes, it’s actually possibly and plausible to use AI to create a first draft of the white paper for you.
If you write blog posts or long-form content, look into MarketerMuse, the AI Content Intelligence and Strategy Platform that will transform how you research, plan, and craft your content. I don’t believe that MarketMuse can write the content for you, but its capabilities can certainly help you to optimize and refine your content.
Support sales via account-based marketing
Another use case I want to share with you is basically supporting sales using account-based marketing. Sales and marketing have traditionally played two separate roles within an organization. Marketing focuses on the top of the funnel and drives demand, while sales is responsible for the bottom of the funnel and closing deals. I am a firm believer that marketing’s primary role is to support sales, in addition to driving demand and building brand equity.
There are many ways to support sales as a marketer. I talked about these extensively in my book, Effective Sales Enablement (if you are interested in purchasing the book, focus on chapters 4-7).
As AI is further embedded into sales and marketing tech tools, it naturally forces alignment and bi-directional communication between these two groups. This has further elevated the need to integrate marketing automation and CRM tools. Many companies do that.
One approach marketers can take to help sales is account-based marketing, which implements targeted campaigns and outreach to complement the sales account’s approach.
The purpose of ABM--account-based marketing--is to address the needs of individual target accounts. What AI can do is further enhance the customization and the prediction. To do that, it requires a pool of intelligence (aka data) at both the account and individual customer levels to tailor your ABM efforts.
One of the key desired outcomes for account-based marketing is to predict prospects’ intent or enhance propensity to buy. Predictive insights and intent data give you real-time intelligence on the accounts that are most likely to convert. This obviously streamlines account prioritization and fully optimizes your budget allocation. And there are several companies that can actually help you to do that.
One of them is DemandBase. It’s used by many enterprise customers, and positions itself as the end-to-end ABM solutions from identifying accounts between sales and marketing, personalizing content and ad retargeting, to tracking the prospects’ ABM results. The AI is also embedded into a DemandBase solution. This is one tool that is used widely my many enterprises.
Another company is called Lattice Engines. They have AI-powered platform that helps B2B marketers scale their account-based marketing programs across different channels. They connect and consolidate multiple internal and external data sources, and build audience segments using AI. So these are some of the companies and also use cases for account-based marketing.
Extend reach via media-buy
Obviously another use case example I want to share with you is a media buy. The media-buy landscape has changed dramatically with the Internet.
Ad placement is no longer a direct communication between advertisers and publishers using email or phones. Now you can buy and sell your ads inventory using an algorithm. You are bidding on the different inventory. So it’s basically created and managed by machines or AI. It plays a critical role in the media buying process.
There are many, many platforms that use the latest advancements in machine learning to optimize impressions in the real-time bidding process, like Albert, MediaMath Omnichannel, IBM Bid Optimizer, etc. So, brands can use artificial intelligence to serve more relevant and targeted messages in the right places, at the right times, by providing data-driven insights
So I’m sharing different use cases with you in terms of how AI is being used nowadays in the current marketing landscape.
If you enjoy my podcast, feel free to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. That would be greatly appreciated. One new video every week.
In the meantime, be well and let’s connect again next week. Take care. Bye bye!
[1] Jaclyn Peiser, the Rise of Robot Reporter, the New York Times, Feb. 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html
[2] Joe Keohane, What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism, February 16, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/
Hello everyone! Last week, I shared with you that I wrote a little eBook about AI that you can purchase on Amazon Kindle. Just in case you missed last week’s podcast, the name of the book is called The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing.
The book was written for marketers to understand what AI is and how marketers can apply it in the work they do. Like I said last week, modern marketing is grounded on using technology to reach out to your audience digitally.
You can’t scale, segment or personalize your marketing without technology. That’s why technology plays a critical role in marketing. In this eBook, I touched on many things, from definition of AI, a bit of history, benefits, and use cases to expectation that you need to set if you for implement AI.
So for this podcast, I want to pique your interests on the marketing-specific benefits of AI.
When people talk about AI benefits, they tend to mention AI benefits in very generic terms. For example, AI can:
- Enhance data analysis such as predictive analysis
- Offer recommendations and predictions
- Automate your repetitive tasks
But what are the marketing-specific benefit using AI? Well there are three from my perspective.
Here are the true benefits of using AI in terms of marketing
1) Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Customers Say, you have a large dataset on how customers engage your website. If you want to learn what types of content people usually read before they contact your sales team on the website, you can build a model by feeding your existing dataset and see the recommendation from AI. Of course, you can compare your findings with your gut or account-specific data to understand the differences and similarities between the AI’s recommendation and your recommendations.
Use that information to refine your content editorials, in addition to keyword optimization.
2) Personalize engagements with your customers
With digital obviousty everything we do is tracked—we are completely tracked—so you can use third party AI-based tools (there are a lot of software with machine learning or deep learning capabilities built into it), marketers can learn exactly what customers are doing in real-time.
There are 3rd-Party tools which can analyze customers’ posts and online conversations to help marketers understand their sentiments, desires, needs or even pains. I mentioned Alyce in the past. Alyce is an AI-based gifting platform which can crawl your target audience’s social profile and come up with specific gift recommendations that you can send to get their attention.
So a lot of stuff moving forward in order to scale, personalize and segment, you need AI to help you and AI is one technology.
3) Improve customer experience through journey mapping
We do AB testing, use heatmaps or even focus group testing to gather information so that we can understand our customers better and improve their customer experience.
What if we can build an AI model by working with your internal data team or work with a data analytic vendor to analyze customer journeys! This obviously will require you to integrate your outbound marketing campaigns to your website analytics. I understand Google Analytics and various third party tools are doing that. However, you can take the data further by merging with other datasets and also external data to understand, say, the time lapse from the first visit to the most recent visit on the website, the types of content or pages consumed, the product demo viewed online or sales email exchanges to see the customer journey by industries or by personas.
Then, you can use the information to optimize the touch points, maybe use the data to predict or anticipate what the customers will do in the future.
Here is the takeaway:
I’m not here to tell you how to build your AI model or you need to do that. To really look into AI in terms of how AI can help you, the key is to know what questions you want to ask and then find a solution or build a model to answer your questions. Does that make sense? But I’m sure sure that you can use other approaches to get the answers as well
So here’s a list of questions to think about building an AI model:
-
Based on our account history and payment transaction data, what do the top 25 new accounts look like? What is the average transaction size? How does that compare with sales’ own top 25 account list? Are they similar or different, and why?
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With our existing lead scoring, what minimal score do prospects usually reach in order to get them to request a demo? With that score recommendation, what is the average success of closing a deal?
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What marketing channels drive the highest quality MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)? How much money can I allocate to that channel to see an improved rate of return?
-
How many pieces of content do prospects consume before they contact us? What are they? How are these content pieces different based on different industries or personas?
To me, the biggest benefits of AI for marketers lie in personalization and recommendations. We all know how to do mass communications. But for the next era of marketing, though, AI holds the key to providing insights and recommendations to do even more effective mass customization.
If you enjoy my podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.
Be well. Let’s talk again next week. Take care!
Good morning, everyone! I have super exciting news to share with you. I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence. Yeah!
Here’s the thing: when I’ve spoken at conferences in the past, it’s been clear to me that marketers are intimidated by AI and don’t know what to make of it. AI piqued my interest when I was doing research for the Technology chapter of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. Ever since, my fascination has skyrocketed.
To help marketers and sales teams better understand AI, I wrote a 9000-word Kindle ebook: The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing to Get Ahead.
I am a strong believer that modern marketers need a firm grounding in relevant technologies so they can use it to their advantage. I am not saying that you need to write code or implement AI initiatives at this time. But as a starter, it’s nice to understand what it is and have some ideas on what it can do for you as a marketer.
The book starts with simple definitions, history, and then I dive into the various marketing-specific benefits of using AI, from running hyper-targeted automated email campaigns to extending reach and improving the overall customer experience online and offline.
It’s an easy read. I promise! And I make it fun. So go to Amazon, type my name, Pam Didner or the name of the book Modern AI Marketer. Download automatically to your Kindle.
Oh, at the end of the eBook, I also provide a list of useful books and online resources. I am positive that you’ll get a good sense of AI, and discover how to apply it in your own way.
Happy AI reading!
If you enjoy my podcast, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. It’s all about B2B Marketing.
So, be well and let’s connect again next week.
Good morning, everyone! I’ve been doing several webinars and podcast interviews in the past 5 weeks. I found one question particularly interesting. That was from Jeff, CEO of MarketMuse. He asked me: “What are some examples of questions I ask to understand my salespeople?”
If you are working with your sales team and don’t have a good relationship with them just yet, here are some questions that you can ask to get to know them. It’s worked well for me and I want to share with you.
For a starter, here is the top question I ask frequently, and it always gets them talking. How do you handle rejections to salvage the potential lost deal? OMG, it’s like giving them a free therapy session.
They would talk about the different types of rejections they encounter and the frustration of almost getting the deal closed and losing it at the last minute. Interesting enough, they can always recount specific deals they’ve lost and what they did before and after that. It’s a question that gives them an opportunity to tell their personal stories. I simply just listen, which helps to get to know them.
To follow that question, I usually ask them: For those accounts which they lost, should the contacts come back to the marketing database for further nurturing. Why or why not?
Then, they start sharing their perspectives on the different types of rejected leads, which types make sense for nurturing and which one don’t. That’s valuable information for marketers to help determine what to do with rejected leads from the sales team. It helps you to work on customized campaign to reach out to these leads.
Depending on how the conversation goes, I also ask what the biggest deal is they closed in the last 2 years and why they think they were able to close it. They love talking about their major victories. I let them show off their glorious moments. Who doesn’t like to share how awesome they are? Again, I just listen.
Then, I ask them to dissect their recipes for success. That helps me understand what they did right to close the deal, such as their game plan, their conversations, their email exchanges etc. Again, it’s not an interview. It’s just a casual conversation over a cup of coffee between two colleagues.
The next question is: What content do you find most useful? I usually have them walk through the typical sales stages from prospecting, qualifying, demo and proposal down to PO placement.
Why do they usually do at each stage? What does email communications look like? What types of content are incorporated into their emails? Interestingly enough, most salespeople still love product-collateral and case studies or white papers. More and more are asking for video format content.
My last question is always: How can marketing or I help you? What can I do to help? Of course, that opens the flood gates for a long wish list, but it doesn’t mean that you have do all of them.
It gives you ideas of what they need and helps you prioritize what you can do to support them.
So, those are my questions to understand my sales team over a cup of coffee:
- How do you handle rejections to salvage the potential lost deal?
- For those accounts which they lost, should the contacts come back to the marketing database for further nurturing. Why or why not?
- What the biggest deal they closed in the last year and why they think they were able to close it?
- What content do you find most useful at different sales stages?
- How can marketing help? What can I do to help?
There! Those are types of questions I ask my sales peeps. So, what questions do you ask to understand your salespeople? I’d love to hear from you.
If you are inspired by what you hear today, please leave a 5-star review and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.
Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
Hello from Portland. This week is one of those weeks when I have several pressing client deliverables. On top of that, I also need to create several podcast and video recordings. Creating content to build my personal brand and working on client projects are two full-time jobs. Ugh… What is the take-away of this: Don’t do what I do. It’s too much work.
Speaking of creating content, here is a LinkedIn message from Queenie who lives in Hong Kong.
She said: Hi Pam, I continually read your blogs and find them useful as I am in the B2B marketing field and specialize in the Asia Pacific market. Shall we connect so I can be informed about new articles.
Of course, Queenie! I’d love to connect, I answered. In response, she added one quick question: When it comes to content marketing, I understand many in-house experts can contribute content but they might not write it in a customer-oriented way. For a tech startup company, what is your take on outsourcing the content writing vs getting a copywriter in-house?
Actually, Queenie, every marketer struggles with that decision. Should I hire someone FT or should I outsource? Which marketing functions should I take in-house and which should be outsourced?
The pros and cons of in-house vs. outsourced:
For in-house resources:
Advantages:
- You have total control of when and how things are done for your marketing materials and campaigns.
- There is more transparency on how things get done.
- The teams understand products and services better.
- Faster communications among team members.
- Much lower risk of confidentiality breach.
Disadvantages:
- Takes longer time to turnaround than agencies
- Skills are more likely to be broad rather than specialized
- Less industry experience
- Reduces employee time left for other business initiatives
For outsourcing:
Advantages:
- Scale efforts quickly
- Access specific and specialized disciplines such as SEO, Facebook Paid Ad buy,
- Quick turnaround with new creative ideas
- You can focus on strategy and leave the tactical implementation to contractors or agencies
Disadvantages:
- Lack of complete dedication to your business
- Lack of full understanding of your products and services
- Requires multiple rounds of reviews
- High turnover of account team support
There is no perfect solution
How do you decide when to use in-house vs. outsourcing?
To me, this is a budget and headcount discussion. I always ask my clients: Do you have an approved headcount to hire someone full-time? Or do you just have budget for outsourcing? For a tech startup, chances are that you don't have headcount and a small budget. You likely need to outsource as much as you can.
I told Queenie that even if you get a headcount, you should hire someone who can wear multiple hats and cover multiple marketing functions, from copywriting, e-mail marketing, to social media outreach.
Many blog posts suggest that you should outsource repetitive tasks or tactical work. The challenge is how do you define tactical work in modern marketing? Is SEO tactical? I think it’s quite strategic, yet, many companies tend to outsource that. Is content creation tactical? Personally, I believe it’s very strategic, but again, many companies outsource content creation.
Understand your existing talent pool and what they can do
Evaluate your overall marketing plan and identify the gap between your talent pool and marketing plan. Then, use your headcount and budget to determine which marketing functions to insource vs. outsource.
The key thing about outsourcing is to make sure that you spend time to train and brief your contractors and agencies. Don’t expect them to know your products and services. It’s your job to brief and train them well. They can excel if you nurture them and provide the tools and knowledge to do their jobs. Give them wings so that they can fly.
I told Queenie: In-house or outsource, that’s no right or wrong answer. At the end of the day, it's what you are comfortable with, how you want to prioritize your resource and budget. I made it very clear to her, if she wants to hire contractors, make sure that she takes time to brief and train them.
Queenie, it was great connecting with you on LinkedIn. I hope that we can meet when I visit HongKong next time.
So, how do you determine when and how to insource or outsource your marketing efforts?
If you are inspired by what you hear today, please leave a 5-star review and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.
Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.
Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
Good Morning from Portland, Oregon.
I have a confession to make. I travel a lot and most of my clients are not in Portland, Oregon. The truth is that I don’t know many local marketers. So, I attended a networking event the other day and I had the opportunity to talk to several local marketers.
One of the young marketers I met, Ken, asked me an interesting question: How do I know if a marketing career is right for me?
He received a marketing job offer after he graduated from college. The job is not exactly what he expected; therefore, he started questioning whether this is right career path for him. The question he poses is perfectly legit, especially if you don’t particularly enjoy what you are doing.
Pay attention and be in tune with you likes and don’t like.
I asked him if he knows what he wants to try next. He said that he is not sure. I also asked him if there are any specific parts of marketing that he enjoys. He said he loves creative and copywriting, but is really not much into data analysis. Yet, as part of his job, he needs to do SEO and social media analysis. I understand that completely. I don’t much enjoy data analysis myself, especially trying to pull analytics manually from multiple sources. Ugh. What a pain!
Here is what I shared with him. Everything has 2 sides. While there may be parts of our job that we enjoy very much, there is usually some part of it that we hate with a passion. That’s just part of the life.
I told him not to write off marketing yet. Pay attention and be in tune with he likes and doesn’t like. Observe what he is naturally good at and what areas he needs to improve.
Find a way to learn or delegate to others
I didn’t advise him to only focus on the part of job he likes and ignore the parts that he doesn’t like. For example, I’ve never like to do data analytics, but be able to analyze data is an important part of modern marketing. I can’t just ignore that or not do it. To solve that dissatisfaction, I could either find a way to do it myself or delegate to someone to do it.
Rather than just letting someone else do it, I look at it as a learning opportunity. That doesn’t mean that I learned to code so that I can do data analysis. I am not a coder and I’ll never be a coder. That’s my limitation. If I need to learn to code to do data analysis, that will literally kill me. So, I find 3rd party tools to conduct data analysis.
Learning how to use new tools and dissect data is a way to expand my marketing skills. That’s one way of dealing with part of the jobs I don’t like. Find a way to learn or delegate to others.
Sometimes, you can find a solution to deal with something you don’t enjoy doing. Sometimes, you just can’t.
For example, I have a friend who is an awesome event manager. With digital, she also needs to learn how to promote her events on social media. No matter how hard she tried, she just doesn’t get how to do social media effectively. She tried to learn, but she also reached her limitation.
Finally, she began delegating to a contractor while she sticks to what she knows best, which is doing physical event production. Therefore, it’s important to find ways to work around or deal with the parts of the jobs that you don’t like to do.
Sometimes, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.
Although Ken told me that he likes creative and copywriting, he is not crazy about SEO and social media. I told Ken to observe and pay attention to his daily tasks and write down what he does every day. Sometimes, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Maybe changing the processes or using different tools would substantially change how he feels about SEO and social media. You just never know. This idea really resonated with Ken.
Take time to self-reflect and analyze why you like or don’t like about your job before you pull the trigger and change your career path.
Ok, I hope this also gives you some ideas on how to do analysis of your own job, especially if you are thinking about your next big move.
If you like this podcast, please subscribe and comment on Apple Podcasts.
I also have a YouTube Channel, if you prefer a video format. Type Pam Didner on YouTube, you’ll find me. Again, if you like the content, please subscribe.
Be well, enjoy your job and talk to you next week.
Good Morning from Portland! It has been super chilly lately, and RAINY. It’s cold! My husband was like, does it matter to you? You are always inside working anyway. True! But…who doesn’t like a ray of sunshine shining through the window, right?
Question: What if you could define your own sales enablement role?
I received an email from Kate. In her email, she mentioned that she’s been an account manager for several companies. She started as a Sr. Account Manager with a new company a year ago. From her perspective in this role, she’s identified a large gap in marketing and sales collaboration; so her manager asked her to create a new role to address these gaps. She read my book and loved it. Thank you, Kate! She wanted to have a chat to discuss how to better define her new job.
If you can define your own role, that’s GREAT news!!
Kate. Congrats. It’s wonderful that your manager asked you to define your own role. It’s an endorsement that says you’ve been doing a fantastic job. And you earned enough of his/her trust so that you can write your own job description! Kudos to you, Kate!!
Here is the approach I told Kate to take so that she can create a win-win job description not just for her, but also for her group.
Create your own version of the job description first.
Given that Kate’s been with the company for over a year as an account manager, she knows where she is having trouble getting support from Marketing and what she can do to guide marketing and other internal stakeholders to better address these gaps. I suggested that she do a quick 30 minutes exercise on her own. She needs to answer one question: In a perfect world, if she could wave a magic wand to get any support from Marketing that she needs, what would that look like? I told her to write non-stop for 15 minutes about anything that comes to mind.
Then, spend the remaining 15 minutes reading the list out loud. Edit and refine the list to identify the areas that she will own, that marketing will own and others that they will need to work together on. Now, she has a rough description of the sales enablement job. Next, set that aside.
Interview internal stakeholders to get their perspectives
Step 2 is to interview stakeholders such as Marketing, Inside Sales, Outside Sales, and even Product Development. Ask them, if there were a sales enablement role within the company, what do they think that role should do? It’s better to talk to them rather than have an e-mail exchange. With Zoom, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams, it’s easy to do virtual conferencing. Put your headset on, turn on the camera and have a great chat with them.
The reality is that they’ll give her a laundry list which will need to be pared down. Therefore, it’s important, at the end of the conversation to ask the internal stakeholders to prioritize and give her a top 3. Just 3. What are the top 3 things that they would like to see a Sales Enablement manager do. The benefit of talking to stakeholders is so that the job description is not created in a silo. Plus, they may identify some things that Kate didn’t even think about.
Compare and review the job description with internal stakeholder’s feedback
Now, Kate can compare her list with internal team’s priorities. This will help her write a 2nd draft of the job description. Out of this draft, she can also identify what she won’t do, to set expectations upfront and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
One more tip: Focus on one big win and many small wins
In addition to getting the job description right, I told Kate, for a new role like this, she needs to identify one big initiative and several quick wins from the start. Quick wins are low-hanging fruit that she can achieve to show success and build traction. A big initiative is likely to take several months or a year to complete and involve stakeholder collaboration. Most importantly, she can use the big initiative to request budget and headcount and start building her own team.
If you ever had a chance to write your own job description, try this approach and see if it works for you.
If you like this podcast, B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
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Again, for any questions, please send them my way.
Be well and talk to you next week.
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that you had a great holiday and are well-rested. I was on the road from 10/14 to 12/21. I am so happy to spend the holidays at home and just chill . . . and eat.
As a marketer, if your company’s marketing plan for the new year is done, I’d strongly recommend you do one thing, tie your job contribution to your Company’s business goals and marketing objectives and do that in one page. This is especially important for a marketing specialist, an individual contributor or a first-line manager.
Obviously, we know our roles and responsibilities. There are many things we do on a daily basis, such as answering email or attending meetings, that don’t really contribute to achieving our business goals and marketing objectives.
When I mentor marketers or even work with my clients, I always encourage them to document what they do and tie that to the company’s business and marketing objectives.
Here is a simple one-pager I want to share with them. On this one-pager, there are six components that you need to fill out.
I am going to read them first.
Business Goals
Business Objectives
Marketing Objectives
Marketing Strategies
Your Deliverables and Contributions
KPIs
Let’s talk about the first one: Business goals. What is your company’s revenue, growth % or market segment share goal? It’s important that you know that. This is especially important if you support your sales team.
Business objectives: What does the company want to accomplish this year? Maybe the company wants to grow a new segment, tackle new countries, or launch new products. Write 1-2 statements.
Marketing objectives: What does marketing do to support the business objectives? In general, marketing tends to build brand awareness, drive demand or enable sales, but it needs to align with business objectives, say, of going after new segments, tackling new countries or supporting product launches.
Strategy is how. How do we drive demand? What tasks do we need to do to make that happen?
The next one is your contribution. What do you do to contribute to the strategy? Can you list 3-5 deliverables that connect to strategy?
The next is how do you measure your success? Be very specific. The number of content items created. Number of MQLs or big projects such as complete a website refresh.
It’s important to have one pager like that. When you have a 1:1 meeting with your manager, you can use it as the basis for a discussion. This will help make sure you are both in sync and agree on your plans and that they support the objectives. If adjustments are necessary, you can make them collectively.
To welcome the new year, I hope that you sit down and create a one-pager and let me know how it works for you.
If you like this content, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
I also have a B2B Marketing and More YouTube Channel. I publish one video a week. Each video is about 5-7 minutes long and all about B2B Marketing. If you prefer video, please subscribe.
Reach out anytime at Pam (@) PamDidner dot com.
Again, Happy New Year!!
Talk to you again next week.
If you are a long-time listener, you know that my episodes tend to focus on marketing and business, not so much about me. I am going to be up close and personal today as I record the last episode of 2019, I decided to do a little self-reflection, a look back to my 2019.
Frankly, this year didn’t start very well, business-wise. I didn’t tell many people, but my pipeline was bone dry the first 5 months. I had speaking engagements and small projects here and there, but nothing steady or substantial.
I was so scared that I started considering going back to be a full-time corporate citizen. You know how you are hitting a wall and can’t break through and you don’t know what the next steps are. That’s how I felt earlier this year for several months.
The key was that I had a good run for the first 4 years, and I didn’t do a good job to continue developing my sales pipeline. I got cocky and thought the business would just come. Well, it didn’t come in the first half of the year.
So, I started investing in business development and re-evaluating my business model. I started prospecting. I talked about how I started that in my blog post: Lessons Learned from Doing Virtual Cold Calls via LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
I also evaluated my business model. Most of my projects are 2-10 month long engagements. The purchase cycle to get a project like that is long. Because I am in B2B, my purchase cycle for new clients can range from 3-18 months. That’s not a quick turnaround to increase revenue and billings, isn’t it? Projects like that are still the bulk of my revenue.
However, I, now, offer 10-hour and 15-hour consultation and mentor packages. The cost for these packages is smaller and many B2B marketers can pretty much pay using corporate credit cards. It doesn’t involve a PO or the challenge of being an approved vendor. I’ve been testing this new model and, so far, it has been well-received by people who came to my sessions and workshops.
I started getting inquiries from people who listen to my podcast as well. The people who reach out for this kind of help are newly promoted VPs of Marketing, Marketing Directors, marketers making a career transition from traditional to digital or young marketers who have the goal of becoming a director or a first-line manager.
They want some help to cultivate their strategic thinking skills. I’ve been there and done that. That’s my forte and I know how to help people build that skill set. I talked about how to think strategically and how to cultivate strategic thinking in Episode 106 and Episode 107.
At the same time, with the business model changes, I am also evaluating the content I offer. I re-aligned the content I create with my business models and created more templates. It’s amazing that the structure of your business models has ramifications on everything you do.
This is also why my one-page marketing plan always starts with business goals and business objectives first before going into marketing objectives. Business models and objectives guide marketing strategy and planning. Period!
On the speaking front, I continue to sharpen my craft. I try different ways to deliver my keynotes and sessions. I add humor whenever possible and I select fun images and gifs to add colors to my presentations.
I try different openings and closings. I have always viewed myself as a coach and teacher, but here is my newfound discovery. I’ve come to realize that the audience wants to learn, but they also want to be entertained, especially going to session after session at a conference.
They are tired of listening. So, I’ve been thinking about what I can do to entertain them, yet also deliver useful messages and key take-aways. The mindset of being an entertainer literally changes how I work and deliver my presentations now.
I am not saying I need to be a stand-up comedian, but it helps to look at different ways to deliver dry materials like messaging frameworks or sales/marketing alignment. I keep asking myself: “How can I make it more fun?”
In addition to blog posts and podcast episodes, I launched my YouTube channel in October. Adding video content has been on my bucket list for 3 years.
You probably don’t know this, but I tended to freeze and get very nervous in front of a camera. Well, after 20 video episodes and countless re-takes and re-recording, I’ve finally overcome that. But I continue to hone my craft.
To be honest, YouTube is not the most ideal channel for talking about B2B marketing. Seasoned B2B marketers usually don’t go to YouTube to find information. They tend to start with search. I am doing this for myself to further improve my presentation skills. Although, I suspect millennial B2B marketers will be going to YouTube for information and maybe that can be a growing potential audience.
With business development, new business models, a different approach to delivering presentations, and the launch of my YouTube channel, needless to say, I’ve been very busy. Building a personal brand and working on client projects are 2 full-time jobs. I work until 11 or 12 often on weekdays and weekends.
My husband, Mike, would read, do his music or whatever, while patiently waiting for me to be done for the night. I am so grateful to have a partner who allows me to be me and gives me space to do what I need to do. However, he does think I am crazy to work that hard. I know. I am crazy.
Ok, the reflection is not all about work. I do yoga 2-3 times a week. I take on the challenge of learning 1-2 difficult poses every year. As of 2019, I can finally say that I can do a headstand (Salamba Shirshasana Sirsasana), handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana), and forearm stand (Pincha Mayurasana).
For 2020, I want to focus on a couple of backward bend postures, especially the upward bow pose, Urdhva Dhanurasana, which is a backward bend while lifting up your spine using your arms and legs.
And, one thing on my bucket list is to learn how to dance. I started taking dance lessons to learn how to waltz and tango. Yes, I am a tango dancing B2B marketer. These are two different dance styles. One is super elegant and fluid, the other one is about showing force and crispness for each move. Dancing and yoga help me manage the stress of working 2-full time jobs. I love it!
Looking back on 2019, like everyone else, I’ve had good days and bad days. I’ve had more setbacks than successes, but that’s what life is all about, we learn from setbacks and failures. I’ve met some great people, I’ve also met some asses. I chose to focus on the best time and let the bad moments go. I am grateful that every morning I can look forward to a new day. I am grateful for all your support.
With the holidays and family events and celebrations approaching, I hope that you’ll take a quiet moment with a cup or a glass of your favorite drink to reflect on your 2019. Cherish what you’ve accomplished and made a mental note of how far you’ve come. Let go of negativity and emotional pain. Get yourself ready for 2020. It’s going to be here in no time.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!
I’ll see you in 2020. Again, this is Pam from B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. Signing off for 2019.
If you listen to my podcast on a regular basis, you know that I am not affiliated with any tools or platforms. Occasionally, I mentioned certain tools and platforms for my listeners to check out if they are dealing with specific marketing or sales challenges.
For social media, I’ve been using ‘Buffer’ for several years. However, a good friend, Lisa, introduced me a tool called ‘Lately’ to me. This tool has the functionality of Buffer, but at the same time, it uses AI to autogenerate social media posts for you. You can quickly pick your favorites or edit the posts, then schedule. You can choose how and when you want them to post, or have Lately’s AI schedule for you based on your audience engagement history. You can seamlessly stockpile your post with hash-tags and short-links. Lately will send them as scheduled to help drive traffic back to your website.
In addition, they have built-in dashboards, the graphs are visually compelling and similar to what you see on Tableau or Power BI. As you are publishing your posts, you can see the traffic on different social media channels and correlate it to your website traffic. You can click each day to see the traffic on each social media channel and connect the results with your workflow.
Once the business development manager, Chris Breault, did a quick demo to me and my team. We were enthusiastic and definitely interested in a free trial. By the time the free trial expired, we signed up to use the tool. You know this is pretty typical for SaaS-based tools. You get a demo, you try, you like and you buy.
There is one thing Chris did which impressed the heck out of me. About one week after we purchase the tool, he sent me an email with a video. I thought this video would be a typical tips and tricks video. No, he created this video for me. He said that he went to my account to check if I am using the tool. He noticed that I’ve been scheduling a bunch of tweets using Lately. That means that I am using the tool. Then, he went on to talk about tips and tricks that may be of interest to me. He also said that if I have any questions, I can schedule another demo with him.
I love this video. What a wonderful follow-up with a new customer. He not only checked on me, but also went into the system to make sure that I was using the tool.
Obviously, some people may perceive this as an intrusion of privacy, since he didn’t get my permission to log into my account. I get that! However, I am running a business, everything I do is business-related. On top of that, all the posts will be public, anyway. In this case, I am OK with him checking on me and providing additional information on what I can do better. However, asking permission is certainly a good protocol to follow.
I purchase many SaaS-based tools, I don’t usually hear from sellers after I complete the financial transaction. Some tools are used by millions of users and you can’t follow up with everyone. I understand. I just want to say that I liked receiving that personalized email with a video specifically created for me.
The challenge is how to scale that. Do you have any suggestions on how to scale that when your user-base grows?
Again, if you like the content, please subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts. If you prefer YouTube, subscribe to my YouTube channel. I publish one video a week.
Thank you for tuning into to B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner.
Have an awesome day!!
In talking to many of my clients, I’ve found that there often doesn’t seem to be a nurturing stream to address leads rejected by the sales team. In some cases, these leads are not even routed back to the marketing automation system. When they are routed back, they are just treated like any other leads as part of regular email campaigns.
During one of my workshops, an attendee asked me if we should have a separate nurturing stream for rejected leads. If we do, how should we segment rejected leads?
I told her that we should segment rejected leads based on the rejected reasons or causes identified in the CRM tool. Say, the causes in the CRM tools are “chose competitor,” “lack of budget,” “not ready,” or “lack of response.”
We can drill down more with our sales reps to understand each cause better. Then, we can craft our email stream based on these causes. If the prospects sourced from our competitor, the recommendation may be to add them to the regular email campaigns. One of my clients simply deletes them from database, because, in their industry, once the sourcing decision is made, people don’t usually make a change for several years.
In this workshop, we ended up doing a working session together as a team to create nurture streams for each cause. The action item out of the workshop was to review the nurture stream with the sales team to get their input before implementation.
So, how do you manage rejected leads from your sales team? I’d love to hear from you.
Thank you for tuning in to B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. If you like the content, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you prefer YouTube, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. It’s all about B2B Marketing.
Have an awesome day!!
I did an 8-hour long workshop for a new client of mine. The CMO of the company, Sara, is an incredibly savvy marketer in the B2C segment. Anything about marketing a luxury brand, she is on top of it. One of her key initiatives in 2020 is to work and enable sales. In the workshop, we identified sales stages, mapped content from marketing to sales, created a series of email campaigns to help outside sales engage with SQLs. We also created a drip campaign to continue engagement with prospects after events.
She asked me what is the different between the Drip and Nurture campaigns.
Here is how I explained to her:
Both Drip and Nurture campaigns use a series of marketing communication channels, mostly email or a combination of email and phone calls, to reach out to prospects.
Drip focuses on presenting buyers information so that they become familiar with your brands and products. The email series is more top of the funnel focused; the message is more general intended for a broader audience. A great example I use is that a person comes to a pet food ecommerce site and signs up for their newsletter. A Drip campaign may start with the first email to welcome the subscriber with a 25% off coupon. The 2nd email is to share tips and tricks to quickly find relevant pet food on the website. The 3rd email is to invite the subscriber to the exclusive FB community. This is a very typical Drip campaign, targeting the first-timer on your website to get to know your site and community better.
Nurture aims at further engaging with your existing customers and prospects that have already shown interest in purchasing. You create a series of emails and other marketing activities based upon their previous actions or interactions and their places in the buying cycle. Since you know them better, they are likely to be in the middle and bottom of the purchase funnel. You can customize your email based on specific segments, and various attributes, such as buying behaviors, content consumption and other information you may have about them.
Using the same subscriber as in the Drip example, this person joined the FB community and, from pictures he posted, you found out that he owns two cats of a certain breed. You also know that he has been on the websites to buy certain types of cat food. Your nurturing email may include suggestions for other types of cat food, toys, and other cat-care information which he may find interesting.
During our workshop, I told the CMO that many people use these 2 terms interchangeably. The big thing is not about knowing the difference between the 2 terms. The key is to create relevant drip and nurture communications that your audience finds relevant and useful without being sales-y and creepy. That’s hard to do right and it takes AB testing, data analytics, clean customer data and solid writing to tie everything together.
After the workshop, one of the biggest action items is to rework the company’s drip and nurture campaigns. It’s so much work, but I love working with the team to create the workflows and a series of emails that facilitates the customer journey.
If you have great drip or nurture campaigns, I’d love to hear about them and share with others.
Again, subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts and share your challenges. I look forward to addressing them in a future podcast or YouTube video. If you happen to be on YouTube, please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I publish one video a week.
Have an awesome day!!
In the last episode, I mentioned that I met Danny Harris at Content Marketing World. He’s a regular listener to my podcast. Thank you, Danny! We did a Zoom meeting a couple of weeks after the conference. Danny is amazing. He created several nice frameworks to tie the customer journey, marketing channels and sales stages together. I am very impressed with his work. Thank you for sharing, Danny.
I asked him if he had any question that he wants me to address in my podcast. He had a fundamental question: “Why do we need to invest in B2B marketing?”
I totally understand why he asked that question. I work with many manufacturing clients and senior management of these companies are not too fond of marketers. For the longest time, many B2B companies were able to grow with minimal or no marketing support at all. That was, obviously, before the digital era. Sales made calls and closed deals with personal visits and phone calls. They also provided information to help buyers make decisions.
However, things have changed in the past 20 years. It’s no longer just sales helping buyers make their decisions. Buyers are doing their own research before contacting sales reps. In some cases, buyers know more about the products and technologies than the salespeople, thanks to the Internet, Google Search and content marketing. There is loads of free content out there that buyers can read and consume
3 Main Reasons that You need to Invest in B2B marketing:
- You need to have a digital presence and be searchable. If people can’t find you on the Internet, they will go to your competitors.
The first thing buyers do when they want to find something is to search. If you are not searchable, that means they can’t find you. If they can’t find you, you can’t even give them an opportunity to know you. BTW, a website doesn’t mean you are searchable. It just means you have a website. There are many tactics you need to use to make yourself rank higher organically when people search. All these are not free. You need to invest in your website and search strategy.
- Take control of how you want your buyers to learn about your company and products. Some information may not be correct and there may be some negative things online about your company and products. The best way to refute that is to create content to show your own point of view on your own platforms. The platform may be your website, your YouTube channel, your community, but, again, it is not free.
- Go where your buyers go. Again, you can’t wait for your buyers to show up at your door or come to your website. You need to go where they go. Unlike in the good old days when salespeople liked to go to conferences to find prospects, because many prospects attended events, now many prospects are online. You need to know where they are and go there. Again, this is not free, either.
Still, many B2B companies are not investing in digital marketing. The only thing I want to say is that buying behavior is changing and you need to change with it. Your sales approach needs to change. If you don’t do digital marketing, you are giving your competitors opportunities take your customers. The choice is yours.
Danny, I hope that I answered your question.
I am, in a way, a B2B company, I am making hefty investments in my B2B marketing efforts, and so should you.
Again, subscribe to my podcast in Apple Podcasts and/or my YouTube channel to learn more about B2B marketing.
Have a great day!!
A quick story to share with you: People listen to my episodes and send me comments or questions privately.
Well, I was at Content Marketing World and trying to get ready for my session. A big and tall gentleman, Danny Harris, approached me and said, “Pam, you’ve changed your podcast title and logo.”
I was like, “What?” Someone actually noticed that I changed my podcast title from "7 Minute Marketing with Pam" to "B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner." Wow!! I was shocked. Danny said: “Yeh, I listened to your podcast.” OMG, I actually met a listener in person the first time. I was jumping up and down in front of him and gave him the biggest hug. He probably thought I was crazy.
Danny and I started chatting and he asked me why I decided to make the podcast title and branding change. Now, since he asked, let me take a moment to share with you why I decided to make the change.
I feel that my listeners tend to tune in for my content. The change of podcast title and image are not why they focus on, plus, I am not sure if they care. In addition, I am still addressing one marketing question 7 minutes at a time. It’s still about content marketing, sales enablement, and B2B Marketing. It’s not like that the content is shifting from content marketing to yoga or something. That’s why I didn’t make a big fuss about the change.
Here are 3 reasons for the change:
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Different identity at different stages: If you are a long-time listener, you know that I’ve shared lessons learned from relaunching my website for the 4th time in 5 years. I talked about that in Episode 56. It’s part of my “independent consulting” evolution over the past 5 years. I started as content marketing consultant, then wrote my 2nd book about sales enablement, which is an extension of content marketing. My service offerings and client-base have been expanding as well. My value proposition is different. I want to elevate the topics I talk about beyond just content marketing and sales enablement and touch on the broader topics of B2B marketing. That’s one reason to change from 7 min marketing from Pam Didner to B2B marketing and more.
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Search optimization: While I own 7 Minute Marketing with Pam, I think it’s better to be searchable for B2B marketing. In a way, I tried to find a title to align with a topic that people search. Given that I am in B2B marketing, why don’t I dial that up? That’s a simple and easy reason why I make the title change.
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YouTube Channel: I am a writer. I express myself better as a writer. However, I also understand that people consume content differently. Some people like to read, some prefer to listen and many like to watch videos. I want to explore using another format to share my experience, templates and know-how. Being in front of video really pushes me beyond my comfort zone. Since I am exploring a new content format, I want to use an overarching title that covers both podcast and my YouTube channel. 7 min marketing with Pam Didner is fine, but I was wondering if I could create a title that tells people what the YouTube Channel is really about.
My team came up with several titles such as:
The Pam Didner Show. Well, it really doesn’t say what this show is about.
How to Become a Badass B2B Marketer. This is a bit too specific.
B2B Marketing with Pam. Well, this is specific.
Grow Your B2B Marketing Knowledge. This is very boring.
All Things B2B Marketing with Pam Didner. This is not bad.
I didn’t like anyone of them. I went through all the titles with my husband, Mike. Then, he said what about “B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner” I was like Viola! That’s it. You know what, sometimes, you spot something, you are like, that’s it. That’s exactly what you want or what you are looking for. When I heard him utter those words, I knew that’s what I want.
Danny, I didn’t explain well when we met why I made the title and log changes. So here it is. Thank you so much for telling me you like the new logo. Creating that podcast logo is a story of its own. I’ll share that later. A lot of drama…
Danny and I connected again after CMW. He asked me another question: “Why does the company need to invest in B2B marketing?” A great question!! I’ll address that in my next episode. Stay tuned.
Have a great day!!
Cindy is a newly promoted VP of Marketing for a manufacturing company. She knows how to get things done, but she tends to get deep into the weeds. That’s because, for a long time, her job was about getting things done. You can give her any marketing tactics and she would find a way to implement them. Now that she is a newly minted VP of Marketing, she is unable to pull herself out of the tactical level and instead focus on structuring a high-level budget plan discussion with her manager, who is the VP of Sales.
So, she purchased a 10-hour consultation package from me and asked me to work with her to create a plan to get more budget. Her company’s revenue is a little over $200M, but her budget is less than 1% of the total revenue and her team is small. She feels that she can do so much more for sales and her company, if she has a bigger budget. She is right.
The first thing she sent me was her budget file with a laundry list of marketing expenses. Ok, that’s not the thing I want to see. The first thing I wanted to see is her marketing plan. I used her input to create a first draft.
Here is what is a simple one-page marketing plan can look like:
Business Goal: Achieve $220M in 2020
Business Objective: Grow new and existing business segments. (I asked her the revenue breakdown between new and existing segments.)
Marketing Objective: Build brand awareness and drive demand for new and existing segments
Marketing Strategy:
- Position the company’s thought leadership by showcasing subject matter experts’ technical know-how and expertise
- Build brand awareness by encouraging opt-in and engagement with high-level project managers and early career professionals in the target industries
- Deliver solid MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) to Sales via Email inquiries and the Contact Us form on the company website
KPI:
- Number of content pieces created for outbound marketing
- Target audience opt-in (subscribed)
- Number of MQLs based on Email inquiries and Contact Us form
This is the executive summary that will get the VP of sales oriented on the marketing plan.
After reviewing this, I suggested adding one new initiative under marketing strategy: Enable sales via account-based marketing. To go with that, we added one more KPI which is marketing’s contribution to sales
The next thing I asked her to do is to categorize her budget based on Thought Leadership, Brand Awareness, and Demand Generation. Once that’s done, she can easily present marketing expenses based on the three strategies. Viola, she summarized a detailed list of marketing expenses that the VP of sales can relate to.
Let’s use brand awareness as an example. Now she has the marketing expenses for brand awareness. Given that brand awareness is measured by subscribers, she can take the total marketing dollar on brand awareness divided by the incremental opt-in subscribers to calculate the cost per acquisition for opt-in.
The measurement of demand gen is based on the number of MQLs which are acquired from Email Inquiries and “Contact Us” requests. She can take the total dollar divided by MQLs to calculate the cost per acquisition.
For 2020, she can set up a new goal for subscribers and MQLs. With the new goals, she can multiply cost per acquisition for opt-in by the new projected subscribers to get the new budget for brand awareness.
She can multiply cost per MQL acquisition by new MQL goal to come up with the new demand gen budget. These 2 numbers are just baseline. Now, she and I need to take other elements into account to make adjustments to the budget. For example, she wants to use paid search as a new channel to drive demand generation, therefore, the cost per acquisition needs to go up to incorporate the new marketing element. I also told Cindy that her cost per acquisition for demand gen is way too low, that’s one of the reasons she is not meeting the current goal.
In addition, I suggested to Cindy to add sales enablement such as account-based marketing as a new initiative to support her sales team. Using a new initiative to ask for additional budget is a good tactic. The VP of Sales may not be interested in a budget increase, but he is probably willing to have a discussion with Cindy about ABM to support the sales team.
We went back and forth about the budget projections. We made sure that each budget item was calculated with proper assumptions and cost per acquisition. Cindy also made sure that she has some industry benchmark data to support her claims.
We created 4 slides. The first slide was about the overall marketing plan and KPIs. The 2nd slide was about 2019 and KPI status. The 3rd slide was about the projected 2020 budget by key categories. The 4th slide was about account-based marketing. Each one was supported with a table to show how we came up with our budget and key assumptions.
I prepped Cindy on what to say and how to position the plan. Overall, the budget meeting went well. The VP of Sales had several questions for Cindy to follow-up. We didn’t get all the budget we asked for, but she received a budget increase to try paid search and ABM.
I understand every company’s planning and budget allocation process is different, some of them are very complicated. However, if you need someone to brainstorm with or give feedback and advice on your plans, please schedule a call with me on pamdidner.com. I’d love to help you.
Thank you for tuning in to B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. I hope you are working on your 2020 plan and asking for additional budget. Wish you the best of luck to get the budget you need for 2020,
Have an awesome day!!
In the last episode, I talked about how to be a strategic thinker in the context of B2B marketing. I shared three ideas:
- Think from the perspective of “why and what”, not “how”
Help senior managers understand why you recommend specific initiatives. Why are they important to the company and customers? Then, dive into the ‘what’, and finally ‘how’. Lead with benefits to explain why.
- Communicate in a way that senior managers can understand
Explain marketing’s impact to revenue, cost or efficiency. I shared one example in Episode 106
- Help senior managers connect the dots
Most senior managers are not native digital marketers. They didn’t grow up with digital. You need to explain the challenges of digital marketing. I recommend that you use an analogy that they can understand to explain the complexity of digital marketing.
For this episode, I want to talk about how to cultivate that strategic thinking capability. I truly believe that skillset can be acquired. I am using myself as an example. I wouldn’t consider myself a natural strategic thinker.
- Understand what your senior managers care about
One thing to cultivate strategic thinking skills is to listen. Listen intently to what your senior managers talk and care about. In general, they care about increasing revenue, reducing costs, and improving efficiency. Can you connect what you do with their goals? In addition to the typical revenue and costs, what other initiatives are they interested in implementing or what changes are working towards. Listen and make an effort to relate your conversations to the topics they care about. This comes from listening first!!
- Attend senior staff meetings and sales meetings
I learned so much by attending senior staff meetings. Get yourself invited or find ways to present something to them. Observe how they interact and communicate with each other. You don’t need to imitate that, but understand how they carry conversations and discuss topics at their levels.
- Work with mentors to cultivate your skills
I was fortunate to have several senior VPs as my mentors when I was working on my craft. I’d suggest that you find mentors to work with you. Recently, I’ve worked with several new VPs and senior directors. They just got promoted and they needed to present their marketing plans and budget. We spent time putting their plans together and I told them how they should set up the flow of their presentation and how to position some key requests and requests.
If you are interested in working with me, I have a 10-hour consultation and mentor package. If you are a long-time listener, I don’t usually talk about my service offerings. I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned it in my podcast. I’ve been mentoring several new VPs and Directors and we’ve seen great results. I’d love to share what we’ve learned.
Again, if you like the content, please subscribe to the podcast. If you are a YouTube watcher, subscribe my YouTube channel. I publish one video a week.
Have an awesome day!!
A big hello from Portland, Oregon.
How can I think strategically? How to cultivate strategic thinking?
Strategic is a such big word. Whenever I think of the term “Strategic Thinking,” I picture a politician or policymaker in a Think Tank trying to craft big initiatives to tackle issues like climate change, unemployment, boosting the economy, etc.
For the sake of today’s podcast, I want to narrow the definition of strategic thinking a little bit in the context of B2B marketing. Let’s keep it concrete: how can you carry productive and interactive conversations with your CEO, VP of marketing, and other senior staff?
I want to discuss the ability to think strategically in 3 very concrete ways that you can implement right away.
- Think from the perspective of “why and what”, not “how”
This is derived from my personal experience. My background was finance, accounting and operations. When I was told to do certain things, my first intuition has always been to think about implementation. How can I make it happen for my management, customers and internal stakeholders? When you try to carry conversations with senior managers, most of the time, they are more interested in knowing why you go with a specific recommendation? What analysis and factors did you use to reach that conclusion? What are some of the pros and cons? Most importantly, what are the benefits to the company and customers? Once they understand why and what, then explain how. Sometimes, some senior staff will start asking how questions, but it’s important to help them understand why and what first, before you answer ‘how’ questions.
- Communicate in a way that senior managers can understand
I’ve seen many marketers sharing social media metrics with senior managers. Frankly, senior managers really don’t care about likes or views or shares. What they really care about is how social media helps the company increase revenue, reduce cost, or improve customer service. So, can you tie your social media conversations with them to the context of improving customer service? You need to understand how senior managers measure themselves and share the information in a way they understand or care about.
Frankly, this is the challenge of many marketers. I understand. I encountered a similar issue when I was in the corporate world. One thing I did was to align our marketing strategy with that of sales and customer service. Much of the content I created was used by sales. I made sure that they know what content I created and how they could use it. I also suggested some content to our customer service team as part of their training. Rather than just reporting out the viewership of content on the website, I also called out how content was used for sales and customer service. When I showed management the content used by sales and customer services, they showed a little excitement and wanted to know more about it.
- Help senior managers connect the dots
Most senior managers are in their 40’s, 50’s and in some case, in their early 60’s. They didn’t grow up with digital. Many use mobile phones and tablets like a novice consumer. They don’t know the ins and outs of digital marketing or the amount of digital integration and the usage of various marketing technologies and tools you need to use to tie everything together.
They don’t know how much back-end work it takes to make sure a website scales dynamically or that photos show up properly on different devices. They don’t know how much work you need to use to create a seamless nurturing campaign to increase conversion rate. They don’t know what they don’t know.
You need to use an analogy that they understand. The typical example I use with senior staff is to relate digital to how long does it take sales to close a deal? Well, 12-18 months. How many touch points does sales need to engage with prospects during that time? Over 30 touch points. Did sales need to strategize and prepare for each touch point? Yes. Was it a lot of work to do that? Yes. Imagine doing exactly the same thing digitally in a scalable and semi-automatic way. Once I said that, they get it. Use an analogy they understand and help them connect the dots.
I hope that this helps, It gives you some ideas to learn how to thinking strategically and provides concrete examples and suggestions that you can use after this episode.
Again, if you like the content, please subscribe to my iTunes. If you prefer YouTube, I publish one video a week. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel.
For the next episode, I want to share with you some ideas that you can cultivate the strategic thinking, OK?
Have an awesome day!!
So, I spent several episodes talking about how to create a solid messaging framework and I shared templates on Ep 101, 102, 103 and 104. For today, I want to share a personal story and talk about how to prioritize your workload when you and your team are overworked and understaffed?
A friend called me up several days ago. Let’s call my friend, Mary, and I haven’t heard from her for over 2 years. I was so happy to hear her voice when I picked up the call. I said: “OMG, I am so happy that you called. How are you doing?” Before she can answer me, she started crying… I was like did someone die or get hurt? Was she fired? What happened? At that moment, I had many questions, but I decided not to ask and let her cry.
After 3-5 minutes, she apologized that she hadn’t called for a long time… I told her I had been a bad friend and I hadn’t called either. This is literally what she said to me: Pam, I see you creating content, speaking, taking on client projects, promoting yourself… You are doing several persons’ jobs. Are you exhausted or tired? I can barely manage my own job.”
Then, she told me that her company recently had a massive re-org, The manager she adored left the company. At the same time, she lost 2 people out of the 5-person team. The company had a big product launch, there were many glitches prior to the launch. She was working 70 hours a week. The workloads actually went up after the product launches to continue to build momentum. She just couldn’t catch up…
She finally hit a breaking point when she called me that day. She was tired and exhausted. She wanted to quit…
First thing first. I told her don’t quit her job. Her company is a great company. I also told her that a bi-weekly paycheck is nice. Trust me, I told her that she doesn’t want to do what I do if she knows the number of hours I work. I also told her that I am also tired and exhausted ALL THE TIME!! I mean all the time. I just happen to hide it well. She got to see me at night. I look like a panda with black circles around my eyes.
Well, it’s not about me, it’s about Mary. I told her that she needs to address her workload head-on. Here are my suggestions proactively address the workload issue:
The first thing I said to her was that the need to have a conversation with her current manager. She needs to explain to her manager what she has accomplished so far. She needs to let her manager know that she’s been working over 70 hours a week in the past several months to support the major product launch. After the product launch, the hours didn’t decrease… It started to affect her productivity, creativity and work and life balance. She needs to prioritize her workload with his approval.
Frankly, this type of conversation may or may not go well. Some managers don’t like to hear these types of issues, but you have to give it a try. It’s important to let the manager know. Having a conversation is a good starting point!
2nd suggestion: I ask Mary if she has a marketing budget. If she does, can she farm out some of the work, not to take on herself? Sometimes, it’s easier to spend money or allocate budget to get agencies or contractors to help. The downside of that is to spend time to train them which, sometimes, may take more time. However, it’s certainly an option worth exploring.
3rd suggestion: Talk to internal stakeholders. She has multiple major requests coming from internal stakeholders. I suggest that she talks to them and explains that she lost 2 people. She has been working for over 70 hours and it’s not sustainable. She needs to prioritize her and the team’s workloads and some stuff won’t get done or will be delayed…
4th suggestion: It’s to put things in perspective. I told her that, at the end of the day, marketing is not life and death… It’s not like we are doctors. If we don’t meet the deadlines today, it’s not like someone will die. For digital, there are always some ways that you can go back to amend it, even if it’s a massive PR nightmare… Say, it’s a PR nightmare, we can still find a way to fix after the events. With life and death situations, it’s much harder to amend. I was trying to put things in perspective for Mary. Changing my attitude when I am stressed out helps me to relax.
5th suggestion: Let it out. I told Mary that I was so happy that she called. I am also flattered that she called me. Talking to someone when you are super-stressed does alleviate stress. Talk it through. Talk it out. Don’t hold up.
Here is a quick follow-up to this story: Mary did talk to her manager and internal stakeholders. Her manager was understanding and allocated some budget to hire a contractor to help out the team. Her stakeholders were annoyed and not too understanding. She had to get her manager to have a conversation with senior managers of internal stakeholders. Things are improving, but it was still stressful.
The point is that she is proactively managing her workloads and making adjustments on a regular basis. You go, girl!
I know how stressful it can be working in Corporate America. I hope that you are making efforts to prioritize your workloads and take care of yourself.
Again, it will be greatly appreciated that you can like or comment on the podcast.
Have a great day!!
For today’s episode, I want to continue the series of how to create a solid messaging framework. I know that this is a niche topic in marketing.
Not everyone is creating messaging or talking points. This may not be your job. As a modern marketer, I think it’s important to have a holistic view of marketing is done. Messaging creation, in a way, is as important as content creation or storytelling.
On EP101, I talked about what is a messaging framework and the process of crafting a framework
On EP102, I shared a product-specific template
On EP103, I went through a thought leadership messaging template.
For this episode, I want to talk about messaging framework for secondary or low-cost/low volume or low-cost/high volume products. I have several listeners asked me: “Pam, my company sells many products. Do I need to create a messaging doc for every product?”
No, you don’t. The messaging framework I shared with you on EP102 is for hero-products. The primary products that sales and marketing focus on to bring the most dollar to the company.
I understand that your company may sell many other products and you need to showcase these products on your websites or even on your print catalog.
If you think about it most of the eCommerce sites have a template that you need to fill out in order to showcase your products on your website. Use that template as a substitute for the messaging framework for many of your products. That’s what I’d do.
So the template is likely to have the following elements:
- Name of the product:
- Description of the product:
- Product Features:
- Product Benefits:
- Product dimensions
- Images
I’d also add a column to show product owners and business groups so you know whom to track when you need to update the information.
In a way, the messaging template is product-level information for you to classify your products online and offline so that it’s easy for your customer to see and search.
Here are the key takeaways:
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Not every product needs to use product-specific messaging templates I described on EP102. Prioritize which products need in-depth messaging templates based on your marketing budget and sales focus
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If you have many products, think about where these products are showcased. Are they displayed online or offline in a catalog? What information is needed for online and offline formats? Maybe a form already exists
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Identify the owner of each product. If you need to update or refresh information, you know where to go to.
This is the last episode of the messaging framework series. Like I said, not everyone does messaging framework, but it’s important to get a sense how it’s done. If you need it one day, you can come to my website to find the templates.
Again, this is B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. I hope you enjoyed the short episode. More B2B Marketing topics to come in the future.
Again, I’d really appreciate that you can like or subscribe to my podcast. Thank you.
Have a great day!!
Messaging and positioning are the most under-rated tasks in marketing. Worse, crafting messaging is just not as much fun as creative development, story-telling, or content creation. I know.
Yet, messaging is the crucial and vital foundation for external communications and internal sales training. You may not create a messaging framework, but it doesn’t hurt to get a sense what it is and what elements should be included in a messaging template. The more you know about different aspects of marketing, the more you can connect the different sales and marketing dots.
On EP101, what is a messaging framework and the process of crafting a solid messaging framework?
On EP102, I shared a product-specific template
For this episode, I want to talk about a thought leadership messaging template.
Thought-Leadership Messaging Framework Template Brands love to be perceived as thought leaders. Before creating a thought-leadership story, you also need a messaging framework.
I shared the product-specific template on EP102. The biggest difference between product-specific and thought leadership templates are the narrative and the ability to explain “why” your company is a thought-leader.
For product-specific template, you need to start with product. For thought leadership template, you need to start with an objective statement to explain what this messaging framework is about.
Address the company’s role and its differentiator in the future of a mega-trend or an industry segment.
Target Audience Again, let’s focus on ONE target audience. For whom are we creating this thought-leadership story? This also needs to tie back to the company’s primary buyer’s personas.
Overall Narrative The key difference in thought-leadership messaging development is to explain “Why.” You need to identify your product or technology category that you are unique and explain why it is critical for your target audience. This section needs to be written in paragraphs, not bullet points.
Company-Specific Narrative Once you explain why the product or technology category is important, you can proceed to describe why your company has the best answers to the challenges in this product or technology category.
Again, you need to write 3-4 short paragraphs to explain the ‘WHY’.
Value Proposition of [Company Product Portfolio] Now the spotlight is on the ‘thought’ leadership value proposition. Rather than focusing on product-specific value propositions, you need to elevate the company and create one statement that showcases the overarching benefits of your company to target audiences.
I usually create several statements and let clients choose. Clients love to analyze my proposals for the one statement they should use. We go through each one and determine the pros and cons.
One example of the a company’s value proposition is to
XYZ company AI-based solutions accelerate your sales conversions for your sales team. by intelligently serving up relevant personalized content.
Benefits of [Company Product Portfolio] Once you identify the value proposition, it’s important to talk about the benefits of your company’s product portfolio. How does the company’s product portfolio help the target audience reduce cost, maximize value and increase revenue?
XYZ company AI-based solutions accelerate your sales conversions for your sales team by intelligently serving up relevant personalized content.
Messaging Positioning I use the ‘Rule of Three!’ It’s important to identify three key trend-based or strategic pillars that you want to talk about as a thought-leader. One of the messaging pillars is artificial intelligence. Tie your narrative to your key leading trends to showcase your leadership position.
Impact of Messaging Positioning Once you have the strategic pillars, you can explain the impact of your company’s product portfolio in each pillar. Again, this can be bullet points and can be product-specific, if necessary.
Recommend personalized content by intelligently analyzing customer engagements from various database.
Messaging Narrative It’s important to write 2-3 paragraphs to further depict the stories in each pillar. Having short paragraph-driven statements helps guide content creators on what to write to tell a coherent and focused story. The messaging pillar is about AI and write 2-3 paragraphs on how your products leverage AI to deliver customized solutions for your customers.
Proposed Thought-Leadership Content Topics As part of the messaging framework, I always come up with suggestions for thought-leadership titles to help senior management visualizes the type of content that will be created. Again, I ask them which titles they like to gauge their preferences and help content creators determine the final titles.
Keywords for Content Creation Again, I add a list of keywords that relate to my clients’ thought-leadership story. Agencies and content creators appreciate the keyword list because they can pick and choose from these keywords when they write the stories.
Here is a quick summary:
- Create a thought leadership messaging framework before writing your thought leadership story
- Use a template so guide your thinking process and rally the team
- Review with senior managers and PR to make sure that they agree with your value proposition and messaging pillars
Feel free to send me an email on pamdidner.com or contact me via various social media channels if you are interested in template and written samples, OK?
Again, I’d really appreciate that you can like or subscribe my podcast. Send me any messaging related questions. More than happy to answer your questions or have a good discussion with you.
Have a great day!!
In the EP101, I talked about what is a messaging framework. A messaging framework is a logical and structured representation of your products’ and services’ unique promises and differentiation.
For today’s episode, I want to talk about a messaging template. It’s very hard to talk about a temple on a podcast because I can’t do a show-and-tell in front of you. You can’t really see the template. This is probably not your job, but it doesn’t get a sense of how it’s done.
So, you need to visualize it and follow along, OK?
For a messaging template you can create, you need to start with a product.
Product-specific Messaging Framework Template Product Name In general, a messaging framework is product-specific, not company-specific. Think about it, we buy “things” to solve our needs.
Here is an example, when we are thirsty, we think that we want to drink some water. We are not necessarily thinking that I want to drink Fuji or Aquafina. As a marketer, that’s what we strive to achieve. When a customer needs something, they think of our brand.
So, your messaging framework needs to product-specific, not company or brand-specific.
Target Audience In this field, you only fill out ONE audience segment in this blank. You can pick 2 or more if these audiences face similar challenges and pain points, and the talking points are very similar, but the rule of thumb is ONE! This needs to tie back to the company’s primary buyer’s personas. Your company may have many buyers’ personas. Select the one which is the primary focus for sales and marketing teams.
Value Proposition Craft one statement to explain your product’s differentiation in the marketplace. In other words, how do you compare your product with that of your competitors?
For Salesforce, it’s number 1 CRM in the world.
For another CRM, it may be the CRM that integrated with Gmail.
You need to have one statement to define how you are different and unique from your competitors.
Customer Challenges Write down 3 customers challenges that your products or services can solve.
I love following “The Rule of Three.” List 3 key customer challenges. Write 1-2 statements per challenge and use the first person: “I need to solve….” or “I have this challenge of….” The reason to write as the first person is that you want your internal teams or agencies to read the challenges as if they are the customer.
One example of the customer challenges for the CRM tool can be: “I need to see my dashboard anywhere and anytime using any devices.”
Messaging Positioning This should connect directly to customer challenges. You need to write one statement to describe your product’s promise to solve the specific challenges you listed.
The position can be “Your dashboard at your fingertips.”
Product Features You need to identify specific product features. You need to provide a list of product features which will substantiate your positioning statements. This is especially important in B2B and technology selling. Make sure to call out specific features.
Product feature to access the sales dashboard can be the mobile-app. The mobile app is available so that your customers can access the dashboard from any devices.
User Benefit Sometimes the product features can be super-technical, then you need to be able to explain technical product features in plain English so that it resonates with your target audience.
Your product benefits: access dashboard from anywhere, anytime and from device to device.
Products, Target audience, an overarching value proposition, Customer challenges, one short statement messaging to address the customer challenges, product features to support your messaging, then you translate your product features to user benefits.
Viola, you got your messaging framework!
Keywords for Content Creation This is optional. Since I do so much research, I always add a list of keywords that relate to my clients’ products. Agencies and content creators love it because they know what keywords to use when they start creating content. It saves them time!
Messaging remains a crucial and vital foundation for external communications and internal sales training.
Here are 3 key takeaways:
- If you want to create a messaging framework, use a template
- Make your template hierarchical. Challenges, tie with product features and tie with user benefits
- Review and test with your product teams, Sales and Customers
If you want to get my template, just go to my website, PamDidner.com, hit the contact tab. Send me an email. Or contact me through any social media channels. I am on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I will send you the template and written samples in no time.
I’ll share more templates in the future podcast. Stay tuned.
Again, I’d really appreciate that you can like or subscribe my podcast.
Have a great day!!
Messaging and positioning are the most under-rated tasks in marketing. Worse, crafting messaging is just not as much fun as creative development, story-telling, or content creation. I know.
Yet, messaging is a crucial and vital foundation for external communications and internal sales training.
What is a Messaging Framework? A messaging framework is a logical and structured representation of your products’ and services’ unique promises and differentiation.
It’s an essential document to guide creation of creative briefs, content, and sales training.
So, if messaging is done right, it provides strategic guidance and consistency to PR, external marketing communications, sales, and can even be used for internal sales and employee training.
As boring as it may sound, I absolutely LOVE creating messaging frameworks for clients!
How to Create a Messaging Framework Here are the steps you can take to create a solid messaging framework.
Step 1: Engage with your product team
You need to engage your product team and subject matter experts to have them explain key features of new and existing products to you. Most of the time, product managers or engineers can explain the technical features well, but it’s a marketers’ job to “translate” them to the benefits that end-users can relate.
Step 2: Draft the messaging using template and vet it with your product team
Once you create a draft of the messaging framework, you need to vet it with the product team to make sure that features and benefits are presented ACCURATELY. Please bear in mind: Messaging is NOT copywriting. Essentially, messaging is the prelude to content creation and copywriting. The messaging framework provides guidance for content creators, copywriters, and designers. Therefore, the messaging framework needs to present features and benefits accurately so that writers can sprinkle their magic on it to create the final content. This is especially true in B2B marketing, given key content pieces may also need Legal’s approval.
Step 3: Test with your sales and customers
After several rounds of revisions working with product team and subject matter experts, you’ll need to test the latest messaging framework with your sales team and get their feedback. If you have the budget, you can also test the messaging with select customers or using AB testing online. Bringing your sales and customer feedback into the conversation will validate what messaging pillars or statements work better and further refine your messaging.
Step 4: Finalize and approval by the product team and Legal
The last step is to finalize your messaging framework based on data from testing, sales and product team. In B2B marketing and technology sales, you many use benchmark and performance data to support your claims. Therefore, Legal review is essential, in some cases, before you publish the messaging framework.
Additional hidden benefits of creating a messaging framework
By working through the process of reading product materials, interviewing subject matter experts and researching keywords, it helps me:
- Connect the dots with key business objectives and buyers’ personas
- Help you understand your products more deeply
- Identify optimal words to use for product differentiation
- Expand your ability to position products in the context of sales and marketing communications
- Pave the way for content strategy and editorial planning
Through years of working with clients, I’ve created several easy-to-follow and simple messaging templates that my clients love to use to brief their sales teams, marketing teams and agencies, including content creators, copy writers, media and search agencies.
The process of developing a strategic messaging framework is time-consuming and lengthy. Start early if you have new product launches ahead.
I have two popular templates my clients rave about
One is product-specific, the other one focuses on thought-leadership. The messaging hierarchy is structured in a logical manner from one to another.
Just send a twitter message to @pamdidner with “send me messaging framework.” I’ll send tweet you the link.
I’ll share more templates in the future podcast. Stay tuned.
Again, I’d really appreciate it that you can like or subscribe my podcast.
Have a great day!!
A neighbor kid asked me What is B2B Marketing? B2B Marketing used to be called Trade Advertising or Industrial Advertising many years ago. Overtime, marketers changed the term to B2B marketing, which sounds a lot classier. Business-to-Business refers to products that people buy for their companies, not for themselves, while Business-to-Consumer focuses on selling products for personal use to individuals.
Many people may think that marketing is just marketing. Basically, we are marketing products and services, so why does it matter if it’s B2B or B2C? Well, marketers use the same channels to promote products regardless of whether it’s for business or consumer products. Marketing channels are the same, but the approaches to business and consumers are different.
There are 5 differences that guide the approaches:
- Product Complexity: Business products, such as machinery or software, tend to be more complicated. It’s not just shampoos, clothes, or blankets which are pretty self-explanatory. For business solutions, you need to explain what your products or services do for a company.
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Dollar Amount: Business services tend to be more expensive. The initial dollar investment is bigger than typical consumer products, like consumer electronics or furniture.
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Decision Making: Because dollar amounts are bigger, more people in a company may need to be involved in the buying decisions. Therefore, a committee may be formed to determine what professional products they need to buy. It’s different from a consumer product where the decision can be made by one or two people in a family.
- Purchase cycle: As the dollar amount is bigger and more people are involved, the purchase cycle is longer and it’s a more complex process than simply using cash or a credit card. A purchase order may be needed when the company is ready to buy.
- Buyers vs. End-Users: Here is another key difference. B2C focuses on marketing to consumers. For B2B marketing, you may need to market to people who buy the technologies or products AND the end-users who use the products. For a piece of software, you may need to work with IT departments, but the end-users may be HR, marketing, sales or product teams. For B2B marketer, you need to think about who you should market to.
I am sure that there are other differences that you can call out, but these 5 key elements shape the B2B marketing approach. Since the product is usually more complicated, you need to create content to educate potential customers about your products and the reasons they should consider or purchase them. That’s where content marketing comes into play.
Because the dollar amount is big and purchase cycle is long, you need to nurture your customers and reach out to them strategically and frequently to keep your products on the top of their minds. To do that, you need to have marketing outreach that facilitates the customer’s purchase journey. You need to articulate customer’s purchase journey and have a plan to engage them at different stages.
Given that the dollar amount is big, there may be many cooks in the kitchen. Sales will need to reach out to different influencers and decision-makers. Therefore, marketers need to stay close to Sales to assist them in accelerating the sales engagement from creating messaging and talking points down to creating customized outreach and campaigns for specific accounts. That’s where account-based marketing or partner or co-marketing comes from. This may not be something you will do for consumer marketing. One of the key characteristics of B2B marketing is that you need to work closely with your sales team.
Many people think B2B marketing is boring. Well, it can be, but it can be fun if you know what you are doing. There is storytelling and the creative aspect of it, but everything you do needs to be purposeful and intentional.
Here are quick take-aways:
- B2B and B2C may use the same marketing channels, but the approaches and processes are different.
- 5 key elements that drive the different approaches between B2B and B2C are Product Complexity, Dollar Amount, Decision-Making, Purchase Cycle, and End-Users vs. Buyers.
- For B2B, it’s even more important to stay close to product and sales teams. Knowing your products well and understand how your sales team works is critical components of marketing to your business customers.
I am a B2B girl through and through. I love B2B marketing and working directly with sales and indirect sales forces.
Share your marketing challenges with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you like it, please like and subscribe my podcast on iTunes. I’d very much appreciate that.
Again, let’s continue to learn from each other. Have a great day.
Hi, everyone, thank you for tuning in to my podcast. So, I received a question from Manjunath. He sent me an email and told me that he has a solution that he wants to market to farmers, but there are too many middle men. He wonders if there is any way to educate the farmers directly about his solution and cut out as many such as dealers and distributors as possible.
Understand how farmers receive information
I completely understand your frustration. It would be great to talk to buyer about your products directly. Let’s hit the core and going to the decision makers who can make the buying decision. That sounds like a great approach. Well, there is one thing you need to do first. You need to know is how your farmer audience receives their information. You need to understand the paths they go through to receive the knowledge or get themselves educated.
Some questions that come to my mind that you need to find answers:
- Can they easily access the Internet to get the information they need?
- Do they go to some sort of local gatherings and get information by talking to other farmers?
- Do they have dealers or distributors they talk to get information from them?
I’d suggest that you talk to as many farmers as possible to learn how they get information. Then, you can determine what channels you should use to reach them. Obviously, you have a solution that you want to sell, right? Depending on the channels they use, you can determine what formats of content you want to create to reach out to them. You may use collateral, videos or personal show-and-tells.
Understand how farmers buy
Regarding your question of cutting out middle men, I don’t think you can totally cut them out if farmers have been buying through them. Chances are that’s how they buy, I am not sure that you can change their buying behavior overnight. Rather than cutting them out, can you think of a way to leverage these middle men and get them to be your partners and help you sell your products? Take advantage of the system instead of going against it. Understanding how farmers buy will help you determine how you can leverage the middle men.
So, here are the key takeaways:
- Understand how your farmers receive knowledge. Document the journeys and create your content according to them. Make your content and information available to them.
- Understand how your farmers buy. Identify their touch points and contacts and see how you can leverage them.
I am aware that different farming communities receiving knowledge and buy products from different sources. I get its’ complicated. I’d start small and test your communications approach in a small city or area first. Talk to as many farmers as possible, determine their learning journeys and test out your content. The best marketing is grass-roots marketing. Selling products to farmers is a long play. You need to be patient and optimize your outreach as you go.
I hope I answer your question and best luck with your endeavors.
Ok, if you like what you hear, I’d greatly appreciate that you’ll like and subscribe my podcast on iTunes.
Again, if you have any questions, please send them my way.
Let’s continue to learn from each other. Have a great day!
I decided to attend VidCon in Anaheim this July. It was one of the few events that I went to as an attendee, not as a speaker. VidCon is short for Video Conference. I first read about VidCon several years ago and thought it was such a genius idea to create an event that brings YouTube Celebrities to their fans, a niche that was not being fulfilled. Someone was quick enough to seize that opportunity and created an event for it. It turned out that that someone and his brother are Hank and John Green. You may have heard of John Green who is also the author of the book I love, the Fault in Our Stars, a NYT bestselling book and a popular movie. In 2018, they sold this event to ViaCom. I am sure that Hank and John are doing very well financially.
Here is the key reason I attended the event: I’m always curious about how consumer brands market to younger generations. VidCon is a great option for me to understand younger demographics, to see various brands’ approaches to reach out to the next generation of millennials, and to check out video content creators, YouTubers.
Nike, Facebook, Instagram, Nickelodeon, NBC Universal, Mountain Dew Game Fuel and more all had big exhibit spaces at the Expo Hall. It was challenging to win young audiences’ mind shares on-site. Every brand was working very hard to make sure their booths stood out.
Canon and HobbyKids Adventures made an impression on me
As a B2B marketer working closely with sales, I’m all about sales and closing deals. Being able to sell products at a conference is music to my ears. Two brands made an effort to sell their products, while creating an interactive, fun and engaging experience for their attendees.
Canon Camera:
Canon’s exhibit space was small (30x40) compared to other major brands. They used the theme “Glamping” to design their booth. They brought in an Airstream, a type of RV, and set up a campground-like atmosphere. They set up interactive areas inside and outside the Airstream that allowed attendees to pose and take pictures using Canon cameras.
In addition, they set up a table called the camp store to showcase a wide array of digital cameras. They staffed subject matter experts at the table to talk to anyone who was interested in learning more about cameras’ features. In addition to existing product lines, they also showcased their proof-of-concept products such as Ivy Cliq, an instant mobile camera printer, and Ivy REC, a Clippable, Go Anywhere Camera.
Their approach is no different than any other brands, but the key difference was the ability to buy! If you wanted to buy their cameras, you COULD! Except for Ivy REC which was not yet available, you could pretty much buy the products they showcased on-the-spot.
Hobby Kids Adventures:
Another brand did something similar and made an impression on me was Hobby Kids Adventures. You may not have heard of HobbyKidsTV. HobbyKidsTV, a family-run children's channel with over 3 million subscribers on YouTube. It’s a low-budget Disney channel, but the content is created by one family. The parents and 3 kids have been on YouTube since 2013. Their youngest child has been on YouTube since he was born. He didn’t know what life was like outside YouTube. Totally reminds me of The Truman Show.
I first read about HobbyKids TV in Wired magazine, HobbyKidsTV, YouTube, and the New World of Child Stars. These children are certainly different kinds of child stars than the mainstream media child stars that I am familiar with.
They didn’t have a big exhibit space, but they certainly knew their audiences well. In their little space, they created 3 obstacles for their young audiences to play through. The 1st obstacle was a Robot Bop Bag: You could punch Robot Boppin Bag and it would bounce back. The 2nd one was called ‘Slime Toss’, in which balls were tossed into a bucket. The 3rd obstacle was a Disc Shooter in which you use a wrist launcher, it’s like a hand gun that ties to your wrist, to shoot discs into targets. Once you played the 3 games, you could get a free T-shirt with your choice of Hobbykids Adventure designs. These games were designed to engage with their young audiences and were strategically tied to their merchandise. They showcased their toys and if you are a fan of HobbyKidsTV, you could also buy these toys on-site.
Both Canon and Hobby Kids Adventures booths were fun, interactive and engaging, just like many other booths. What I really liked about them was that they also sold products on-site. They made an effort to build brand awareness, engage with their audience and allow purchases if the audience was ready to buy. It covered the whole stack of the purchase funnel from awareness to purchase. I love it.
Are you ready to get a haircut at VidCon?
AXE:
There was another brand worth mentioning. AXE, a deodorant brand, took the same approach with a different twist. They brought in a big RV right there on the exhibit floor. It made a big presence! Inside the RV was a barber shop which gave boys and men haircuts. Yes, you hear me right, haircuts.
Rather than pushing their hair care products to the attendees, they offered people haircut on-site and used the opportunity to showcase products such as shampoos, gels, and color styling pastes. I thought that was a subtle way to educate young adults on how to look stylish with AXE products. Outside the RV, they set up a game zone which allowed boys to play video games and chill. At the same time, they were proactively giving away free samples. If you didn’t get a haircut, well, you could try free samples at home.
What about the other booths?
NBC universal’s booth was very traditional. You could take a photo with a People’s Choice Award trophy, but so what? I don’t think they fully understood the attendees. Facebook promoted their TV channel called Facebook Watch. Well, the booth was grand and beautiful, but I was not clear about the specific call-to-action. Nickelodeon’s booth was fun, with multiple kids’ activities and play zones, and made a push for their big new movie, Dora the Explorer. Adobe had a booth as well. The theme was about #createyourstory, but the booth experience didn’t align with the theme. You lined up to get into a room. Before getting into the room, you chose one of the 5 characters which best resembled you on a tablet. When you walked into the room, there was just a big TV screen with the character that you chose to imitate your movements. How did that tie with the theme #createyourstory? I didn’t get it. However, they did make an effort to show content creators their product called Adobe Rush which is a video editing tool.
I also got a chance to talk to aspiring YouTubers and attendees. They are very different than my target audiences of B2B marketers. YouTube is not only the place they share their content, but also the place they seek entertainment and receive information and knowledge. Yes, I mean knowledge. Many told me that they only watch Netflix and YouTube, they don’t watch major networks or cables. If you are trying to reach young audiences, YouTube is certainly a channel you can’t miss.
Is VidCon worth attending? It depends. I went because I wanted to check out a different conference and demographic. If you are an aspiring young content creator or have children who love YouTube, this might be a good conference to go to.
Have you attended any fun and unique conferences? If you do, please let me know. I’d love to check them out.
Again, let’s continue to learn from each other. Take care and have a great day!
A listener of this podcast, Chris, posted a question: What is the best way to integrate branding and messaging into sales? How can marketing help sales stay 'on brand'?
Define brand and branding
First of all, let’s define what brand is. What does brand or branding mean? A brand is beyond a logo. It’s how a company as a whole presents itself, how employees behave, and how customers perceive the company. In a way, a brand is a business, organization, or entity’s identity. Branding is the act of creating that brand. Jay Baer said it nicely: “Branding is the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company with what people actually do think about your company. And vice versa.”
If brand is everything a business, organization, or entity does, then sales represents that vision of the company in a personal way. Therefore, they need to thoroughly understand the essence of the company’s brand.
The best way to train sales on the company brand is to incorporate that as part of sales onboarding and continuous training.
Be part of sales onboarding and training
Many companies have formal sales onboarding with 1-2 days of training. As part of the agenda, they usually have a one-hour session about brand. A brand manager will come in and talk about the essence of the brand, brand personas in the context of corporate culture and brand guidelines, such as logo usage, color palette, and will even share presentation templates. Some of them will even discuss how to use logos with partners or customers if sales plans to do co-marketing.
For companies that don’t have formal onboarding, I’d recommend you check with your marketing manager. You need to know where the brand guide is and how to use the logo/tagline/colors correctly. At a bare minimal, use the official company templates to create your presentations.
Bring messaging to sales
Chris also asked about messaging. I define messaging as what salespeople can or should say about products, services, offerings and the company. The most frequently asked question when I was working with sales for new product launches was what can they say about new products. Therefore, it’s important to arm your salespeople with talking points and product messaging.
Talking points can change depending on the sales stage and individual salespeople. However, salespeople still need some baseline to start with, right? For a new product, there are new features. Well, how should we prioritize the features? What are the key benefits? You need to provide some guidelines about the key features and benefits that salespeople can highlight when they engage with customers.
It’s like giving comedians a script. They may not follow the script completely, but the script gives comedians something to start with and improvise around. That’s what messaging does. It gives salespeople talking points for new products. They can pick and choose what to say and how to say it, using their best judgement in the situation they are in.
So, what is the best way to communicate messaging? Well, the best way to educate sales on messaging is to bring your messaging to the sales huddle meetings. Walk them through the framework and key talking points and encourage them to ask questions. Tell them where the file will be. Follow up with email or several emails.
Here is the ugly reality…
no matter how many times you communicate, they’re still going to come to you and ask you to resend the messaging information you presented. Make sure that you have the link ready to send. Or if you have a sales content library, you can direct them to the library and ask them to download from there.
Following brand guidelines and messaging helps salespeople stay on-brand. And the best way to share that information is to be part of sales communications, onboarding and training.
Chris, I hope I answered your question.
How do you share information with your sales team?
Let me know so we can keep learning from each other.
I have huge respect for sales people. I do! Personally, I don’t think that I am cut out to be a sales rep. The reason is that I don’t take rejection well, I take it personally, as if it’s my fault. So being told “no, thanks” 20-30 times every day is going to crush me. Needless to say, I haven’t been doing cold calls.
It's time to increase my sales pipeline
My leads tend to come from referrals, workshops and organic outreach through my website. It has worked well for me. But I want to increase my sales pipeline so I decided to give virtual cold calls a try. There are many ways to do that. I decided to use LinkedIn Sales Nevigator and InMail, since many of my prospects are on LinkedIn.
Find an expert to assist me
I couldn’t do this alone. I knew that I needed someone to help me out. Sean Anthony found me via virtual cold call (InMail) on LinkedIn. I didn’t respond to his email right away, but I liked the content he shared. He is salesy, but not too salesy. He is the founder of GrowthResponse.io and specializes in lead generation and customer acquisition using LinkedIn.
Identify Ideal Customer Profile, their pain points and challenges and my offerings
First, we identified my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). I told him my peeps are B2B enterprise marketers in the manufacturing, healthcare and financial services segments. He also drilled down on my ICP’s pain points and challenges. At the same time, I shared with him my offerings. I help B2B marketers in content marketing, sales enablement and account-based marketing. Based on my offerings and my ICP’s pain points and challenges, we worked together to rewrite my headline and profile summary on LinkedIn. We want to make that very clear so that people can easily know what I do and offer.
Change my new headline, tagline, LinkedIn profile
In the past, I emphasized my corporate experience, author and speakership, but it didn’t help to explain what I do for my clients. So, we changed that.
Here is my new headline:
“Accelerating B2B marketers’ contribution to sales with content, sales enablement, account-based marketing using proven methodology”
I emphasized the keywords of content, sales enablement and account-based marketing. I also explained that I have a process to do that.
Using different words, we also created a tagline so that I can place below my signature on LinkedIn:
This is my tagline:
“Helping B2B marketing teams increase sales velocity through content, sales enablement, and account-based marketing”
So, you can tell, it’s something similar. That tagline is part of the InMail, people can immediately understand what I do without going to my profile.
The next thing we tackled was the profile summary. I started by sharing my passion for creating alignment between sales and marketing. I followed that with the 3 main challenges that marketers encounter, then moved on to explain how I address these 3 challenges.
I moved the blurbs about authorship and speakership to the experience session, so people search for speakers on specific marketing topics can still find me.
On a side note…
I’ve changing my LinkedIn headline and profile at least 20 times in the past 5 years. The reason is that my expertise and experience continue to grow. Therefore, I need to constantly update my value propositions to reflect that. Plus, the secret of writing is rewriting. It’s amazing that I can constantly find better ways to explain who I am and what I do. A value proposition is not something you do and then just check off. You need to constantly evaluate what you do and what you can offer to be competitive.
Once we were done with ICP, LinkedIn headline, profile and tagline, we were ready to approach virtual cold calling. For this, we carefully crafted a sequence of 5 emails.
Carefully orchestrate the sequence of email for cold calls
The first email is very simple and short. Let prospects know that I am reaching out because we share some mutual connections. Something simple like this actually enticed people to accept my invitation to connect.
The 2nd email is a “Thank you for connecting” email and asks the prospects whether I can be a resource to them. It finishes by letting them know they can reach out anytime if they want to explore opportunities to work together.
The 3rd email is a Value-Add email. I created a relevant blog post for my ICP, share the link with them and ask for their feedback.
The 4th email is a meeting ask. I follow-up and check if they read my content. I also ask if they are open to a phone chat.
The 5th email is the final email. In it, I remind them what I do and ask them to contact me if they ever need any help in the areas of content marketing, sales enablement or account-based marketing. I also share a free chapter from my latest book, Effective Sales Enablement.
I use Sales Navigator to find prospects and reach out to a small number of prospects every day. It requires that I stay on top of it and follow through with prospects consistently.
Here are some of my findings after 8 weeks of virtual outreach
- 35% accept my initial invitation
- Out of that 35%, 80% failed to respond to further emails and 19% said “no, thanks” after the 3rd or 4th
- Only 1% request a meeting
- Out of that 1%, 50% actually attend a meeting.
The first 90 days are typically an experimentation period where we try to achieve a message to market match. Here is the biggest finding for me:
We’ve noticed that manufacturing companies with 51-1000 employees have the best response rate, while larger enterprises, companies with 5001-10,000+ employees, have a poor response rate. That was counter-intuitive to me initially, since my experience is enterprise, therefore, I tried to align my enterprise experience with enterprise customers. But that’s not the case. Granted my experience is enterprise, but prospects that need my expertise are the companies that are growing into being a big enterprise. They are going through growing pains and have so much to do that they need strategy help… That’s really my sweet spot.
As a result, our focus for the next month will be on companies with 51-1000 employees.
One more thing to share…
For people who said no, some of them appreciate the useful content I share. But some people are pretty nasty, saying things like ‘I don’t appreciate you looking for work on LinkedIn.’ Well, that’s what LinkedIn is for. People are on LinkedIn to find work or jobs. That’s the way it is. But I understand their frustration of getting cold calls. I get it.
Since the purchase cycle for the prospects to engage with me is about 8-12 months, I am planning to run this outreach for several months and see how it goes. More updates to come.
So, do you do any virtual cold calls? How does that go?
Share with me and let’s keep learning from each other.
A client I haven’t talked to for 2 years texted me on Monday. She asked me if we can get together for a cup of coffee. I am so glad to hear from Harriet. She was the chief of staff and operations manager for a business unit in a global enterprise. I helped her create keynote presentations for her general manager, Jeff, and I even helped her build the internal communications process. Once I created several keynote presentations and established the internal communication process, she just ran with it. Through the grapevine, I know that she is doing well.
Jeff promoted her to be the director of marketing several months ago. I sent a short note of congratulations. She was super-excited about the opportunity, even though Harriet doesn’t have marketing experience. However, Jeff was willing to coach Harriet and help her ramp up on sales and marketing. Plus, Harriet is a fast learner. With proper coaching, she should be fine.
Unfortunately, Jeff left the company right after he promoted Harriet. So a new general manager, Tom, was hired to replace Jeff. Tom has solid operations, finance and product experience, but doesn’t know much about marketing. Tom relies on Harriet to articulate what his marketing team does for the group. However, Harriet, without a strong marketing background or experience, has a hard time articulating her team’s contribution. she asked me if I can help her on a couple things:
- Articulate her team’s value-add and contributions to Tom
- Help her create a 2020 marketing plan
When we met, she was stressed. She told me that Tom is a nice guy, but he also has been asking many questions that she doesn’t know how to answer given she is new to the role. Plus, the marketing team didn’t have a marketing director for many months and the team was under Jeff for a while. Jeff knew the ins and outs, and there was no transition between Jeff and Harriet due to Jeff’s sudden departure.
What does your manager care?
I told Harriet and let’s think about what Tom wants to know. Tom is a product and finance guy, plus, he cares about his revenue goals and customers. He wants to make sure that his customers are happy and that he hits the revenue targets. Therefore, we need to answer three important questions:
- How does the marketing team help build the customer base?
- How does marketing support the sales team?
- How does Harriet’s team help current customers?
It’s not about telling Tom what marketing does on a daily basis. We need to talk about marketing’s impact on new prospects acquisition, its ability to enable the sales team to close deals, and the support of top accounts. Answering these questions will help Tom understand the marketing team’s impact on things that Tom cares about: revenue and customers.
Based on these 3 question, I helped her build a presentation deck to educate Tom on the marketing team’s contributions.
Articulate your contributions from your manager’s perspective
Given that Tom is new to the role and has no marketing experience, I told her to explain:
- How does the company as a whole market to Tom’s customers? Harriet needs to explain how corporate marketing works with product marketing and country marketing etc.
- How does Harriet’s marketing team fit into the overall marketing machine?
- Then, we move on to explain what does Harriet’s team do to support direct sales?
- What does the team do to find prospects?
- What does the team do to educate existing customers about new products or new features of existing products?
- After that, Harriet can move on to second half of the 2019 plan, focuses, challenges.
- It ends with initiatives in progress and next steps
I kept emphasizing that she needs to talk about marketing from Tom’s perspective. Tom cares about sales and customers. Well, what can she do to make sure that sales and customers are taken care of. For sales, it’s about sales training and pass-through content. For customers, it’s about solving customers’ issues, and possibly working closely with customer support. In addition, she needs to think about how to work with subject matter experts to create content that sales and customers need.
Flow your presentation based on the questions you want to address
We spent one hour talking. After the meeting, I offered to put together a deck template so that she can fill in the blanks to clearly articulate her team’s value-add and contributions. I shared my proposed flow with her the next day. When we met again, we moved some slides around and she was able to take the skeleton I built and add relevant information to tell her own story.
Harriet very much wants to make the transition from an operations manager to a marketer. I told her that we can spend several sessions together. I am more than happy to help her make that transition. After all, I made that transition 12 years ago. I love to share what I learned.
If you have challenges articulating your team’s value-add and contributions, reach out. Let’s talk about it.
Again, let’s keep learning from each other.
I was asked a question the other day. How do you know that you are a true digital marketer? That’s a great question. The truth is there is no way to measure your digital knowledge per se. There is no test that you can take. The breadth and depth of your digital knowledge and expertise is based on your personal experience. In addition, digital technology is changing every day. There is no baseline that you can gauge against.
To make it more complicated, digital knowledge can also be categorized into different fields from website design, search optimization, paid social media buy, retargeting paid ads down to personalization and data analytics. No one person can be an expert at all of it.
Personally, I’d evaluate a person’s digital knowledge based on an ability to ‘connect the dots’.
Digital is about connecting the dots
in the past, if you wanted to create print collateral, you knew there were specific layout templates that you could use. You would use that design template with some modifications and fill it with compelling copy and purposeful visuals. The good ole’ days were so much simpler.
But today, when you create digital collateral, your thinking process needs to be different. The design and copy of a digital asset are heavily dependent on where it will be displayed and how your audience will consume it. Will it be viewed on a mobile device? If so, your design should have minimal visuals and the copy needs to be structured to scroll up and down easily. The size of copy should be dynamically scaled to the form factor of the device from mobile phones and tablets to desktops, because you don’t know where this asset will be read. As a digital marketer, you also need to be concerned with the flow of information and overall user experience. That is not something that you need to think about when you just create one piece of print collateral.
Often, I’ve seen many brands just upload PDF collateral. When the readers open it on their phones, it shows the whole PDF or an entire page on a tiny screen. The readers need to pinch with 2 fingers to zoom in to see the text. If you want to continue to read, you need to scroll left and right to see the complete sentences. It’s very user-unfriendly.
I am not saying the PDF is dead. The PDF layout still works nicely for print or desktops. As a marketer, we just need to be cognizant that our content will be consumed on multiple devices and think through on how the content will come through.
Digital allows you to test and validate your assumptions
Another important element for digital marketers is testing, especially QA and AB testing.
For example, when I launched my new website, I made sure that I viewed the different pages on PCs, Macs and various phones and tablets as well as different browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and Edge. I’ve discovered that some images or colors did not show up well on some browsers. Then, I needed to figure out how to fix that. Another characteristic of digital is the ability to do A/B testing of headlines, CTAs, creatives or whatever you want to test. That’s not something you can do easily with print.
Digital is about attention to details
How do you know if you are a digital marketer? On the digital side, everything is integrated and connected. For example, when you design a website, you need to think through the user journey and SEO, in addition to using beautiful visuals and layout. When you create content, you need to think through how and where users consume the content and what user-interface should look like to create a seamless customer experience.
If you do event marketing, you need to think through how to use email or different tech tools after events to continue to build the relationships with your new leads. Digital is complex because there are many details, bits and pieces that you need to pay attention to. Most of the time, you won’t know how everything is tied together until you dive in and start doing the work.
The best way to be a digital marketer is to work on inbound and outbound marketing, sales enablement, and even customer services. That’s how I learned to be a digital marketer. The learning never stops.
How do you grow your digital knowledge? Share your thoughts.
Let’s keep learning together.
Hey, it’s Pam Didner here. So happy to do another episode of 7 Min Marketing from Portland, Oregon.
About a month ago, Carter Hostelley, President of LeadTail, hosted a dinner for his friend, Ted Ruben, who came to Portland to emcee a marketing event at Intel. He invited me to be part of that dinner and asked me to share my thoughts on overall content marketing trends. Just an informal chat. It was a very intimate dinner gathering with 8-10 marketing professionals. We talked about marketing trends, shared personal stories or just whatever topics that happened to come up at that time. Delicious meals. Great wine. Excellent conversations. Just what a great dinner party should be!
It was fun to see Carter again as I haven’t seen him for almost 2 years. The last time I met him, he had just moved to Portland from San Francisco. I asked him how he’s been doing. He told me that he has been super-busy. It turns out that he’s been doing quite well in the past 2 years and has grown his agency to almost 20 people. Dang. Well-done, Carter. And very impressive. So I asked him what any consultant or small business owner would ask: “How do you find your customers and prospects?”
To my surprise. Carter told me that he doesn’t do typical outbound marketing. Ok, that’s intriguing, If you don’t do outbound marketing, how do you get your prospects? His answer was one word: “Community.”
Here is how he does it:
Rather than doing typical digital outbound, he spends his energy proactively to nurture and grow his community or ‘network’. His community consists of industry experts, professional colleagues, consultants, agency people, and influencers whom he considers friends. He hosts regular dinner get-togethers. He usually invites 8-12 people from his community to attend his dinner party. He carefully orchestrates the dinner party list by bringing 1-2 influencers or industry experts and 8-10 agencies, consultants, and brand marketing managers. The influencers or industry experts are the draw to get people to attend the party. Carter provides the influencers a platform to share their insights and thoughts as a way of stirring some interesting and intelligent conversations. Attendees get a chance to meet industry experts, enjoy the dinner, network with fellow marketers, and have wonderful conversations. #winwinwin
Here is one interesting observation: Carter’s target clients are start-ups and mid-size companies, not big enterprises. He regularly turns down enterprise clients, because it doesn’t fit his business model. So, I was puzzled why he invites major brand marketing managers to attend his dinner. Is he wasting his time and money? They are not even his client-base. There is no real pay-off . I asked him why he does that? He answer was one word again: “Community.”
It’s not about him anymore. It’s about the community. He doesn’t need to meet enterprise marketing managers, but his community members such as agency and consultant friends or even industry experts or influencers would love to talk to them. It’s about creating networking opportunities for his community, even though there is no direct benefit to him. I thought that’s very smart and thoughtful.
Carter’s approach of getting prospect is a long play. He proactively nurtures and expands his community and makes an effort to help his network whenever possible. Whenever they have questions or requests, Carter will do what he can. He doesn’t invite one person for one dinner. Over the years, the same person may attend several dinners. Throughout the courses of these dinners, Carter gets to know them well. And they get to know Carter and his community. Slowly, these people become his advocates. If they see opportunities that may fit Carter’s service offerings, they send prospects to Carter. In a way, his community and monthly dinners are his version of outbound marketing, but not focusing on digital outreach or relying on machine algorithms, but on human connections, which he calls the human algorithm. I thought that’s pretty cool.
I participated in his dinner in Portland and one more time in Silicon Valley. It is always fun just to know other fellow marketers whether they are on the client or agency side. Carter made an effort to introduce to me his community, I reciprocated by sharing my network with Carter and his community. That’s how referrals work, if you think about it.
Like Carter said, you just never know when and where your next lead will come from. It’s nice to network and build those human connections to foster the potential opportunities. Again, it’s not something you can do once and check off. You need to spend time nurturing and working on it, like any relationship. Carter has been doing dinner parties for years.
On the other hand, my approach for finding prospects is completely different than Carter’s. Although I don’t do paid marketing, I still do typical digital outbound marketing. I make sure that my website is optimized with the right keywords and content. Then, I create content on a regular basis to drive traffic to my website and to build my thought leadership presence. I also make an effort to speak at marketing conferences. In addition, I do virtual cold calls in which I reach out to potential prospects by sharing relevant content on LinkedIn. I also run email campaigns to my subscribers. I rely on SEO, content marketing, email, and virtual cold calls to find prospects, which is very typical of outbound and demand gen efforts.
By talking to Carter, I realize there is no one way to find your prospects. There are many ways and channels that you can use. The key is to understand what works for you and create a model that you can repeat.
Both of us agree that best way to get leads is through referrals. The best way to get referrals is to do a good job for your existing customers and be helpful to your past and existing customers and network. At the end of day, you just don’t know where your leads will come from.
If you have your own approach of building your prospect pipeline, please reach out and let me know.
Let’s keep sharing and learning from each other.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
One of the mandatory requirements for modern marketers is to understand the technology side of marketing, or martech. Modern marketing can’t function without technology. There are technologies and platforms behind any digital communications and even for offline marketing. Just take Facebook ads as an example. They have evolved so much, from simple banner ads to processes like using messenger to share content and timely updates with your subscribers. Social media platforms are continually evolving and coming up with new and creative ways to sell ad space. To help manage those techniques, new platforms and tools are being created all the time to manage the new capabilities. You require technology upon technology to manage your marketing efforts. You can’t just launch one tool, check it off the list, expect everything works the same anymore.
A great example is voice recognition. We, marketers, literally just spent the past 10 years optimizing our websites for text search. Now comes Alexa and Google Home, in the near future, it will be our jobs to create voice-centric content and make sure that they are optimized for voice recognition. So, we have SEO and SEM, guess what, we may have voice search optimization and voice search marketing. You know it’s coming. Guess what, we may need a new set of martech just to manage voice recognition. Martech evaluation never ends
We need to constantly stay on top of new technologies and evaluate and re-evaluate your martech. It’s exhausting. According to Martech 5000, there are more than 7000 tools and platforms available as of 2019. There is a tool for almost any marketing and sales function or tactic you could ever imagine.
Here are several steps to help you keep your MarTech stack up-to-date
- Clearly articulate your pain points and challenges. Know what you want to solve. How you define your problems will guide the subsequent research
- Google search on your pain points and see what tools and platforms are available
- Research the potential platforms and understand their pros and cons
- Contact vendors and request demos
- At the same time, talk to your colleagues and industry peers and get a sense what they use
- Pilot or do free-trials before you make a purchase decision
That is one approach for evaluations based on your pain points and challenges. Over a period of time, you’ll end up with multiple tools that may perform similar or overlapping functions. Then, you need to re-evaluate the overall MarTech stack, kind of like spring cleaning, to determine what you want to keep or delete.
There is no simple answer to this question. My advice for keeping up with technologies is to pursue continuous learning. The more you understand about how technologies work holistically, the more you can connect the dots and the more strategic you become.
The best way to go about creating and updating your MarTech is to know and understand what’s out there.
If you want to talk about your company’s MarTech stack, reach out anytime. Love to have a chat.
Again, if you like the podcast, please share with your marketing colleagues and friends.
Keep learning, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam.
My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
Chris asked me this holy-grail question: how can marketing help sales and vice versa?
Well, the question is very abstract. Let’s bring it down a notch. Marketing can do many things to help sales.
The question is what marketing wants to do to help sales and whether sales agrees that it would be helpful.
In many cases, marketing helps sales build a pipeline, which means getting potential leads or marketing qualified leads for sales.
Marketing can also help sales on messaging, what to say and how to say it, about new products and offerings. From messaging, marketing can naturally extend its help to content creation for the sales team and even incorporate content into sales onboarding and continuous training.
Marketing tends to be on the digital forefront way before sales or any other organizations in a company. Therefore, marketers can transfer their knowledge to help with social selling. They can also share do’s and don’ts on social media. Some marketers are very good at doing marketing research, which may also apply to competitive landscape analysis. There are so many things marketing can do to help sales, Chris. The sky is limit.
Ok, let’s turn this around. What can sales do to help marketing? Well, sales should educate marketing on how they sell and proactively tell marketing about the challenges they encounter. Brainstorm with Marketing to help solve some of sales’ impasses. The example I use all the time is a whisky company wanted to increase its shelf space in the super markets and liquor stores. The sales team worked with their marketing team to run free-tasting events in multiple stores and use geo-targeted social media paid ads to drive traffic to the stores. That’s a great example of using marketing to close a sales deal.
I understand budget, resource, organization structure, and business priorities tend to get in the way of how sales and marketing should work together in enterprises.
However, it doesn’t hurt to open a dialogue with your marketing peers. Help them understand your needs and challenges. The more you talk, the more you’ll find ways to work together. It’s like any good relationship, you need to work at it.
So, the short answer is, start talking and keep the conversation going is the best way for marketing and sales to help each other.
If you have any questions on how to bridge that relationship, reach out to me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or my website. Let’s have a chat.
Again, if you like the podcast, please share with your colleagues and friends. It will be greatly appreciated.
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time. Ok, this is Episode 90. I can’t believe that I am only 10 episodes away from 100. It’s certainly been a journey.
Here are 3 big lessons learned from doing 90 episodes:
1. Unlike blog posts, it’s much harder to edit podcast episodes after publishing
I consider myself a writer, not a podcaster or a voice professional. Like many people, I don’t particularly like the sound of my own voice. Vocal recording is not something I do naturally. From my perspective, blog writing is so much easier. If I find myself unhappy with a blog post after publishing, it’s a simple task to change it at any time. No sweat! For podcasting, when I finish recording, there is post-production to finalize the recording, so changing is a much more involved process. Producing a podcast is also more expensive than writing a blog post.
2. Podcast script writing is different than the writing of a blog post
In my earlier episodes, I took some of my blog posts and recorded them as they were. Ok, that was mistake. Podcast scripts are different than blog posts. For a podcast, you need to get to the point much sooner. You need to keep it flowing like a conversation, not necessarily like an essay. For a similar topic, I need to write a blog post, then I need to write differently for a podcast script. It’s double the amount of the work. Well, I become better over time, but it’s still an effort. The biggest benefit of writing podcast script is to train myself to write differently and
3. It helps me structure my answers in a succinct way
Another benefit of doing podcasts, especially my format of answering one marketing question in 7 minutes or less, is that it helps me think through my answers logically and structure them in a succinct way. It has helped me tremendously to prepare for media interviews that I do online or offline. I am less nervous and more comfortable talking to others while being recorded. In addition, the practiced from recording audio episodes helps in all aspects of my presentation delivery.
Before I kicked off my podcast, I didn’t know what format of podcast I wanted to do. As much as I wanted to interview guests on my podcast or partner with another marketeer to debate and discuss marketing challenges, the logistics, coordination, and cost wouldn’t be sustainable for me. Therefore, I selected a show format that gives me better control: which is just me talking, answering one question at a time in about 7 minutes. Ok, it may not be as flashy as I’d like, but the logistics are sustainable and I have more within my control. Plus, my target audience is B2B marketers. If they read or listen to something, they want actionable take-aways. That’s something I can do for them.
The ugly truth is that I stayed away from podcasts for a long time. I didn’t want to expose myself to others on a platform that I was not good at yet. For writing, I can hide behind the curtain and make changes whenever I want. For podcast, you can’t hide. What you record is what you get, even with awesome post production edits. I wouldn’t say that I am very good now, but I’ve certainly come a long way since my first episode.
Overtime, I actually learned to enjoy the process of recording and answering people’s questions. My original goal was to hit 100 episodes. Well, I’m close and we’ll see how far I can go.
If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
Again, if you like the podcast, please share with your friends and colleagues. It will mean a lot to me.
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
I received a question from Keri. She just joined a big tech company. Her job is to enable sales. sales. But there is a catch: she is not part of the established sales enablement team. She is part of the corporate marketing team. When we talked, she was 3 weeks into her job and was not sure what her job is. She feels that there is duplication between her role and that of the sales enablement team, even though her manager assures her that this is not the case.
Here is what I told her based on a quick 15 min conversation:
First of all, there is no duplication between her and the entire sales enablement team. Sales enablement, in general, focuses on onboarding and training. Their job is to “train” sales and makes sure that sales is ready to sell. Their job is all about training. I told Keri that her job is to enable sales from the marketing side, not about training. And there are many ways marketers can help sales:
Content:
Marketing creates a lot of content. She can suggest and recommend marketing content which can help sales accelerate their engagements. That’s not something that the conventional sales enablement team does. But there are a couple of pre-requisites before she can do that. She needs to get a sense of the current content landscape. Understand the top content by products, by personas, and even by buyers’ stages. Also, she needs to understand her sales team’s processes and methodology. Having the knowledge of the content landscape and sales stages, she can map the most relevant content to the sales stages and share that with the sales team.
Partner Marketing:
Another way to help is partner marketing. Sometimes, sales will identify strategic accounts to target for co-marketing or co-selling. Great examples are HP and Intel partnering together to sell PCs or Walmart and Coke working together to sell Coke at Walmart during the holiday seasons. Marketing can work with sales to create and execute co-marketing efforts. This is another great way to enable sales as a marketer.
Account-based marketing:
One more option I shared with her is account-based marketing. Working closely with sales on strategic accounts to close deals. Use existing marketing elements to create tailored and personalized campaigns to complement sales engagements with certain accounts and the target persons in these accounts. Again, this is not what the typical sales enablement team will do.
I told Keri that her job is not to duplicate the efforts of the sales enablement team. There are many things she can do to help support sales in her own way as a marketer. The way she should position herself in her company is as a marketer enabling sales, so there will be no confusion about what she does and how she is different from the sales enablement team.
Keri is very smart and she connected the dots right away. She told me that she will keep me posted about how it goes. Well, Keri, I am looking forward to hearing from you.
If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave a review and comments on iTunes.
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
What is the main requirement to be a digital marketer? I’ve been asked that question often by traditional marketers. The way I define traditional marketers is that they are marketing professionals who are not digital natives and didn’t start their marketing careers on the digital side.
I usually tell them that the key difference between traditional and modern marketers is the ability to think in multi-channels in a sense of integrated marketing and to understand the technology behind-the-scenes. By the way, these two are related. If you understand how technology works and integrates, you’ll have a holistic view of your company’s marketing and can think strategically by connecting different marketing dots.
Here is a great example
Say, you are a content creator by writing weekly blog post for your company. And you use DivvyHQ, a platform to plan, workflow, and collaborate with a team, to brainstorm and create content from beginning to the end. Your blog posts are then uploaded to your company’s website using Wordpress. These blog posts are used as part of email campaigns run on Drip, which is an email automation tool. Social media managers use CoSchedule to syndicate the content out to various social media channels and drive traffic back to your website. Since all the promotions through various channels are coming back to the website, the company is also using Google Analytics and Tableau to analyze marketing attributions and the performance of each channel.
Once the visitor is on site, the team uses KickFire to see which company comes to the site by checking their IP addresses. Once we know that, the inside sales team uses Discover Org, Inside View or Winmo to get more intelligence about the potential prospects such as their email addresses, company’s marketing spends, and additional contact information. Do you see how each function uses different tools? Say, you are a content creator who creates weekly blog posts. Using Google Analytics, you can see which channels drive most traffic to your blog post. If email works well, you can have a chat with your email marketing manager and understand how you can optimize your blog post for email outreach. So, you don’t just create blog posts, you use other tools to understand your audience and marketing analytics to do your job better. It’s important not just do your job, but understand how your job as part of the overall marketing.
So, what is the best way to understand your company’s martech stack?
For many of us, we only work in sub-sections of overall marketing. Do we care about the complete martech stack? Well, if you want to foster your strategic thinking, you need to understand how the back-end works. This is not something that you can’t leave it to IT or junior marketing specialists anymore. The more you know that other people don’t know, the better off you can provide unique value-add to your managers, internal stakeholders, and customers.
Ok, how to gain insight into the complete martech stack?
- Pick a framework that you understand such as customer journey, sales stage or even by specific marketing functions. Here is I’d suggest. Google Stackies Award 2019. The Stackies Awards give marketers an opportunity to put their martech on a single slide that illustrates their “stack” which is the collection of marketing technology tools they use and how they conceptualize them working together. By going through the award winning stackie slides, you’ll get a sense the different frameworks companies use to showcase their marketing stacks. Here is a bonus: you can also see what are the popular martech tools out there and learn about new tools that you haven’t heard of yet.
- Once you pick a framework to map your company’s martech, start having conversations with IT, your marketing peers, internal stakeholders such as research, and analytics teams. Find out what tools they use and how they use them. Draw your own diagram to show how everything ties together as you understand it. It’s like a scavenger hunt. You go to different places to find clues to piece the puzzles together to create your own big picture. I love doing that.
- Review your findings with your stakeholders and refine them as you go.
Viola! You have a high-level view of your company’s martech stack and you know how the technologies work together. You can start identifying gaps and exploring where you can add value. Most importantly, be able to have a strategic and intelligent conversations with various stakeholders using visual you create.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to understand the martech stack of your company. By understanding that, trust me, you’ll look at marketing in a totally different light.
If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave a review and comments on iTunes.
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
I had an epiphany talking to Rob Clarke, co-founder of Strala, at Martech West in early April. His company created a turnkey platform that allows you to standardize UTM parameters to track all your online and offline marketing outreach. He told me that marketers like to ask 3 questions: who, what and when.
Marketing focuses on Who, What, and When
- Who are they?
- What did they do throughout their buying journey?
- When did they do it?
If you have a standard tracking system that is integrated to your marketing automation, CRM, POS (point of sales), eCommerce and other platforms, you can see a series of actions that prospects do through their journeys. With all the information in one place, hopefully, you get some insights to determine the next steps to nurture and drive better conversions. If you tie that information to your budget, you can see which marketing channels perform better and adjust your marketing budget accordingly.
My conversation with Rob prompted me to think what sales people would like to know when they talk to prospects. Are the questions the same like marketer’s who, what, and when or something different?
Sales focuses on Why and How Much, in addition to Who, What, and When
Working with sales for a long time, I realize they like to understand Why, How much and when?
- Why did they come to us? Why are they interested in us?
- How much budget do they have?
- When will they likely buy?
Of course, who and what are also important, but these answers to these questions may be more in-depth than marketing want to know.
- Who are they?
- What challenges do they have?
- Which of our offerings can solve their challenges?
- What else can we do to help them?
If you think about it, even if sales and marketing are talking to the same prospects, the way they communicate and the information they gather are fundamentally different. Obviously, one focuses on the top of the purchase funnel, while the other focuses on the bottom of the funnel. One emphasizes on awareness-building, while the other is all about how to move prospects to different sales stages to close deals.
So, understanding the types of questions that sales asks will dictate how you support your sales team. You can’t take the marketing content and just dump it on the sales side and expect them to use it. Why? Because they ask different questions. If you work on ABM, don’t expect that the copy you use for mass marketing outreach will necessarily apply to the sales side. You have to consider accounts’ needs and the questions that sales wants to address.
In previous episodes I talked about, in order to support sales as marketers, you need to understand how sales think and work. One of the key ways is to know the types of questions they ask at different stages. That piece of intelligence will help you determine your sales support approach and the content you can recommend for the sales processes.
If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave comments on iTunes.
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
In my previous episode, I talked about the importance of keeping up with marketing technology. One of the best ways I mentioned is to talk to various vendors at marketing conferences. When I went to Martech West in the San Jose Convention Center early April, I did my rounds and talked to different vendors. I am not affiliated with any of these vendors but I want to tell you about 3 vendors that caught my eye and share with you what they offer.
Voicify
You can use their platform to create a voice-enabled application which can be downloaded to Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana and your chatbots. It allows brands to seamlessly create and manage their voice content across any number of smart speakers & devices. This is similar to Libsyn, which some of you may use to manage your podcast episodes. Libsyn lets you upload your audio files and then automatically syndicate to iTunes, iHeart radio and other podcast or radio channels. The Voicify platform is the Libsyn version for voice and more. For Libsyn, you upload the finished audio files. For Voicify, you can manage your content and a list of questions and answers all in one platform. You can update and refresh your content on a regular basis and you can also customize and deploy your content for different voice assistants and chatbots. This is the first voice management platform I have come across. Again, it’s called Voicify.
Strala
The next one is Strala. I enjoyed talking to the co-founder, Rob Clarke. He is incredibly passionate about tracking customers’ online and offline touch points to improve customer journeys and quantify ROI, basically tracking all your marketing efforts end-to-end. He said if you really want to track each touch point, you need to standardize your touch points’ tracking mechanism with consistent marketing taxonomies across all channels, publishers, content and messaging. I 100% agree with him. Most marketing organizations are divided by marketing functions. Marketers tend to focus on measuring the marketing they manage. But someone needs to have a holistic view and take ownership of automating the tracking beyond basic UTM parameters. They offer 3 products: Touchpoint, I just mentioned. Journey Stream that shows customers’ touchpoints throughout their journeys. And, Prism is their standard dashboard. I know many vendors offer similar tools. I just thought their approach is sound for standardizing all the tracking, not just using APIs to pull data from various sources. Again, it’s called Strala. They position themselves as “Turnkey Insights and attributions across all online and offline touchpoints.” Very cool.
Alyce
Ok, this company caught my eye because they want to help you pick the perfect gifts for your customers. Alyce bases its gift suggestions on information that is pulled from customers’ social media accounts. The company can also provide popular gift options on their platform. Apparently, they have more than 30,000 gift options. Their platform uses AI to select the gift options, and is integrated with SalesForce.com to track conversions. The company will also manage your direct mail logistics.
Here is a nice caveat: You can’t go wrong with gift selection. Whatever you choose, your recipient will always be able to donate the value to a meaningful charity or exchange for another equally valued gift. I think Alyce is a great option if you plan to do one-to-one hyper-personalized account-based marketing (ABM) for strategic accounts.
I talked to over 30 vendors and got a good understanding of how each one of them wants to fit into the overall sales and marketing processes. Understanding martech is overwhelming. The key is to understand what challenges you aim to solve and take it from there.
If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave comments on iTunes.
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
In my workshops, one of the key points that I emphasize all the time is the importance of understanding marketing technology. In my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement, I even dedicated one whole chapter to technology and its impact on marketers supporting sales.
We all know technology is important, we use it every day. But, as a marketer, we are overwhelmed by the continuing evolution of technology and have a hard time keeping up.
Here are 3 ways that you can keep up with martech.
Pick up a field that you want to understand more
It doesn’t matter if it’s social media, search, events, email or what not. Martech vendors are constantly exploring the latest technologies to refine and improve their platforms with additional features. With more features, they can be more competitive and, of course, they can also charge more.
Using FB as an example, they add new features to their advertising platform all the time. Even if you outsource your social media buy, it’s still important for you to understand the ad exchange arena so that you can ask intelligent questions about how to better increase conversions, lower cost per acquisition, even the A/B testing results on messaging, calls-to-action, or creative. Subscribe to blogs or podcasts that specialize in the areas of your interests. If you work with a decent-sized agency, ask them to share the latest trends. They love sharing what they know and how they get things for you.
Learn to build a martech stack for a specific initiative
Another way to keep up with technology is to take a specific initiative or address a specific marketing process gap within your company. This may or may not relate to your daily job. Say, your company is interested in launching account-based marketing to help sales win key strategic accounts. To make that happen, there are a list of questions which need to be addressed:
- How do we know which accounts the marketing team needs to work on? Should we get a list from sales? If they don’t have a list, should we jointly come up with the list together? What tools should we use to come up with the list?
- How do we collaborate with sales to ensure a consistent customer experience? That may lead to thinking about the collaboration process or tools we should use to keep both sales and marketing in the loop.
- What marketing elements or campaigns should we do to support these accounts? Different campaign elements may require a different mix of technology platforms and processes. Can we use current tools to make that happen? If not, what tools do we need?
By asking a list of questions, you start going deeper and deeper. it’s like peeling the layers of onion. I see it as a scavenger hunt. It’s frustrating and fun at the same time. It will force you to start searching for the tools inside and outside of your company. Start looking for tools that can help you to implement the initiative.
Talk to vendors directly
Another option is to talking to vendors directly. I love attending conferences and talking to marketing and sales vendors. Yah, vendors like to scan your badge and I get many unwanted emails, but that’s the price I am willing to pay so that I can understand how they use various technologies to create their platforms and help marketers to do their jobs better.
Doing a walk around at the exhibit hall is another way to educate myself about different martech areas and learn how to think outside the box. So when you go to conferences, do a walk around the exhibit halls. Talk to the vendors. Have them explain to you what they do and what products they offer. The best way to test if you understand their technology and platform is to paraphrase what they say back to them. By doing so, I learned to internalize their technology and understand how that fits into overall marketing communications.
Find a topic that you want to understand more. Read about it. Get your agencies to educate you. Start an initiative to build a martech stack for that initiative. Or just talk to various vendors directly.
That’s how I started to learn more about martech. I didn’t understand paid search about 10 years ago… I started reading different blog posts, and I also enlisted my search agencies to do some lunch-and-learn for my team. Then, I ventured out to talk to as many vendors as possible whenever I could. I built up my martech knowledge bit by bit so that now I can make suggestions to my clients for some of their martech needs.
If I can do it, so can you. The ability to understand technology and source the appropriate platforms for different processes is essential for modern marketers.
If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
So if you like the podcast, please leave comments on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
I was listening to Kyle Porter, CEO of Salesloft, deliver his keynote at SaaStock17. It was a great keynote. The key take-away: let’s not forget that sales is about building human-to-human connections. He was saying that AI and technology are not here to replace sales people. If AI or technology is done right, it’s about bringing more humanity to the overall sales experience. It’s about giving insights so that you can better serve your customers. That’s the irony of AI. Using artificial intelligence to augment real human connections. Build that 1:1 experience with empathy and caring.
I love the way he thinks and approaches AI and other technologies. I understand that AI and technology is about automation and scalability. That’s how I think about it as well. When I talk about AI, I tend to focus on what AI can do to automate processes and predict customers’ behaviors to increase conversions. While we automate as many activities as possible, let’s not lose sight of the key objective, does it improve the customer experience and build personalized connections to solve customers’ problems? That should also be a question that we ask when we inject AI or new technology into our workflows.
Another thing he touches on is the 3-tiers of account-based marketing. When I talk about account-based marketing, I touched on one-to-one, one-to-few and one-to-many approaches.
On the sales side, he approaches account-based selling from ICP, MCP and NCP perspective. ICP is the Ideal Customer Profile. He defines ICP as your strategic accounts, the accounts that you want to get and close. For these accounts, sales have customized game plans, and tailored messaging with a very specific cadence of emails, phone calls and other activities that sales will do to focus on these accounts.
The next tier is MCP, which is the Minimal Customer Profile. There are your tier-2 accounts. They’re important and should be on sales’ radar. The outreach uses a less personalized approach, say, follow-up with phone calls, email and some select social activities.
Next is NCP which stands for New Customer Profile. This may be a new industry segment that you want to pursue. Sales’ approach is likely to be standard email with a specific frequency.
For all the tiers, it’s important that you codify the processes so that it’s repeatable and scalable in ICP, MCP AND NCP. I am fairly familiar with ICP. MCP and NCP reminds me of the different tiers of marketing support that I created for different product families. I allocated marketing budget to the different product families based on the revenue and business priorities.
Another thing I learn is that tiered account-based selling should also align with account-based marketing. Whatever tiers that sales is using should be closely tied to the marketing strategy.
If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave comments on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Tatianna knows that I’ve updated my website 5 times in the past 4 years. She is going to lead her company’s website overhaul this year. This is the first time that she is taking on a project like this. She asked me what she needs to pay attention to before she starts.
I asked her if this is a complete overhaul or a partial overhaul. Tatianna told me that her company is a start-up and has grown very fast. They’ve not refreshed the website for over one year. The CEO wants to refresh the home page, products, and customers pages.
Here are the elements I told Tatianna to focus on:
- Design
- Content
- SEO
- Site Migration
There are many things that she needs to pay attention to, but I prioritize these four as the key focal points.
Design
I went to her company’s website. Since it’s a partial overhaul, I asked her if the company is interested in a big overall haul in the near future. If they are, are they thinking about updating the current design elements? The current design is very photo-stockish and business-like. Are they looking into being more icon-driven, like Dropbox or video-share company Loom’s website? I told her that design is a business decision. Does the company want to refresh the home, product and customer pages using the same design or choose a complete different design for a future complete website overhaul. It’s important to have that discussion now. I told her, based on my past experience, management cares about design more than content and copywriting, perhaps because it’s visual and easy to critique. Everyone always has something to say about design. She needs to be prepared for that.
Content
Her site has a lot of content. She is not touching the resource library. If she does, she should use this opportunity to do a complete content audit. Delete the old content, refresh and update content that is still relevant. Categorize content based on customer journeys, buyer personas, products, solutions, and even industry verticals. She asked me if she should evaluate content by most views, more popular, most download etc. I told her she can, but bear in mind, that this is historical data. Most popular content may be from back in 2015. Most downloaded may be a piece of content for the product that is no longer exist. At the end of day, content clean-up can be manual and subjective. Tools can help to some extent, but humans need to make the final decisions.
SEO
You can’t overhaul the website without SEO. It’s important to understand keyword lists and how customers search and incorporate these words into copywriting and content. It’s important to work with someone who has SEO expertise. Period
Site Migration
I told her that I spent at least 6-8 weeks after the new site was launched cleaning up and updating broken links. This is especially true if you decide to retire a big chuck of content. Many content pieces are interlinked. You need to run MOZ or other similar tools to check the broken links and 404 errors. I told her that she needs to set aside time and budget for this. She also needs to educate internal stakeholders that, when new site is launched, it doesn’t mean the website is done. The reality is that more work is ahead to ensure SEO and all links are working properly.
I told Tatianna that the site is never DONE. There is always something we need to work on or fix. Software is updated on a regular basis, so is the website.
I’d love to hear your lessons learned when you are done. Just to compare notes. Tatianna, best of luck with your website overhaul.
All right, you know where to find me. Send me your questions or thought.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave a comment on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this!!
Someone filled out a question card at my workshop without leaving a name, but I like the question: “How to Reduce the tension between sales and marketing over timely follow up to qualified leads?”
Whoever wrote the question, I just want to let you know that it’s a common issue across industries and companies. You are not alone. Marketing works hard to get leads, but sales says that the leads can’t be converted or are not ready to act on. Sometimes, they don’t even follow up… I get it.
I think there are three ways to address this issue:
- Agree on actionable MQL definitions
- Focus on quality of leads, not quantity
- Establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Agree on Actionable MQL Definition
I am using myself as an example here. I do a lot of research for my clients on messaging framework, SWOT analysis, persona creation, and content writing. So I download white papers, trends and reports from many websites. After downloading certain types of content, I’d get an email or a call from that company’s salesperson trying to follow-up with me. Obviously, the marketing team didn’t qualify me before they passed me to the sales team. I usually share my real first and last name. By the way, my last name Didner is not very common. If marketing had done some research on me, they would know that I am not a qualified lead and probably didn’t meet the sales’ team’s ideal customer profile (ICP).
The best way to get sales to follow-up your leads in a timely manner is to make sure that you pass leads that meet their ICP. These prospects have done something on their website to indicate that they are ready to talk. I use LeadGenius as an example frequently, their MQL definition is someone who matches sales ICP and has raised a hand to request a demo. When this lead is passed to sales, sales knows that this person wants to see the demo, therefore, it’s a hot lead. Sales has a big incentive to follow-up right away.
Focus on quality, not quantity
Many marketing groups are tasked with an aggressive goal, such as 2000 leads per month. For 2000 leads a month, that’s 100 leads per day based on 20 working days. If you are looking for 100 highly qualified leads, you’ll need to amp that to 400 leads per day assuming a 25% conversion rate. People like me may be perceived as a high-qualified lead who came to your website and downloaded several pieces of highly valuable content. But a high lead score based on content consumption, in this case, doesn’t mean that I am a highly-qualified prospect. Continuous nurturing won’t convert me, either, given that I’m only interested in white papers or trend reports, not necessarily about the products and services. It’s important to have a frank conversation between sales and marketing about goal setting. A high number of leads doesn’t equate to high quality leads. Sales want as many leads as possible, I get it. But it may be unreasonable to task marketing to get all those leads, especially if the budget is small. Leads are not free. Driving outbound campaigns for inbound leads is not free, either. You need to correlate your budget with lead goals and educate the sales and management team to understand that.
Establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA)
To ensure that sales performs timely follow-up on leads try to set up an SLA and ask the sales team to commit to follow-up on the leads within a certain amount of time, like 48-72 hours after a lead is assigned to them. Of course, you need to make sure that you have a dashboard in place to track that follow-up. If they aren’t keeping up, have a conversation with them.
Here is the truth: you’ll have sales people that follow the SLA and you’ll also have sales people that don’t. Maybe you can also do the correlation analysis to see if salespeople who follow-up on your leads have a higher probability of meeting their sales goals than those who don’t. Use the data to have a conversation with those who aren’t following up in a timely manner. Salespeople are motivated by data. If you can show them that timely follow-up of your leads help them, they’ll do it. Hopefully, the data is on your side.
This is very common issue on the marketing side. I want to let everyone know that you are not alone. If anyone of you have other ways to address with this issue, please let me know. I am more than happy to share your best practices with everyone and give you credit as well.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave comments on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
A fellow marketer from the B2B Marketing Exchange, Regina asked: “How do I get my marketing peers to shift their thinking so they focus on helping sales achieve their goals?”
I’ve discovered that, in enterprises, budget, business goals and measurements influence how marketers behave and function as a team. If your marketing peers are not supporting sales, one of the possible reasons may be that their marketing objectives or success measurements are not set up to motivate that behavior.
So my first question to you, Regina, is, how are success metrics are established in your marketing organization? The next question that I want to ask is more philosophical: Should all marketing functions support sales directly? Well, my thought on that question is probably not.
Some marketing functions are very much aimed at the top of the funnel, focusing on as social media posts, traditional TV commercials, and even big billboards you see on highways or big shopping centers. These types of marketing efforts are still critical to build awareness, but it’s hard to quantify their contributions to sales directly. Customers need to be aware of the existence of your products before they can consider or evaluate your offerings or services. Top of funnel activities are hard to tie with sales directly.
However, some marketing functions such as email marketing, event marketing or demand generation campaigns are easier to tie to sales. In this case, you are right it’d be great that these marketing teams could work with sales directly. As their peer, I’d encourage you to influence and educate them about the benefits of working closely with sales. A great example is a close tie with sales can showcase their contribution to the bottom-line.
The best way to help shift their mindset and behavior is with a top-down approach: The VP of sales and CMO are aligned on several key initiatives and these key imperatives are part of the marketing plan. The CMO articulates how these initiatives will impact the team. Then, have measurements to monitor the progress. This will be the ideal to drive behavior changes. You know how it is. The boss says that this is what we need to do. Ok, we’ll do it then.
Regina, it’s hard to get all the marketing peers to align. Do what you can to influence and educate them, at the same time, work with your management and get their buy-in.
Again, send me your questions. You know where to reach me.
If you like the podcast, please leave your comments on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
I launched a brand-new workshop titled ‘How to leverage existing marketing elements to enable sales’, at B2B Marketing Exchange in February. The workshop was sold out. For it, I created a list of questions and a series of templates to guide marketers to think creatively about ways to help sales using existing marketing elements. Overall feedback was positive for the framework, questions, and templates, but several people requested more case studies. Ok, that’s good feedback. I’ll certainly incorporate that accordingly.
In addition to private client training, I am doing 3 more workshops this year as of now.
Interact19, April 9-10 in Columbus, Ohio.
My workshop is called sales and marketing alignment. This will be a 6-hour long session in which I’ll touch on sales/marketing collaboration, service level agreement, MQL definition, mapping sales and marketing content and account-based marketing. Again, I’ll also provide a series of templates. If you are interested, please use the promo code, PAMFRIEND10, to get 10% off.
If you are a marketing manager in corporate/central marketing or a product marketing manager in the business unit supporting sales, you will find this workshop helpful.
MAICON, July 16-18 in Cleveland, Ohio
There has been a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence and marketing lately. I am creating another brand-new workshop: Artificial Intelligence for Sales Enablement, which will be given at MAICON, Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference on July 16-18 in Cleveland, Ohio. The purpose of AI is to either automate existing processes or enable new processes that were not possible before. I will look at the sales stages and identify areas that can use AI to be more efficient and effective. You can use DIDNER200 to get $200 off your conference registration fee.
Content Marketing World 2019, September 3-6, Cleveland, Ohio
This will be my 9th year in a row speaking at Content Marketing World. I invite you to join me at my Workshop: How to Leverage Your Existing Marketing Programs and Content To Enable Your Sales Team (link). I’ll take what I created for B2B Marketing Exchange and expand it with additional case studies and best practices. If you missed my first workshop, you can catch this one at Content Marketing World. Use Promo Code: DIDNER19 to get $100 off of CMW conference pass.
I promise you that my workshop is fun, engaging and interactive.
If you decide to attend any of these workshops, let me know and send me your questions in advance. I’ll make sure that I address your questions head-on during the workshop. If you have best practices to share, let me know as well. More than happy to share your good work and give you and your company credit.
Again, reach out ANYTIME. I’d love to hear from you.
If you like the podcast, please leave a comment on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. I hope to see you at my workshops.
At B2B Marketing Exchange, a fellow marketer, Matt, asked me “Pam, what tools do you recommend providing the sales team with updated content? They are always asking where I go to find X or Y?”
I know… It’s hard. For sales to find any content, it’s easier for them just ask marketing directly. We’ll tell them, anyway.
There are many ways to address this, but three options have worked well for me:
Upload content to a sales content management library
Make sure that you have a sales-centric content library that only salespeople use. Upload your content there, tag them well by-products, geos, keywords, technologies and other categories so that it’s easy for salespeople to search. Nowadays, some platforms offer auto-tagging which makes content marketers’ job easy. When you source tools, you should check if they offer that feature. Typical content management library platforms are Highspot, Showpad, Seismic, Attach and more. Some tech companies have built their own content management library for both direct and indirect sales forces. A great example is Cisco. You should train salespeople to go to the sales content management library first to find whatever content they need before they contact you. They’ll do that if it’s easy and offers the benefit of a very quick response.
Share updated and new content at weekly sales calls
There are usually weekly and/or monthly sales calls. Sometimes, there are multiple sales meetings if your sales force is big. Find out the different sales meetings and determine if it makes sense for you to attend or present content at them. Get 10-15 min of the time and present finished and upcoming content. Also, let them know how and when to use these content pieces. Connect your content with their sales processes.
Yes, it’s a pain to attend several sales calls if your sales teams are big. The key is overcommunication is better than under-communication. Say the same things several times. In marketing, we all know that we need to hit the prospects at least 6-7 times to make an impression. Well, you need to do the same for the sales team. Say it multiple times at different meetings.
Send out regular newsletter updates
Again, it’s another communications channel. I know that the click-through rate is not high on regular newsletters. However, it provides sales team another way to see content. The newsletter is there when they need it. Ok, I’ve seen something content related to that topic, ok, let me go search my InBox. Another way to find content in addition to sales content library.
Matt, start with a content management library, then have a regular communications process in place. Let me know how it goes.
These three options minimize the numbers of email inquiries and phone calls that I got from my salespeople, but it didn’t eliminate the problem. The truth is that you’ll still get calls or emails from them on where to find stuff. That never ends. Embrace that as the reality. That’s the way how salespeople shower you with love. I try to put a positive spin to this question.
If you have other recommendations on how to help salespeople finding content, please share.
Love to hear from you. Ok, send me your marketing question ANYTIME. If you like the podcast, please share your comments on iTunes.
All right, keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Early in December, Victor, a good friend, referred a potential client to me. This client is not my typical B2B technology and global enterprise clients. It’s a mid-size and regional accounting firm based in Northern California. The founder was able to grow his business through events and referrals. While they recognized that digital marketing and outreach is necessary to continue growing, they didn’t know how to start. What they did first was to update their website, that was good. Then, they did a re-branding of their logo. I didn’t know why they did that in that order, but OK, that’s fine. During the re-branding, they hired a marketing agency to conduct a complete audit and create a comprehensive marketing plan. Well, that should be good, right. After the plan, it’s execution. It should be easy, right? Well, it didn’t go well. The agency was not able to get traction during the execution since the content was needed to come from subject matter experts like partners and managers. In addition, partners and managers were very busy. Their hours need to be billable so they really didn’t have time to work on creating content such as blogs, white papers or what not. Everything seemed to be last minute and, ultimately, the relationship between the agency and the accounting firm didn’t work out.
Beeta, one of the firm’s partners, asked me to review their work and come up with a plan to move things forward. She made it very clear that they don’t want to overhaul their website or change the current logo. It’s ok to update and optimize the website, but my recommendation should not include a complete overhaul of the website. Ok, it’s good to know what a client wants or doesn’t want to do. I can work around that.
After reviewing the plan from the other agency, I told Beeta that the plan is solid. They have many recommendations. What I suggested was that we focus on 1-2 big initiatives. In addition, I told her that plan is one piece of a puzzle, for major initiatives to work, we need to align Plan, Processes, Tools and People. The failure to execute properly had a lot to do with three things:
- Lack of systematic process to show who should do what and when
- Lack of tools to automate the processes to make partners and managers’ job easy
- Lack of an internal program manager to herd the subject matter expert cats.
So I suggested that we should focus on one big initiative first. Since events and referrals are the core of their marketing outreach, let’s optimize and improve on that. What can we do or automate before, during, and after the event? Is the training the most important part? Beeta told me that they don’t have time to do prep before the event and follow up after the event. Fine, let’s train the partners to understand the process and delegate the preparation and follow-up to the internal program manager. Again, we need to have a process, then identify who does what and when in advance. In general, I told her that they need to know who should attend the event at least 3 months in advance. If partners want to delegate research and follow-up to the program manager, this person needs time to prepare. Advanced planning is critical if we can to make this work.
Another pain point is content creation. Beeta told me that they understand the content is important. Unfortunately, the agency expected them to write content, but they just didn’t have the time. I told Beeta that we may not need partners to write content. How about doing interviews with them instead? Have writers interview partners and draft the content and have Partners review. However, partners need to “commit” to doing the reviews and getting back to the writers in a timely fashion. We need to hold partners accountable. Partners have to meet writers half-way.
I told Beeta that marketing is not sexy. The execution is about processes and tools. Let’s use the post event follow-up as an example: we need to send out an email to prospects 24 hours after the event with CTA to set up a follow-up call. If prospects respond, what should we do next? If they don’t respond, what should be our next steps? Askquestions, create a process flow that everyone can follow. For each step, identify who should do what and have templates or scripts available. Source tools wisely, make sure that tools are integrated. It sounds easy, but it’s challenging when you get down to the nitty-gritty details.
We had an in-depth discussion on the processes, tools and the potential hire. Then, she asked me what I can do to help her. I can help her find the person to hire. I can also help her to set up the processes and tools with templates. The program manager can work with me to implement the processes and tools and work closely with partners and managers. This person needs to have a marketing background, but must also be able to write well and do program management. It’s hard to find someone that has the required background, but I have a couple of candidates in mind.
This type of work is not what I usually do. I tend to focus on marketing strategy, planning, messaging framework, customer journeys, and even sales enablement. However, I also enjoy being in the trenches to layout processes and sourcing tools. I learn as much as I do from the planning work.
A marketing plan is important, but processes, tools and people are even more critical during the execution stage. Another component is training and communications. Train people how to use the tools and reinforce it over and over again.
I told Beeta that we can build momentum. There will be some growing pain along the way but we will get there.
Again, send me your marketing questions. You know where to reach me. If you like the podcast, please leave comments on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Many people downloaded my eBook, A Quick and Easy Framework for Marketers to Enable Their Sales Team. I usually follow up with a personalized email to thank them for downloading the eBook. I also ask them to send me any questions they may have after reading the eBook. Whether it’s related to the eBook or other marketing topics, I always encourage people to reach out and send me their marketing questions. If you listen to my podcast, you know that’s how I enjoy my podcast.
One of the eBook reader, Robert, has a rather unique last name, so I looked him up on LinkedIn. He is managing director for an engineering company in the UK. His company does mechanical engineering designs, materials science, and analytical verification and testing for different industries, like automotive, aerospace and more. Cool stuff.
When I sent out a personalized email, I also mentioned that I like his company’s website, but, from a user-experience perspective, there are a couple of things I’d do a little differently.
He sent an email back to me right away and said that he appreciated my feedback.
He told me that
they had some issues with the main page and the order data should be displayed. It seems to be dependent on the weather...(!) That just made me laugh…
He also said that the company has little experience in B2B. He feels that he has a lot to learn....but has started to invest time in a CRM system and in slowly building their network and prospects.
Then, he remarked that he is hesitant to send out cold emails to prospects, as he thinks it can be viewed as ‘trashy’, and possibly have the opposite effect and wonders what I would suggest?
Well, Robert, I know exactly how you feel. When I started 4 years ago, I was hesitant to send out email as well. To make it worse, my email style heavily leaned towards business writing. It was professional, but not personable. I didn’t know how to put myself out here. Or more accurately, I was afraid to put myself out here. I was afraid my email or my offerings were not good enough. People wouldn’t like it….
I modified my website 5 times in the past 4 years, I also continuously modified my email templates and writing approach. I am not saying that I achieve nirvana, but I feel more comfortable writing and I write from the point of view what I think my readers need. And I don’t usually send out email unless I have something to say.
Here is what I said to Robert:
Investing in a CRM is totally the right thing to do. I did that when I started… And I totally understand how you feel, Robert. I felt the same way when I started 4 years ago. Here is what I’d suggest you do about email:
Imagine how you’d talk to prospects face-to-face about their challenges and your suggestions. What would you say to them about your company and products? Then, do the same on email. Do your research and homework about your prospects. What are some of their challenges and pain points? What can you do to help them? Draft your email based on what they need and what you can do. Be sincere and succinct. Start with your heart. That's it, really.
You may not get it right the first time. Just keep working on it. Don’t worry about being perceived as trashy, just be yourself and present your case to the people you want to help. There is always fear and doubt. I get it. I still fear that people won’t like my blog posts, videos and podcasts. The truth is that there are always people out there who won’t like your content. Well, they are not your audience, anyway.
Just do it. It’ll be fine. You got this.
Good luck and let me know how it goes, Robert.
We all have to start somewhere…And I did 4 years ago. Well, now it’s Robert’s turn.
Again, send me your marketing questions. You know where to reach me.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Andie from the UK sent me a LinkedIn messaging:
“Hey Pam, I've been following you on Twitter for a while, and have recently heard your Marketing Book podcast, thought I'd reach out as sales enablement is a big problem right now: Where to start?!
Actually, several people approached me about this question since I published my book in October 2018. Given that the sales enablement effort from the marketing side is different from company to company, let me address this based on the 3 different roles of marketing professionals,.
Where to start to enable sales
* as an individual contributor
- as a marketing director with a small team
- as a VP of marketing
As an individual contributor:
Say you want to take the initiative to support sales as an individual contributor. The best way to start is to clearly articulate your own roles and responsibilities. Are you doing email marketing? Are you managing social media channels? Are you a content creator? Or, if you are wearing multiple hats, what do you do?
Next, talk to the sales team to understand their challenges and needs. When you open that Pandora’s box, they will tell you many, many things that they need your support on. You need to categorize and prioritize their requests, then identify the items that you can help them with, in the context of your roles and responsibilities. That’s one way to start: a bottom-up approach.
Another way is to internalize their needs, create a formal request with solid recommendations on what you plan to do after your discovery and research. Present to your management, seek their support and get approval and funding before you start. That’s still bottom-up, but a more formal approach.
As a marketing director:
What if you are a marketing director, how do you start? As a marketing director, you likely have a team and a budget already. You probably have a plan in place on how you’ll leverage your team and budget to achieve your marketing objectives. Start having conversations with your sales counterparts and understand their challenges to see if you can address some of them with your current plan.
Sometimes, there is low-hanging fruit, such as revising select marketing content for sales needs or sharing a messaging framework or even helping with on-boarding training. Again, the key is to incorporate what you can do as part of your plan deliverables. The best time to do that is at the company’s annual planning cycle. Get a fresh start and have a discussion as part of the fiscal year planning.
As a VP of marketing:
The ideal way to start sales enablement is top-down. As a VP of marketing, you have that authority and power to role model by initiating the collaboration with the VP of sales.
Obviously, you have your marketing plan and initiatives for the year, as does the sales team.
Understand the sales plan and key imperatives for the year. Identify the areas that marketing can add value. If you are budget and resource-constrained, start with several small initiatives or even ask for budget from the sales team. Get the VP of sales’ buy-in and identify team members from both sides to form a task force or a virtual team, since many small projects start with some form of task force. And request timely updates from the team to keep the momentum going.
Like I said, the best way to start sales enablement synergy is starting at the top. Senior management’s commitment goes a long way.
Ok, there is a consistent takeaway from my recommendations above:
- Know what you are doing first [Symbol] Know yourself.
- Seek to understand sales’ challenges and pain points.[Symbol] Know your sales team
- Identify their challenges that you can address [Symbol] Know what you will do.
-
Map it into your overall plan deliverables [Symbol] Create a plan to execute.
That’s how I’d start, Andie. I hope that I answered your question. If you are in a specific marketing role, please let me know. I can explain further what you can do.
Ok, you know where to find me if you have any marketing questions: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, email, you name it.
Again, if you find the podcast, please share your comments in iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
B2B buyers spend just 17 percent of their time meeting with potential suppliers, while 45 percent of their time is spent researching independently, according to Gartner. Out of that 45%, B2B buyers spend 27 percent of their time researching independently online and 18 percent of their time researching independently offline.
With approx. 62% of buyers time spent on research and meeting with suppliers, what can marketers do to help buyer’s research and sales efforts?
There are plenty of things that marketers can do. I want to share
-
2 tactics that marketers can employ to help buyer’s research efforts
-
1 recommendation to support sales teams
The two tactics are search optimization and content marketing:
Let’s think about how B2B buyers do research. First of all, they type problem statements or keywords into Google or other search engines to get relevant links and content. Buyers will generally click on different links to view content.
So, first and foremost, marketers can facilitate buyers’ research by focusing on search optimization on your websites and content.
Optimize Search
you need to understand a list of keywords or problem statements that buyers are likely to type, then make sure that you seamlessly add them to your website and content. In order to do that you’ll need to have buyers’ personas and a clear understanding of buyers’ challenges as well as how your products resolve those challenges. The pre-requisites of search engine optimization are to have a deep understanding of your buyers’ personas and the ways they search or research online.
Obviously, keywords and challenges are not only helpful for website and search optimization, but they are also beneficial to determine what keywords to buy if you run paid-search which is Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Search optimization is tedious tactical work, it’s a specialized marketing discipline of its own, but it’s super-critical to create a solid digital presence online. For my own website, I allocated budget for continues search optimization efforts. Website and search optimization is something you have to do on a regular basis. It doesn’t help.
Leverage content
Now, let’s talk about content. For B2B buyers, content is still king when it comes to digital research. After search optimization of your digital presence, content is an important component of marketing outreach. The challenges for content marketing are what to communicate and what formats of content to create. “What to communicate” comes down to understanding customers’ buying journey from awareness and consideration to purchase. Identify questions that buyers may ask at each stage and create content to address those questions. For example: what are some questions that buyers may ask when researching the purchase of a marketing automation tool.
- What is marketing automation?
- What are the top 10 marketing automation tools?
- What do people say about different marketing automation tools?
- What is the pricing of different tools?
List a set of questions that your buyers may ask. Address them through content. Regarding the formats of the content, you need to do some research and find out what formats resonates with your buyers. For the same topic, you may have different formats of content.
These content pieces, in theory, should reside on your website. Then, you promote the content through different paid and organic traditional and social media channels and drive traffic back to your sites.
Search Engine Optimization (organic search) and Search Engine Marketing (paid search) coupled with relevant content can certainly facilitate buyers’ purchase journey.
There are different mixes of marketing channels, such as e-mail marketing, events, sponsorships, influencer outreach, that you need to consider when planning how to reach out to your buyers. For B2B marketing, the least you can do to help your buyers during their research stage is search optimization and content marketing.
The third way to help buyers during the research stage is to help your sales team through account-based marketing (ABM).
ABM is strategic and personalized marketing outreach and engagements with people at target accounts through close collaboration between sales and marketing. Basically, as a marketer, you allocate some marketing budget and align some of your marketing efforts with your sales’ account-based outreach. Marketing complements sales outreach to increase the probability to win a deal. I talked about Influitive’s ABM marketing example on episode 49.
Now back to Gartner’s statistics: Although B2B buyers spend just 17 percent of their time meeting with potential suppliers, 45 percent of their time is spent researching independently. As a B2B marketer, you can make a large impact on that 17% and 45% if you focus on the right tactics.
So, if you have marketing questions, you know where to find me.
If you like the podcast, I’d appreciate a review on iTunes.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
A friend’s friend, Ryerson, reached out to me and wanted to know how to make the transition from a corporate marketer to an independent consultant. How did I build my personal brand? How did I get speaking gigs? How did I get interview opportunities?
Here is what I shared with him: don’t worry about what I did. Work on four things first. These four elements will shape what you should do next.
- Focus on small wins: If money is an issue, you need to have income immediately. The best way is to contract with former employers. There are always things that need to be done. Assuming that you left on good terms, contracting back is an option to keep you afloat.
- Network, network, network: Go through your contact list. Set up coffee meets to let everyone know that you are available, and you are looking for opportunities. I told Ryerson that he needs to reach out to past colleagues and agencies and let them know that he is available for hire. Meeting face-to-face is more powerful than short email exchanges.
- Craft your ideal customer profile: I asked Ryerson who are his ideal customers. He couldn’t tell me. Who are the customers that he wants to work with? Enterprise marketers? Small business owners or what not? Can he visualize his customer? I asked him to write a 500-word essay about his ideal customer. The writing will help him create or shape a persona which will guide his value propositions.
- Define your own value propositions and offerings: Ryerson told me that he is a jack-of-all-trades, but Jack-of-all-trades is great if people know you. For people who don’t know, it’s hard to convince them that you can do everything. So, what can he really offer to his ideal customers? Why does his ideal customer need from him? As a consultant, what really differentiates him from other consultants? He needs to define that for himself.
I told Ryerson to get these done: ideal customer profile and value propositions will guide his website development, LinkedIn profile writing, his elevator pitch to potential customers, even his personal brand development.
I shared with him that this is not the most difficult part. The challenging part comes from business development and constant promotion of self. The truth is that he needs to promote himself every day. It doesn’t stop. It’s hard work.
There are many ways to do self-promotion. There is no right or wrong ways, per se.
For me, I focus on content marketing. I create original content such as books, blog and podcast to share my knowledge and expertise, I then promote that content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Everything I do is organic. Frankly, I should do more paid and sponsored, but I chose to allocate budget to create content and focus on 3 social media channels.
I also do email marketing to share useful templates and content.
Oh, I also spent a lot of time on SEO and website speed optimization. For business development, I am constantly on LinkedIn to source potential leads and I follow up with marketing professionals who sign up for my newsletter or reach out to me via various channels.
Everything I said so far is only for digital channel outreach.
I also attend marketing conferences, networking events and do coffee-meets with colleagues, friends and potential prospects on a regular basis. Offline Networking is as important as online digital marketing outreach.
Client projects and speaking engagement are the results of consistent digital, offline marketing outreach and customers’/friends’ referrals. There is no short cut.
I told Ryerson that he didn’t have to do all that. I did everything based on my budget. When I started 4 years ago, my revenue was small, so my marketing effort was small. Now, I spend more money on a website, SEO, content creation, influencer outreach since I have more revenue available. To do marketing right takes time, effort and money. You just need to do it, learn from your mistakes and keep working at it.
Ryerson told me that he will start with my 4 suggestions and he’ll keep me posted on how things go.
If you have been through a career transition, share with me how you did it. Love to hear from you. You know where to reach me.
If you like the podcast, I’d appreciate that you leave a review on iTunes.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Keep Hustling, my friends. You got this.
This event is it! #B2BMX
For B2B marketers, the one B2B marketing conference that you can’t miss is B2BMarketing Exchange. It’s jammed packed with all the B2B topics from customer-centric experience, demand generation, account-based marketing, to marketing insights and more.
More than 1000 B2B marketers and over 90 sessions in 3 days. In addition, it’s in Scottsdale, AZ on 2/25-2/27. Who doesn’t like to go Arizona in February? Palm Trees and the Sun. It’s just perfect!!
Workshop: How to leverage existing marketing programs to support sales
I did a global content marketing workshop and messaging framework session last year. This year, I created a brand-new workshop and session. The workshop is about sales enablement: How to leverage existing marketing programs to enable sales. All right, a very lengthy title, but it does explain what the workshop is about.
Although my book covers different topics on how marketers can better support sales, I created a framework to talk about how marketers can support sales using existing marketing programs. You’ll think about your marketing elements from the lenses of salespeople after the workshop.
For this workshop, I’ll
- Identify digital marketing elements that can be part of the sales discussion;
- Brainstorm specific marketing programs that can aid sales negotiations; and
- Integrate sales and marketing tools through account-based marketing.
And, Here is the bonus. I’ll make it FUN!!
Session: 5 Creative Ideas to Optimize Your ABM Initiatives
Oh, speaking of account-based marketing (ABM), that’s what my session is about.
Many marketers also collaborate with sales to win strategic accounts. Marketers create highly customized presentations for targeted account engagements, but there is so much more that you can do for ABM.
I’ll discuss the pros and cons of several approaches that support sales enablement for ABM programs. I’ll also share case studies and best practices around strategic planning, message crafting, personalized content and campaign execution.
I’d recommend that you go to B2B Marketing Exchange website to check out the workshops and sessions. A lot of good speakers!! If you are interested in coming, please use the promo code B2BMXDIDNER to get 25% discount. So, save the dates: 2/25-2/27. I’d love to see you there.
Again, send me your marketing questions. I’d love to address them as part of my workshop or session.
Again, if you like the podcast, please leave a review on iTunes.
Keep Hustling, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
While being interviewed for a podcast, I was asked a great question: “Hey, Pam, you wrote a sales enablement book from a marketer’s perspective. That sounds good. But how can marketers really benefit from supporting sales?”
Ok, I’d like to answer that at two different levels:
At the micro level:
Like I said, with the rise of digital, the boundaries of sales and marketing are disappearing. In the past, email marketing was done exclusively by marketers. Now, sales can run their own customized and personalized mini email campaigns straight out of their CRM systems. Another example is social media. Social media is not a marketers’ tool anymore. Sales are using it for social selling and social listening, even customer services are using it to answer customers’ questions real-time.
Through supporting inside sales and post sales, you, as a marketer, learn how the other groups use your marketing channels. You get to know how sales handle rejections and how customer services address customers’ concerns. You can use the knowledge to refine your buyers’ personas, editorials, content planning, even your inbound and outbound marketing efforts. It’s a win-win.
At the macro level:
Marketers’ career paths may be limited within marketing departments. Supporting sales opens additional career opportunities. I know several marketers that moved into sales enablement, operations, customer services, and even training.
There are plenty of benefits to supporting sales. For me, supporting sales led to the publication of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement.
I strongly recommend marketers work with sales closely. Supporting sales is like opening a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna’ get, but you know that you’ll get something delicious.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Keep Hustling, my friends. You got this.
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
Through speaking and consulting, I was fortunate to make friends around the world and I keep in touch with them through texting. But I use different messaging apps depending on where they are and what messaging apps they use. For friends in the US, I use the phone texting app on my iPhone. Quick and easy. To communicate with friends in China, I use WeChat since the majority of Chinese are on WeChat. For talking to friends in South America and Europe, I use WhatsApp. That should not be a surprise to anyone. Interesting enough, for friends in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and some part of Southeast Asia, I use Line, which is the largest messaging app in Japan.
So, guess what I used to connect with customers and friends when I was in Taiwan in December? Line!! While I was there, my friend took me to the Times Square of Taipei: Taipei 101. A trivial fact: Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world from 2004 to 2010. The building, like its name, is 101 stories high which is mighty and amazing. Similar to the World Trade Center in New York City, most of the floors are offices, but select floors are for shopping, expensive restaurants, and high-end bars. Taipei 101 is fun, crowded, touristy and filled of holiday cheers. I love it!
What does a messaging app have anything to do with Taipei 101?
My friend made an effort to show me the “Line Friends” store. A physical retail store. He told me that Line was so popular in Taiwan that they opened a store to sell products of their popular emoji and sticker characters such as Brown, Cony, Moon and more. You can see these characters as stuffed animals, in toys, clothes, water bottles, stationery and different kinds of trinkets.
If you are not familiar with Line emojis and stickers…
Brown is the bear and Cony is the rabbit. Apparently, they are in a relationship. Cony is very expressive, while her boyfriend, Brown, never changes his face. James is a long hair due who works at his father’s company. Each of the characters can be found in LINE’s exclusive games, and they are also emojis and stickers which you can use to reply to your friends’ messages.
Now back to the store…
The store was surprisingly crowded and busy because it’s December, the busiest shopping season of the year. By listening to some conversations in the store, I could tell that many of the customers were tourists and they were buying the products for their families and relatives as holiday gifts. What a clever idea of transforming an app’s emojis and stickers to real products as a way to continue building brand affinity with the app that you use every day.
Business decision drives marketing
Although opening a retail store is a business decision, it’s also a creative way to build word-of-mouth with user-generated content that people can share when they purchase their favorite emojis and sticker characters at the store. It’s free and earned social media impressions that Line doesn’t need to spend a penny on. They reused emoji and sticker characters for branded merchandise and their mobile games to create more business opportunities. That kinda reminds me of reusing and repackaging content in content marketing.
As of Q4’16, Line has more than 220 million active monthly users. Using a physical store to sell branded products is not only an interesting decision but also a marketing opportunity for users to build brand affinity with the app. Pretty cool.
So, there is my 7 min marketing highlight from Taipei. If you are ever in Taipei 101, you should check out the store.
Again, if you have any marketing questions, you know where to reach me.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this!!
I was fortunate to be invited back to do a workshop and a session at the Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland, Ohio for the 8th time. When you go to an event like this for 8 years straight, you start seeing familiar faces and begin forming a circle of friends that you hang out with from year to year. As always, it was wonderful to see Kelly Hungerford, Jeff Julians, Amy Higgins, Jay Baer, Michael Brennen, Robert Rose, and many other friends. I don’t know about you, but as much as I see them on FB or Twitter, I still prefer a meaningful hug and in-person catching-up.
I’d like to challenge myself so I present a different topic each year, and I was excited to create a new one for 2018’s conference. My session title was 5 Creative Ways Marketers Can Enable their Sales Team, and it is no surprise that it’s closely related to my new book, Effective Sales Enablement. As a speaker, I can tell you that the content needs to be solid throughout, but the most important part is the opening. I like to come up with a fun start to the presentation that will capture people’s attention. Once I can get the opening right, I believe everything else will flow naturally.
This time, however, I couldn’t think of a fun opening. My initial plan was to go directly to the 5 creative ideas that I wanted to share. Pretty boring, right?
But, I did a last-minute change. Here is what happened. I went to that morning’s keynote. The keynote speaker was Andrew Davis. He is a great keynote speaker. He made his keynote like a show, very entertaining and fun.
So he shared one of his observations. He said that our customers have no attention span and no time to read our emails, download our e-books, dive into our blog posts, yet these very same customers can binge watch two seasons of Stranger Things on Netflix in one weekend. Why is that?
He talked about how these shows are created in a way to pique our interests and provoke our curiosity. They build up suspense and drama like ocean waves to draw us in. He stressed that we need to do the same when we create our content.
For example, can we create titles to pique our audiences’ curiosity and attention? Can we build up the hype as part of our content storytelling and flow? Of course, once the hype is built up, can we deliver that level of expectations to meet the hype?
I decided to take his suggestions to heart and apply them to my session. I wanted to see if I can come up with several fun titles that will pique attendees’ interests.
So, my session title was “5 Creative Ways Marketers Can Enable Their Sales Team.” Well, it’s on-point, but didn’t capture audiences’ attention or invoke any curiosity. So, I created 3 additional titles which say the same thing but state in a way which will capture their attention.
Are you ready? Drum roll, please!! Here are 3 titles that I came up with:
- 5 Untold Secrets Marketers Can Score with Their Sales Teams
- A Quick and Dirty Framework You Can Use To Improve Your Sales Enablement Efforts Instantl
- Check Out the Untold Secrets that Will Lead You to Sales and Marketing Nirvana. WOW!
When I started my session, I told my attendees that Andrew’s keynote put me to shame. I was looking at my session: 5 Creative Ways Marketers can enable their sales teams. Concise and get-to-the-point, but there is no excitement in it.
So I put Andrew’s message into practice right away.
I shared with them the 3 titles that I came up with and I shared them with a sense of passion and a dramatic voice. They all laughed. I told them that they would vote on which title fits my content the best after I finished my session. That somehow captured their attention. Yeah!!
I didn’t simply share 5 creative ways to enable sales. I put into a framework so that they can work with their sales or marketing teams to brainstorm the creative ways that they can enable sales. And, throughout the 45 minutes, all eyes were on me. They were listening.
At the end of the session, I came back to the 3 titles again. I had them vote on which one worked the best for my content. Most of the people voted for, are you ready?
A Quick and Dirty Framework You Can Use To Improve Your Sales Enablement Efforts Instantly
Then, 4-5 people voted the last one:
Check Out the Untold Secrets that Will Lead You to the Sales and Marketing Nirvana. WOW!
I said to the audiences, that these people are just trying to mess with me.
To cap things off, I ended up my session by giving away 5 books.
This was such a great experience I decided to use the session title my attendees loved, and created an eBook which compliments the book launch. You can check out the eBook on www.pamdidner.com/enablesales
What is my lesson learned? To never stop thinking about my opening. To make a conscious effort to put interesting ideas I hear into practice, and if you keep working on it, something will come.
Another lesson I learned is a quote from Andrew Davis: “Pay attention” is a misdemeanor. All attention is earned. Indeed, you want your audience to pay attention to you, and you need to earn it. There is no free lunch.
We shouldn’t create content for the sake of creating content. It’s about making effort to earn someone’s attention.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this!
Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
Alicia asked a question: With all these new trends, the ways that sales and marketing teams operate and collaborate will continue to evolve. How is the role of content producer going to change?
Alicia, content producers usually create content for inbound and outbound communications. So, let’s look at the sales side to understand what types of content they usually need. In general, there are three types of content that sales need. Maybe there are more, here are the 3 types of content on the sales side are:
- Onboarding and training content
- Content used by sales to present to customers
- Content used by sales to pass to customers
People may not realize that some marketing content can be used for onboarding and continuous training. Amy Pence, Global Sales Enablement Manager, shared her a typical on-boarding agenda with me.
9-10 am they start with storytelling. 10-11 is about Discovery to Demos to dollars. 11-12 focuses on sales stages and playbook. 1-3 is whiteboarding. The topic for 3-4 is Competitive corner. If you review Amy’s agenda, you can see content marketers can provide value in many ways. The first agenda item is storytelling. As a content marketer, you can share how you tell product stories that are relevant for the sales team as they work with customers. For the second agenda item, live demos are likely conducted during on-boarding, but you can share with your sales training manager any show-and-tell videos that marketing has created. As for the sales playbook, you can contribute product messaging, a buyers’ guide, and customer testimonials. The next item on her agenda is to discuss competitive landscape. For that topic, you can share product comparison guides, performance benchmark data, competitive analysis, and additional resources or reference materials. If you know the overall content landscape, you can help sales enablement or sales training managers source content and accelerate salespeople’s knowledge and performance. It’s a win-win.
Now, let’s talk about Content used by sales to present to customers
Michael King, former marketing director of DataDirect Networks, explained the importance of marketing helping sales by putting content into context. When he was at DataDirect Networks, the sales team had regular Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) meetings. Experienced sales managers would share the challenges they encountered when they talked to prospects and existing customers. Then, they would share the solutions to address those issues and the relevant content they used. For example; “if customers inform you that they do not need centralized storage, here is what you (as the salesperson) should say and what content to use to illustrate your points...” He stressed that knowing which content to use is as important as understanding the customers' challenges which I agree completely. Again, this is also another area that content producer can provide value.
That last one is content used by sales to pass to customers
Many of us have had the experience of going to a car dealer to buy a car. Car salespeople would hand us nicely printed brochures or booklets to help us make a decision. Those brochures are marketing materials, but they are handed out by salespeople. I call them pass-through content. For your sales team, there is a list of content that they’ll share via email or leave behind after customer meetings. If you have a regular cadence of creating new content or refreshing existing content, it’s important to communicate a list of content that you create or refresh with your sales team. Educate salespeople on a list of content and let them select the appropriate ones to use at different stages of sales journey as they see fit.
So, here are 3 ways that the sales team can use the content. If you think about it, the job of content producers really doesn’t change. Their job is still about creating content. What changes is that they need to be cognizant of the content usage on the sales side. If you’re creating content for marketing outreach and you know that your sales team may use some of the content, then you need to think about how the sales team will use them. Anticipate their needs, make necessary customization in advance so that content can be amplified on the sales side.
Ok, Alicia, I hope I answered your question.
Again, send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner.
Keep Hustling, my friends. You got this.
Jim posted a question: User-generated Content (UGC) is becoming part of every brand. How should a marketer approach the challenge of UGC in various languages?
To use UGC or not to use UGC is a corporate policy discussion. The legal team will request you to get permission from the user to use it. So, you need to track down who owns the content. Then, the marketing team might say that the user-generated content doesn’t align with the corporate brand guideline, then you probably can’t use it. However, your social media team will probably say ‘OMG, this is great’ and want to move forward quickly. There is a lot to sort out between various stakeholders before you can use UGC. This is especially true in enterprises.
Many companies decide not to use UGC because the hassles that they have to go through. There is another reason why enterprises are not keen using UGC, they are concerned to dilute the brand, or they can lose control quickly. Think about it. If you allow one country to use UGC, then, every country can do it. The challenge is that every country marketing manager may have different perceptions or selection criteria on what UGC they can select, it can become a mess quickly. Of course, I am talking about the worst case. However, it’s indeed a slippery slope, that’s why many global brands are hesitant to use or scale user-generated content across regions.
Set aside the control, brand dilution or collaboration nightmare, using UGC makes a lot of sense if your company doesn’t have a big budget to generate original content. You can use UGC to complement your content. It’s a win-win.
To scale it, it’s important to have a process in place. For example, a template can be created for country teams to fill out in order to get approval by Legal and the corporate team. A high-level guidance needs to be documented as part of that template so that everyone is on the same page. The guidance can also include the good, the bad and the ugly of UGC examples. The approvers need to be identified and the turnaround time needs to be established. Everyone is communicated on the UGC guidance and approval process.
Overall, user-generated content is a great way to complement the original content created by brands. It also adds additional validation to your products and services. Be cautious of what you share, how to share it, and have a process in place to monitor it.
Again, send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner.
Keep Hustling, my friends. You got this.
Mary, a good friend of mine, sent me an email and asked me if we can chat. Things have not been going well for her lately, and she wanted to talk about it… I said: sure, of course. If friends need time to vent or talk, I make sure that I am there for them. That’s what friends are for.
She told me that she recently broke up with her boyfriend of 3 years. She was very much vested in the relationship. I asked her what was the reason for the break-up. She said that she is approaching 30. Eventually, she wants to settle down and have kids, but the ex-boyfriend is not ready to make that commitment. She didn’t feel that their goals are aligned at this time. Therefore, she called it quits. Obviously, that took an emotional toll on her. Thinking about putting herself out there again stressed her out. She decided to take a break from dating. I agree that’s the right thing to do for the time being.
Obviously, when it rains, it pours. If it’s not just the personal issue, she has to deal with it, as it turns out the work front is not going well either. She has a new manager. This manager sees her as the most junior and youngest person in the team and automatically assumes that she is not ready for big projects. She always assigns Mary operational tasks such as team meeting arrangements, program manager types of jobs. Mary can do this and can do it well, but she wants to work on something more strategic with bigger impact. She mentioned her concerns to her manager several times, but the manager decided not to do anything about it. She’s concerned that she will not have anything interesting to show, in regards to her marketing experience, on her resume after 2-years into this job.
I let her do most of the talking and venting. I was just listening and asking questions. She asked me what I would do in her situation.
I told her that I sense her frustration. I’d be lost if I were her, too. I gave her big kudos for being brave enough to break up the relationship and not dragging on. Not many women can do that so simply and choose to move on that quickly. It will be painful for several months, but it’s the right thing to do in the long run.
On the work front, it’s a little trickier. I told her to make another appeal to her manager. Try one last time and let the manager know her desire to take on more strategic projects. There’s a chance it won’t work, but that’s OK.
In the meantime, if I were her, I’d focus on getting all the deliverables done but not so emotionally vested on the current job. Rather than devoting to the job 120%, I told her to change her attitude by focusing on her own well-being. If there is something she wants to learn and try, now it’s a good time to do it. Apparently, she always wanted to learn dancing and French, well, now it’s a good time to do both.
At the same time, I said that I’d keep an eye open for other job opportunities within the company. Now, it’s the “wait” time, but she should also proactively explore opportunities. Patiently wait for other opportunities to come along.
I also asked her what kind of work her managers assigned to her. She said that there is mostly scrum project management. I was asking if scrum like agile software development type of scrum. She said yes, and she will be a certified scrum master. I was like “What?” I told her that is HUGE. It will certainly look good on her resume as a certified scrum master.
I also told her that there is Agile Marketing. She should check out Jeff Julian’s Agile Marketing book and Andrea Fryrear’s book, Death of A Marketer. If she positions it right, she can certainly link her Scrum learning to Marketing. I told her project management, and scrum training won’t be wasted efforts. She was delighted to hear that - she did not initially share that perspective. At the end of our conversation, she felt a lot better and more excited about Scrum projects.
I told her to learn as much as she can about the Scrum and Agile approach and take the time to pamper herself whenever possible. She promised me that she would do that. You go, Mary!
In our lives, we tend to have more lows than highs. The key is to create your own high points when you are in a low. Change your focus and attitude. No one stays in the low points forever, but you need to proactively make changes to bring the high points back to your life. Sitting around and doing nothing will not help.
Mary reaching out and proactively talking about her own issues with me is the first step. Refocusing her energy on her well-being and being open to embrace and learn about scrum is the 2nd step. Paying attention to other opportunities is the 3rd step. She is making an effort. When we are making efforts, the universe is listening. Good things will happen.
Mary, I am thinking of you. I want to know how you are doing in a couple of months. You always have a friend in Portland.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this!
Many of you know that my book, Effective Sales Enablement, was launched at the end of October. I’ve received positive and negative comments by those who’ve read the book. Thank you so much!
I’d like to take an opportunity to address some of the comments that were raised by you who read the book. There were three comments I’d like to address:
- Your book talks about many topics. There doesn’t seem to be a focus.
- I was looking for how-two templates, but I didn’t see many.
- There are many ideas, and it’s overwhelming.
Your book talks about many topics, and there doesn’t seem to be a focus
Ok, a good point. I know that I touch on many topics in the book.
Sales enablement is still evolving, and marketing can support sales in many different ways depending on your jobs and responsibilities.
Because marketing is dynamics and situational, I want to make sure that I cover many marketing related topics so no matter what job functions you do, you’ll find something useful.
If you perceive that as lack of focus, my most sincere apologies.
I was looking for how-to templates and I didn’t see many
Again, another great point! This book was written for marketers who understand the foundation of sales and marketing. This book is about to elevate your knowledge and help you connect marketing and sales dots. I shared how-to steps on key topics, but I didn’t provide many templates. If you are looking for templates for specific topics, let me know. Templates should be situational-based.
There are many topics and it’s overwhelming
I get it! I wrote the book, I know. The chapters are topic-driven. I detailed each chapter in the preface. I suggest that you read the chapters that are relevant to you. No need to the book from back-to-back. You can jump around between chapters. Read the chapters which are relevant to you and focus on the ideas that can apply to you.
Ok, I got one question from my FB post: What if I am not in marketing, will this book be helpful?
I wrote this book with a specific audience in mind: B2B marketing and sales professionals. If you are not in marketing, you may find something useful, but you may not. It’s your call. Like I said, I wrote this book with B2B marketing and sales professionals in mind.
Feel free to read the comments on Amazon. If you have any questions, please reach out, OK?
Love to hear from you. Keep hustling, my friends. Take care.
I just finished reading Talk Triggers by Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin. The book offers a complete guide to creating customers through word of mouth. It totally exceeds my expectations.
Jay and Daniel provide what they call the 4,5 and 6 systems. They talk about the 4 requirements for a talk trigger which gets your customers to spread the word for you. Then they identify 5 types of talk triggers that you may be able to use for your marketing outreach, and they end the book with 6 steps that you can take to implement a complete word-of-mouth strategy. A solid framework for a book!
According to them, repeatable, differentiated and relevant word-of-mouth is not a gimmick, but a business decision. Jay and Daniel used the DoubleTree Hotel as an example. Presenting guests with chocolate chip cookies when they check in at DoubleTree hotels is unique and repeatable customer experience and relevant to their brand. The simple and delicious chocolate chip cookies give their guests an opportunity to talk about the treat and their experience. A chocolate chip cookie which is reasonable, repeatable, relevant and remarkable is a trigger to get their guests to share on social media. And it’s a business decision.
Talk triggers can also be implemented by small businesses. Lockbusters, a locksmith in New York City, offers a fair and fixed price and sticks to it. Whey they fix your lock, they will also oil all the other locks, not just the lock they fixed, for free. Also, they’ll perform a complimentary security audit. Who doesn’t appreciate a free service like that? Again, this is repeatable, reasonable, relevant and differentiated enough to entice their customers to talk about Lockbuster.
Jay and Daniel share many such examples in their book.
Whenever I read a business book, I always think how I can apply some of the authors’ ideas to what I do. When I was reading these examples, I was thinking about what strategies I can implement as repeatable, reasonable, unique enough to my brand and relevant to my customers. I came up with one idea that ties to my book launch: If you read my book and can’t find anything useful, no problem, schedule a call with me. I want to hear your challenges and come up with a solution or even a template for you. Seriously, if you are a marketing manager or salesperson that read my book, but you can’t find anything useful, just reach out. I want to help.
Their book, especially the 6 steps how to implement WOM, inspired me to share examples in the book with my teams and dig deep into our understanding of our customers and our digital purchase journeys to see what we can improve and how we can generate talk triggers. We came up with several ideas that we want to implement in 2019. We will see how it goes. Not everything we implement will generate word-of-mouth, but it’s important that we keep trying and testing.
Several memorable quotes that I want to share with you from the book:
“Talk triggers aren’t gimmicks; they are business choices.”
“Experiencing your business firsthand, just as a customer would, can help you identify potential talk triggers.”
“Same is lame.”
I really enjoyed the read. The book is structured in a logical flow and packed with solid case studies and research data. Check out the book on Amazon.
One more note: Jay and Daniel talk the talk and walk the walk. When they sent their book out to industry influencers and peers, they add a little-stuffed alpaca, a tin can of Hilton Double Tree Cookies, and an Uberflip headband. A big package. Many people took videos and photos of unboxing the package they receive from Jay and Daniel. They created a talk trigger and generated millions of free impressions to help them build buzz for the book.
Well-done, Jay and Daniel.
Send me your marketing questions via @pamdidner. If you have a book that you want me to do a review, let me know.
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
Andi who attended my Global Content Marketing Workshop at Content Marketing World sent me this question:
Pam, I am sitting here going through my notes from CMW highlighting what I need to take action on when I get back to the office and I have highlighted so much from your presentation! I do have one question - do you have a recommendation on how to transition from a traditional marketing program to a content program without it being jarring for the audience?
Ok, first of all, Andi, this is a, what I call, a holy-grail question. If I completely crack the nut, I’d say that I am the chosen one who knows the untouchable secret.
Here are my two suggestions on how you can approach this. One is to tackle it from the marketing end, the other approach is work from the sales side. So hear me out.
Tackle from marketing:
- First step, you need to do your homework. Understand how the existing marketing programs work and perform. What traditional marketing programs or campaign have the company tried? How did they do? Is the marketing team happy about it? If not, why not?
- Take the insights you gather and identify some opportunities where content marketing can help. If the internal resistance on content marketing is high, start small. If people are open to new ideas, well, suggest or recommend something with a bigger scope.
- Propose the ideas or your recommendations to senior managers to get their input. Communicate from the perspective: “Ok, here are a couple things which are not working well in the traditional marketing. Maybe we can try or pilot something and see how it may help or improve the existing traditional marketing elements. Use the word pilot so that you don’t come out looking as if you’ve proposed a massive change.
Andi, I don’t know what traditional programs are not working in your company. Assume, you do a lot of events, marketing managers gather many business cards and the event team passes them to the sale teams, but salespeople won’t follow up. Maybe content can be used as a means to nurture the prospects. If the prospects click on specific types of content such as a buying guide or a feature comparison list which may serve a clue that the prospect may be ready to move on to the next stage. Then, you can pass that lead to the sales team, because you qualified it.
Another example: maybe your company is still doing a lot of traditional paid ads, they don’t know how to do paid efforts on social media. Maybe you can do some research on where your target audiences go and propose social media outreach campaigns. Again, it’s a pilot. Make it 3-6 month program and have the specific performance metrics tied to the campaigns.
OK, another approach is to leave the existing traditional program as it is and tackle content marketing from the sales side:
Tackle from the sales side:
- Say, your marketing team would like to continue with traditional marketing, that’s fine. Leave the way it is. You start with your sales team by understanding their needs and concerns. The most important thing is to understand their sales processes and methodologies.
- Draw their processes and identify the types of content they may need for each stage.
- Source content that will help them, share your content recommendations with them and ask if these content pieces are something they will use. They will tell you yes or no. Start with 5-10 salespeople, if your sales team is big.
- Identify the missing gaps where the existing content can’t meet their needs.
- Propose a plan to create content for the sales team. If you don’t have a budget, ask them if they can cough up some budget to help you. Again, start small.
I tried this approach with my sales team before and I got the budget I needed to create some sales-centric content for them.
So, a quick summary of the two approaches, Andi:
One approach is to understand how existing traditional marketing program works and performs. Find the gaps and see how content marketing can fulfill the gap.
The other approach is to understand the sales team’s needs and see if you can provide content to address their needs.
I am sure that they are other ways to address your questions. If you provide additional information, maybe I can come up with additional ideas, OK?
In the meantime, I hope this helps. Good luck, Andi!
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Ann Handley, the author of the popular Book “Everybody Writes”, shared her journey of creating content in her own backyard, also known as her website, during the Content Marketing World conference. Here is the background of her keynote: She wrote 2 books and is prolific in providing content in popular publishing sites from Inc to Forbes, but her website is like a content ghost town, so one of her followers said to her “what gives?!” She took on the challenge, started creating content and doing email marketing to engage with her followers. Email marketing, Ann? Welcome to the dark side.
She talked about her journey and learning about getting subscribers. One of her key learnings is to write for the audience of “ONE.” She used Warren Buffet as an example. Warren’s Annual Letter to Investors is widely read by millions of people. He shared that he writes that letter with his sister, Doris, in mind. He said that Doris is very smart and a voracious reader, but she doesn’t understand finance jargons and the complex economic trends. Warren made sure that he writes in a way that Doris can understand. He also injects humor into the letter to get Doris to laugh.
So, Ann followed the same approach. She tried to write with her Doris in mind. I love this story shared by Ann.
Most of us in the B2B marketing have buyers’ personas in mind. We try to craft our messaging and content to our personas. We are doing what Ann was talking about to some extent. But can we be even more focused and write the content with one person in mind? Will that make it more compelling and personable, possibly, humanize our brands or even our products?
Her talk made me think about my own email marketing. I don’t send out email on a regular basis. I send out an email when I have something to say, but I am very business-like…. I share my post, podcast or what not…. Can I write my email with the intention of a specific marketing manager in mind?
In an effort to be more relatable, I am going to take on that approach moving forward. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.
I just wanted to say - Ann, thank you for sharing your journey. I am now trying to find my own Doris.
If you are also trying to write with only one person in mind, please keep me posted about your journey. #findingyourdoris. I’d love to hear about it, and I bet so would Ann!
Also, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Keep hustling, my friends. You got this!
Joann asked me for some quick and easy sales enablement tricks that marketers can implement right away. Well, this is such a basic question, but there is no quick answer. It really depends… It depends on your marketing jobs and your interactions with the sales team. Your roles and responsibilities will guide how you support your sales team.
The best way to start is to have a clear understanding of how you support your sales team and find ways to optimize the process or your support efforts. If you are an event manager, you probably coordinate with your sales team on how to divide and conquer on the show floor. You know salespeople’s challenges are to gather as many leads as possible. To better support them, it’s your job to come up with creative ideas to draw the crowd to your booth. What can you do to drive more foot traffic to the booth? So understand how you support your sales team and find ways to do it better.
Another way to better support sales is to understand their challenges. Obviously, we can’t do their jobs for them. But, it’s possible to understand their sales process and methodology. Get a sense what they do on a daily basis, even what kind of rejections they receive. How do they move prospects through the sales journey? It’s very similar to understanding buyers’ personas. To market better, you need to understand your audience. To support your sales team better, you need to walk in their shoes.
Once you have that understanding, you can pinpoint the specific challenges and needs that you can help alleviate or satisfy based on your roles and responsibilities. For instance, if you are a content marketing manager, you can identify some content pieces that sales can use or customize for sales engagements.
Here are some ideas that you can implement quickly to support your sales team:
Can you find a join initiative that sales and marketing teams can work on together? For example, can both sales and marketing tackle a strategic account together? Account-based marketing is a great way for sales and marketing to collaborate.
Another quick and easy way is to attend sales meetings. Most sales teams have weekly huddles. Can you attend the weekly calls and understand the current status of sales team efforts? I often discover useful information attending these calls. From time to time, I’ll proactively ask them if I can present and share upcoming content pieces and marketing plan and priorities. I help them understand what we are doing on the marketing front to build awareness and drive demands.
Here is one more idea: what about training sales on social media? Marketing tends to be on the forefront of adopting digital. Can you share do’s and don’ts on social media? You can also share what tools to use to understand prospects better.
Joann, to answer your question, it’s important to start by knowing your own roles and responsibilities well. Then, make an effort to understand sales challenges and needs. Lastly, pinpoint challenges and needs that you can assist with based on your roles and responsibilities
By understanding your roles and challenges, you can determine where you can best provide value.
The bottom line is that there is no quick and easy way to support sales. It takes time and effort to support them and do them right.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
With my 2nd book launched, many people ask me why I wrote a Sales Enablement book instead of another content marketing book.
Well, there are professional and personal reasons:
One the professional front:
Sales and marketing tend to be treated as separate functions with limited integration, especially in enterprises. With the rise of digital, many marketing elements can be used for sales conversions and engagements. Here are two great examples:
Email marketing:
Email marketing used to be one of the key channels for marketing campaigns. Email marketing campaigns coupled with relevant content are now used by sales to run mini and personalized outreach to facilitate the sales process or act as a talk trigger.
Social media marketing:
Another example is the usage of social media I shared in my book. A sales team of a whiskey company was working hard to gain shelf space in liquor stores and supermarkets in a specific city. In order to get more shelf space with these stores, the sales team proposed that the company would run location-targeted paid social media ads to promote free tasting events at these stores with agreed-upon dates. The goal is to drive as much traffic as possible to the stores for tasting, and eventually, buying that particular brand of whisky. You know how it is. While you are in the store, you are likely to purchase other types of mixers or liquors which directly increase the stores’ revenue. The stores loved the idea that the brand was running geo-targeted ads to drive foot traffic. Once customers are in the store, they walk around, they likely to buy more products. I am thinking about my Costco run. I walk in with one thing in mind and walk away with a cart full of stuff.
In the digital age, marketers and salespeople should make an effort to evaluate how to better leverage marketing elements as sales engagements and negotiations.
To do that, it requires both sides to understand each other well. Marketing needs to understand sales processes and methodologies and sales needs to understand the various marketing channels that the company offers.
It sounds easy in theory, but it requires a massive amount of collaboration and communications. When we are all under deadlines, this is not something we can do on a continuous basis unless it’s mandated by the top or there is a process in place to facilitate it, which is what I talk in-depth in my book.
So, on the personal front
I simply wanted to challenge myself to write another marketing related topic. Then, I looked inward and asked myself what experience and learning I have that I can share from my 20 years of corporate experience. So, what was it? Oh, what about my experience of supporting the indirect and direct sales teams? We all know how hard it is to support them. I learned so much from them, yet they also learned from me about the evolution of digital marketing and how to use social media to their advantage. So, it was a win-win.
Originally, the topic was how marketing can better support the sales teams. In a way, we, marketers, are enabling sales. So, it morphed into the realm of sales enablement.
Most of sales enablement books are written by sales consultants, sales professionals, or sales trainers. This book was written by a marketer for marketers. If you are a marketer, it provides additional ideas for how you can better support your sales team. If you are a sales person, sales ops or sales enablement manager, it helps you to get inside your marketers’ heads and know what to ask for.
So, go to Amazon to order the book. If you are interested in the chapter outline or a free chapter, go to the pamdidner.com Books Page. You’ll see links for downloading a free chapter and chapter outline. If you can’t find it, just send me an email or contact me via any social media channels. I’ll personally send you the free chapter or chapter outline.
So, here is another idea to share with you. If you read the book and find nothing relevant that can apply to your marketing or sales roles, please schedule a call with me. I want to understand your challenges and see what I can do for you, OK?
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
I did a session on “How to Build a Global Content Marketing Team” at Content Marketing World two years ago. Karen attended that session. Subsequently, she and I had a conversation on how she should structure her team. She has a small team which supports several geographies. And she didn’t have approved headcounts to support the different local teams on the ground. She asked me what to do. I told her that her team members need to have two roles. For example, a writer’s job is to write content, but that person should also be responsible for several countries or one geography region. So, all her writers are assigned specific regions or countries, in addition to their regular jobs. These writers are also the local teams’ main point of contact for content-related requests or questions. So far, the dual roles have worked well in the past 2 years.
However, she has noticed that each writer has different strengths. For example, one writer is very good at blog writing, the other one is super-efficient on webpage and product copy. So, she is considering shuffling writers’ responsibilities based on their strengths. She is also thinking about having the local teams go to different writers based on their specialties. With these changes in mind, Karen decided to reach out and ask my opinion.
Well, I told her that I totally understand why she is doing this and where she is coming from. The biggest drawback of that option she shared with me is that the local teams will need to go to different writers for different needs. It’s no longer one point of contact. Based on my experience working with the local teams, they prefer to go to one or fewer people at HQ, if all possible, for their needs. If they need to go to one writer for blog writing, and another person for the landing page, the HQ team is not making the local teams’ jobs easy. So, when I explained that, Karen nodded and agreed with me.
Well, it’s not all a lost cause. I did tell her to draw out the new organizational structure, present the idea to the local teams, explain to them what she has in mind and solicit their feedback and input. They know that Karen is the final decision maker, anyway, but it’s important to bring them into the process. It shows respect and a sense of collaboration.
She told me that she will follow up with her local teams to get their feedback. I told her to keep me posted about the final decision. It was wonderful to talk to Karen again.
Marketing resource and headcount are always finite. Organization structure, roles, and responsibilities of team members will shift as the business strategy and focus change. There is never a right or one-size-fits-all organizational structure. You do the best you can base on your needs at that time.
I shared How to Build a Global Marketing Team presentation on my website under courses. If you are interested, please check it out.
Oh, one more quick note: the best time to evaluate the overall organizational structure is during the annual planning. Your objectives and strategies from your annual plan will provide guidance on how a team should be structured for the upcoming year.
If you want to brainstorm about your content marketing org. structure, please reach out anytime.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Keep Hustling. Until next time.
An HR manager asked me, “Pam, do you think sales-enablement training and development belong in HR?”
Well, we all know that training has been one of the core competencies provided by HR, in addition to talent recruiting, performance reviews, and pay structure.
Here is the reality, with the rise of technology, training is no longer confined to classroom settings or online courses. It can be micro-training through mobile apps with snackable doses of information pushed out daily to users. It can be virtual and interactive hands-on training through augmented reality or even just on-point educational videos on YouTube or topical-driven podcasts that you can listen anywhere.
Frankly, anyone in the company who has budget can develop some sort of training materials for their teams. Content-creation tools are readily available for everyone to use.
There are also different content-syndication platforms that enable you to easily share your training materials on any platforms. You can use Loom to record your training, then share on YouTube, via email, or any social media platform you desire. Anybody in the company can be a content creator.
The boundaries of training roles and responsibilities between different functional groups has begun to fade with the rise of technology. It raises the question: who owns sales training? HR, sales or functional or product groups?
Conventionally, sales training tends to reside within the sales organizations. A sales-enablement manager or a sales-training manager who is responsible for sales onboarding and training may develop a continuous training regimen, from a pre-onboarding curriculum to continuous onboarding or annual refreshers and updates using different medium and technologies.
To accomplish this effectively and digitally, it may be necessary to integrate the company’s email system (IT department), the employee-performance system (HR department), the training platform (Sales Enablement department), and the content management library (Marketing department). When salespeople complete the pre-onboarding curriculum, their managers will receive an email notification, or a management dashboard will be updated with the results. After salespeople take tests for each subject in their curriculum, the score is sent to their managers and automatically updated in their HR records.
Sales training can belong to several departments. If the sales-enablement training methodology and platform being used is recognized as best practice, then the HR department can easily argue that sales-enablement training should be folded into its responsibilities to drive corporate efficiency. The sales team can argue that sales-enablement training has unique requirements that only apply to sales and, therefore, the sales function should retain the ownership of the entire effort. The marketing team can make the case that a big chunk of sales training content comes from the marketing team, therefore, it should be run by marketing. Organizational structures and roles and responsibilities will continue to morph as markets, customers, buying habits, and technology evolve.
So, who should own sales training?
I have seen the sales-enablement training function report to marketing, sales, sales operations, HR, and even product teams. In some companies, sales training might be put under HR because one of the more important responsibilities of sales enablement is training, and HR is responsible for hiring and training company-wide.
Amy Pence, sales-enablement manager at Alteryx, reported to the sales team. Then, her team was moved from Sales to HR to scale her best practices across the corporation. In some cases, subject-matter experts or product engineers are responsible for creating product training for the sales team and, therefore, the training function is incorporated into the product teams. Emma Hitzke, Senior Marketing Manager for Intel’s IoT division, leads a sales-enablement team that reports to one of the product groups.
So, it depends on the budget, timelines, skillsets, resources, senior management direction, and even the maturity of the sales organization. Even after taking these factors into consideration, ongoing adjustments have to be made based on a changing external environment as well as the fact that sales enablement itself is still evolving.
Even though the goal is the same, every company structures its sales-training support based on what works, or what they believe will work for them at that time. Eventually, they will probably pivot the team structure.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where sales training resides. The key is to foster close collaboration across departments to share best practices and provide knowledge and tools to unleash employees’ and salespeople’s potentials.
One question answered and more to go.
Please send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner.
Be well. Keep Hustling. Until next time.
In my last episode, I talked about a class I took on how to take better photos using my iPhone. I found a class through the Today at Apple website.
By going through that site and checking the various classes thatApple offers, I have to say that Apple does a great job on content marketing and sales enablement. In a way, their content is an extension of sales enablement. They use content to educate new users on how to use their products better. They use content to show existing users new tricks.
All the classes are product-centric. They are on-point and focus on getting users ramp up as quickly as possible.
Their class content, in a way, focuses on conversion from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. To me, classes they provide are the essence of content marketing: offer relevant and educational content to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.
With millions of users, people come to the site naturally to find products, ask questions, and make purchases. Apple doesn’t need to use paid and sponsored content to drive traffic to their sites while most of us still need to dial up paid media as one of our key marketing mix.
The key learning is not completely relying on your organic traffic or dialing back on paid or sponsored content. Most of us don’t have Apple’s brand recognition and a massive user base, we, unfortunately, still need to incorporate paid media as part of our marketing mix to drive traffic to our sites and facilitate conversions. The key takeaway is to create relevant and educational content to assist and support your users in any way possible.
Another learning for me is that salespeople need to be more than salespeople. The instructors of classes are all in-store reps. So they all wear multiple hats: sales rep, IT, subject matter expert, and teacher. This is no different than enterprise or B2B sales teams. Many of them are not just salespeople anymore. They are also order takers, trusted advisor, and problem solvers, or even problem finders. Salespeople can’t be just salespeople anymore. To provide value-add, we all need to wear multiple hats.
You can use content marketing as a means to enable the sales team and your users. You can also use content to train your sales teams so that they can play multiple roles and provide value to their customers.
Please send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner.
Be well. Keep hustling. Until next time.
Like everyone else, I take a lot of photos using my iPhone. I notice that younger generations take better photos than I do. I wanted to learn some new tricks to take better photos using my phone. I knew that Apple stores offered video-creation classes, so I wondered if they offered classes on taking better photos.
So I went to Apple.com and started a quick chat with one of the employees. It turned out that I just needed to Google “Apple Today” to find out what classes are offered at Apple Stores. Typing “Apple Today” took me to the “Today at Apple” website. Then, I entered country and city to find the nearest Apple Stores. Viola! I could browse the classes that were being offered that day and for the upcoming week at the Apple Stores near me. Pretty cool!
Then, I clicked on photo and video category. There are tons of classes such as How to Shoot Photos with iPhone, How to Edit Photos on iPhone, Photo Walks: Portraits and People, Crafting Your Shot Co-created with Chase Jarvis.
I signed up for Crafting Your Shot Co-created with Chase Jarvis. Apparently, this is a new class. Chase did a lot of photo shoots for Apple.
The instructor, who is an Apple sales rep, opens with a video by Chase Jarvis, and I thought his points were interesting. He boiled down the secret of taking great portraits (people photos) into three elements: connections, composition, and light.
Connections are about your emotional connection with the people that you photograph. Do you know them well? Do you know their personality? Do you know their stories? If you know them, it will help you to capture the essence of who they are and display their feelings, mindset, even a bit of their soul.
Composition is about place and moment. Now that you know them, you can pick the background or locations that brings out the best in them. This makes sense to me. I asked Tim, my photographer friend, to take photos for my son’s high-school yearbook. My son is an outdoor person who played tennis throughout high school, so we chose a local park with tennis courts. He didn’t wear a suit and tie for his yearbook photo, because that’s not who he is. We chose the location to reflect that Aaron is casual, outgoing, and athletic. Before and during the photo shoot, Tim talked to Aaron casually and got to know him better and put him at ease with different shots. That’s the connection element that Chase mentioned earlier.
The third element is light. Lighting can get complicated. This class didn’t get into the type of lighting that we should use in different situations, but it emphasized using natural light whenever possible.
Throughout the class, iPhone photo features are mentioned discreetly. They encouraged us to try the Portrait mode, which is their new feature. The instructor even suggested using the iPhone flash to increase lighting and experimenting with the zoom feature.
One part of this class that I enjoyed was that the instructor showed tons of examples of great photos and analyzed why they were great. That was like attending an art critique class. It was fun.
After the class, I have a new understanding of photography. With a phone on hand, it’s easy to take photos anytime, but high-quality photos occur when you know your subject well, carefully choose the right place, and use the right lighting.
These three elements of taking great photographs also apply to content marketing, if you think about it…
Just as knowing you photography subject well is important to get a good result, in order to create relevant content, you need to know your audiences well.
The composition in the context of content marketing is your writing approach and the flow of your stories.
The light in the context of content marketing is hard to define, but I see the key message and creative development as the light of your content creation.
See? Taking a great photo is not much different than creating useful and relevant content. Well, a photo is a piece of content anyway.
#EverythingIsConnected
I was able to use one Apple class to create one podcast episode. Maybe I should take more Apple classes.
Please send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner.
Be well. Keep hustling. Until next time.
Hard as it is to believe, even though I’ve only been working for myself for 4 years, I’ve just relaunched my website for the fourth time. That’s pretty much one relaunch per year. I am not talking about changing copy here and there. I am talking about a complete re-design of the website…
Here is the story of working on my website, full of drama and nightmares, and my takeaway.
I launched my first website in 2012. It was pretty much a blog and creative outlet. I was publishing my reflections and observations about life in general. It was not a business website and no clear value proposition about who I am and what I do.
Then, I completely redid my website in 2014 when I publish my first book, Global Content Marketing
As 2015 rolled around, I decided that I should sharpen the focus of my web presence to match my book, so I created globalcontent.marketing as the main site and migrated all my content to that site and kept the pamdidner.com site static. Frankly, I don’t think that was a right move. Hindsight is 20/20. What I should have done is to keep building my personal brand.
In 2016, I realized that I made the mistake. Focusing on pamdidner.com is the better thing to do. Also, I was thinking about writing my 2dn book. Having just the Globalcontent.marketing site just wouldn’t cut it. So, I redesigned PamDidner.com and moved all the content back. Again, this was a strategy change which directly impacted my website presence.
In 2017, I added courses, e-commerce capabilities, revamped speaking and other features, and change the design elements to make it more modern. It’s not a total re-launch, but it was still a massive change.
Now, with the arrival of my 2nd book, guess what? It’s time to redo my website with a newer look. I feel like I am remodeling a room to welcome my 2nd baby. In a way, it is. This time, the remodel was even more elaborate. I thought about my value propositions and I added professionally done videos. I also had the blog and podcast pages custom-coded for search categorization and to be more visually appealing.
Here are 3 quick lessons from launching and relaunching my website:
- Digital marketing can’t be static. It’s not something you can check off. Google updates its search algorithm constantly, WordPress is adding new features all the time. Your website needs to keep up with technology changes. You need to feed the monster and dress it up constantly. It’s work that never ends.
- A website is part of marketing outreach. Creating a website is easy, the challenging part is to tie subscriptions, downloads and offerings seamlessly to marketing automation, CRM, and other tools. That’s the hard part. I am constantly working on my workflow to improve the customer journey. It’s difficult and exhausting.
- Tie your website conversions to Analytics. I didn’t know this very well when launching the previous sites. I didn’t set up goals and UTM properly on Google Analytics. The best way to understand your website is to make sure that you define how you will measure conversations and success using whatever tools you choose. It requires a lot of thought.
OK, I kicked off the website launch meeting in April to anticipate the launch on 7/31. Well, it went live on 7/31, but certain design elements didn’t transfer, so my team took everything down. Ugh. My team worked through all the details and migration again and relaunched on 8/9. Once it was launched, we discovered more problems like the e-commerce features were not working properly and some images and video hadn’t transferred or links were broken over… The QA took 3-4 week and we are still making minor changes here and there. It just never ends.
Man, creating a seamless digital customer experience is easy to say, but hard to do. If you are not in the trenches, it’s hard for you to understand how much work goes on behind the scenes to make a website user-friendly and seamless.
Like I said, the saga continues. Friends who know me well are putting a bet on when I will redo my website again. I really hope this website will last for a couple of years, but I know that’s wishful thinking. Something will come up and prompt me to redo my website again.
In the meantime, I am very pleased with the current website. My value proposition is clearer, I have solid offerings. Most importantly, I have a better understanding of who I am and what I can do.
Something about writing copy for my own website brings clarity to who I am. Writing is the best way to discover your inner self.
Ok, I am sure that you will hear more about my website plight in the future. For now, check out my website: www.pamdidner.com. I am very proud of my 5th makeover.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Some listeners know that my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement, will be available in October. While working with the publisher on editing the manuscript back in May, I also started thinking about how I need to revise my value proposition. The value proposition in this case is ‘How do I differentiate myself from other marketing consultants?’ Until now, I’ve focused on content marketing, or my value proposition or uniqueness being that I know how to help enterprises (not SMB) set up a process to scale content across regions. Not many people can do that, so that is unique to me. Now, with Sales Enablement coming into play, what is my new value proposition? How do I redefine what I can offer to combine my knowledge of global content marketing and sales enablement?
I started by identifying several unique strengths or experiences that only I can offer.
- 20+ years of corporate experience in various positions, from finance to accounting, from operations to product development, from marketing to sales enablement. I have a wide array of experience and understand how a company works.
- I have a unique process to teach people how to scale content across regions, that’s the 4 P’s of global content marketing.
- In addition, I understand indirect and direct sales people. I have a unique point of view on what marketers can do to better support their indirect and direct sales team by evaluating the different marketing elements, collaborating on account-based marketing and more.
- I have steps that people can follow to map content between the sales processes and the customer journeys.
All these points are unique to me. The next step is to distill all the uniqueness into one over-arching statement that I can say when I communicate FTF or on my website.
So I came up with 5 statements and tested each with different colleagues and clients. I am going to read them out loud and slowly, so you can think about them, as well.
- Align sales and marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience
- Grow business by aligning sales and marketing with global content marketing
- Increase conversions through content marketing and sales enablement
- Enable sales with integrated global content marketing
- Connect sales and marketing to engage and convert audiences worldwide
Here is my quick analysis of these 5 value propositions:
Align sales and marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience: this statement is way to generic. It can apply to any sites. I crossed this one out right away.
Increase conversions through content marketing and sales enablement: Ok, this statement is way too specific. It focuses only on conversions, but sales and marketing alignment is so much more than that. Otherwise, I like the mention of content marketing and sales enablement in this statement.
Grow business by aligning sales and marketing with global content marketing: Actually, I thought this is not bad. It mentions global content marketing, sales and marketing alignment, but puts a focus on using content marketing to align sales and marketing. My offering is broader than content marketing.
Enable sales with integrated global content marketing: This statement sounds like global content marketing is the only way to enable sales.
The last one is to Connect sales and marketing to engage and convert audiences worldwide. Ok, very few consultants can boast that they can work with sales and marketing to engage audiences internationally. This is certainly unique.
I ended up playing with the last one a little more. I tried different combinations of words. I decided to go with “Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences.” Of course, I need to test this statement online and get more feedback, but, at least, I have an overarching messaging to guide copywriting for my new website.
So, hear me out. With the new book, my audiences will be expanded to the sales side. Therefore, I want to make an effort to include the sales team as part of the value proposition. However, I am a marketer through and through, my intention is to educate marketing teams on how to better work with the sales teams. Therefore, connecting sales and marketing teams make sense. In addition, I want to play to my expertise of scaling content across regions, therefore, I want to bring global into the value proposition. So, here is the final value proposition for now:
Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences.
You can see that on my new website.
I also came up with other copy such as ‘Helping sales and marketing connect the dots’ and ‘Align communications and resources to get things done.’ ‘When marketing is done right, sales and marketing can co-exist beautifully.’ I see these copy fit nicely under my over-arching value proposition statement.
With this start, I began to build out statements to explain my services and offerings such as Pam can help you find commonalities in misalignment, drive joint initiatives through account-based marketing (ABM), craft a messaging framework and map content between the sales processes and customer journeys.
I started with one value proposition, then built positioning and proof points to support it.
Here is a quick summary.
My value proposition is:
Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences.
My positioning is:
- Find commonalities in misalignment.
- Proven structured methodologies to align sales and marketing
- Bring clarity and propose recommendations to complex digital marketing and sales efforts
My proof points:
- 20+ year of Corp experience.
- Deep understanding of MNCs (multi-national companies)
- Strong technical and marketing knowledge and able to articulate marketing from the perspectives of finance, management, operations, business units and other functions.
In a way, I created a messaging framework from the value proposition, positioning and proof points.
You can follow the similar thinking process to build your messaging framework. I have templates that you can follow if you want to try. Send me an email via my website, pamdidner.com and I’m more than happy to share them with you.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
My son, Joey, was a high school leadership camp counselor this summer. He managed about 30 high schoolers during the two 10-day over-night camp sessions, so it was about 15 kids per session. He came home when these two sessions were over. I picked him up from the airport. He looked physically and mentally exhausted but in good spirits.
So, on the way home, he was talking to me about the camp. I asked him what is the biggest takeaway from being a counselor? I sound like a podcast interviewer. He described his take away in two words: parenting and depression. Depression? Was he depressed? No. He explained it to me.
He said that he learned a lot about parenting. Well, he was a quasi-parent for these high schoolers for 20 some days. Since this was a leadership conference, they did personality, or team building exercises to help them discover who they are and what their strengths/weaknesses are. Through these exercises, kids need to start look inward and confront some of the emotional issues that they possess but have ignored for years.
When some of the emotions started surfacing, some kids broke down and didn’t know how to deal with it. He said most kids are from well-to-do families, but there are issues at home with their parents, with schools, or even with their own gender identities.
As mature as Joey is, he is only a college freshman. He is not trained to deal with some of the questions that these kids were asking him. He listened intensely. He was very careful not to tell them what they should do. He doesn’t think it’s his job to tell them what to do, but he tried to ask questions to help them assess the situation, then, guide them to identify some actions they can take on their own.
It’s funny that he told me how much he learned about parenting during the 20-some days. And he concluded that parenting is hard. No kidding, Joey. He said since he was responsible for all these kids and their safety, he was constantly on high alert. Even if he were sleeping, he would wake up in the middle of the night cold sweat, and the first thing pop into his mind was “where are my kids?”
I laughed so hard when he said that. Welcome to the parenthood, Joey!
The second thing he mentioned to me is alarming. He said that depression among teens is real and rampant. Most of these kids have so much, yet they are deeply unhappy. They obviously have emotional baggage that they carry with them. At the same time, I wonder if peer pressure and social comparison also play a role. When I look at my friends’ Facebook posts, everything is perfect: the family reunion, fun vacation, beautiful meals, and more. On social media which these kids know intimately, babies are always smiling, the holiday family get-together was always pleasant and friendly with no drama. Deep down, we all know that’s not true.
I am wondering if the kids growing up with smartphones and picture-perfect selfies fully understand that pictures or videos don’t tell the whole story. Perfect pictures don’t mean perfect lives. Life is full of setbacks and failures. Behind the scenes, we all have to deal with our ups and downs. The social comparison—or the urge to post pictures to show how happy they are—may be dragging them down.
I don’t have an answer for rampant depression. Since the causes of depression are different from individual to individual, the remedies will vary from case to case.
However, this issue makes me think about data and marketing. The greatest benefit of digital marketing is that we can optimize our marketing efforts using data, but to what end? I am using myself as an example. I’d look at my Google Analytics on a regular basis, I am never happy with my site traffic. Nothing I did was good enough, there is always something I need to do to improve on my website and outbound marketing. Often, I’d also fall into depression. When that happens, I tend to sit back and give myself a pep talk: Look at how far you’ve come in the past four years, Pam. Website traffic is not a result. It’s all part of the journey. Just keep doing what you are doing.
As marketers, we are always trying new ideas and technologies. Sometimes, it works, and sometimes it creates a major setback. I don’t know about you, but when that happens, it depresses the heck out of me. It’s so much more personal when you work for yourself. You spent your hard-earned money—and it just doesn’t work. It’s frustrating and depressing. This is especially true on the promotional front.
I am lucky that I have help. I can turn into my family and mentors to vent. I can also turn to my yoga practice. Overall, I can change my perspectives and count my blessings.
Joey was grateful for the experience. He was not sure if he wants to do it again next summer, because of the emotional toll. I asked him if he was depressed. He said: “No, Mom! If I am ever depressed, I can talk to you and dad about it. I will ask for help.” That’s the best thing Joey has ever said to me, in addition, that he loves me. He can come to me when he has issues. I am glad that he understands he is not alone and he can ask for help.
As marketers, we can ask for help, too!
Welcome back, Joey!
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
This week, one listener, Jim, asked me about branding.
“Companies with very strong brands want to maintain their brands across markets. How do you keep the core essence of your brand but also adapt it for new markets?”
There’re several ways to scale the core essence of your brand across regions. I want to address that in 4 different elements: Logo, Design, Tone-and-Manner, Corporate Culture in 7 short minutes.
Logo:
Many people associate the essence of branding with logo usage. This is indeed only one part of the story. At the minimal level, keep the logo the same across the region—unless your logo can be perceived as offensive in some cultures. The most famous example is Starbucks’ mermaid logo. In the western countries, we look at the mermaid (or some may call it, siren), and don’t think much of it. In the Middle East, a female appears on the logo full frontal, and nudity is not allowed. The logo in Saudi Arabia shows the crown of the siren on the sea, but you can’t see the mermaid. The key point is that the logo still adheres to the same look-and-feel with the same color schemes. You can still tell that it’s Starbucks logo without the mermaid image.
Design:
The 2nd element to stay to the core essence of the brand is the design of your online and offline presence. This can be your online store experience, physical office layout, or even the uniforms that employees need to wear. Again, it needs to stick to the overall brand guide of colors, fonts, personas, etc.
Tone-and-Manner:
The 3rd element is tone-and-manner. This is how you select words and images. For some companies, the tone-and-manner of communications is casual and fun. For some, it’s more formal and business-like. Some of you are familiar with Warby Parker, the e-commerce site selling glasses. If you look at Warby Parker’s and LensCrafters’ websites, you will notice that their word selections and image choices reflect who they are or even their business models.
On LensCrafter, one of the rolling marquee images focuses on “book your eye exam now” with an image of an optometrist. LensCrafters wants to drive conversions through the eye exam appointments. Once you are done with your eye exam, you can shop around in the store to get your glasses with prescription.
For Warby Parker, rather than focusing on “booking your eye exam now,” Warby Parker helps people select glasses first. But people don’t know how to select glasses since there are many choices, so they have a quick-and-easy quiz that you can take starting by your gender, the size of frame preference, the shapes, colors, and materials, then it comes up a list of recommendations for you to choose. If you are on their websites, you’ll notice that the tone-and-manner is cheeky in Warby Parker, LensCrafter is more like a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer.
Corporate Culture:
The last element is corporate culture. Corporate culture usually is engendered by corporate values set by founders or senior mgmt. It reflects on how employees behave and communicate with each other. If branding is done right, brand personas echo corporate values and culture. Innovation is highly valued at Intel, it’s part of the corporate culture but is also documented as one of their brand personas when I was at Intel.
Products:
One more point: some people may argue that product localization may affect how you convey your brand at the local level. True. Your products maybe are localized from country to country, and the content and communication outreach may need to be customized, but the core essence of the brand should stay the same. McDonald’s customizes their menus for different countries. In India, for example, they have the McVeggie.
But the core essence of their brand, which stays the same, is about a wholesome place where you can spend with your family and friends.
Lastly…
Ultimately, the core essence of the brand is carried out by people and products. Know your products well. Hire good people and educate your employees about your brand essence and corporate values at the local level. Training and communications are key to scale the core essence of your brand across regions. What is a good logo is also a good brand? Good brand starts with employees and products.
Jim, I hope I answer your question.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Many businesses use Google Analytics (GA) to measure website traffic, paid search performance, organic search optimization, and even track sales and conversions. So, how much do you know about Google’s Analytics? Well, I am the first to confess: I didn’t know much about GA. My GA knowledge was limited to the measurement of website traffic such as page views, bounce rates, top 10 most viewed content, numbers of visitors from different countries and content views by devices. That was about it. But I know that Google Analytics can do so much more.
When I was in a corporate role, I had a team who would prepare the analytic reports and recommendations. I would review them, mostly, just to approve their recommendations on what was needed to be optimized as next steps. I didn’t have to get my hands dirty. Mostly, I couldn’t judge if the recommendations were good or bad, because I didn’t do a deep dive into data to understand how the analysis was done. I took the team’s recommendations at face value.
I ran into a similar issue when I started working for myself. I know what questions to ask, but I didn’t know how to customize or use GA effectively to find the answers on my own. I hired someone to help me out. We tried to standardize the dashboard, but I had different questions every time, whenever we reviewed the dashboard. By asking different questions, I was trying to view data in a different light to see if I could find other ways to better optimize the website or drive higher traffic. Different questions mean different dashboards. He would pull different reports and we would schedule several follow-up meetings. Since I paid him by hours, it got expensive very quickly.
I decided it was time to take the issue into my own hands and really understand how GA works. First, I went to YouTube to find any Google Analytics courses. Many of them require me to pay. I was like, there got to be a better and cheaper way to learn. So, I went to Google directly. Viola! Google offers systematic courses for their users in the Google Analytics Academy. You can find Beginner and Advanced courses right inside the analytics tool.
Each course is divided into 4-6 modules and each module offers several 5-10 minute videos or demos that you can watch. It took me about 5 hours to go through the Beginner and Advanced courses. I have to say that it was incredibly useful and beneficial. After that, I understand the methodology behind the analytics, the definitions of different terms they use, even the layout of their default dashboards.
When I was watching the course videos, I had my Google Analytics account open and tested the instructions and steps real-time. It was 5 hours well spent.
Here are my takeaways from completing the courses:
- For some analytics tools, you can take the dashboard as it is. For scalable and fluid analytics tools that you can personalize and customize, you need to understand how the tools work and their methodologies in order to gain insights into your data.
- Business goals don’t necessarily directly translate to the goals in your analytics tools. You need to set the goals up in a way that tools can be used to track relevant metrics.
- You need to put in the time to learn and use the tools. The tools are as good as gold, but only if you use them on a regular basis.
- Using tracking codes is super important. It’s a way to tell your analytics tools what information to gather.
I started to understand the relationships between reports and the structure of raw data. My new found understanding of GA led to the restructuring of my own dashboard, especially, goal setting and purchase funnel conversions.
Although I have business goals in terms of revenue and new customers, my goals in Google Analytics focuses on conversions, number of subscribers, content downloads, and schedule meetings. Business goals and Google Analytics goals don’t exactly translate one-to-one. Yet, I am able to make connections between Google Analytics goals and business goals.
The greatest benefit of digital marketing is the ability to understand prospects’ digital footprint and analyze the data to offer a better customer experience. To analyze the data, we need to understand our tools.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Frequent listeners know that I practice yoga on a regular basis. The truth is that I go to 2 different yoga studios in Portland. I do Hot Yoga in one studio and learn new and different yoga postures in another studio.
Attending classes in two studios, I get opportunities to see how different yoga instructors conduct their classes. For Hot Yoga, we do the same 26 postures every class. It can get boring sometimes, same old postures over and over again, but that’s when the personality of a teacher comes into play.
One particular instructor, Sasha, is unique. She ran away from home when she was young, then, lived a pretty messed up life until she found Yoga. You can tell that she doesn’t follow rules. She would play music during classes, add a couple of postures here and there, and ask us to breathe in certain ways between postures. Then, she would add random observations or reflections as they occur to her. Like the other day, when we were doing twisting postures, she said that she was on the toilet yesterday and turned on one side to get the toilet paper. She was thinking, hey, I am doing a twist, then I need to turn around and do the other side. That kind of random thoughts would just blast out of her mouth at any moment. Then she’d suddenly realize that’s TMI, too much information and just laugh it off with us.
She has a solid following for her sessions. Her class is entertaining.
The other studio teaches Iyengar Yoga. Unlike Hot Yoga, we’d go through different sequences of yoga postures every time. Nina, one of the senior instructors, has in-depth knowledge of yoga practice and postures. She is well-trained, and she demonstrates each posture with specific instructions on how to do them right. I learn challenging poses such as a headstand, handstand or elbow stand in that studio. I wouldn’t say that her classes are entertaining, but it’s certainly educational and insightful. I become a better yogini because the quality of her teaching.
The teaching styles of Sasha and Nina makes me think about content creation. Not every piece of content you create needs to be entertaining or storytelling. Sometimes, you need to tell your products and offering as it is, straight forward and on-point. Sometimes, you need to create content with exciting creative and an interesting writing angle to provoke an emotional connection or create a specific experience with your target customers.
To do that, you need to truly understand your customers. Sasha understands that 26 postures is boring, she tries to add some spice to her class by sharing her personal stories or breaking the same sequence a bit. Nina knows her students want to challenge themselves and make progress with their practices, so she focuses on giving no-nonsense instruction to help her students improve. They understand their students well, interpret their needs and find their own ways to help their pupils.
Here is what I learned by watching Sasha’s and Nina’s teaching styles:
- Know what’s unique about your products and your offering. In an enterprise, this should be in your brand style guide or brand persona.
- Understand your audiences’ needs. This is your buyers’ personas.
- Determine how you or your products can help your audiences’ needs. Explain and demonstrate it in your own ways. In an enterprise, this is your editorial and content planning.
- Not every piece of content you create needs to tell a story. You need a mix of different formats of content.
It’s funny how I make a connection between Sasha’s and Nina’s teaching and content marketing. Just like Douglas Adams said in his Dirk Gently’s books: Everything is connected!
Many times, I have meetings until the minute I walk into the yoga studio. I tend to feel tense all over before my yoga sessions. After 90 minutes, I feel like I shed 50 pounds of weight off my shoulders. Then, after a nice hot shower, I am completely rejuvenated and ready to start my day. I love the feel of the Portland breeze on my face when I walk out the studio.
Have you tried yoga before? Give it a shot. Maybe you’ll gain some marketing insights as well.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Recently, I attended MozCon, a search conference, hosted by Moz. Moz provides search marketing tools that makes SEO, inbound marketing, link building and content marketing easy. This company is pretty well-known in the search community.
One of the speakers was Amy Hebdon, who specializes in paid search at Paid Search Magic. So, what do you think when the term, paid search, comes to your mind? When I think of paid search, I think of the following:
- Optimizing a long list of keywords and phrases that I need to bid on or purchase
- Numbers of impressions I need to accomplish
- Lowering CPCs (cost per clicks)
- Trying to rank number 1 on Google
What I liked about Amy’s presentation is that she was looking at paid search in a very holistic way. She talked about the purpose of paid search. It’s not about ranking number 1 or hitting a goal of inbound traffic or impressions. At the end of the day, paid search is about putting your best offer in front of your target customers when they’re most ready to take action. So, the key here is your offer. Rule number 1, if you want to do paid search, you need to have a compelling offer. Once you have that, you need to present your offer in an easy-to-follow landing page to allow your visitors to take action quickly.
What she was looking at was the conversion rate from paid search to landing page, not CPC nor paid ranking. These are still important, but she made an effort to track conversions. She tried to tie paid search’s contribution to an offer on the landing page, in a way. She tries to relate paid search to revenue.
The only way to track paid search conversions is for clients to have a process. In order to have a tracking process, the clients need to break down the silos and work with other team members within the company. For instance, the client needs to work with webmasters, copywriters and product owners among others to optimized as needed and track the engagements from paid search to the landing page.
She said that paid search is no longer about ranking and CPC, it’s about helping clients to break down the silos. Paid search works wonders if clients create a better online experience by crafting compelling offers, optimizing copywriting, and improving landing page experience.
Based on her case study, CPC (Cost per click) went up for her client, but the total revenue contribution from paid search increased significantly.
Her approach to paid search is less about paid keywords, but more about the overall experience from the minute the prospect clicks on an ad until they arrive at the landing page. She was looking customer experience as a whole. I love that.
It makes me think about content marketing. Content itself really doesn’t mean very much. Content has its value only when it’s part of marketing outreach.
Let’s use e-mail and content marketing as an example: email marketers can’t just worry about the look-and-feel of e-mail or add a bunch of content to the email. They need to think about what happens after people receive the email. Does the landing page provide an experience consistent with the email? If the goal is to get the prospect to “request a demo”, do we make it easy for audience to request a demo after the landing page clicks. Therefore, email shouldn’t be all about click through and open rates, but should be more about email’s revenue contribution from the “request a demo.”
It’s easy for all of us to measure what we do, but it’s so much harder to comprehend the overall marketing outreach holistically and measure our contributions to sales and revenue. It requires us to break down the silos and set up a tracking process and evaluating each touch point carefully.
If you want to talk about how to measure content marketing’s contribution to conversions, reach out and let’s have a chat. I’m more than happy to help.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
I was requested by a client to create an eBook for account-based marketing. The client asked if I could add some real-world account-based marketing examples as part of the eBook, so I went hunting. Well, not so much of hunting as Googling.
I came across this blog post by Influitive. Influitive offers an advocacy management platform. The blog title is “The Results of 3 B2B Account-Based Marketing Campaigns: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Truman Tang, the author of the blog, talked about 3 ABM campaigns Influitive ran. I don’t usually summarize a blog post, but I thought their 3 examples are worth sharing.
First of all, what is account-based marketing, anyway? Well, in a nutshell, it’s marketing working together with sales to create customized outreach for target accounts. It’s planned and intentional effort. In a way, it’s a marketing version of sales enablement if you think about it.
So, here are 3 examples Influitive did:
Influitive discovered that many of their target accounts were not aware of reviews of their own products. The marketing team decided to send their contacts at these accounts a personal package that contained a review about their companies on a third-party review website.
The marketing team thought it was a good introduction point for talking about what they could do to get more customer reviews.
The package included a handwritten note from the sales rep, a review from one of the prospects’ customers, and an Influitive sticker. Some packages also included an eBook about how to generate a sales pipeline with the help of customer advocates which is tied to the key benefits of Influitive’s products. The marketing team sent it in a nice box via UPS, which helped the track of the package so they knew when to follow-up. For this effort, they generated a 29% response rate and a 1.6% sales-qualified opportunities conversion rate. Not bad.
Truman did a quick AB testing. He sent 50% of accounts a less than positive review about their brands, and the other 50% a positive review. He observed that 95% of their responses came from people who had received positive reviews. It made sense to me. We all like people to say nice things about us, right.
For their next ABM effort, they decided to target companies that were ranked in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant—but could use more reviews.
They asked their salespeople to create custom videos that personally congratulated each company on their standing in the Magic Quadrant and sent the videos via Twitter. Then, the marketing team informed these accounts that they could get to the upper right (AKA the Holy Grail) of the quadrant with the help of their customers. They sent out a small sample of 24 videos, and generated four responses (17% response rate) resulting in one sales-qualified opportunity (4% conversion rate). It was better than the last campaign.
Here is the big lesson learned: Creating video is a time-intensive effort. Some sales reps had many outtakes when they did the recordings. I can relate to that… For each podcast, I need to record several times. I get it. Even though it’s hard to scale, the response rate was solid. The marketing team asked the sales team to do it again for holiday video campaigns. The results were good as well.
For the 3rd campaign, they decide to kick Campaign #1 up a notch by sending packages with positive online reviews, but this time they put them inside piñatas that were filled with candy. Real piñatas! I attached an image of piñatas on the transcript. I thought the idea was awesome.
They also switched up their messaging a bit by adding some social proof from one of their advocates, Amy Rosenberg. She shared personal testimony about her success with their platform and offered to speak with them via email. It added a nice human element to the campaign.
Results – After sending the “piñata-grams” they had a 36% response rate along with a 3.4% sales-qualified opportunities . Their best campaign ever!
Here is the lesson learn: If you want to do account-based marketing, any conversational starter campaign needs to stand out and catch people’s attention, then having something as part of the outreach for your accounts to take action on. Truman said it well:
“To strike a balance with all of their ABM efforts. The campaigns had to be flashy enough that people would take notice, and personalized enough that they would feel special—but inexpensive enough to be doable.”
I love Influitive’s examples so much that I added them to my client’s eBook and I made a podcast about it.
Thank you for sharing, Truman! A nice post, indeed! Well-done!!
So, 3 examples to share with you today. Are you doing account-based marketing? Love to hear your stories and challenges.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Frequent listeners know that I just finished my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. This book was written from a marketers’ perspective on what we, marketers, can do to enable sales. I believe that marketing elements, f used right, can support sales and show impact directly. I am always looking for examples on how marketing better support sales.
Here is a great example from James Rogers, Digital Marketing Manager for PowerBlanket. I met James at MozCon, a search marketing conference in Seattle. PowerBlanket is a small manufacturing company that builds industrial heating blankets, wraps, and custom heating solutions for dozens of industries with hundreds of applications. Powerblanket is a 55-person company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Its marketing department is a 2- person team with a few contracted content creators. Obviously, they don’t have a big marketing budget. If they spend $$ on something, the results and ROI must follow. I have supported manufacturing companies before. I totally get it.
I asked James if PowerBlanket does a lot of events. He said that although they used to, they have seen that the ROI of events and tradeshows have diminished in the past several years. They still recognize that event MKT is a good way to reach out their potential customers but, since the ROI is limited, he and his team modified their event strategy. They still attend events, but it’s usually with his distributors, and with a different goal in mind.
He works from the angle of enabling his distributors to succeed. If the distributors succeed, then Powerblanket will succeed.
For events, he doesn’t necessarily attend fewer of them, he simply attends events where his distributors are sponsors. He works at their booths to help them present his company’s products. He is on-site and talking to potential customers.
Since he knows search and digital MKT well, he helps his distributors optimize their websites with the right keywords. He also creates marketing materials that distributors can use to share or upload to their websites.
Supporting distributors at events, doing content creation and optimizing their websites are ways for him to provide value to his distributors so that they can sell more of his company’s products.
He tackles it from both online and offline perspectives. Onlineà website help, content creation and search optimization. Off-site à event support.
I asked him if his distributors sell his company’s products exclusively. No, he said, most distributors also sell competitors’ products. His salespeople are joining the conversation and helping the distributors to address questions that they may not know. Because of this joint effort, they are able to close several deals together.
When he told me the story, I was so excited. This is a perfect example of marketing enabling sales. Exactly the point I try to share in my book.
Here is a quick summary: PowerBlanket is scaling back on their event budget, but they instead found a way to maximize the impact of their time and energy by attending events with distributors to help them sell Powerblanket products. The effort they put in spending time at distributor booths ‘rubs off’ on their distributor and enhances their education in Powerblanket solutions. With that effort, he also provides additional assistance to distributor websites, search marketing support and customized content for them, Powerblanket is stretching its marketing budget to increase sales.
A great example of effective sales enablement. Thank you for sharing, James! Great job!!
Do you have any sales enablement examples to share? Please reach out.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
My podcast editor, Jeff Julian, drove his RV all the way to Anaheim from Kansas City to attend Vidcon with his wife, Michelle, and kids, Brandon and Addison. Actually, this is a fun conference. The tagline for Vidcon is ‘For people who love and make online video’. Frankly, this conference is packed with tons of YouTube celebrities. It’s really a venue that allows young millennial and Generation Z fans to meet their YouTube stars. Such a cool idea to link fans and YouTube celebrities together, why didn’t I think of that?
Anyway, as the whole family is already on the West Coast, they might as well drive all the way to Portland to see Pam, right? It’s only 980 some miles. And he did. It was wonderful to see Jeff, Michelle, and their kids. Since I did several podcasts about marketing takeaways from my visits to Lima, Macchu Picchu, Chatsworth Manor in England, Jeff was joking about me doing a podcast about his visit. Of course, I am going to do an episode to commemorate his visit.
So, what is my marketing take away from Jeff’s visit?
We took a trip to Trillium Lake near Mount Hood. When the light is at the right angle, you can see the reflection of Mount Hood in the lake. We didn’t see that, but it was still a beautiful day. People were kayaking, swimming, and fishing. We took a hike instead.
Jeff and his son, Brandon, are into geocaching. For listeners who are not familiar with geocaching, it’s like a treasure hunt. You use GPS or other navigational techniques to find hidden containers, called caches. Once you find it, you sign the log with your code name and date to show that you’ve found the cache.
I know about the game, but I’ve never tried it. First of all, I don’t have much patience for ‘hike’ and seek. Secondly, it requires me to look at the GPS constantly. I don’t want to look at my phone screen while I hike. Lastly and the most important reason: I have no sense of direction. If I were doing that, while hiking, I guarantee that I’ll get lost and never find a way home.
Jeff and Brandon were looking for a geocache while we were hiking. And, when Jeff found out that I’ve never done geocache ever, he insisted that I needed to do one. I agree. The first cache we tried to find is called Rodent Warning. With this clue: right out in the open, five feet off the ground in the crack of a tree. Really, the description is vague and not clear. The GPS led us to a place covered with trees. What does it mean ‘right out in the open?’ Does it mean the open ground area surrounded by the trees or an open grassy area from which we can see the sky? So we were not sure which area… And we kept looking up, but we couldn’t see the container in the crack of a tree. Either GPS was wrong, or we were just completely blind. We weren’t able to find the cache. I blamed the GPS and the unhelpful clue.
Well, I gave up. It’s interesting that for things like this, I give up easily. For work-related stuff, I don’t give up easily and will work until I find a solution.
Jeff and Brandon didn’t give up and tried again with another cache. This time, Jeff and Brandon went ahead and found it. Then, Jeff gently nudged Michelle, Addison and me to find it. Ok, this one was not hard to find, because the clue is clearer. Here is the clue: Look for two huge root balls of fallen trees. It’s deep in the center of the smaller one, covered by a piece of bark. Ok, we found two huge roots of fallen trees right away. We went around the roots. Right in the center of these two fallen trees, we saw a piece of bark. Viola. Behind that, a robot. I found my first geocache robot. I signed my name and dated it. A major milestone for me. Yeah!
So, what is my marketing take away from this experience? Well, the two descriptions made me think about marketing. To me, one description is vague, the other is clear.
There are times, as a marketer, you need to provide clear and straight-forward content, especially content related to product features and benefits, to guide your customers through their purchase journey. There should not be confusion in terms of what you want your customers to do or how you want them to behave. This is especially true for point of sale. Make it easy for them to buy, like Amazon’s one-click system.
But there are times, you may need to be vague, in general, like when you are giving a sneak peak of your product launches, clues for creative marketing campaigns such as interactive gamification or contests. There are times and places that you can make your customers work a little to get what they want, but you need to provide certain incentives to entice them to do that.
So, 1st geocaching adventure for me, one marketing take away from Jeff’s visit and one podcast.
We had a great time at Trillium Lake. Portland, Oregon is a beautiful place. You should visit. If you are in town, let me know.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
My friend, Mike, wants to launch a podcast. He was thinking of recording using his phone, then exporting the audio file and finally uploading it to Libsyn. As simple as 1, 2, 3. He asked me how much time I spent on my podcast and what is my process. Well, no one has asked me that question before.
For me to talk for a solid 7 minutes about a topic, I need a script. So, I start with a script. It usually takes me about 90 minutes to write a full 7 min script with a couple rounds of edits. Then, I take 30-40 minutes to record several takes, You know how it is; the first take never really works. Once that’s done, I export to my Mac and upload the audio file for my editor to access. My editor, Jeff Julian, is a smart software developer who also knows marketing and technology. Whenever I have questions about marketing technology, I talk to him.
Ok, I got sidetracked a little. Let’s get back to the podcast process.
Now, Jeff has my audio file.
First, he needs to extract the audio to a mono track since my recorder saves the file in stereo with only one channel of audio. Next, he needs to reduce the gaps between sentences to half a second to make it sound fluent, but I can tell you that I do have longer pauses when I do my recording. After that, he needs to normalize my sound and volume to the suggested level. I don’t know what that means, but, apparently, there is a certain volume level that you need to set up for podcasts. Ok, then! He is making it tight!! Oh, I am not done.
The next step, he needs to take out my breathing noise. Finally, he will edit out my bloopers and then add music to the beginning and end of the podcast. Are you tired yet? I am. He is still not done! Once he has a final file, he uploads it and the transcript to Libsyn so that the podcast can be syndicated to iTunes, iHeart Radio and other podcast platforms. This process not only takes a powerful machine to make these steps go fast, but he uses a suite of tools that cost over $2,500, plus other software subscriptions that are $60/month.
Once he is done, Iva, my marketing manager, will take over. She uploads the link to my website. Although my podcast promotion drives traffic to iTunes, I make sure that I have all my content in one place on my website.
Let me run some math for you, Mike. It took me 2 hours to write a script and do a recording. Jeff needs to take a couple of hours to make it sound great and Iva takes 15 min to upload and test it. I am talking about 4-5 hours to produce a 7 min podcast from beginning to end, and I am not counting the time that Iva needs to promote to various social media sites. When everything is done, it’s about 7 hours’ worth of work for 7 Minute Marketing.
When I shared the whole process with Mike, he was like: “What?” I was also like “What?” Before thinking through it and adding it all up, I didn’t know that it takes 7 solid hours to do one podcast. Am I doing it the hard way… What am I thinking? Mike, your rustic approach may work. I know other podcasters don’t spend the amount of time and effort like me and got more listeners than me. Who knows? Your podcast will take off and become a sensation.
Mike, at the end of the day, it’s about your topic and audience. Your audience may be OK with your authentic approach. Since I talk about marketing topics, I want to make sure that I share something my audience will find useful… To do that, I need to make sure that my content flows logically. To flow logically, I need to take time to write my script. Then, I need to practice several times before I record because recording doesn’t come naturally to me. I am still working on my delivery. Mike, another thing about podcasts is that you can’t create just 2 or 3 episodes. You need to publish episodes on a regular cadence. It’s work. It’s a lot of work!
After my chat with Mike, he was a little overwhelmed. I don’t blame him, I would be, too. I told him if he feels strongly about it, try it. He has nothing to lose; it’s not like his livelihood is depending on it. He told me that he would think about it a little more, especially about what he wants it to be about. He is right; content is everything. Determine what you want to say first, production is secondary.
By talking to Mike and other senior executives, there is a perception that digital is easy. It’s easy to produce a video, a podcast, and an image because everyone is doing it. It’s easy because the tools are readily available, but to do it well to drive conversions takes time and effort. And it’s never easy! And it’s never free.
Talking with Mike made me realize that Jeff and Iva have done a lot of work to make me look good online. Thank you, Jeff and Iva. You are awesome. I very much appreciate your help.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
I was talking to Michelle, a marketer, about my new book, Effective Sales Enablement. I told her that I wrote this book from a marketer’s perspective and how marketers can better enable their sales team. She told me that her company doesn’t have a sales enablement team, but it does have a sales operations team. So, what is the difference between sales enablement and sales operations?
If you think about it, Sales enablement, in essence, aids and supports Sales. So does Sales Operations. Sales-support structures come in various shapes and forms, depending on the size of a company, budget, resources, organizational structure, the maturity of the Sales organization, and even senior management’s preferences.
Some organizations tuck Sales enablement into Sales operations. Others keep the groups separate. Some have no official Sales enablement group; the enablement work is done by product-marketing teams in business units.
It doesn’t matter what the structure is and who does the jobs, someone is taking care of sales enablement work.
So, what are the differences between these two groups?
Like I said, each company can define the differences between the two groups. Here is one common approach to differentiate them.
Sales operations:
- Can covers Sales rep operations: Territory planning, deal routing, account assignment.
- It can support Sales administration: Proposal, quoting and contract management, contract governance.
- It touches on Sales incentives and compensation: Compensation optimization and administration.
- It works on Sales pipeline and forecasting: Forecast reporting and dashboards
- Manage Sales tools and processes: Systems and data management such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Configure Price Quotes (CPQ), Sales Performance Management (SPM), Deal Desk and Discount Approvals.
Sales Enablement Responsibilities:
- It touches on Sales onboarding and training, including content, process and training events.
- Sales enablement manages content planning, mapping, management, and analysis.
- The team also manages sales processes and technologies, including process performance analytics.
- They can also work with sales to brainstorm the tactics to engage new accounts or work with sales on account-based marketing.
So, that’s the gist of how they are different.
Another way to look at it is that sales operations tend to focus on short-term items such as quota, pipeline, incentive etc, while sales enablement focuses on long-term initiatives such as onboarding, training, sales content mapping, account-based targeting and more.
Michelle, even if your company doesn’t have a sales enablement team, someone is in your company is helping sales with sales training, content mapping to different sales stages, account-based strategies, and even sales communications. You just need to find out who is doing those tasks. Reach out and see if you can leverage existing marketing efforts, tools and outreach to help sales. Help them connect the dots.
Share with me how sales enablement is structured in your company.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
I discussed repurposing, repackaging and reusing content at one of my workshops a couple of weeks ago. One attendee posed this question: “So, can I just take the same blog post we wrote and use it as a script for our podcast? Can I just consolidate 5 case studies into one big eBook?”
Well, yes and no. In general, the answer is NO. Let me talk about this a little more. The essence of repurposing, repackaging and reusing your content is to repurpose, repackage and reuse the core idea of your content, not to copy exactly from one format to another.
Here is how I do it from my own experience:
I recently did a keynote in Europe. The title of the keynote was “Humans vs. Machines. Is Content Marketing Doomed?” I created a 60 slide, image-rich presentation. It had a nice opening and closing with plenty of AI-based marketing examples in the middle. I started with “Good morning! What comes to your mind when you think of Humans vs. Machines?” When I decided to convert my presentation to a blog post, my opening needed a change.
Here’s the new opening:
I had the great pleasure of speaking at the Best of Content Conference in Vienna. Although the topic is still content marketing, I was focused on the implications of AI: what are the ramifications of AI’s on content marketing?”
So, that was my opening for my blog post.
I mentioned at least 6 different examples in my keynote presentations, but I only used 4 for my blog post.
For the closing of my keynote, I shared Stephen Hawking’s comments that AI may be the last human invention, the invention that ends human civilization. In the long term, he may be right, but I choose to be hopeful. In my blog post, I took a different approach on the closing, I mentioned that no one is creating a robot or a machine to completely take over a marketer’s job. As humans continue to train and teach machines how to learn, we, as marketers, should also continue to develop and learn new skill sets.
For the same topic, I also did a podcast. Since my podcast, 7 min marketing with Pam, is so short, I can’t cover the whole presentation, but I can easily do 6-7 podcasts on the same topic, right? I started with one podcast with the title: What is AI? Short, sweet, simple in 7 min.
Repurposing, repacking and reusing content requires a lot of thought, just like any original content that you create. You have to take the format and context into consideration. You also need to take into account resources and budget. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Just like everything we do in marketing, it requires thought and planning.
Do you have easy ways to repurpose, repackage and reuse your content? Please share them with me.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
I spent the past 10 days writing a complicated strategic brief on behalf of an agency to brief their creative team, copywriters and content creators. This agency is running a big campaign for a large technology company.
I’ve briefed creative, media and social media teams, content marketing agencies and freelancers before. This is nothing new to me. But this time is different and it’s super-complicated. There are 6 dimensions that I have to take into account as part of the brief:
- One very sophisticated and feature-rich technology product
- There are 4 major solution areas I can vouch for this product. Under the 4 major solution areas, there are 8 subcategories.
- We’ve identified 3 personas that we can target.
- In addition to personas, the campaigns need to cover 3 stages of the purchase cycle which are awareness, evaluation, and purchase.
- We are launching in 5 countries. It means multiple languages.
- The last element is that we do 3 separate campaigns as part of the brief.
I just mentioned 6 individual elements, but I still haven’t explained the intricacies among these elements or how they’re related to each other.
No matter how it’s sliced and diced, it’s a complicated brief.
So, I started from the top by clearly articulating the overall communications objectives, then moved on to campaign objectives. They are not necessarily the same. Communications objectives are what you want to accomplish overall with your marketing outreach and integration. A campaign objective is a specific instance you run for a specific period of the time which can achieve one of the communication objectives or target one or two personas. I want to make sure that everyone understands the overall communications objectives, then explain what we want to accomplish as a team by running the 3 campaigns.
That took a little time to write and I reviewed that with my contact and made sure that they agree with the objectives.
From that, I worked to describe the overall market landscape:
- What is the overall competitive landscape? What is the Projected Total Available Market?
- What are some megatrends and their impact on our products and services? What are the client’s offerings in the overall marketing landscape?
After researching all that, I added the current status update to my brief to help people get up-to-speed by sharing the past history. In general, I don’t add the current status update field. However, these 3 new campaigns are the extension of past campaigns.
The next is the target audience, purchase funnel, and product focus information.
After that, I incorporated marketing channels. Understanding a list of marketing channels will help content creators and the creative team determine the type of content and templates they need to create. If YouTube is one in the marketing mix, well, we need some video content. If we need to support print, then we need to create print content.
As part of the brief, I’ll add messaging and creative guidance. For brief guidance, I’ll identify either one messaging statement or one or two keywords to guide the creative exploration.
For this complicated brief, I also added a complete messaging framework based on audience’s challenges to guide the content creation process. To further help content creators, I added a narrative for each persona. The information will also further help content needs.
Oh, one thing I start to add to my briefs is the keyword list for SEO purposes.
I didn’t add the list of content that we need to assemble, but those deliverables will come later after a content audit.
When I finally did the briefing meeting. It’s FTF meeting. During that meeting, there were a lot of questions. Most focused on detailed tasks and the specifics of what they needed to do. The team talked things through on who does what. It was productive.
Most briefing sheets don’t need to have as many categories as this one. At a minimum, you need to understand your company’s overall marketing objectives, campaign objective and goals, audience, messaging and product priority. The brief sheet is usually 1-2 pages.
Of course, if you, as a client, have background information for agencies, you need to attach that. It’s better for clients to supply the information in the brief so that content creators and agencies don’t need to waste hours doing their own research and charging you for doing that.
My briefing sheets have been evolving over the past two years. I have a base template but then I add and delete categories depending on the situations we are in, the goals we want to accomplish and the available budget.
The briefing is such a challenging job. As a briefer, I need to comb through all the information, select and find the relevant information that my team needs.
Here are some tricks for creating a brief:
- Know your customers well.
- Understand how the brief will be used and know your team members’ needs.
- Have a brief meeting and allow the team to discuss and ask questions.
- Keep it simple and focused. That’s the hard part.
When I was all done, this particular, complex brief was over 5 pages. Like I said, most won’t be nearly as long. Try to keep it as short as possible while providing all the information necessary to carry out the campaigns.
Do you have a brief template you follow? Love to see how you structure your brief.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
I had coffee with a friend, Maria, last week. We haven’t seen each for almost 2 years. I was very excited to see her. After catching up with talk about our family and kids, she asked me: Pam, what have you been working on lately? Well, that’s a good question. What have I been working on? How would you answer that question when someone asks you what have you been working on?
The first thing popped into my mind is that I spend a lot of time doing e-mail, Powerpoint, writing, and texting. That just sounds awful as if I didn’t accomplish anything except doing administrative busy work. But, after thinking about it a little more, I realized all of these activities, somehow, tie to the key initiatives and business goals I set out to accomplish in the beginning of the year. I established a revenue target, set the target date to publish my 2nd book, and identified a marketing mix to continuously build my personal brand.
So, what have been I been working on? I’ve been working on several client projects. Billable hours are nice as that feeds into the revenue goal. I submitted the manuscript of my 2nd book, which helps in hitting the publication date. I am redoing my website and continue to publish blog posts and podcast episodes. So, preparing for my book launch, doing content marketing like blog and podcast to help build my personal brand and working to generate potential leads which in turn contributes to the pipeline and revenue target.
All that sounds good. But the question forced me to do a quick evaluation of my progress relative to my goals. While I’ve been spending a lot of time working on client projects, which is great for working towards the revenue goal, I didn’t spend enough time on prospect outreach. Not so good. I completed my 2nd book, but I haven’t created a solid launch plan yet. Although I am producing content such as podcasts and blogs, does that really help on the personal brand building at this time? I am not 100% sure. Her question made me realize that I need to do a more formal mid-year checkpoint of my progress before the start of 2H’18, which is July 1st. A check-point with myself. I put that down as a to-do list.
Let’s come back to how I answered her question: The first thing that came out of my mouth was that I do a lot of email, Powerpoint, writing, and texting. What the heck? That was a terrible answer. Then, I said: “Maria, let me take that back and start it again.” This time I told her what my goals are for 2018, then I went ahead and explained that my day tends to focus on client projects, creating content to build my personal brand and getting my 2nd book published with a solid launch plan. Of course, in the midst of that, I try to find time to check off my travel bucket list and do my weekly yoga. Making my clients successful, setting myself up for success, exercising and taking care of myself is what I have been working on.
This question reminded me of a blog post that I wrote several years ago which has the highest number of views on my website. The blog post is called “the differences between planning vs plans.” You can google search that.
In that post, I talked about the differences between planning and plans. Planning is an active way of discussing the goals, objectives, strategies, and tasks that we need to accomplish. Plans are the documentation of planning.
Have a plan, then we need to be ready to modify or adjust it based on changes of your goals.
So, what have been you working on lately? Does that somehow tie with your goals?
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Ok, I did several episodes about my trip to Lima. Now, let’s come back and focus on answering your questions. I did a webinar last week with Mintent, a Content Marketing Platform company. The topic of the webinar was ‘3 creative ways that marketers can enable sales across regions.’ At the end of the webinar, one attendee, Megan, asked a question:
How do you draw the line between arming sales with marketing material and getting inundated with too many requests for tasks such as writing sales correspondence emails with prospects?
I totally understand Megan’s concerns. That’s exactly what happens sometimes. Marketers do everything they can to support sales. Over time, without noticing, marketers become admins for the sales team. It’s called scope creep… The best way to avoid that is to clearly communicate what you will do and won’t do. This is called a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
When I was supporting sales teams, I was working with 50-60 field people and supporting several key accounts. I received a lot of requests and questions from them on a daily basis. Initially, I didn’t have a good idea what I needed to do to support them, and it quickly became unbearable. After several months, I started recognizing there was a pattern. The requests generally broke down into the following questions:
- What is our overall marketing strategy?
- What can marketing do to help generate leads?
- What can we say about our products and services?
- Where is the content located and what content can be used for different stages of the sales journey?
So, I structured my support model based on some of the most frequent requests. For example, I made sure we have a short deck to talk about the overall marketing strategy. I had a lead list or pipeline that I could share. I provided a monthly update on some of the key marketing activities at sales meetings. I also had a messaging framework in place. Most importantly, I identified 5-10 content pieces per sales stage that I believed would be helpful to the sales team and put it on a datasheet for their easy access.
Speaking of content and resources, I may not know all the content out there, but I know how to search and who to ask to find out what content is available. There were times I directed them to the appropriate contact and wouldn’t get in the middle of it. There were also times I’d politely tell them I couldn’t help. Over a period of time, they got to know what I could do for them, when they should come to me and when they shouldn’t. I was still busy, but it was manageable.
When I was writing my Sales Enablement book, I had a chat with Sasha who worked in a growing start-up. She was in marketing, but she did everything for her 5-person sales team from presentation creation, sales pitch brainstorming to crafting mini-e-mail campaigns for her sales team. That worked well for her. Her sales team loved her and she enjoyed the work. She did acknowledge that her scope couldn’t scale if the sales team grows to, say, 15-20 people. The company will need to hire another person like her to support the bigger sales team or she needs to change her support model.
So, Megan, as you can see that Sasha and I had different support models. You’ll need to structure how you want to support your sales team based on what you will do and won’t do. You also need to take into account the maturity stage of your company and sales team.
Clearly articulate what your roles and responsibilities are. Bear in mind that the service level agreement is a guideline, not an absolute rule. From time to time, I’d make exceptions, this is especially true if the sales team is on the cusp of winning a big account, if a key account needs some last minute urgent support. At the end of the day, it’s about growing business for your company. You do what you need to do to support it.
A quick summary of some ideas that work for me:
- List 5 questions that the salespeople ask most frequently. See if you can create standardized content or presentations.
- Create a list of recommended content for each sales stage
- Have a good understanding of content by-products, technologies, personas or the purchase cycle. Make a quick cheat sheet for yourself. You need to update it on a regular basis based on product, technology, persona changes.
- Know the subject matter experts and direct the sales team to them if necessary
- Create a service level agreement and get their buy-in
I hope these tips are helpful. Do you have any useful tips that you can share? You know where to find me.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner Love to hear from you.
Be well. Until next time.
I was hoping to record this episode when I was in Machu Picchu. That would be a major milestone, right? I carried the recording equipment all the way up 9000 feet above the sea level. I was taken away by the ruins, the mountains, the history and just the overall experience. I decided to be present and enjoy it as much as I could. And I did! I recorded this episode when I came back to the US.
A quick update on getting to Machu Picchu. First, I had to travel to Lima, then took a plane from Lima to Cusco. From Cusco, our group took the bus to Ollantaytambo. From there, we took the train to a town at the bottom of Machu Picchu. Then, we had to take a park bus to the entrance. It’s a long way to get there.
Machu Picchu is one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, so many rules are set up to proactively protect the site. The government limits the numbers of tourists that can access the site each day. To manage the visitor flow, we are put in groups of 15-20 with an assigned tour guide and a specific time-slot. When your assigned time slot arrives, you need to show your ticket and your passport, which are checked to make sure they are completely matched. In other words, the ticket is non-transferrable. With the rise of terrorist attacks, I guess it makes sense that the government wants to know who is in and out if they need to track down potential suspects. God forbids something happens to this site. If this site is gone, it’s gone forever. There is no way to replace it.
The rules are annoying, but I understand.
Once we passed the entrance, we had to go through a windy narrow path and then enter into a half-way house. Once you walk out of that area, Boom! You are suddenly presented with the majesty of Machu Picchu. I got a little emotional when I saw it for the first time… OMG, it’s stunning and exactly how I imaged it would be. I was still in disbelief that a tribe of people devoted so much time to build a civilization on top of a mountain in the middle of the rainforest. The tour guide showed us the temple and residential areas for the royal family and common people. The irrigation system and architecture were really states of art, at the time.
So, what are my marketing takeaways from visiting Machu Picchu? Well, there are two.
Machu Picchu made me think about messaging and value propositions. To market our products, we are taught that we need to find unique differentiators for our products. Well, since there is only one Machu Picchu in the world, it’s easy to identify and craft its unique messaging. The messaging can tap into the history of the Inca empire, the mysterious abandonment of this city, the human sacrifices, the battles with Spaniards, their sophisticated and advanced knowledge in architecture and irrigation and more. There is no lack of content and story to use in marketing Machu Picchu.
Obviously, our product and services are not as unique as Machu Picchu and we are likely not the only company serving the same customers. But we should strive to find our own unique differentiators. The best way to start is to ask why and what. Why do we build the products? What problems do we want to solve? We obviously build our products to serve a specific segment of people. If we demonstrate our products to them, what would we say? How do we tell our stories?
It doesn’t matter how commoditized your products are, you can always find your uniqueness. Just type “hammer” on Amazon.com, you can see a variety of hammers for different purposes. The price ranges from $5-$50. Each one of them has its unique positioning.
While I was at Machu Picchu, I started thinking about my own value propositions. With the new book, Effective Sales Enablement, I can’t just talk about global content marketing anymore. The overarching value proposition needs to be changed to somehow tie global content marketing and sales enablement together. Obviously, my expertise is global in nature. I know how a marketing organization works in a global company. I know how to create a scalable marketing process between corporate and local, how to create scalable personas, messaging framework, marketing planning and strategy. On top of it, I can shared ideas and recommendations on how marketing teams can better support sales teams. So, what should my value proposition be? I don’t know yet. Messaging and value propositions are difficult to crack and they change as new features and benefits are added.
Oh, here is another takeaway. After Machu Picchu, our group took the train back to Cusco. The train was very slow and it was a 3.5 hour ride. To increase revenue and entertain the guests, the train staff did a fashion show with carefully curated upbeat music. They used the aisle as a run-way to showcase 100% Alpaca coats, sweaters, shawls, jackets and more. It was a lot of fun to see the staff dressing up as models. It did get people excited and interested in checking out the clothes. By the way, these clothes were not cheap, but people were buying. Here is another marketing take away: the best way to market your product is show-and-tell. It never fails.
While recording this episode, I can still recall tingling excitement of being on the top of that mountain. Totally worth it.
My next trips are Vienna and Seattle. I am looking forward to sharing my marketing take-aways from these two cities. Stay tuned and more to come.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
I stayed in Lima for a couple of days before my trip to Machu Picchu and learned some interesting trivia about Lima and Peru that made me think about marketing… I know… Just can’t get marketing out of my mind even when I am on vacation.
Here are several things I’ve learned that reminded me of marketing:
Lima receives only 0.3 inch of rain per year. Portland, Oregon, where I live, gets 44 inches of rain per year. People in Lima doesn’t know how to use an Umbrella. It’s the 2nd largest desert city after Cairo in Egypt. Ok, here is the interesting fact: Although it doesn’t rain, it often reaches close to 100% humidity. Because of high humidity, the weather is always cloudy and feels like it’s going to rain anytime, but it doesn’t. When I was there, it was overcast with the dark clouds hovering overhead, I thought it would rain anytime. No, it just stayed overcast the whole time, but the air felt damp. My jacket felt a bit wet while I was there…
Since there is almost no rain all year round but many people and cars in the city, it creates a large amount of dust. People are constantly cleaning and dusting. They clean their cars, buildings, streets, otherwise, the city would be covered with thick layers of dust. Daily maintenance and cleaning is important for the city to showcase its best. So that pieces of information makes me think of our own digital presence. Our own websites and digital presence also need to be maintained and cleaned on a regular basis. Although a website needs to have fresh content, it also needs to be maintained and cleaned by deleting or updating old content. It’s kind of sad that, when my tour guide mentioned cleaning, I was immediately thinking about digital marketing maintenance.
Here is another piece of trivia information that made me think of marketing, especially content marketing. The largest immigrant population since the early 1800’s is Chinese, followed by Japanese, then Italian. About 10% of Peruvians are of Chinese-descent or have some or Chinese heritage. A Chinese restaurant is called a Chifa: derived from Chinese moms calling their kids playing on streets to come home to eat (吃飯了). The famous Peruvian dish, Lomo Saltado, is cooked with soy sauce. Another common fish dish, A la chorrillana, has what American’s would call a Chinese ‘sweet and sour’ flavor. And the side for both dishes is rice! My tour guide told me that Peruvians love Chinese food. Who doesn’t?
It made me think of content localization and customization. If you need to localize content about food in Peru, the proper way to describe a Chinese eatery is Chifa, which is unique to Peru.
Speaking of brand and messaging localization and customization, here are a couple examples I saw in a supermarket. Tide, the popular detergent brand in the US, is called Ace. The word Tide probably doesn’t make much sense to Peruvians. However, the Tide logo remains the same, even though they customized the brand name. Then, I passed by the hair-care product section, I noticed that Head and Shoulders and Pantene both keep their product brand names in English, but features and user benefits are translated into Spanish. It’s interesting to see how brands determine what to localize or translate. Talking about connect the dots, I somehow made a connection between Chifa and brand/messaging localization of Tide, Head and Shoulders and Pantene.
Here is another example of global vs. local that I noticed. Due to the Spanish Inquisition, 80% of Peruvians are converted or coerced to Roman Catholics. Indigenous beliefs and religions were suppressed during the colonial period. Somehow though, you can still find local influence when they practice Catholicism. For example, the Inca people believe in the God of the Sun. Whenever you see virgin Mary’s statue, you can see her wearing a crown shaped like the sun with discreet decorations that are meaningful to the locals. This may not be a great example of global vs. local, but the reality is that you can’t ignore the local elements even when you try to preach to or coerce your own religious beliefs on others. It’s the same in the marketing, you need to understand your customers’ needs and incorporate the local flavors into your marketing outreach.
Peru is a country with 30M people, but 10M of them live in Lima. My stay in this city was short, but the food is fantastic, and they incorporate various international cuisines to enhance their own local flavors. My next step is Cusco, the former capital of the Inca Empire. This city with 500,000 people is situated nicely over 11,000 feet above sea level. I hope that I won’t get high-altitude sickness… I’ll keep you posted…
The next episode, I’ll be recording from Machu Picchu.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
More from Peru in the next episode.
Be well. Until next time.
I am recording this podcast from Lima, Peru. I am going to Machu Picchu in the Andes Mountain. I am so excited. I read about Incas’ people and culture when I was eight. I can’t believe that I am here. I will share my trip highlights and marketing takeaways from Machu Picchu in the upcoming episodes stay tuned.
This week, I had an interview with Jim and Lee from Moravia. He read my book, Global Content Marketing, and finally reached out to discuss some questions he has from reading the book. I love readers and listeners reaching out and asking me questions.
One of the questions was: “Pam, what is the difference between a marketing plan and a global marketing plan?”
Well, the only thing different is the word “Global”. The way you define “Global” will have ramifications on how you write your marketing plan. First of all, let me define the purpose of a marketing plan. A marketing plan is a document that you use to
- let your management know what you will do for marketing outreach
- get budget you need
- rally and align your team members and agencies
Therefore, it’s an internal document. Global, in that sense, is defined an internal collaboration between the headquarters and local teams. I focus on the internal.
Marketing plans always have your marketing objectives which is what - what do you want to accomplish. Then a set of strategies which is how - what do you need to do and how to do it to achieve the objectives. Followed by who - whom do you market to? That’s buyer’s persona.
If you’re marketing across regions, you need to work with the local team, get their feedback and make adjustments to your marketing objectives, strategies and buyer’s personas.
Whatever marketing elements you have in your marketing plan stays the same, but you need to add the global or local twist by talking to your local teams and sales team.
You need to consider if you need to add additional personas. You also need to add priority countries, since you have limited budget and you can’t solve the world hunger by marketing to every country. For content perspective, you need to also identify languages that you’ll support. If Canada is one of the priority countries, you need content for both English and French. If you market to Switzerland, the 4 official languages are German, French, Italian and Romansh. Prioritize the languages.
You may also need to identify key local deliverables and success metrics.
Jim, the differences between a marketing plan and a global marketing plan is to
- Solicit feedback from the local team to make necessary adjustments to your objective, strategies and personas.
- Add priority countries
- Add languages
- Add the local team’s key deliverables
- Modify your success metrics
The global marketing plan is to add a right dose of local flavors to reflect the collaboration of the headquarters and local team. At the end of the day, it’s about communication, collaboration and compromise.
Jim, Lee and I had a great conversation. Another question they asked is about success metrics. Should the local team have the same success metrics? A great question. I’ll discuss that in my next episode. Jim and Lee, it was great talking to you. Let me know when your blog is published.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
More from Peru in the next 10 days.
Be well. Until next time.
While I was speaking at the Clever Content Conference in Copenhagen this April, my friend, Christian, proudly showed me his hometown Copenhagen. The city is not big and you can pretty much walk and bike everywhere. He and I walked around the town for 8 hours straight. I visited little mermaid, churches, the Royal garden and more. But I was mostly blown away by an area called Freetown Christiania. I was shocked that a place like this could exist in modern society. Christiania is a self-proclaimed autonomous anarchist district of about 850 to 1,000 residents, covering approx. 84 acres in Copenhagen. The people in Christiania have developed their own set of rules, independent of the Danish government. The rules forbid stealing, violence, guns etc. It started back in the 70’s with many hippies who cherished a progressive and liberal lifestyle. Of course, the idea was great and the utopia didn’t last. Crime organizations and gangsters quickly infiltrated the area.
In the middle of Christiania is Pusher Street where you can buy different grades of marijuana. But weed is not legal in Copenhagen, the people who are selling are not really law-abiding citizens. Therefore, when you walk down that street, you are not allowed to take pictures. These people don’t want their faces plastered all over social media. When I was walking on that particular street, I could tell I was being watched, but the mood was light… People were talking and joking, but you could tell people were watching you.
In that area, graffiti everywhere. All the houses are built with recycled material. None of these houses have solid foundations. It seems that there are public showers for residents. Even though people say no rules apply to Christiania there are clearly unwritten rules or codes that people live by. Because of that, the area is not dirty and there are no piles of smelly trash. So, despite the anarchy, there are still rules that people need to follow so that the community won’t fall into chaos. It’s called Freetown, but it’s not so free that you can do anything you want if it messes up the community.
Walking around Christiania made me think about creative development in marketing. Being creative doesn’t mean any boundaries. It’s quite the opposite. Without boundaries, it’s created for the sake of being creative. It’s random. It’s like using a bow to shoot arrows but without aim or a target.
The inception of a creative concept for a big marketing campaign needs to be guided by some sort of rules or boundaries. Those boundaries are set by a brand guide, messaging framework, campaign objectives and more. Therefore, you need to craft a creative brief which includes relevant information such as communications objectives, the name of the product, product value propositions, marketing channels where the campaign will run, target audience and calls-to-action. The brief should be 1-2 pages, not 30 slides. You set up some boundaries while leaving the creative director freedom to come up with several awesome ideas to guide your marketing campaigns. Constraints need to be set up in order for creativity to flourish. Rules need to be established even for anarchy to exist.
I was surprised that a place like Freetown Christiania is tolerated by the Danish government. This town adds a unique differentiator to the brand of Copenhagen. It drives more than 500,000 visitors a year and is the 4th most popular tourist spot of the city. When you have a chance to visit Copenhagen, please check it out.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Ok, I reached a major milestone last week. While in London, I visited my publisher and finalized the manuscript of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. Now, the manuscript is officially moving to the production phase. I am not at the finish line yet, but I am very happy that the hardest part is DONE.
People approach me all the time asking about how to write a book and get it published. I want to share my experience with you, in seven minutes. BTW, my experience is more on writing a business book, not a fictional novel. So, what’s the difference? This is my opinion. I think it’s harder to sell a novel and it’s better to have an agent. For business books, personally, I think you can represent yourself and pitch it to a publisher directly.
Here is the process I used for publishing my 2 books:
- Start with a topic that you are either the expert at or very passionate about. Writing is a frustrating creative journey. Unless you love the topic, it’s hard to get through the whole writing and rewriting process.
- Put your ideas into a general framework or methodology to explain your ideas. Or you can dissect the topic into different elements and add adjacent subtopics. Frankly, there is nothing new under the sun. The secret is how you present an existing idea with a new twist or from a new perspective. For my 1st book, I created a framework called the 4C’s of Global Content Marketing. For my 2nd book, I discussed how to enable sales through various marketing elements. I dissected the topics from a marketer’s perspective.
- Now you have a topic and a general framework, it’s time to write a book proposal. Hey, if you want a sample for your book proposal, I am more than happy to share mine with you. I am not saying mine is the best, but I structured the proposal in a way that makes it easy for the book publisher to get the gist of who I am, what the future book is about, and a sense of the overall outline and this topic’s competitive landscape.
- Once that’s done, you can send your book proposal to various publishers. Publishers are usually very good at letting you know if they are interested in your book proposal. For payments, some pay an advance, some don’t. I have heard that this is where an agent is helpful. Maybe! Most people write business books to get additional business opportunities or check off their bucket list, not necessarily try to make money off the book. You need to understand why you want to write a book. If you are driven by making money, I hate breaking the news to you. You are better off doing something else.
- Many people prefer self-publishing. I don’t have experience with that. The two biggest advantages for working with publishers: hold myself accountable to a deadline. They set up a date, I need to meet their deadline. Another reason for working with publishers is to access their retail and international distribution channels. If you are self-publishing, you will probably sell it on Amazon or your own website. You have to work hard to get on other online channels. It can be challenging.
- With or without a publisher, the next step is to buckle down and write. There’s not much more to it. One word at a time. Allocate time, sit down and write. Just do it.
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By talking to various business book authors, the writing seems to take about 4-8 months. The production process is about 6-9 months if you work with publishers. They will do a layout design, typesetting, fact-checking and a series of other steps to get the book published.
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After you’ve handed in your manuscript, it’s time to start working on the launch and marketing plan. Many authors work closely with PR agencies to create marketing campaigns. This time around, I decide to work with a PR person and focus on mainstream media promotion and interview opportunities.
When the book is published, there’s still a lot of work to do. Marketing and promotion never stops. It’s like demand gen, you have to do it day in and day out. I didn’t do a good job promoting my first book. This time around, I am making an effort to create an integrated plan with paid and organic marketing campaigns and content marketing efforts. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
Are you ready and willing to take the plunge? Like I said, I am more than happy to share my book proposal with you.
Again, send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
After speaking at the Cleve Content Conference in Copenhagen, I met up with a good friend, Diana, in Manchester, England. We were thinking about where we should spend our weekend. She suggested that we visit the Chatsworth. I got excited right away. I recalled reading somewhere that Chatsworth was Mr. Darcy’s country estate, Pemberley in the movie version of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. In the movie, Mr. Darcy’s country estate seemed fantastic, so I had to check out.
We got there around 10:00 am and the estate wasn’t open until 11:00 am. We strolled through the field around the estate. I was told that Chatsworth covers over 1000 acres and most of the field is open for public all year around. The current owner, the 12th Duke of Devonshire, still lives in this manor with his family. He is keen about open access and allows the community to use it for recreational purposes. We lucked out on the weather. Birds chirping, flowers blossoming, cloudless blue sky and lush green grass. It was a superb and perfect spring day.
If you’ve listened to my podcast about my visit to Chateaux Clos Luce in Loire or read my blog post about my experience attending the USTA US Open, you’ll notice that I put my marketer’s lenses on whenever I go.
As a marketer, I was blown away by Chatsworth for the following reasons:
- Their staff is their true brand ambassador: Each room and hallway has one or two staff in attendance. They are friendly and willing to share their Chatsworth knowledge and stories. I am sure that many of you have experience of visiting palaces and castles. Most of the staff members were like watchdogs. They are there to tell you ‘not to’ do something; like not to take photos and not to touch anything. Very different at Chatsworth. Every staff member I talked to was friendly, genuinely loves this estate and wanted to provide a great experience for visitors.
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They constantly thinking ways to improve their product offerings: Most mansions and palaces we visit, they focus on showing a bunch of rooms with antique furniture. They showcase the same rooms years after years. No changes. By going through the rooms at Chatsworth, I could tell that they constantly move things around to create fresh experience for visitors. The movie, Duchess, was based on the 5th Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana. This movie obviously made Chatsworth popular. People want to check out the place where Georgiana lived. Therefore, they created a gallery hallway to share Georgiana’s lifestyle. That gallery was beautifully done. The other gallery hallway was also completely redone to showcase the current Duke’s and Duchess’ modern art collections. Two hallways in parallel, one modern, one classic. Both renovations were done in the past several years. The estate, in a way, is their product. They constantly move things around and bring new collections to enhance their product. Marketing works the best when you have something new to say about your products. They are doing that just that. I thought that’s very impressive.
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Telling stories through content marketing and curation: The 11th Duchess, Deborah Cavendish, wrote several books about Chatsworth. Talking about content marketing! She used her books to share the history and stories about Chatsworth and got people to pay attention to the estate. Of course, several documentaries were done over the last few decades. That continued to build buzz and increase interest. Another thing worth mentioning is the merchandise they sell in their gift shop. We all have passed through various museums and palaces’ gift shops before our exists. This gift shop is rather unique. all items are sourced with intention. Rather than displaying the same categories of merchandise, they mix and match related and relevant accessories with elegant style and taste. It’s like shopping in a high-end store. They also know people are curious about the current Duke and Duchess. I noticed a clever marketing idea which is to showcase some of the Duke and Duchess’ favorite products. A sign denoting “A few of my favorite things” highlights some of the store’ products, enticing people to check out items the Duke and Duchess like.
I didn’t talk to the management to do this podcast. These are my personal observations from simply viewing and talking to several members of the staff. I asked one of the staff members who’ve been there for several years why every staff is so eager to tell Chatsworth stories. She said that the Duke and Duchess are both very kind and generous. They consider themselves lucky and they treat their staff with respect.
I think she hit the core about how to run a good company. The corporate culture, especially for a family-run business, truly reflects the personal values of the founders.
Chatsworth is considered one of the finest country estates in England. I can totally see why. The staff is doing a great job representing Chatsworth. They continuously refresh and update their product, which is their estate and they make an effort to tell stories and curate the best experience for their visitors.
Talking about customer retention and word-of-mouth. They won me over and I’ll not only visit this place again but also share my wonderful experience with others, like what I am doing now.
Do you put on your marketing lenses when you travel? Any good stories to tell? Please share with me.
Again, send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Recently, I did a keynote presentation about Humans vs. Machines. Is Content Marketing doomed? When I think about humans vs. machines, I think about the self-aware artificial intelligence like the Terminator’s Skynet, I am the Borg from the Star Trek or the agents in the movie, the Matrix. Of course, R2D2, C3PO from Star War or even Bender from Futurama also come to mind. However, these are Hollywood versions of AI.
In real life, we have seen a Robot called Asimo developed by Honda kick a soccer ball to President Obama. We have seen sophisticated robots which can flip or walk on uneven and hilly terrane from Boston Dynamics. Not mentioning about automatic cars developed by Google and other tech and car companies. We are developing these AI-Based tools to make our lives easier and productive.
However, in January 2015, more than 7000 people from tech, academia, and other fields signed a 4-page open letter based on the report with the title: “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence”. They acknowledged the immense benefits of AI, but cautioned policymakers and the public about the danger of self-aware and self-adjust artificial intelligence beings. They also articulated AI’s impact in aspects such as security, machine ethics, laws, and privacy. Luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking both signed the open letter. Elon Musk still affirmed his point of view that AI is more dangerous than nukes. Stephen Hawkings expressed concerned that AI could destroy human civilization.
So, what is AI? Well, there are many different interpretations, different levels and different perspectives of AI. So, let’s define AI first. I love this definition from Wikipedia: Intelligence exhibited by machines. What is Intelligence, anyway? Intelligence is machine can think and behave like humans. Let’s peel the onion further. What is thinking? Thinking has many levels. Machines can think about how to play a chess. Machines can also think how to adjust his behavior to assist humans like Data in Star Trek. The different levels of thinking or behavior also define different levels of AI.
In general, there are three types of AI:
Artifical Narrow Intelligence, Weak AI or Narrow AI: Do a task competently, modify behaviors when the situation changes. Google translate, Alphago, Siri, IBM Watson, Autonomous cars are all examples of narrow AI.
Artificial General Intelligence: Strong AI or human-like AI:
- Perform any intellectual task that humans can
- Capable of cognitive functions humans may have –
in essence no different than a real human mind
- Understand and reason its environment as humans would
ASI: AI becomes much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills
On an AI continuum: it starts from Narrow AI, AGI, then ASI.
Currently, all the applications are task-driven, we are on the cusp of narrow AI. There is no human-like AGI yet, but experts expect that will happen in the next decades, especially we keep working on to make machines smarter and taking on more complex tasks. The general consensus is that it will take a long time to get from narrow AI to AGI, but from AGI to ASI, the transition will be in no time. When machines are smarter than humans, what will happen to us? That’s what Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkings are concerned about.
In the meantime, many companies are developing AI-based tools to assist marketing efforts. I talked about Lead Crunch feeds customers’ best top 25 customers to its AI-based platform to create ICP for their customers. Drift offer AI-based bot chat to carry intelligence conversations with potential prospects to get audiences to schedule a time with the company. Salesforce.com created Einstein, AI-based platform. It learns from all that data to deliver predictions and recommendations based on your unique business processes.
McCann Japan developed an AI-CD bot. Use the bot to develop a creative concept for its commercial. Their first pilot project was creating a commercial for Clorets, chewing gum to convey Instant fresh breath that lasts for 10 minutes.” Then, they tested human-generated commercial with an AI-generated commercial. The human-generated commercial did slightly better than AI-based commercial. Imagine that AI Bot getting better every time…
Here is AI-based music. Pretty good, right…
Are marketers doomed? I don’t think so. If you think about it, we still need to set up processes or workflow before we can take full advantage of AI. We still need to do quality checks. As of today, AI still need to hand whatever they accomplish for humans to complete. However, it’s important to stay on top of the trends and acquire new skillsets. Learning is part of every marketer’s job description.
I thought it’s important for us, marketers, understand what AI is and what they offer at this time.
I was in Melbourne, Australia, speaking to Cisco’s Channel Partner Marketing Managers at Cisco Live. I love working with channel partners. They usually don’t have a big marketing budget and every dollar they spend has to count. After the keynote, I did 8 1:1 whiteboarding sessions with their channel partners. They asked me any questions and I answered on the spot, as simple as that. One of the questions: “Pam, I have 30,000 names in my database. How can I find warm leads?”
I love that question. I offered three suggestions.
- Use e-mail and content marketing: For this case, don’t just send out e-mail for the sake of sending out e-mail. Since you want to find warm leads in your database, the title of the e-mail and the content you include in your e-mail campaign needs to be designed to find out which prospects are addressing targeted challenges that could benefit from your products or company offerings. The title also needs to show urgency, like now. So, your title should be something like “if you are looking for solving [challenges] now, here are 5 steps… or Are you evaluating [tools or platforms], you may find this useful. This e-mail is very specific and well-designed. If they open your e-mail and check out content, you know there may be interest. This will enable you to narrow down the list of 30,000 to a quantifiable subset that is more likely to buy. You can then follow up on a smaller number of higher quality leads.
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Write your own code: Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata, share his way of finding a list of warm leads. Their product integrates with Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot among other systems to measure the performance of content marketing. Based on their understanding of their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), they made a hypothesis that companies that use Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot, and that create a large volume of marketing content on a regular basis, would be very interested in their product. To find companies that fit this criteria, their engineering team wrote an application to crawl and analyze marketing automation systems used by over 200,000 company websites. From that analysis, they compiled a long list of companies. Then, they narrowed down that list by analyzing the blogs and resource pages on these companies’ to gauge the size of their content marketing efforts. The companies with lots of content tend to have a higher propensity to use Curata tools. Therefore, they further narrowed down the list with that criteria. With that revised list, they cross-referenced over 100,000 leads in their CRM database and LinkedIn to identify potential prospects with digital marketing or content related titles. Viola, they have their list of warm leads that the sales team can go after.
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Use artificial intelligence and content marketing: This approached was shared with me by Lead Crunch, a demand gen company who works closely with their sales and marketing team to discover relevant leads using AI-based platforms. Basically, you share your top 25 best customer profiles and the information is fed into an AI-based predictive modeling to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Then, you use that profile to find highly relevant and look-alike matches, which becomes a hit list of key target companies for the sales team to target. With additional cross-referencing of their database, Lead Crunch can also include buyers at each company to help the sales team engage and approach these prospects.
To summarize the three approaches I just spoke about:
Use e-mail with content designed to elicit leads of potential customers that are currently evaluating similar products or addressing relevant challenges.
Write your own code based on propensity-to-buy hypotheses, like Pawan did. Identify an initial list, then cross-reference with your own existing database.
Hire an AI-based demand gen company. Let the AI model identify the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on your best top 25 customers. Then, use AI to find look-alike target leads and create a contact list for the sales team.
Everything I talk about sounds cool, but it takes time and effort and multiple rounds of optimization and modification to get a good list.
Finding warm leads is no longer just marketing or inside sales’ job. It requires marketing, IT, as well as inside sales and outside sales to work together to determine ICP, external and internal customer data correlation, propensity-to-buy criteria setting and more. There is no shortcut.
Do you have innovative ways of finding warm leads in your own database? Please share with me.
Again, send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
If you ask sales people “what they need from their marketing team?”, 10 out of 10 will say that they need more high-quality leads. But what is a high-quality lead? Or what is a marketing qualified lead (MQL)The definition varies from company to company and from industry to industry.
I had a chance to talk to, William Wickey, Head of Content and Media Strategy at Lead Genius, who relayed how their marketing and sales teams agreed on the different stages of leads so that there is no debate on how to move leads further down the funnel. You can see the complete table on the transcript. I will talk about Pre-qualified leads, MQLs, Sales Accepted leads and prospects. Sales Accepted lead is very similar to Sales Qualified lead that we are all aware of.
| Lead Category | Definition | | Pre-Qualified Lead | Inbound and outbound leads that fit the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) | | Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) | Pre-qualified + requests demo (He calls them “hand-raisers.”) | | Sales Accepted Lead | MQL criteria is validated by sales reps | | Prospect | SAL + completed ICP calibration (Qualifying process specific to Lead Genius. Equivalent to SQL.) | | Demo Scheduled | Prospect agrees to a demo presentation | | Evaluation | Prospect has completed demo | | Proposal | Prospect has been sent contract | | Committed | Prospect has signed contract and has been sent payment link | | Closed Won | Paying Customer |
To define the leads, William stressed that marketing needs to understand the sales process. With an understanding of the current sales process, marketing can work backward to arrive at more accurate lead goals and budget projections. Obviously, the sales team also has its own lead goals in mind. From there, sales and marketing can meet to hash out the differences and reach an SLA (Service Level Agreement).
Since finding MQLs is marketing’s job, it’s clearly defined as request for a demo. This definition is crisp and clear. When you go to the Lead Genius website, you can see the button “request a demo” sprinkled seamlessly onto various pages. The ‘request a demo’ button is also displayed prominently in the upper right-hand corner. There are other buttons to drive conversions such as “get in touch today.” The lead definition is articulated well and easily measured. And it is reflected on their websites.
It’s interesting to note that, when I talked to Emmy Jonassen, the direction of acquisition at Hubspot, she told me that Hubsopt does not have SQL. However, they also have a clear and crisp definition of what they call intent-driven MQL. They defined MQL as
- Request a demo
- Call sale’s toll-free number
- Engage through on-site chat or
- Send an e-mail and ask to talk to sales reps. In a way, their MQL is a high-quality SQL already.
Again, you can find these four calls-to-action on their websites easily. The sales toll-free phone is on the navigation bar. A “Get started” button is prominent on key pages. On the pricing page, you can see the bright and shiny “Talk to Sales” button. They also have a very sophisticated back-end system to allocate leads to different sales people. It’s about making the lead transition easy from the website to sales team.
Agreeing on lead definitions minimizes confusion and builds better collaboration between sales and marketing. You can also use actionable lead definitions to guide the calls-to-action as part of your website design and layout.
If your company has a clear lead definition, do you use it to guide the calls-to-action on your website? What else do you do to increase conversions on your websites? Love to hear from you.
Again, send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
A friend asked me if I feel lonely working for myself. It’s funny that question has never popped into my mind in the past three and half years. Then, I decided to sit back and to give it some serious thought.
Well, I do work from home, not in a co-working space or in a company environment. I have a remote team. We are close, but we don’t have face-to-face interactions. I am in front of my computer a lot, but I don’t do much video conferencing when I have meetings or talk to people online. When I travel to speak or visit clients, I travel by myself. I usually eat by myself. When I travel to a place I’ve never been before, I’d join a tour by myself. It does sound a bit lonely, doesn’t it?
But there are differences between lonely, isolated and alone? In my line of work, I need to constantly keep myself up-to-date and travel frequently for speaking engagements. Because of the amount of interaction with peers and attendees, I don’t feel isolated from the society. In fact, I feel information overload sometimes. So, no sense of isolation there. Let’s cross isolation out.
I am indeed alone often. However, I do enjoy doing stuff on my own. Some of my friends feel weird eating alone at restaurants. They prefer to eat in their hotel rooms. I don’t. I am totally OK eating alone and doing my own things. I see it as a date with myself. I really enjoy my own down time. So, no issue in being alone.
Now, the next question is “Am I lonely?” I make an effort to go to networking events, schedule coffee times with friends and ex-colleagues or learn new things such as dancing, new yoga postures, even just binge watching TV series. I can honestly say that I don’t feel lonely. Ok, I can check that off, too.
I saw a great friend the other day. She is a CMO and works in a very nice office. She told me that she feels very lonely in the office. I asked why? You are in an office surrounded by your team and peers. Well, first of all, she is a senior executive. Her team respects her, but not necessarily hangs out with her. Ok, I get that! Secondly, most of her peers are males. Again, they talk, but they don’t hang out. I can understand that too. I guess it can get pretty lonely when you are high up. I don’t have an answer for her. Maybe this is the price that you need to pay if you reach a certain level in the corporate world.
Even though I don’t feel lonely, isolated or alone, I do miss having colleagues around. I remembered how wonderful it was just walking down the aisles and asking colleagues to have lunch together or go out for a walk after a long meeting. It just feels good to have someone around to brainstorm with, vent or just simply talk trash. I do miss that. Again, this is the price I have to pay if I want to work for myself.
Life is not perfect. You make the best of the cards that you have been dealt.
Do you feel lonely at work? Are you doing anything about it?
This is not a marketing question per se, but it’s about marketers’ well-being.
Send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Enjoy your downtime. Until next time.
I am a firm believer that the function of marketing is to grow business and support sales. Great story telling, wonderful commercials, and fantastic events all sound great, but they need to have calls-to-action that tie with sales directly or indirectly. Otherwise, they are just some marketing fluff.
I met Jenny, CEO for 3 Busy Dogs, a company that makes beer for dogs. Yes, you hear me right. Beer for dogs, but no-alcohol. The company is small, so she doesn’t have a big marketing budget. To create buzz, she relies heavily on user-generated content on social media and co-marketing.
User-generated content such as pictures of owners and their dogs hiking, watching TV or simply just spending time together, drinking beers and living it up. You know, cute dog and cat pictures garner tons of likes and shares. Any free media impressions are good media impressions.
Jenny also focuses on co-marketing. She doesn’t do co-marketing for the sake of doing co-marketing. Whatever co-marketing she does, it has to sell her products. She finds products that will complement her dog beer. For example: what goes well with beer? Oh, pizza. Yes, there’re pizzas for dogs. She partners with Paw’s pizza. What else goes well with beer? Oh, Cigars! She found a company that offers cigar sausages for dogs. I am serious. Oh, what more things go with beers? What about yogurt? Yes, there is frozen yogurt for dogs. I am not making this up. Feel free to Google dog pizzas, dog cigar sausages, dog frozen yogurt. And to sell more beers, she actually creates various beer float recipes which combine beer and different flavors of yogurt as treats for your dogs.
I was laughing so hard when she was talking to me. I was not laughing at her, but I was laughing with her. Those are clever and creative ideas to sell more products. You go, Jenny.
Bentley’s Pet Stuff has stores in multiple states and took the beer float idea and created “ice cream social” events to offer dogs free ice cream and beer floats to drive foot traffic during the summer.
To me, this is a creative, fun, and low-cost way to drive traffic and increase sales, in addition to building brand awareness.
Partner marketing can also work on the B2B side. Jobi George, VP of Business Development and International Operations at StreamSets, shared his partner marketing story with me. Since companies’ data comes from different systems, StreamSets helps companies manage and organize dataflow in pipelines. They call themselves air traffic control for data. StreamSets, a start-up, does not have a big marketing budget. To make their marketing dollars go further, they choose partners who can complement their solutions. ‘Together is better’. Co-marketing helps them present a strong solution for their joint target customers.
Cloudera, a platform for machine learning and analytics optimized for the cloud, doesn’t offer the dataflow performance management that Streamsets does. If they work together, they create a end-to-end solution for their target customers. So they partner to create joint messaging. StremSets positions itself as an ideal solution for data input into the Cloudera infrastructure. They attend industry conferences together. They develop invitation list to invite each other’s customers to attend special events. They also do webinars incorporating both platforms and create joint white papers and other content.
Jobi said it nicely: “The purpose of partner marketing is to make one plus one equals more than two. At the end of the day, it’s about creating more customers for both companies.”
Of course, the B2B example doesn’t’ sound as much fun as ice cream social. But it is equally impactful to drive demand.
Are you doing co-marketing in your company? Share your example with me.
It was wonderful talking to Jenny and Jobi.
Send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
I was reading a great sales book by Erik Peterson, Three Value Conversations: how to create and elevate and capture customer value at every stage of the long lead sale. Ok, the subtitle is very long. Just remember the name of the book is Three Value Conversations.
One thing that struck me is the idea of finding the unexpected needs of your customers. Erik noted that sales reps are trained and conditioned to be problem-solver for their customers. That's good, but he argues that sales are solving the problems that customers already know. Because it's addressing known problems, buyers control the conversations. In a way, sales reps are putting themselves in what he calls the "Commodity Box."
Peterson suggested turning that conversation around. To do that, sales reps need to change their roles. It's not about solving a known problem, but rather the value-add comes from finding a problem not understood by the customer. So be a problem finder, not just a problem solver. Buyers don't know what they don't know. Here is a statement from the book: "The premium is your ability to tell buyers something they didn't know about a problem or of a missed opportunity that they didn't' even know they had." Find problems they don’t know and turn the table around to address the needs that buyers are not even considering. He calls that "unconsidered needs." And he categorizes "unconsidered needs" into three categories:
- Undervalued needs:
- Unmet needs:
- Unknown needs:
If you are selling a cybersecurity product, one example of an undervalued need is to call out specific compliance or regulations that your customer has overlooked.
An example of an unmet when a customer has become accustomed to a workaround and no longer even looks for a better way to do something.
And unknown need might be to automate a process for applying security patches instead of manually applying them when a system administrator is available.
To unravel these needs, you need to understand the customer's workflow and tech stacks well. It's easy to be a problem solver, but it requires a lot of work to be a problem finder.
Although this book is about selling, I thought this concept of discovering unconsidered needs also applies to marketers or me. Can we identify not only the existing pain points and challenges of our customers, but also help them to look at the areas that they usually overlook. At the end of the day, it comes back to "know your customers well."
BTW, I don't know the author, Erik Peterson, but I really enjoyed this book, the Three Value Conversations. Check it out on Amazon. Let me know what you think.
Now, back to my writing.
Send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
Some listeners may know that I am writing my 2nd book. I have to say writing is hard. The hardest part is to structure 50,000 - 70,000 words in a logical manner so that you can share a unique point of view and flow in such a way that readers want to flip from page to page. Not only do you need to offer a compelling and unique point of view, but you also need to tell a great story.
Writing my 2nd book is like raising a 2nd child. You learn what worked well the first time and what you need to do better the 2nd time around.
There are three things I make an effort to do differently this time around:
- Incorporate others' point of view: when I wrote the first book, I mostly drew from my own experience. I talked about my experience first, then shared case studies at the end of the chapter as a separate call out. I used case studies to validate my point of view. This time around, I incorporated case studies throughout the chapter. I showcase other people's know-hows, then share my thoughts after.
- Topic-driven chapter: For my first book, I created a framework to provide structure for the book, such as the 4 Ps of Global Content Marketing. For this book, it's very much topic-driven. I discuss each relevant topic in-depth.
- Think about your book launch while writing: When I wrote my first book, I was buried in the writing trench. I didn't think about my website, positioning of the book or launch content until the book was published. I was scrambling to do all of that after the launch and with almost no budget. This time around, I allocated budget aside and started working on a launch plan as I am writing. While I am writing, I also think about the content that I can use for blog posts, speaking materials, and copywriting for the new website.
If you think about it, that’s no different from content marketing. While I create content, I need to give some thought to where the content will reside and how the content will be promoted. It gives me some ideas on how to repurpose the content into different formats. If I create an 18-page white paper, I can break that down into 4-5 blog posts or podcast episodes, create several infographics, and even develop 2-3 presentation slides. Treat the long form content as a mini-product launch.
We all learn from experience. Writing is still hard. It's even harder, given that my experience in sales enablement is not as comprehensive as global content marketing. The bright side is that I have a plan to tackle it and lessons to draw on from my first book.
We all tend to do our job the same way day in and day out. It's important to sit back and reflect on what we’ve done to see if we can do it better. So, what is in your regular job that you can do it a little differently? Feel free to share your experience and lessons learned with me.
Now, back to my writing.
Send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
A listener, Ally, working in a small software company with 2 marketing people doing everything from marketing to sales support. She is working on a brand guide to standardize not only the look-and-feel of outbound communications but also create the consistent layout for different formats of content output. Her sales team thinks the brand guide is a colossal waste of time. They feel that she should spend the money and budget on creating sales collateral. She asked how to demonstrate the value of a brand guide to her sales team.
Well, Ally, let me share with you a known ‘secret’: if the sales team had their wishes, they would love to see all the marketing budget focused on the bottom of the funnel and demand gen. But before we get to there, marketing needs to somehow find a way to make sure that people are actually aware of our products. Even for referrals and word-of-mouth, it starts with someone becoming aware of your products, using them, then referring or sharing with others. A good chunk of marketing’s job is to make sure that people are aware of our products and services.
As you already know, to do that, we need to reach our audiences several times. In a traditional world, customers need to see the ad 6-7 times before the brand makes an impression on them. In the digital world, it’s not only about frequency but also about a consistent experience. That consistency needs to be reflected in image selection, copywriting, content etc. To make all that happen, a brand guide is needed.
Brand guides are not only about logo usage, typography and color palettes. They should also include a brand persona, which relates the human attributes of your brand. Use specific adjectives and nouns to describe your brand personality. For people living in the US, you’re probably familiar with two ice cream brands: Breyers and Ben and Jerry’s. Both of them are part of the Unilever Conglomerates.
If you look at their package designs, Breyers brand persona is about family, tradition, quality, while Ben and Jerry’s is about individualism, quirky, wholesome and environmental friendly. Don’t take me wrong: Ben and Jerry’s is all about quality as well, but they chose to talk about quality in the context of individual flavors and sustainable food sourcing. These nouns and adjectives in brand guide will lead copywriting and image selection. For example: to show where their milk comes from: Breyers may show an image of a cow rolling the meadows peacefully, Ben and Jerry’s uses an animated image to show cows playing a guitar and having a great time. The brand personalities guide creative development.
So, how does this impact the sales team? I see it impacts sales teams in 3 ways:
- If sales reps create content, they need to understand the brand guide or use templates from it. Therefore, if you have templates for e-mail, presentation, blog post, product brief for sales team to use, incorporate them into the brand guide.
- To provide a consistent experience, sales’ training and development should also conform to the rules of the brand guide.
- Sales teams are the frontline interface of a brand. The reinforcement of brand and its values, occasionally, is complicated by how sales teams are recognized and incentivized. Compassionate brands do not reward greed. Exciting brands do not accept complacency. Sales wins are important, but it’s also important to be clear on how the sales team goes about it.
To summarize the brand guide’s impact on sales,
- Use the templates from the brand guide to deliver consistent experience
- Guide the design of training and development
- Consider brand’s personas and values to establish sales compensation.
The purchase journey from marketing to sales is a continuum. Customers may go back and forth between sales and marketing personnel or material, but the overall experience should stay the same. The content they receive from either sales or marketing should have the same look-and-feel with the same tone-and-manner. For complex sales, sales reps are the brand and the unique differentiator. Marketing creates a brand guide, but sales reps, account managers, customer service and support teams all shape the customer experience and bring brand promises to life. In order to do that, sales reps need to understand what their brand promises are.
Ally, I hope that I answer your question.
Back to my writing.
Send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
One listener, Lisa, knows that I am writing my second book. She posed a question, “how did you come up with the subject and title of your book?”
Well, it’s hard. In the US, more than 90,000 books get published every year. Chances are whatever I want to say is likely to be said already. There is truly nothing new under the sun.
However, don’t let that discourage you from writing about your topic. It is all about how people relate to their readers.
When I think about Lisa’s question, I find that selecting a title is not much different than creating a marketing message. Your message needs to identify the unique differentiation of your products. At the same time, it needs to be relevant enough to your customers, so they can get ideas on how to address their pain points or solve their challenges.
When I select a book title, I follow that same thinking process. I try to identify a topic that is unique to my own experience and knowledge and, at the same time, is relevant to a specific segment of marketers. Coming up with the first book title, Global Content Marketing, was pretty easy. My experience at Intel had always been global. I was hoping to write something about the collaboration between the headquarters and geographies. One aspect of my jobs was editorial and content planning. The term Content Marketing was on the rise. When I started searching on Amazon, there were content marketing books, but no Global Content Marketing. Bingo. I found my topic. It was something based on my unique work experience that enterprise marketers may find interesting.
For this book, it was much harder. I didn’t want to write another content marketing book. I wanted to try something different.
Throughout the whole process, I contemplated several ideas. The first title I was thinking about was a combination of a memoir and business book. I wanted to share how I made a transition from a CPA to a traditional marketer to a digital marketer. It was certainly unique and might help people who are looking for a career transition. But here is the challenge in the publishing industry: a personal memoir is a personal memoir, and a business book is a business book. They don’t mesh. For my mash-up, who is my target audience? Am I writing to people who are over 40 looking for a career transition or am I writing to people who are interested in transitioning to the marketing field? Or am I writing for marketers who want to transition from their traditional role to digital role? Is this book about career development or just a personal memoir?
Do you see the dilemma? I could find my uniqueness, but I had a hard time identifying my target audience and coming up with positioning that makes sense.
The second idea was about technology’s role in marketing. Technology, such as AR/VR, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, will further shape digital marketing moving forward. I’d love to write a book about this. This topic could be written in multiple ways, but these two come to mind:
• Focus on high-level and future trends and their ramifications for customer behaviors, then use that as an anchor point to discuss how marketing needs to change. Keep it strategic and high-level with a lot of fun stories to share.
• Focus at the tactical level on how technologies reshape marketing from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, then discuss the changes in the context of processes, tools, people, and organizational structures. Hone in on case studies.
Don’t you think this is a great topic? I love this topic. If it’s written well, it’s certainly relevant to marketing professionals. The target audience is clear. But here is my challenge: I don’t necessarily have unique work experience in various technologies. It will require a massive amount of research in the behavioral science of consumers, staying on top of ever-changing technologies, and reading tons of marketing/management academic articles to formulate a solid point of view.
The more I dig into it the less I feel that I am qualified to write about it. Plus, I don’t think I have the time to pull it off. I wish I could spend 12-18 months full-time just writing about this topic. That would be super nice. But I can’t. I have to put bread on the table to feed my family. Very sad!
Then, I came to the third idea. I’ve heard about the misalignment between sales and marketing often. I had directly and indirectly supported sales teams when I was at Intel. I strongly believe marketing’s job is to support and enable sales. The term, Sales Enablement, has been popping up right and left. I did my research, and most of the sales enablement books are from the perspective of increasing sales productivity through training and development. But my experience leads to a different approach with a unique point of view.
I’ve identified a clear target audience, they are B2B marketing and sales professionals. In addition, the topic is relevant to marketers looking to better support sales.
If you are interested in writing a trade or business book, here is what I’d suggest starting to find your topic:
• Start with your expertise and experience. What can you offer?
• Identify your audience. Who are they? How will they benefit?
• Conduct research informally or formally to validate your analysis
• Start on an outline and write your book proposal
I may be simplifying it a bit, but that’s the gist of the process I followed.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
A friend, Erick, was tasked to conduct a content audit and asked me if I have a template that he can use. I sure do.
In general, content audits are conducted for three reasons:
- Some audits just have a grasp of what content is out there and share that with the whole team so that everyone has a holistic view. People who are responsible for outreach can pick and choose what to share. In a way, you create a master list content. In this situation, you may only need top 50 most popular content pieces or the most recent content in the past one year.
- It's time to redesign the website. You need to have a comprehensive view of content to determine which one to keep and which one to toss. You can also need to know what additional content which needs to be created.
- Some clients want to understand if it's possible to map existing content to different purchase journeys, then determine if there is any content gap in each stage. The audit result will guide the future editorial planning. In this case, you map content based on purchase or customer journeys.
A quick note: content doesn't limit to blog posts. It is any original content which has was for your company. It includes video, podcasts, press releases, webinars, case studies, white papers, infographics, eBook, collaterals, and other forms.
Here is the truth: there is no one-size-fits-all standard content audit template. You need to understand your own or your client's objectives, then create a customized template or modify an existing template.
For these three types of content audit, I've developed two simple templates.
The first is a quick understanding of the content landscape. The second, a comprehensive list of content on your website. For both, the template is the same. In the end, it is about creating a master list. Therefore, you have a list of categories such as these:
- The title of content,
- URL,
- Purchase journey stage (awareness, consideration or purchase),
- Content format,
- Language,
- Persona,
- Search keywords,
- and so on.
I created 15 categories that you can pick and choose what will fit your objectives.
For the third audit type, the template is based on your customer's buying journey. You need to determine your customer's purchase journey. In my template, I listed four stages: Learn, Plan, Decide, and Purchase. These stages are more B2B-centric, so you will need to make sure they align with the stages your customers and prospects go through.
- Learn: Your customers have issues that they need to address. What are they? What do they need to know about these problems?
- Plan: What can they do to solve these issues? How should they go about it?
- Decide: What tools do they need to solve their problems? Or What do they need to help them make a right decision? Who should get involved?
- Purchase: How can they build the business case to make a purchase?
Make sure you identify the stages well. When you review the content, you can categorize them in the relevant stage. You may find some content will cover more than one stage, which is OK. Oh, if your company offers various products and services, you can also tie the content with specific products and services.
When you finish, you will notice that there are usually gaps in certain stages you will need to address.
Before sharing the templates with Erick, I told him that he needs to be clear about his content audit objective. Why does he conduct the audit? That will determine which template to use.
I also told him that content audit is boring, unsexy and thankless. If he does a great job, nobody cares. If he does a lousy job, nobody can tell the difference. So, why bother? Well, here is the thing. Even though no one can tell you that you did a bad job, the analysis you present will have ramifications for future editorial planning, website's design, and the overall customer experience. Therefore, it's important to take time to do it right. The devil is indeed in the detail.
If you are interested in the templates, please email me to pam@pamdidner.com. I’ll be more than happy to share the templates with you.
Send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner
Let me help you with your marketing challenges.
Be well. Until next time.
Today, I want to share a little story about me. Since I am a marketer, I have the tendency to see everything through the lenses of a marketer. When I go to a website, I’ll immediately start evaluating the design, copy writing and Calls-to-action. When I am reading an email, I start thinking, “What is the intent of this email from the sender and does he or she achieve the objective?”
One day, I was having a casual conversation with my dentist about this. Apparently, he does the same thing. At any social gathering, he doesn’t pay attention to people’s attire or their appearance; he is fixated on their teeth. It’s funny how our jobs and professions affect how we view things outside of work.
Here is me in the beautiful valley in France, surrounded by beautiful French country, and yet I couldn’t stop being a marketer. Let me share with you my Da Vinci story.
Visiting Chateaux in the Loire Valley has always been on my bucket list. On one of my business trips to Europe this year, I made an intentional detour to Loire. Like a typical type-A traveler, I mapped out details and powered through famous Chateaux such as Chambord, Cheverny, d’Amboise Chenonceau, Villandry and Usse, all in one weekend. All right! Chateaux on steroids in 48 hours!
On the way out of Chateau d’Amboise, I was chatting with a couple of Americans who had just arrived in Loire that morning. We were exchanging tips on what to do or see in our short stays. They briefly mentioned Chateau du Clos Luce, Leonardo da Vinci’s last residence. What? Da Vinci was in Loire five hundred years ago? I got a chance to see the “Last Supper” in Milan. I was so impressed with his masterpiece. I just had to check out his place.
His last residence was more like a villa, not a chateau. It wasn’t huge. I got a chance to visit his bedroom, kitchen, study and work place. The residence had a huge garden. The museum staff built prototypes of his inventions such as a machine gun, a flying machine and an assault chariot and placed them nicely at around the garden.
I marveled over his drawings and prototypes of his inventions. Then, as a marketer, I kept wondering: if he were able to bring these machines to life and make them work, how would he market and sell his incredible inventions? How would he explain the complicated features and benefits in a way that nobles, kings and wealthy merchants could comprehend? What would his show-and-tell demo look like? What kind of visual content would he create to convey his message if he didn’t have the resources to create live demonstrations of his prototypes? If he were a savvy business person like Thomas Edison, would he build a company, hire a team and dispatch them to different kingdoms and territories to promote his inventions? Oh, wait, what if I were his Chief of Staff or VP of Sales or Chief Marketing Officer? Suddenly, I got excited!
By the way, all these thoughts were running through my mind while I was standing in his study room. Oh, I loved his study room. There was a corner for him to draw and paint, then there was an area so that he could experiment with chemicals and whatever Da Vinci liked to do, and there was an area where he could rest or have discussions with his guests - a brainstorming place. Such a nice setting!
So I’m standing there in his study thinking, “How would I promote and sell his inventions if I were his VP of sales or CMO?” Before I got started, I asked myself a hypothetical question: “Would it have been possible to successfully sell Da Vinci’s creations in his era, the early sixteenth century, even if the products were manufactured and a sales team were properly trained?” Well, humans had been selling and buying for thousands of years by then. Selling would not be the issue; the issues would be the products and the buyers. Then the next two questions came to my mind:
• Are Da Vinci’s products relevant?
Let’s think about this: During Da Vinci’s time, most of the goods in transactions were products they needed to eat, wear, live or transport. Although transactional products may also have included art, music and different forms of entertainment or even weapons, products existed to meet their daily needs. Obviously, most of Da Vinci’s creations were so advanced that they were not directly relevant to people’s personal or business essentials. So, that’s a “No”.
• Are Da Vinci’s buyers ready?
The so-called “advanced technologies” during that time were things like winches and wedges. Until Da Vinci’s death in 1512 , people still believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo Galilei didn’t publicly announce his belief that the Earth orbited around the Sun until 1632 . Acceptance of out-of-the-box thinking was low and the pool of potential customers that could afford luxuries was small. So, this was another “No”.
As much as I was excited about marketing and selling Da Vinci’s creations, I quickly analyzed the possibilities in my mind and recognized the chances of success were very low. As much as I could convey his vision and put the team together to sell the products, the products didn’t solve the buyers’ immediate challenges and the whole ecosystem wasn’t ready.
While looking at his inventions, I ran through the whole analysis in my mind for about 10 minutes. Then, I came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t have been feasible to sell his products at that time. Da Vinci’s ideas were meant to remain only ideas in his era.
It might seem a little worrisome that I was still thinking about marketing while I was in the presence of Da Vinci. You think he would inspire me to invent something. But, he did not – he inspired me to do what I always do. A marketer will always be a marketer. That was my Da Vinci story. Sad, but true.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.
At my last episode, I shared the exciting news that I started writing my 2nd book. The book is going to examine sales enablement and I explained why I picked this topic. My friend Amy asked me what sales enablement is, anyway?
Like everyone else, I turned to Google for answer. There are only 2 million results, but I like this one:
CSO Insights, a research company specializing in sales research, articulated a definition that is widely recognized and accepted in the sales enablement field:
“A strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training, and coaching services for salespeople and frontline sales managers along the entire customer’s journey, powered by technology.”
This definition centers on providing essential technology-based training, onboarding and coaching as well as relevant and effective content.
Ok, Google is not the only way to get a definition. I also turned to Amazon. I bought several books about sales enablement because I wanted to see the definitions from different authors.
Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey, authors of The Sales Enablement Playbook, state, “Sales enablement is the concept of extending a prospect-centric mindset to all departments within an organization. ” “Sales enablement isn’t a position; it’s an ecosystem... [An ecosystem that] crosses all functional and hierarchical boundaries. ” Although their book mostly covered training, onboarding, coaching, content and prospecting, which is similar to CSO Insights’ definition, they stress that sales enablement is everyone’s job.
In addition to Google and Amazon, I also turned to companies who build sales enablement platforms, like Hubspot. Hubspot’s sales enablement definition focuses on technology and process. “Sales enablement is the technology, process, and content that empowers sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity. ”
In these 3 distinctive definitions, there are some common elements:
• Training
• Coaching
• Content
• Cross-functional
• Technology
• Process
For the purpose of my book, I created my own definition of effective sales enablement:
“Delivering a positive customer experience by equipping sales teams with knowledge, skills, processes and tools through cross-functional collaboration in order to increase sales velocity and productivity.”
Most definitions I’ve seen shared focus on supporting sales and facilitating the purchase process. They are written as one internal team (marketing) supporting another internal team (sales). I get that. In a digital-first marketing environment, it’s crucial to deliver a positive and consistent customer experience both online and offline. That is why it's vital to add the customer to the sales enablement definition. Without customers, there are no sales.
In my definition, “knowledge and skills” represent content, training and onboarding. “Process” suggests documented sales processes and methodologies. “Tools” are mostly software platforms and technologies to implement sales enablement efforts. Increasing sales is important, but sales enablement’s role is to increase sales velocity. Sales velocity, another term which is common in technology-based selling, is defined as how quickly a product is sold or a deal is closed.
Now, you understand my definition of sales enablement. I’ll keep you all updated as my book progresses, but in the meantime, do you have any sales enablement story that you can share with me? Reach out and I’d love to include your stories into my book.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Happy New Year! Can you believe it? It's 2018.
I don't know about you, but I have this love-and-hate relationship with New Year's resolutions. Here is the "hate" part: New Year's resolutions frustrate me because I have what I like to call a "one-month curse" that I can't break. I spent a couple thousand dollars buying a treadmill once. I used it for about a month, and now that treadmill just sits in our bedroom collecting dust. I pass by it every day and tell myself that I need to get on it, but I always end up doing something else instead, like eating…
I bought an expensive and beautiful diary with the intention of writing every day, but again, that one-month curse. That expensive and beautiful diary is situated nicely right next to my monitor. I see it every day, but I end up doing something else instead of writing, like binge-watching TV! Just I've just finished watching the first season of the Orville by Seth McFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. I don't like his humor very much, but I have a huge respect for him. He can sing, dance, write, act, direct and produce. An incredibly talented individual.
Ok, I digressed. Let's come back to New Year resolution. I talked about how much I hate New Year resolutions.
Now, let's talk about the "love" part: Not keeping up with resolutions doesn't stop me from creating new ones. I still create New Year's resolutions every year with fully committed enthusiasm. So, I am either in complete self-denial or I am an eternal optimist who believes that I have a chance to be salvaged by a distorted gleaming hope of a miracle.
I choose to believe the latter. I, one day, will be strong enough to break that one-month curse. The key words are: one day. It will happen one day.
Before writing down my 2018 goals, I went back and checked on my 2017 New Year's resolutions. I failed miserably on any goal that required regular commitment like, "Do yoga three times a week", or, "Write a blog post every week". Well, I can toss these resolutions right out the window. That one month curse!
Although I am terrible at keeping up with resolutions that require daily or weekly discipline, I was actually pretty good with deliverable-driven resolutions. Last year, I set out to launch a podcast. I also resolved to complete a book proposal and learn how to do a handstand which a yoga pose of balancing on my hands with my feet kick up in the air.
I accomplished all three of them! 7-Minute Marketing with Pam was launched in September. I can now do a handstand (see picture below), and I started working on my 2nd book with a publisher. I won some; I lost some. I can live with that.
So, here are my 2018 New Year's resolutions:
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Do yoga three times a week: I have not given this one up yet. I am determined to break the one-month curse and make it a two-month curse in 2018. That will be a progress!
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Complete my 2nd book: The manuscript is scheduled to finalize on April 1st and the book is scheduled to be available on September 10th, 2018. So, you know what I'll be doing for the first half of 2018.
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Check off three things from my bucket list: This one is not going to be difficult at all. I am on it! It's all about traveling, going to places and having FUN!
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Learn how to do a forearm stand: I learned to do a handstand this year. It only took the whole year… The forearm stand is another inversion stand that I want to learn in 2018. Time to build my shoulder strength and give my biceps a kiss!
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Learn the Waltz and West Coast Swing: My son loves West Coast Swing. It looks so cool when he showed me. I want to give it a try.
Here they are. My five new year resolutions. I feel the force is strong with me… for today, anyway.
Actually, the force has been strong in the past three and half years after I left the corporate world. My book, Global Content Marketing, took me to over 10 countries. I was fortunate to be able to share my how-to through speaking, coaching, consulting and writing. I made friends around the globe through various social media channels.
Most importantly, many people have helped and supported me along my journey without asking for anything in return. I am forever grateful for your generosity.
Don't get me wrong: I still have my ups and downs. I have good days and bad days. I still worry about the sales pipeline. I am still facing growing pains. I'm still working long hours. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. Ha!
While recording this podcast, I am staring at that expensive and beautiful diary next to my computer. Rather than writing every day, I think I'll just write a year-end review. That will be a good starting point.
Even though great challenges lie ahead, I'm still looking forward to 2018. I still believe that the force will continue to be strong with me.
Happy New Year, everyone! May the force be strong with all of us.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.
For today, I want to share some exciting news. I signed up with a publisher to work on my 2nd book. No, it’s not about content marketing. No, it’s not about anything global. So, what is it? OK, drum roll, please! It’s about sales enablement! When I told my friend, Amy, about the news, she was like, “Whaaaaaat? What’s that? And why did you choose a topic that is so, um, unpopular! Oh, I mean, niche?” Amy, I feel your love.
Let’s talk about why I chose that topic.
I am a firm believer that marketing’s role is to grow business and drive sales. Everything we do in marketing should directly and indirectly lead to a conversion. Two interesting challenges prompted me to write the book.
- I want to help sales and marketing teams understand that there’re more and more marketing elements that can be used for sales efforts due to digital integration. In general, sales teams likely only associate demand-generating activities or events with marketing, but marketers do so much more than that. If we look at marketing activities in a broader sense, many marketing programs have the essence of sales enablement. Channel partner marketing, co-marketing with key partners, email marketing, loyalty programs, and affiliate marketing are part of marketing outreach to support sales or the bottom of the funnel.
I believe that sales teams do not leverage these marketing programs effectively. Just one quick example: We could dedicate a space on our website to showcase our customers and their products or we could selectively include our customers in our weekly webinar or podcast series. The tricky part is how to integrate our customers’ products and messaging seamlessly so that it’s not sales-y. That takes time and effort to do it right. But, it’s a missing opportunity for both sales and marketing teams if we don’t leverage some of the digital opportunities to better integrate sales elements into marketing programs. It’s more than a “buy” button.
- I also want to address the ever-growing overlap of responsibilities, goals and tools to sales and marketing teams. The line between sales and marketing is becoming blurred. Once digital and social media came along, sales and marketing started to use the same communications tools. Email marketing is a great example of this. Email marketing used to be only in the marketer’s domain. Guess what? Now, sales teams are also using email marketing to do their own versions of targeted email campaigns by sending their customers relevant content. That’s good and all, but this may create duplication and inefficiencies and further impact the overall customer experience. The communications between the two groups need to be tight, since the line will only get blurrier in the future.
So I supported sales for a long time, so I also wanted to share my own thoughts on how to better support sales as a marketer. How can marketers look at their own marketing programs differently and invite sales or add certain sales elements to the existing marketing program to create a win-win situation.
Ok, to Amy’s 2nd question: why choose an unpopular topic?
Yes, like global content marketing, sales enablement is also a niche topic. I hope someday that I’ll start writing popular and catchy titles like “Master Email Marketing in 7 Days”, “Social Media is as Easy as 1-2-3” or “Create Killer Viral Content in 5 Hours!” but, I haven’t figured out how to do marketing with clever tricks and shortcuts, just yet. Based my experience, to do marketing right takes time, effort and continuous optimization. There is no shortcut. Yes, I need to find a popular topic to write. That will be my 3rd book. Ha!
I told Amy that if you want to frustrate yourself mentally and physically, write a book. If you want to be anti-social, write a book. If you want to stress yourself out beyond your control, write a book. Why am I doing it despite all the frustration and stress? Writing helps me organize my ideas and put them in a proper framework. It brings clarity to my thoughts. I might as well get a piece of long form content out of that. Now, that’s the content marketer part of me talking.
I’ll keep you all updated as this journey progresses, but in the meantime, are you supporting your sales team? What are your tips and tricks? Lesson learned? Reach out to @pamdidner on twitter and I’d love to include your stories into my book or my blog.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.
This week, I want to share something I read from the book of Verne Harnish, “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.” This is a how-to book. Verne shares templates and specific processes that you can follow when you grow your company from 1 person to 50 people to 100 and more. At each stage of the growth, you need to make significant changes in people, strategy, processes, and tools. If you are growing your company and your processes and tools are setting you back, this can be a great book to get ideas on how to put your hiring and internal processes back on track. By the way, I am not affiliated with Verne. I just like his book and I thought I would share with you.
There is one thing he mentioned in his book that caught my eyes. He talked about the importance of establishing “core values” for your company before any strategic planning or even funding pitches. Core values will guide how people behave and how the company is run. Most importantly, core values will discreetly nourish your corporate culture when you not looking.
The perception is that setting core values requires a lengthy discovery process, soul-searching, and a big budget. In his book, Verne disagrees that this process needs to be lengthy or spend a big budget to do that. He uses a fun and quick process called the “Mission to Mars.” I really like this process.
Here are the steps:
- Gather a group of employees or managers across the company. Or you can use your senior management team.
- Ask the group to pretend to be a team of Martian anthropologists studying American businesses. Each group member needs to come up with five employees – that are not in the room – and you will send them to Mars. Martian anthropologists don’t speak English and don’t know PowerPoint. They can only observe your employee ambassadors through their actions. With these parameters, which five employees would best convey the good things about your company, just through their actions?
- The key here is to not over-engineer or over-think the list. There is no need to find people who present themselves well professionally or to find a balanced team that represents each job function. Just choose five employees who would best give the Martians a sense of what’s good about your company.
- Each has five names on their list – no more, no less. Go around the room and determine the top three vote-getters. (Side note: Don’t let the employees’ names get out of the room. This is not about the performance review. The names are just a means to drive discussion to create core values).
- Start with the employees who received the most mentions. Initiate a conversation with these people. Who are they? How do they go about their work? What would customers and co-workers say about them? Why are they important or valuable to the company?
- As you jot down what’s being said, you’ll start to see themes and patterns emerge. Don’t worry about the words that pop up that are less polished. The goal is to know what the “real core values” of your organization are.
- As you get closer to finding the right words and ideas to describe your company’s core values, the energy level of the room will start to rise. The goosebumps on your arm will tell you when you hit the right core values. You will know them when you see the words.
- Then, it takes some wordsmithing to get the concepts hammered into keywords.
Voila! You have your core values.
I love his process. It’s easy, quick, powerful and cost-effective for companies who don’t have a big budget and a lot of time to do it. I can ultimately see this exercise working if it’s facilitated well.
It may seem that a core value creation exercise has nothing to do with marketing per se, but core values will indirectly affect the tone and manner of your writing and guide the content creation, especially in telling a story about your company.
So that’s the wrap for today’s podcast.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.
This week, I have the following question from Benjamin. He asked:
“What digital roles/skills/capacities focus areas will large brands need to master in order to effectively market to today's customers and provide great customer experiences?”
Ok, that’s a loaded question! I remember a discussion with my VP when I was in the corporate world: “Should a future marketer be a generalist or a specialist? Should the marketer focus on having a general understanding of each marketing discipline or drill down to be an expert in a specific field?”
My take on this. I want to talk about from the perspectives of technologies. When technologies get involved, things get complicated. A natural force will gently nudge us to specialize in a specific marketing field. Think about the evolution of computers: back in the 80’s, computer engineers could easily comprehend hardware and software by assembling their own personal computers and writing their own code. However, as technologies became more complicated, operating systems were built on top of hardware, and network and different stacks of software were added on top of operating systems. Things are so complicated that no one engineer can master all the stacks. Computer engineers need to choose: should they focus on hardware or software? If it’s software, what programming languages should they specialize in? Not to mention new fields such as cybersecurity, mobile app development, machine learning and more spring up like mushroom. Computer-related fields continuously to grow.
I see the evolution of marketing moving in that same vein. Technology-driven marketing will naturally nudge us to specialize in specific marketing fields. A great example is SEO. It takes years to know the ins and outs of SEO and the technologies are always changing. Another great example is e-mail and marketing automation because it also takes time to run a great e-mail campaign. Continuous learning is a must to keep up with the ever-changing technologies. And Like computers, there are new fields that keep popping up such as sales enablement and agile marketing. Oh, to know what agile marketing is, you have to check out my friend, Jeff Julian’s website, EnterpriseMarketer.com.
Well, that doesn’t mean that you should not be a generalist. A generalist makes perfect sense if you want to climb the corporate ladder to become a marketing director, VP of Marketing, CMO or even eventually manage a product group. You need to be able to connect the dots and see how each marketing function ties together. Obtain the ability to see the forest for the trees. Be strategic.
To be a generalist or specialist: there is no right or wrong answer. It depends on where you want to go and what you want to be. Of course, fate and destiny play a role in it as well.
In general, the specialist’s skillset tends to relate to a specific marketing discipline such as e-mail marketing, SEO, event marketing, and media buy etc. I call these “hard” skillsets. There’re also “soft” skills which I address in my book, “Global Content Marketing.”
Here are the five soft-skills I mention:
• The Taste of an Artist
• The Acumen of a Business Leader
• The Data-Driven Mindset of a Scientist
• The Desire of a Lifetime Learner
• The Curiosity of an Investigative Journalist
The Taste of an Artist: Having a keen eye for design, user-interface and image selection. With digital marketing, the intangible design on your websites, mobile apps, even simply the layout of eBooks, can transform certain types of emotional experiences that you want to convey.
The Acumen of a Business Leader: Understanding how to quantify ROI of marketing and how to work well with other functions in a company.
The Data-Driven Mindset of a Scientist: Analyzing data and deriving insights to optimize creative, copywriting, promotional channels, syndication timing and budget allocation. But you can’t blindly follow the data. Sometimes you’ll need to listen to your gut.
The Desire of a Lifetime Learner: Technologies move fast. It’s important to stay on top of new marketing disciplines (e.g., voice recognition search, programmatic, augment reality, etc.) Learning is so critical and should always be part of your professional life.
The last one. The Curiosity of an Investigative Journalist: At the end of the day, it’s about searching and looking for a compelling story to tell. To write a good piece of content, regardless of the white paper, future trends or inside scoops, you need to dig in deeper than just writing a quick 500-word blog. You need to do your research to write a good piece of content. And There is no shortcut.
So, roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, read, network and learn. There is not much to it. It’s a never-ending journey. I am still learning. Keep moving forward.
Benjamin, I hope that I answered your question.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.
I got the following e-mail from one of my students, Laura.
Hi Professor,
I had you in class a few months ago. I was wondering if you had any examples of a content strategy that you could share with me? I have to create one for work and I'm just overwhelmed by the format. So I thought I would reach out to see if you had anything to share.
Hope all is well.
Thanks,
Laura
Here is my email back to Laura:
Laura,
Good to hear from you. I totally understand that it can be overwhelming.
Here are a couple steps to get you started. I’d recommend that you sit back and have a cup of coffee or tea. J Write down 1-3 bullet points on why you’re creating the plan and whom is it for. Are you creating this as part of the overall marketing plan? As part of a sales plan? Or as part of a product launch plan? Is this a stand-alone presentation or part of the bigger marketing plan?
Who will see your presentation? A marketing manager? A sales manager? Subject matter experts or a product team? Why do they need to care about the content? How can they benefit? Are you asking for support, resources or budget?
Have a crisp understanding of why you’re creating the plan, whom it is for and what they want to see and that will guide you on what to add to your deck and how to flow your presentation.
Once you understand why and what they want to see in your deck, then it’s easier to structure your information.
Laura, as a rule of thumb, several elements will need to be included in your deck:
- Content marketing strategy and high-level tactics or deliverables
- Status updates and content usage
- Marketing or sales challenges and how content helps
- Content roadmap
- Content ownership and delivery timeline
- Next steps
Content marketing strategy and high-level tactics: Nothing too complicated. Start by showing your overall content marketing strategy and key deliverables. Refresh everyone’s memory on your overall plan.
Then, provide a quick status update. Show what you have done and the results, if there are any.
Next, share how content addresses some of the marketing challenges. It’s about providing value to the marketing and sales team.
In addition to the plan, it’s nice to show a content roadmap by quarter, by purchase cycle or by sales process. The roadmap complements your plan. With your content roadmap, it will be beneficial to showcase the owners and the delivery timeline.
It doesn’t hurt to have a slide to describe “help needed” or “next steps”.
You can add or delete these elements as you see fit. The bottom line: management wants to know what you have done for them lately and what you can do to support the marketing and sales team to grow business.
Laura, I hope that this helps and good luck with your plan.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
On this episode, rather than addressing one marketing question, I’d like to share a conversation I had with the sales and marketing team at Curata.
Curata is a platform that can help you curate, plan and measure your content marketing efforts. It has a very nice, solid platform that allows you to select relevant content and quantify the ROI of your content. BTW, I am not affiliated with Curata at all, but I love their curation platform and analytic capabilities. You should check it out.
Curata is still in the startup phase. They have a full-time sales enablement manager, Sasha Laferte, who resides in marketing. Her job is to use content to educate prospects and help the sales team close deals.
I asked Sasha, what is the secret sauce of building alignment between marketing and sales?
What she said resonates with me: the “Holy Grail” is to think of sales and marketing as one team and share the same goal. She also mentioned that it’s important to sit down with the sales team to understand what their challenges and needs are. To stay on top of their needs, she sets up a monthly meeting with them. During the meeting, she shares the content roadmap and solicits feedback from them to modify content editorial so that everyone is on the same page. A two-way dialogue and regular communication is key.
She told me that she makes all the efforts possible to meet deadlines. It’s vital that she delivers what she commits to since sales is counting on her content to convince prospects and to get their prospects to the finishing line.
Sasha also makes a conscious effort to make the sales team’s job easy. If a long form piece of content is created, she not only shares the content, but also informs the sales team of the target persona, the stage in the purchase cycle for this piece of content, proposed e-mail copy for sales to forward, proposed social media copy and more. She makes a conscious effort to help the sales team understand how to use the content effectively.
Phil Cappadonna is the Director of Sales at Curata. I asked him, is the sales enablement function really necessary?
He said before Sasha, sales needed to create content and sell. That was a lot of work and it took time away from selling and talking to customers. In addition, each sales person was creating content to support his own sales efforts. Duplication and inefficiency were an issue. Having sales enablement support simplifies and prioritizes content needs. Monthly meetings allow sales to review the content pipeline. Occasionally, some sales reps have urgent desires to create specific types of content. After open discussion, they might realize that their need was not as urgent as they thought or that some other content piece suggested by others may accomplish similar objectives.
Then I asked Phil, what were his target areas for future improvement?
He answered that he would like to further explore the idea of storytelling. In addition to showcasing Curata’s platform and its benefits, he would like to make an effort to tell a convincing story about the offerings as a whole.
At the end of our conversation, Sasha mentioned that she did an anonymous survey when she was 6 months into the job. It gave the sales team an opportunity to provide honest feedback.
Phil admitted that their company is unusual in that it’s so committed to content and inbound marketing. I believe that’s usually a case for SaaS companies. And startup. Sales and marketing at Curata are both committed to demand generation. Both drive traffic to the websites. Both are all about leads and both strive to measure the effectiveness of their content. Sharing the same goal between sales and marketing is crucial to them.
I understand that Curata is a start-up and the team is small so it’s easy to build a friendly and tight rapport between sales enablement and sales. But you can also do that with bigger team with a positive attitude and a commitment to your internal stakeholders. It has nothing to do with the size of a company. Sasha said it perfectly, “It’s about listening and respecting the sales team’s needs.” I agree! Of course, the sales team needs to meet her halfway, as well.
Sasha and Phil, it’s wonderful that you have such a great relationship. Thank you for sharing your story.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable take-aways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.
During my recent workshop, “7 Ways to Increase Conversions with Digital Content”, I tried to hone in on the fact that increasing conversions is not about replies to your customers’ angry tweets on Twitter, or drip e-mail for nurturing. Don’t get me wrong, these tactics are important. But it’s even more important to see the forest for the trees.
Yes, see the forest for the trees!
What I am trying to say is that you need to focus on understanding different touch points that you use to engage with your customers. For example: if you have an integrated campaign using banner ads, paid keywords, Facebook ads, email and Twitter outreach to drive traffic to your website, can you articulate each channel step-by-step that your customers come to your website and from which channel? Put all of the touch points on a big sheet of paper, then sit back and stare at this data and internalize how these channels may tie together. By doing that, you can see how each channel are tied together. That’s what I mean about “seeing the forest for the trees”. I strongly believe in the importance of seeing how each marketing channel integrates since your customers will come in from varying channels. If you know how the channels work together, you can provide a better customer experience.
The next day, as I checked out the hotel, I ran into Elaina Mango who attended my workshop the day before. She is the Director of Communications and Social Media. Elaina recognized me from the workshop, and we ended up walking together to the Social Media Strategies Summit. We started talking about our favorite topic: marketing. We talked about how important digital is. I made a mention that it’s challenging to create a 3-hour workshop when my workshop audiences are a mix of young marketing specialists who want deep know-hows and seasoned marketing professionals who just want to think holistically. They have different expectations. Yet, I feel compelled to speak more broadly, which may not meet the expectations of some marketers who look for a deep dive.
Then Elaina said something that surprised me. She said there’s one thing that marketing teams don’t do anymore. I said, “What is that?” She said, “Mapping.” Man, that word was music to my ears. She said in the earlier days before technology, her teams would get together and use post-it notes to map out marketing activities and campaigns on the wall. The team would talk about the issues and move around the post-it notes. Everyone would understand the steps, process and ownership. It was boring, but it was essential. She said, “It’s funny that we don’t do that anymore.”
I agree with her. I used to facilitate “map days” early on when I was with Intel. Interestingly enough, I had not done it for several years before I left. It seemed that everyone was always busy and no one wanted to spend an entire day doing that.
Mapping is similar to creating and documenting the marketing outreach workflow that I discussed at my workshop. Understand the steps that you lay out for your customers and the integration of your marketing channels. It will provide you the holistic view of the overall marketing efforts.
Elaina, thank you so much for coming to my session. Maybe it’s time to bring mapping back to your marketing team. That was a wonderful morning walk. I hope to see you at future events.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable take-aways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.
I was speaking at Social Media Strategies Summit recently and decided to pop into my friend Mike Brown’s workshop to say “hi”. I learned a new term from Mike that day (via Kodi Foster at Viacom): E.I.E.I.U. He said that the content we create should fit in the EIEIU categories: Entertainment, Inspiration, Education, Information, Utility.
He is very clever to coin the term EIEIU.
Your content needs to make your customers feel that they receive tangible or intangible value. By classifying your content in this way, you’re able to understand what kind of value your audience might get out of it – tangible or intangible. It doesn’t mean that every piece of content needs to be Entertaining, Inspirational, Educational and Informational all at once. If you look at all of the content you create, chances are you have a mix of content pieces that fit into one or more of these categories, though.
Let me share some great examples of EIEIU in action:
Entertainment: “Dear Kitten” produced by Buzzfeed for Friskies Cat food. If you haven’t seen it yet, click on the link or search for “Dear Kitten Friskies video” online. The writing is hilarious.
Inspiration: The best inspirational content usually come from Athletics brands such as Nike or Under Armor. They inspire us to be the best we can. Under Armor’s video features ballet soloist Misty Copeland dancing as a young girl while reading a rejection letter she received when first starting out. It’s about empowering girls and not taking “no” for an answer. It conveys that everything is possible and encourages us not to give up.
Education: Explain a new technology, trend or complex concept such as what is Blockchain? Cloud computing 101.
Information: This can be about your products features and user-benefits. Share with them what your products can do for your customers.
Most of the content we generate tends to fit into Education and Information categories.
Utility: How-to content. Check out REI.com, Lowes, Home Depot or BirchBox DIY content. This type of content typically includes tips and tricks on how to do things better.
I created similar categories when I led my own content marketing workshop. My categories were: entertainment, help, challenge, education and buy. I’d add “Challenge” and “Buy” to the EIEIU categories.
Examples for a “Challenge” content piece would be quizzes or other forms of interactive content that engages customers.
Finally, “Buy” content focuses on promotion and discount offers.
If we add two more letters to EIEIU, the term can be CEBIEIU. Ha!
In general, most of our content tends to fit into the Education, Information, Utility and Buy categories. Entertaining and inspiring content is much harder to create. It requires time, effort and budget to get it right.
At the end of the day, there is no right answer for the right mix of content. It’s not about 10% entertainment content, 20% inspiration content, 50% utility content, or whatnot.
It’s about answering the question, “Are you providing value to your customers?” Is your content helpful, useful or beneficial? Does it help customers solve their problems and, at the same time, facilitate their buying process?
Do good for your customers and good will come to you.
It was great to see Mike again before the year-end.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Today, I want to do something different! I want to share a term I’ve learned, it’s called situational fluency. That’s right, situational fluency.
Recently, I read a book about Collaborative Sales by Keith Eades and Tim Sullivan. With pretty much almost all human knowledge on the Internet and at our finger tips, buyers know more about us than we do ourselves. They talk to everyone, except sellers, to get ins and outs about sellers’ companies, products and services.
For big ticket purchases on B2B, buyers do their homework! More than 50% of buyers contact sellers when they are half way through the purchasing cycle. With that being said, sales can’t just follow structured scripts and rote steps. You still need training, sales scripts and sales methodology when you sell technologies or complicated products. That’s still very important. What’s changed dramatically is that you need to improvise based on what you know about buyers and what buyers know about you. BTW, buyers know a lot about you. Rather than selling to buyers, you need to “collaborate” with buyers. Understand what they know and guide them to what they don’t know. Sellers need to see themselves as a collaborator and be situational depending buyers’ needs. This concept is nothing new, but being situational is increasingly more important than ever before.
I teach marketing courses at universities. Students often ask me for templates. They want black-and-white answers. They want me to tell them to use this template at this situation, use that template for that situation. However, marketing is different from product to product, from industry to industry, even from company to company. Templates need to change based on situations. I always tell my students, I can give you templates, but you need to improvise and adjust the templates for the situations you find yourselves in. I encourage them to modify my templates. I even ask them to share their modified templates with me and I am more than happy to write a blog post about it. I told them that only when they can modify my templates are they demonstrating solid understanding of the processes they represent. It’s like learning basic waltz moves. Once you get the basics down you can finally let your creativity go and improvise as you go. You can create your own choreography and be situational no matter what types of waltz music is playing. You adapt as you mood moves you.
When you get advice from marketing experts or read steps from how-to books, don’t follow them without thinking. Analyze the situations you are in, take the essence of their instructions and modify as you see fit. Create your own formula!
Be situationally fluent. That’s my motto for this week.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
Standardizing content
How do we standardize content if localization and personalization drive better engagement? - Juliet
This is something that we struggle to find a balance in scaling content across the region. There is no right or wrong answer per se, so let me address that in these ways:
- Products and personas,
- budget and resources,
- common editorial,
- and common creative.
Juliet, in a perfect world we want to personalize and localize content as much as we can. However, we are all limited by budget and resources. It’s better to create a set of standardized content. Let the local team pick and choose which one to use, also, allow the local team to create their own content for local usage.
It’s a matter of finding a balance between standardization and localization. Be sure you are testing and measuring the impact of your content approach so you can learn what is working for your audience.
That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam. If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pamdidner.
Thank you for listening, until next week.
What is the best way to open a presentation?
I am doing a session at a conference. How do you make a compelling or fun opening to get people’s attention? - Kerry
I tried several different approaches for my own presentations. Here are my 3 suggestions:
- Articulate very clearly what you want to talk about
- Start with a story or an observation related to your topic
- Start with an alarming statistic data or a quote
Really, there is no right or wrong way to approach your opening, the most important thing is to BE you! Start from that first. Share with audiences what you think and how it is beneficial and useful. Respect their time and make their time worth it by speaking from your heart as if you are having conversation.
Oh, and remember to smile. This is something I should do myself.
Good luck Kerry. Let me know how your presentation goes.
Send me your marketing questions via Twitter (@pamdidner)
Question: Hey Pam, how do you make a living as a personal consultant? - TOM
Answers:
If you ask different independent consultants, you’ll get different answers
But for me, here are the 4 categories of my revenue stream:
- Speaking - Speaking opportunities at conferences. People reach out to me organically via my website.
- Teaching- I teach an online course at West Virginia University. It’s a lot of work and doesn’t pay a lot, but I really enjoy it.
- Consulting - Marketing planning and execution. I work with clients and help them create marketing plans. I also work with them to implement tactics such as email marketing content creation or campaign execution. Another aspect of consulting is facilitation, I facilitate workshops and do 3-6hrs workshop focusing on ‘how-tos’ and setting up the processes of content and digital marketing
- Coaching - I receive requests from young marketing professionals who reach out to me via Linkedin. I give advice on their career planning or work with them on marketing plans
I’ve been fortunate to launch my own career after 20-year in the corporate world. Working for myself as an independent consultant requires a lot of hustling and self-motivation. The work never ends.
Building close relationships with your teams in other countries
Question: What is the best way to build close relationships with my team? - Sarah
Answer:
The best way to build close relationships with your team is having regular face-to-face meetings. If your travel budget allows, it would be great to have a face-to-face meeting every 6 months or so. Have a 2-day meeting in which you provide updates and the team shares best practices and discusses challenges and solutions.
If you can't do it face-to-face, the alternative is to conduct a regular bi-weekly or monthly meeting virtually. Below are possible topics to discuss and share during the meeting:
- Business and sales updates
- Status of the company
- Success matrix and reality check
- Product roadmap and launch timing
- Messaging, product positioning, and content planning
- Marketing research and insights
- Best practices and updates
- Budget discussion
- Tools and processes
- Co-marketing plans with partners
Building close relationships require time and effort. There are no shortcuts.
What does a CPA have to do with marketing
Question: What is a CPA? What does it have to do with marketing? - Thierry
Thierry and I were having dinner in Paris. He listened to a podcast interview I did and I mentioned a term, CPA (Certified Public Accountant), during the podcast. He didn’t know what CPA stands for and wondered if that is a new term for content marketing.
Because of his question, I realized that I violated an important rule that I told my clients not to do, I used an abbreviation without an explanation.In my blogposts, I am usually very careful not to use abbreviated terms and make an effort to explain any I do use. And I always tell my clients to explain abbreviations or use a local equivalent for specific geos. Yet here I was, making the same mistake that I told my clients to avoid. But podcasts are fast, conversational and engaging, so we are liable to use local references without realizing it. Be cognizant of using abbreviations or local references during podcasts and make an effort to explain them, because you don’t who may be listening from the other side of the world.
Topic: Marketing Plan 2-pager: Part 2
Senior executives are very busy. They may not be 100% up-to-date about your plans. Before presenting a marketing plan, it’s important to have a two-page summary to guide them and get them up to speed.
The 1st slide of the summary contains:
- Sales goals
- Business objectives
- Marketing objectives
- Marketing Strategies
The 2nd slide of the summary includes:
- Personas
- Marketing Tactics
- Success Metrics
Personas: It’s a marketer’s job to determine personas for marketing outreach. Different product divisions have different personas. You can’t support them all. You need to prioritize based on your limited budget and resources. So identify the appropriate personas that you want to reach to drive revenue. Be able to articulate why you chose the ones you did as opposed to others.
Tactics: these are specific actions and deliverables which need to be accomplished to support objectives.
Here are some examples of how objectives, strategy and tactics are tied together:
MKT objective:
- Drive demand through lead generation & nurturing in [specific] industries or verticals
MKT strategy:
- Implement marketing automation and CRM to track and nurture leads from end to end.
Marketing Tactics:
- Identify specific marketing automation and CRM tools that you will implement.
- Articulate key deliverables and milestones for your demand gen efforts.
Success metrics: Metrics depends on your marketing tactics. If you do e-mail, it can be open rate, if you do events, it can be business cards you collect. if you do banner ads, it may be a goal of driving traffic to your website. For B2B, the common goals are likely to be the number of leads or prospects. Work with your teams to determine a relevant set of success metrics.
Use a two-pager to ground your mgmt before going into the details of your marketing plan.
Marketing Plan 2-pager: Part 1 Let’s talk about a marketing plan 2-pager. For this episode, I want to touch on the first part of a 2 pager. Then, I’ll address the last part of the 2nd pager in the next episode.
I’ve presented hundreds of marketing plans to senior mgmt. The lesson I’ve learned was that it’s important to have 1-2 summary slides to ground senior management about the plan before diving into details. Senior management tends to go from meeting to meeting and their minds run at 180 miles a hour. Before you do a deep dive into your plan, it’s important to have 1-2 summary slides to ground them and set the expectations up front.
What should be included in your summary slides which I call a 2-pager?
Slide 1:
- Sales goal and business objective
- Marketing objective
- Marketing strategy
Slide 2:
- Personas
- Marketing Tactics
- Success metrics
For this episode, let’s talk about slide 1, starting with ‘Sales goal and business objective.’
Goals refers to the revenue or growth goal of a company. Well, if you work in a big company and support a product division, it can also be the sales goal of a product division. It’s important to make the connection between marketing and business objective. Even if the link may be somewhat indirect, it’s critical to show that you understand the sales goals and business objectives.
Example sales goal: reach 30% Market Segment Share or growth rate in 2017 or achieve $10M in revenue
Business objective refers to what your company will do to solve or enable your customers.
Example:
Empower our customers to make superior decisions by resolving [their specific pain points] or by using a wide of array of [your solutions, products or services]
Marketing objective is “What”: What do you want to accomplish with your marketing efforts to support business goals? This should tie back to your sales goals and business objectives.
Here are some examples:
- Build brand awareness as a trusted, professional provider for your company’s technologies and services
- Drive demand through lead generation & nurturing in [specific] industries or verticals
In general, marketing objectives are about building brand awareness, driving demand, facilitating purchasing or enabling the sales team.
The next is marketing strategy. Marketing objectives are ‘what’ while Marketing strategy is ‘how’. How will you accomplish the objectives?
Here are a couple of examples:
If your objective is ‘build brand awareness’, this statement can be one of the strategies.
- Provide valuable educational and thought leadership content through multi-channel marketing
If your objective is lead gen, this can be your strategy.
- Implement marketing automation and CRM to track and nurture leads from end to end.
If your objective is facilitating purchase, one of your strategies can be:
- Deliver a seamless customer experience by unifying online and offline marketing.
There! Your first slide of a two pager . It should have sales goal, business objective, marketing objective and marketing strategy. Let your management know that you understand sales goals and business objectives and your marketing plan is set up to fully support business growth.
I’ll talk about the 2nd slide of a two pager in the next episode.
The question of the day: Should I listen to the data or my gut when it’s time to make marketing decisions?
Here are some thoughts that I want to share with you:
For anything Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and search related, I tend to follow the data. I make an effort to understand the keyword lists and how my audience searches and use the data to guide content creation. However, I don’t let keyword and search dictate my writing or creative approach. For that, I follow my gut, then I use AB testing to validate my gut decision.
To buy facebook ads or not buy Facebook ads, that is the question.
At a conference I attended, an agency was promoting their Facebook campaign app. They noted that, with over 2B people on Facebook, the people you want to reach are there and it’s just a matter of finding them and reaching out to them with relevant content, creative copywriting and strong calls-to-action. They even had data to back it up. I think they are right to some extent. But you need to consider whether FB is a relevant medium for you to spend $$ on. If you have limited budget, do you get more bang for your buck on FB vs other marketing channels?
My gut told me that my target audience, Enterprise B2B marketers, are on Facebook for personal reasons such as talking to their family and friends. When they are on FB, they are not looking at Facebook ads to find content marketing experts. My gut told me that I shouldn’t do Facebook ads. But this agency did such a great job talking about Facebook that I decided to give it a try. I spent ad money for over 8 weeks, Well, my gut was right. With that money, I actually got better results using e-mail or paid search. I knew that I should have trusted my gut. Well, you may argue that the results may have changed if my image, copywriting or CTA were stronger. True! I but I also validated my gut with my customers. I asked them, if they didn’t know me and saw my ads on Facebook, would they click on them? Unanimously, they said ‘NO’.
There is no right or wrong answer of following data or following gut to make your decisions. Or you can do both.
The key thing is not to blindly follow the data. Gut check is as important as data. Marketing is both an art and a science.
Question: What are the differences between planning and plans? -- Nathalie
This topic came up while I was talking to one of my clients the other day. I asked how she is doing. She told me that she is stressed because the company started planning for 2018 and she has a lot of work to do get ready. I am recording this podcast on July 18th, 2017 and she is already starting to prepare for the next planning cycle. In general, a lot of big and well-established corporations do that. They kick off the planning and start gathering industry and marketing information early so that they can get ready for the planning cycle.
Here is the thing that frustrates my client: no matter how much effort she puts into creating a solid marketing plan, it’s subject to change.
The budget might get reduced or product launch might get delayed, causing the marketing plan she put so much time and effort into to become out-of-date? But was it useless?
Does this mean we should not plan? Frankly, planning is in our DNA. We plan our wedding, our vacations and even our days, because we see the benefits of planning. The whole planning process helps us to
- Know what to do to accomplish end goals
- Mitigate foreseeable chaos
- Align our team, especially a big team or multiple marketing and product functions
The truth is there is a difference between “plans” and “planning”. Planning is an active way of discussing the goals, objectives, strategies and tasks that we need to accomplish. Plans are the documentations of planning.
Since things change, plans need to get updated on a regular basis. Planning is a continuous process that helps us adjust course, keep on-track and make accomplishing goals more likely.
President Eisenhower says it so poignantly, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Planning is the prerequisite of business success, but success is not guaranteed by planning.
Here are three take-aways:
-
Planning is an active ongoing process, while plans are the documentation of that discussion at one point of a time.
-
Planning aims to mitigate problems and changes, yet bear in mind that the only constant in life is change.
- Planning does not guarantee success, yet it’s absolutely necessary.
The saga continues!
Question: “I lead a virtual marketing team. Everyone seems to have his or her ideas on how to do things. How do I lead the team to consensus?” -- Melissa
I know how hard it is to lead a virtual team. If you work in a big corporation, you know what I mean. There’re a lot of initiatives which are cross-functional.
Here are three rules I follow:
- Do my homework and define what I want first.
- Let the team Tear Apart My Ideas
- Get the team’s recommendations and input to refine the plans
When I was an operations manager, I was tasked with organizing a winter party for 200 people with help from a committee of 10 volunteers — all with different backgrounds and opinions. Had I opened the floor to suggestions from the get-go, I would have got at least 30 ideas thrown at me that I’d have to narrow down over numerous meetings, while juggling my full-time job.
So rather than asking the volunteers, “What do you want?” I did some homework and defined what I wanted. I searched online; I talked to event vendors; and I met with past volunteers. This helped spark my creativity and pointed me in the right direction, based on what worked well — and what didn’t — in the past.
From there, I presented a handful of theme ideas, the party objectives and an outline of how the event should flow.
Then, I put this information in front of the committee, it gave them something to react to …
I let them tear my ideas apart. We all love to be critics. Let them tell me what they like or don’t like and suggest more ideas.
This same framework and approach can also be applied to working with marketing and product development teams.
If you’re writing a value proposition, meet with your product team first, draft two or three options based on their insights, and then have your customers provide feedback. Define what you want and let your customers tear them apart. Or, if you manage content creation, and you have ideas about the types of content you envision based on your understanding of your company’s products, services and desired outcomes, go ahead and sketch them out and let your team tear it apart. My point is, bring your ideas to life first — come up with a couple of solutions or recommendations to share — and then let others chime in.
After letting them tear your ideas apart, now we move to the next stage: ask specific questions to build up a refined set of ideas — questions like, “What don’t you like about the ideas?” “What are your recommendations for changes? And the logics behind it?” “What features would you add to make our products better?” Do a deep drill-down with the team and let them talk things out.
The trick is: You have to keep everyone focused and not get diverted in different directions. You have to know when to let them win and when to stay firm to drive consensus to a final decision. To do that, you have to define what you want first and set clear objectives. This will serve as your guiding light on when to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This is also important when the team reaches impasse, that would be the time to remind everyone about the agreed-upon objectives.
I have been able to carry this same approach from my role as operations manager, to marketing manager, to my current role of independent consultant. I internalize and create my own ideas and recommendations based on what I think my clients want, and then I present them to my clients so they can add their feedback to create what they actually want.
Applying content marketing to sports marketing Question: How does content marketing apply to sports marketing? -- Jake Let’s start with the content marketing definition first. Here it goes:
“The process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to target audience with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers.”
In other words, content marketing is about creating and sharing content to help, challenge, educate, entertain your audience or facilitate their buying process.
Modern sports marketing is no longer confined to big stadiums or fun events. Sports fans follow their teams and share their passion and frustrations digitally. With the always-on social media, sports teams and fans are not limited to interacting with their team only during the regular season. Teams need something to engage the audience during the off-season. Content is that “something," a means to sustain that continuous momentum and emotional connection.
Speaking of the types of content. During the season, everything can be a piece of content: team practice videos, pre-game locker-room rituals, in-game play-by-play updates, post-game analysis and interviews, even players sharing tips and tricks on how they improve their game. Fans have insatiable appetites and they want “in”. They want to be part of the inner circle. Content serves that purpose.
During the off-season, you can re-use and re-package some of the highlights from the past season. You can create contests, quizzes and other creative and fun activities that will engage your fans.
Sports marketing isn’t limited to professional and amateur sports. Although GoPro is not a sports team, its products create a massive amount of user-generated sports marketing content. They build their websites and let users go nuts sharing their videos. It's a great content marketing example. Use content to market the products. It works for GoPro.
At the end of the day, sports marketing is not about content, really. It’s about relationships. It’s about your teams and your fans. It’s about helping your fans get to know the team, the players and the game better. It’s about helping them be part of the game. Content is merely the means.
Question: How do we deal with marketing burnout? Let me speak from my personal experience.
After 20 years at a big corporation, I decided to work for myself. It sounds romantic but, when you are in the trenches trying to make it work, there is nothing glamorous or romantic about it. I am my own secretary, IT, sales, marketing and HR. When I just started, I didn’t really have the luxury of turning down jobs. I provided multiple services from creating strategies, e-mail campaign even down to beautifying presentations for senior management as long as their quotes met my expectations. At the same time, I needed to promote myself. Between client work and marketing myself, it’s like having two full-time jobs. I work all the time.
Here is how I deal with stress and burnout.
- Have a plan. Even when I just started out and was a one-person shop, I still did formal annual planning. I had my planning meeting with myself. I identified 2-3 new initiatives that I want to do, set up sales goals (realistic and stretch) and identify lead pipeline and a list of people and companies that I want to reach. Although my plan may have changed here and there, I had a plan to set direction. I learned from my corporate experience, it’s important to have a plan.
- Prioritize: I don’t prioritize well. I took on several assignments and worked through weekends and nights to get them done. I am still doing that, but I make a conscious effort to prioritize. I divide my day so that 80% of my time is spent working on urgent items that are likely due in 24-72 hours. and 20% of my time is spent on initiatives which need be implemented in 2-3 months. It doesn’t always work, but I am making an intentional effort to follow the 80/20% rule.
- Delegate: This is a chicken and egg question. I didn’t delegate initially, because I couldn’t afford to hire others. I ended up doing everything myself. Now, I can afford to delegate, but I don’t have time to hire and train others… So, I still ended up doing everything myself. If you have a team, you need to train and coach them, then delegate.
Here is what I do on the personal front to manage stress:
- Exercise: This helps me tremendously! I do steps or cardio 2 times and yoga 3 times a week. Pumping some oxygen into my body. It’s good for you. You just need to prioritize to exercise.
-
Let it out: Find someone to vent to! Get your stress and frustration out. Find a friend or someone, talk it out. It helps.
-
Walk away: I can sit in front of my computer and work for 9-hours without getting up. Even though I can’t think anymore, I am still glued to my computer. I literally need to force myself out of my chair and go somewhere else. IT’S OK TO WALK AWAY.
- Stress and burnout come with the choice I made. I am aware of that and accept that consequence. We need to manage them the way we manage our days, our relationships or our businesses.
Question: “How do I make the transition from a traditional marketer into a digital marketer?” -- Elaine I’m going to talk about my own personal journey of making that transition. I started out as a marketing operations manager. I did mostly back-end stuff, meaning I set up tools, processes, vendor sourcing, training etc. Then I moved into event marketing, and from there I worked on print ads. My first encounter with digital was banner ads. I remember tinkering with various different shapes of banner ads: square, rectangle (vertical and horizontal). Sometimes we’d run into glitches, like the ads were not working properly. Mostly I just remember that anything digital was a lot of work to get right in the beginning. From there, I moved to a strategist role. As a strategist, I was tasked to create global Go-To-Market (GTM) plans for our local marketing teams to help build their campaigns. Even though I worked closely with social media, paid media, events, search, and even creative services, my knowledge of the digital side of things was still limited. That’s because my job didn’t require me to get my hands dirty. I had this urge to understand digital marketing more, but how? Here’s what I did: 1. Ask for help: I was fortunate enough to work in a global company that had access to lots of resources, so I’d reach out to media, web, event MKT, and search agencies. I’d ask them to give me special 1-on-1 training to help me better understand their fields, and most of them were happy to share their knowledge with me. While there was the initial risk of a client surpassing them in knowledge, it ended up being a non-issue since digital technology changed so rapidly. As a result, we all landed on mostly equal footing in terms of having to play catch up. Around 2005-2006, my company sensed the marketing landscape changing. A “disturbance” in the force, if you will. Our marketing operations team worked with our agencies and sought out influencers to create on-demand training videos. We had over 60 videos covering a range of various topics. Some videos, like Search 101, were mandatory for us to watch. We were also required to watch three other courses, similar to picking college electives. Now, that might seem like kind of a drag, but honestly, watching a bunch of videos was Ok with a glass of wine in hand, plus… they were tied to our employee bonus! Our company did these mandatory digital training courses for about 2 years. That was a great move to propel the whole marketing organization forward toward the digital marketing realm. Now, everything is on YouTube. So no excuses! Asking questions, reading, and watching videos are all great first steps to making that transition. 2. Learn new tricks by doing Whoever said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is a LIAR. The best way to learn is to get your hands dirty. To understand social media, do social media. If you want to understand AB testing, you guessed it, do AB testing! Create different ads with different copywriting messages to test and see what works. I, personally, was terrified of Twitter back in 2007, but I decided to get myself out there and see what happens. Nothing bad happen and I ended up making a lot of virtual friends. Here is another thing I did: I wanted to understand paid search and paid social, so I paid out of my own pocket for some ads to learn how it worked firsthand. Another example: I had no idea how to create a blog, so I decided to dive in headfirst by launching a blog website. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty! Do or do not, there is no try! If you can’t get your hands dirty, ask your agencies and have them show you how they buy media and what tools they use. 3. Understand technology and the back-end When I say understand technology, it doesn’t mean that you need to learn how to code. It means understanding how everything works together at the back-end. For example: even though I have a person in mind when I write a blog post, it doesn’t mean I can write about whatever topics I like for that person. In the digital marketing world, I need to understand what keywords and phrases my target audience uses when he or she searches specific topics. Then, I make an effort to seamlessly integrate these keywords into my blog post. Why do I do that? Because it will impact the organic search and ranking of my website and the blog post. To elevate the domain authority of my website, I need to reach out to relevant sites to make sure that they do a link back to my site. The more sites that link to my site, the more apparent my domain authority becomes to Google’s algorithm. It’s like the more people mention you, the more popular you probably are. (Unless you’re an airline, in which case the opposite may be true.) So when you create content, you really need to think in advance about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and your content syndication channels. If you are working on nurturing your leads, you need to understand what content they have downloaded to gauge their interests and purchase intent. To do that, your back-end needs to be integrated to help you do the necessary analysis. You won’t know how digital works until you know how the back-end works. Digital marketing is complicated, because it touches on technology. That also means there are endless possibilities to integrate and remix to various channels. When you are a traditional marketer, you can be a generalist and still do a good job. When you are a digital marketer, you need to be both a generalist and a specialist. It’s likely that you will focus on a specific discipline, but you still need to understand how everything ties together. Yoda said it well. You need to unlearn what you’ve learned. It took me 3-4 years to really understand the intricacies of the back-end and how everything works. The journey never stops. When you stop learning, you stop living.