Better Messaging = Better Results: Thought Leadership with Michael Cannon

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Katie Byrnes

This next B2B Marketing Thought Leader Interview is with Michael Cannon, CEO of the Silver Bullet Group, the global leader in messaging effectiveness solutions. Michael is an internationally renowned sales and marketing effectiveness expert, and a best-selling author, most recently coauthoring with Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing), et al., Marketing Strategies That Really Work! Promote Your Way to Millions.

How is it that you became interested in both Sales and Marketing?

By necessity, is the short answer. After three years of selling, I was promoted to sales management. In that role, a key area of focus was identifying and providing my teams with what they needed to win more deals. One of the things I quickly observed was that prospective customers were always asking us the same three basic questions, which were some versions of:

Why should I meet with you?
Why should I change-out my current solution for a new solution?
Why should I buy this new solution from your company instead of other competitors?

Another observation was that the training, collateral, and sales tools that were given to the sales teams did not provide persuasive answers to these basic buying questions.

That’s how I got into marketing. My night-and-weekend job was closing these gaps, meaning, I created or drove the creation of the messaging and tools that enabled the sales teams to more persuasively answer these buying questions. The reward was that a lot more of my teams went to President’s Clubs, and of course, the promotions that came with that.

Help me understand the connection between messaging and results.

If you agree that the business marketing definition of messaging is “the words you use, along with supporting visuals, to persuade a person to buy from you”, then the relationship is clear. The more persuasive your messaging, the more likely it is that people will buy from you.

When you think about it like this, the big “ah-ha” is that messaging is literally “the fuel” on which all your marketing and sales engines run. The effectiveness of your messaging has a big impact on the results, or lack of results, of all your marketing and sales investments.

What do you think is the problem with most messaging?

Objectively, the problem is that most companies are using corporate, market, and product messaging to answer the prospective customer’s key buying questions and it does not work. These categories of messaging are just too high-level and descriptive to be effective.

For example, take a look at this customer messaging map. As you see in the product messaging category, most of the messaging describes what the product does, what’s included, how it works, and some of the key benefits. It’s all the typical “content” in a product brochure.

What it does not provide is a persuasive answer to the prospective customer’s key buying questions. What’s missing, as you can see from the map, is an entire category of messaging called “sales messaging”. This new category is designed to provide highly persuasive answers to the prospective customer’s key buying questions. It enables the sales conversation that both Marketing and Sales need to have with customers.

Now, I’m not saying that corporate, market, or product messaging is not good or needed. Clearly, they fill a communication need. The takeaway here is that Marketing needs to create both descriptive messaging and persuasive sales messaging, if it wants to have more influence on the customer’s decision to buy.

It’s also interesting to note that the main reason for this gap is because, up until recently, Marketing has not had a framework to define the customer messaging required for market success. They also lacked a methodology for creating great sales messaging and a truly objective set of criteria to evaluate messaging effectiveness, prior to market testing or launch.

How can I assess if my current messaging is effective or needs work?

Beyond the typical market research, such as A/B testing, you can use objective evaluation criteria. For example, first determine the target buyer’s key buying question(s). In Marketo’s case, one of the buying questions is probably “Why should I select Marketo to automate my demand generation activities rather than other competitors?”. Now look at your messaging and ask yourself, “Is it a persuasive answer to this question? Is it persuasive enough to win an order?”. If the answer is “no” or “not really”, then you know your messaging needs work.

Another evaluation criterion is determining if you are answering the buying question from the product feature, product benefit, or customer business value perspective. Are you selling the oil drill, the hole in the ground, or the oil? Clearly, the goal is the oil. The drill and the hole are just means to that end.

Take a look at this list of objective evaluation criteria and use them to test the effectiveness of your messaging. The more of these criteria you use, the more persuasive the messaging will be.

What is the best advice for companies looking to improve their messaging?

From a strategic perspective, the change we are talking about is a paradigm shift in the way companies go to market. Today, most sales messaging is created by the sales teams, one rep at a time, one deal at a time. This means that most of the cost occurs, and is hidden, in the salaries and time of the sales teams, plus lower win rates and market share. Take a look at this market research from many well-known market research analysts. It paints a vivid picture of just how much productivity and revenue companies are losing using their current business model.

To make this shift as an organization, asking Marketing to close the gap is necessary, but not enough. Marketing must also be given additional resources and learn a new skill. Conceptually, the business case is simple. What’s most efficient: The way we currently go to market or having a few marketing professionals also create great sales messaging, integrate it into all their marketing deliverables, and leverage that investment across the entire marketing and sales organizations, including inside sales, outside sales and channel partners? The right answer is pretty easy to see.

Below this, what I recommend is to start small and build up a series of wins. For example, select an existing product, refresh the existing collateral, sales tools, sales support training, and lead generation programs with high-quality sales messaging and see what happens.

When you give prospective customers a great answer to their buying questions, and enable Sales to do the same, typical results include increasing win rates by 15-30%.

How can sales messaging help us improve our content marketing and demand generation results?

Another one of the principles we teach is that, in order for your messaging to be effective, it must be organized into 3-5 key points. So if another of Marketo’s prospective customer’s key buying questions is something like “Why should I use software to automate my demand-generation activities?”, then the outline for your content should be organized around the 3-5 key reasons that this is a great business decision. You can have a separate piece of content for each reason, or sub-reason, and trickle them out over time, with a summary at the end that links back to each piece for more information.

Same goes for demand generation. Each reason, or sub-reason, can be its own campaign.

What this approach provides is a logical framework for ensuring that every communication is a silver bullet – a persuasive answer to the prospective customer’s key buying questions.

Better Messaging = Better Results: Thought Leadership with Michael Cannon was posted at Modern B2B Marketing – Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

Email Marketing Best Practices from MarketingProfs Digital Marketing World

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Maria Pergolino

As part of a ‘mini-series’ of virtual events happening at the beginning of every month, MarketingProfs has collected a number of speakers including Sara Erzin from CheetahMail, Greg Cangialosi of BlueSky Factory and Scott Voigt of Silverpop to discuss topics ranging from email segmentation to social media and lead nurturing. With thousands of people registered for these events, I’ve decided to provide a summary of the three presentations for any that couldn’t attend.

The first presentation was Email Segmentation Made Easy presented by Sara Ezrin, a Director of Services at an Email Provider, CheetahMail. While the presentation focused on B2C, highlighting segments, such as those who abandon carts, best practices from the session could be applied to B2B organizations.

So why is Email Segmentation important anyway?

Forrester Research shows that 59% of consumers open email based on their individual interests and 51% open emails based on their needs at that time
Marketing Sherpa and Q Interactive found that 56% of recipients considered email from a known sender that was “just not interesting to me” to be spam

Why should segments be developed?

Improve email performance metrics
Sell the right product to the right customer
Increase message relevance
Increase customer loyalty
Increase transactions and revenue
Maximize the effectiveness of dynamically populated emails
Provide data for ongoing campaign optimization
Decrease Opt-outs

Segments to consider:

Basic Segmentation

Email Response Segmentation- Using email response data to create segments based on opens and clicks

Users who open/click
Those who click yet have not purchased
Purchases of a specific product/category/service
Persistent non-openers

Site Analytics Segmentation- Using site analytics data to create behavioral segments to increase the relevancy of your campaigns

Abandoned subscription forms
Product category of site browsers
Cross sell to purchases of a specific product

Customer Value Segmentation- Most advanced type of segmentations that looks at the revenue, frequency, and recency of behaviors and purchases of customers for segmentation

Loyalty
Buying Expensive
Buying More but Paying less
Just Bought
Lapsed Buyers

A final note: Once you create segments your work is not done. Make sure you are testing both the segments themselves and how well your emails are working with them. Make sure you are tracking what you are testing, and apply lessons learned across all your campaigns.

The next presentation was Maximizing Email with Social Media from Greg Cangialosi of BlueSky Factory.

People are using both email and social networks- and for good reason. It’s causing success.

A big worry is that social media will hurt email, but the opposite is happening- they are enhancing each other.

There are four ways to think about email with social media:

1. Email campaigns that drive people to your social media sites. These are emails that promote your social media presence hoping to gain friends, followers, or other social media connections. Two types of these include:

Sending out emails to people announcing a new or growing social media site and asking email recipients to join
Sending out emails to subscribers on your regular topics but including links to your social media sites inside the email

2. Social Media campaigns to drive email subscriptions. There are many ways to do this, but typically you are either sharing information about a white paper or newsletter via a Tweet or permantly posting a link up that resides in a social media page that allows someone to subscribe to your emails without ever leaving the social media site.

3. Email campaigns that include social sharing links that help email recipients share the content you have created with others who have not opted-in via social media. This has the ability to increase the reach of every one of your emails with no extra cost.

4. Creating a social graph with email. This is the most important part because it truly allows you to merge the two mediums. Essentially, because many people use the same email address for their subscriptions to your email site as they do in social media it can be the way you marry this data together. It allows you to build profiles, understanding who your most influential subscribers are or to tell which offers you should deploy in social media versus those that will work best in email alone.

Application through B2B was presented, but only briefly. It was simply stated that social media and email can help B2B companies become an authority or become a friend (not just a resource) to those using them together.

The final presentation entitled, Nurturing Prospects through the Pipeline, was by Scott Voigt of Silverpop.

Marketers need to be a lead developer, not just a lead generator

Generate
Capture
Qualify/Score
Distribute
Nurture
Report

Work with sales to develop a process of what should happen with leads and then provide them information about what leads are the best for them to spend time with. To do this, use lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a top priority for nearly half of B2B Marketers, according to Forrester Research, but according to the presentation most do not score, and those that do were better able to turn leads into opportunities.

Types of lead scoring:

Explicit – helps define the right type of lead
- BANT- Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline
- Demographic and Firmographic Information
Implicit- helps define the right timing of the lead
- Recency
- Frequency
- Score depreciation
- Behavior

Things to keep in mind about lead scoring:

Listen to sales
Provide a a balance between explicit and implicit
Measure appropriate behaviors
Set discounts for inactivity
Fine-tune over time

Next Scott talked about Lead Nurturing. He said lead nurturing is rules based marketing that drives relevant messaging given a contact’s stage in the buying cycle. It’s like smart email marketing for B2B companies.

Goals of Lead Nurturing:

Opens
Clicks
Site stats
Downloads
Register for an event
Become a Fan
Provide additional information
Have someone raise their hand to say they are ready to buy

As we can see from these goals, it’s usual to get a response often. Because of this, the presentation reminded watchers that they need to create a compelling offer to drive that response. Nurturing doesn’t just have to be emails- it can be a piece of mail or a sales call. Think about how all these methods can work together to nurture your prospects.

During the webinar a simple nurturing campaign was presented. At Marketo we call this a drip campaign. The flow they presented was:

Wait until 3 months after a prospect doesn’t buy
Send a check-in email from the original sales rep
Wait another 2 months
Send a different offer (maybe a discount), again from the sales rep

The important message here is that this process can be automated, allowing the rep to focus on active leads, and notifying them if the recipient reacts to the message in some way.

Although I didn’t include a summary of these, each presentation had a case study that accompanied it. If you want to learn more, it’s worth going back and watching these sessions, including the case study.

To learn more about email marketing, watch the Marketo webinar, B2B Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing or visit our Email Marketing resource section

Email Marketing Best Practices from MarketingProfs Digital Marketing World was posted at Modern B2B Marketing – Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com