The Short Answer: Nothing
When Henry Ford decided to make a car for the “every day” working person, he essentially created a product targeting a segment based on a need he saw in the market. Since 1908, the ability to segment buyers has grown more complex since there is never been more data about individual buyers and buying groups. This is especially true in B2B, where depending on the variety of products and use cases a company might have thousands of segments who might have interest in engaging. This has led a huge investment in content, automated nurture programs and the design of more lead scoring programs than I care to think about.
But just like the theme of many of my past blogs, the approach clients are taking to solve the problem is not aligned to the issue. In this case – stop focusing on only one segment (MQLs) and thing about how to build a platform that can support all buying segments (17 segments specifically, based on the MarketOne Segment Model for B2B).
To think about this another way, only a very small group of businesses are ready to buy at any given point in time. However every business will eventually buy from a supplier. By focusing all your time and attention on the MQL segment – you risk a poor buying experience for 98% of the know prospects in your database. That is not a winning approach.
But before we pack everything up and consider a career change, all is not lost – one good thing about our MarTech investments over the past 10-15 years is that there is data in there which can be used as ingredients to create segments right away. But be warned – since scoring programs designed to find only MQLs has been the focus, the data will likely be incomplete and require some significant engineering to make it actionable. So I advise working with a partner to get this started vs. trying to build this out in house.
Some perspective on this, one of my more progressive clients, who recognized the need to put real rigor around their data is in year 4 of this commitment and they are just getting to place to understand buyer history (descriptive analytics) to begin testing real buyer segments to understand what drives conversion to pipeline. A partner like MarketOne can help cut that timeline by 75-80%.
Make 2017 the year try something new (and old)
I mentioned a moment ago, one of my clients that is on the right path, and they did it by looking at the data and seeing what it told them. They combined sales history and marketing history, engineered business context on top of the data and what emerged were buyer segments that can now be actioned into targeted outbound communications designed to figure out who is and who is not in market . The real irony here is that marketing used to think about engaging customers using segments – accept we called them mailing lists and we used to buy them from publishers and list brokers that used core data best practices to organize the data and make it usable. Somehow this basic concept got lost in the digital madness because it was primarily tied to old analog communication channels like direct mail.
Marketing automation platforms made it seem so simple to take nurturing and direct email in house. After all email is cheap, so why outsource it – MAPs have made it easy, right? MAP was going to enable B2B marketing to get down to the segment of one or hyper segmentation. But what the MAP vendors didn’t tell us was that goal required a focus on data. The inability to process all the new data is crippled the marketing database and marketing’s ability to segment. So as nurture pilots and scoring applications failed many marketers reverted quickly back to an undifferentiated strategies of batch and blast, call all marketing response management and cheap cold calling.
This leads to a poor customer experience, where we speak to all our leads as if it was the first time, so they are now tuning out channels like email. In the same thread, I also get why email is still being used, because it is cheap and we can see that leads respond and convert our forms attached to these programs. But it is not generating enough to hit our targets.
If you doubt what I’m saying – read response management interviews. You’ll think differently.
If you were to speak directly with the buyers engaging with email, most would tell you that they already aware of what you have to offer and many of them are well supported by sales. I have read enough response management interviews to understand this fact. Something I encourage every marketer out there sitting on a wealth of customer interviews. Read them – I guarantee you will start to think differently about your digital programs ability to nurture and qualify leads on their own.
So what do you do about it? Marketing needs a clear way to segment and understand what they have in their database to really enable analysis that is capable of producing insight. The alternative is to read inside sales interview data (which is a good place to start). But if you are using an in-house team you likely have very little to read. If you have a good tele partner like MarketOne, there is a ton of information you can dig into as long as you didn’t “throw the baby out with bath water”. The challenge with raw interview data is that using it a source of insight will not scale when trying to operationalize and progress scoring models globally.
The solution – start thinking about segments and make a commitment to engineering a solution (and find a partner to help you)
Below are some examples of how we might start to define segments for our clients in B2B – these are the 17 segments I mentioned. These segments are based on typically available data inside most MAP and CRMs. You just need a plan and commitment to engineer a solution – which is why I recommend taking that MAP scoring budget line item and instead use it with a partner that can help create a blueprint for how your marketing and sales database might look today. But be careful – digital marketing partners who have no experience picking up the phone in B2B will be less valuable than one that does.
Once you get a viable model in place, you can start producing insights from your customer data, which is what scoring is all about. Scoring should be designed to help operationalize the right next touch for my customer so that it either keeps them engaged while they research or it helps convert them into an opportunity to sell because they are ready. Keep customers engaging with you so that when they are ready to invest you are at the top of their list. Scoring is not always about conversion to MQL.
Marketing’s job is to help the buyer, accelerate learning – and facilitate the next step – not push them somewhere they’re not ready to go.
Buyers buy when they are ready, and now that marketing owns the top of the funnel your job should be to help the buyer and accelerate their learning, not force them into sales when they are not ready. Stop pushing and start testing, listening and learning. Below is an example of how a customer centric buyer workflow might play out using both tele, live and digital communications channels.
Just because someone is interested, doesn’t necessarily signal intent. And just because someone doesn’t appear interested – doesn’t mean they’re not part of an account that has intent.
Every action or inaction linked to a buyer contributes to their segment. Marketing automation and digital content has created the ability to see more information about a buyer’s interest or lack of interest. However, remind yourself that just because we can see what someone is interested in, does not necessarily translate into them being ready to buy. The buyer still needs to build a business case; they need to gain agreement with influencers, users and decision makers. They need to find budget or take budget away from other investments before they can commit to any real sales level discussions. Combine that with the fact that that influencers and users you see in your funnel that are “bad non-converting leads” are also part of the decision making process – so if you upset them with a poor experience, you could negatively impact your chances of convincing the organization to put your solution at the top of the consideration list.
Call to Action: talk to MarketOne about creating a segmentation model for your prospect database
So as we kick off 2017, let’s stop doing things to same as last year and shift the thinking about how we nurture and convert buyers. Here are 5 things to work into your 2017/2018 demand marketing plans:
- Focus on treating every prospect like a customer
- Focus on treating every customer like family
- Take nurture out of its digital MAP silo and start working with your inside sales and/or tele services partner to integrate nurture across digital and tele channels.
- Focus on unifying and collecting data across marketing, sales and delivery – staff a team focused on engineering and analyzing this data. Nurture starts with an honest 1:1 conversation designed to listen to the buyer. Do that for 12-24 months, then maybe you can begin to understand how to better automate the top of the funnel.
- Find a partner that understands how to use phone, chat and email to engage customers – don’t try this alone, you will struggle finding people with the combined experience required to get this moving down the right path.
Originally published for MarketOne International in January, 2017