We are looking for beta testers for our new website called MarketingReportCard.com – a marketing measurement dashboard. Designed for small to mid-size businesses, companies can login to the beta version of the MarketingReportCard.com and document and measure tactical marketing results over time.

The MarketingReportCard.com beta is simple and free to use. Honestly, the biggest advantage of the marketing report card methodology is the fact that everyone agrees on the key performance indicators upfront. If you can agree on how you are measuring your marketing, it becomes easier to improve your marketing performance.

MarketingReportCard.com was originally envisioned as a dashboard for small and medium sized companies seeking a simple way to evaluate tactical marketing performance. Marketers use this tool identify, agree upon Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measure marketing performance month over month, so they can quickly see when performance is slipping and when to take corrective action.  To be effective, KPIs must be monitored and updated monthly. Continuous monitoring allows marketers to quickly take action when performance drops below benchmark levels.

The BETA version of the MarketingReportCard.com uses a simple spreadsheet interface that makes the learning curve virtually non-existent and also to make data collection quick and painless.   Since no two companies are the same, marketers using MarketingReportCard.com can define their own KPIs as well as their own methods for weighting and measurement.

To register for the beta, simply visit MarketingReportCard.com to register. No credit card or other financial information is required to participate.

When we ask that question, we get the same answer: we have a global delivery model, we are client centric, we put people first, we are domain experts and/or we really understand our clients.

Woop do flipping do. Welcome to the club. With those credentials, you are beautiful and unique, just like everyone else.  Your competitors have the same answer. They have a global delivery model, they are client centric, they put people first, they are domain experts and they really understand their clients.

So if you are just another IT services shop, what do you do when it comes to answering the question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”  How do you differentiate yourself in the undifferentiated world of IT Services?

There are really three interrelated ways to answer that question. All three answers build on each other and are critical to each other. But explaining all of them here would take too long and is beyond the scope of this post.

The first answer is “trusted customer relationships.” We believe this answer is most critical, actionable and more important and therefore will be the basis of this article. The second answer falls into the camp of messaging, positioning, and defensible-niche creation. We’ll discuss that answer in the next article.  The third answer comes at the question from the inside-out perspective – company  culture, decision making process, and internal trust. Again, this is a topic for another article.

Trusted Relationships and Hunting Big Accounts –  the founder’s problem of scale

Say the word “trusted customer relationships” and many definitions and meanings come to mind. Each definition has a different context. In this case, we need to be very specific about context and so we want to talk about a very specific scenario.

In our work with professional services firms in the $1 to $5 million/year revenue range, what we generally see is a founder who has left a senior Fortune 500 IT position to start a company. As a first customer, the new entrepreneur lands his account by selling services back to his former employer – a whale (a large farmable account capable of more than $1M annual billings and a well known brand or reputation).

In this scenario, other than a trusted relationship, there is very little that on the IT services menu that differentiates the IT services shop from the competition. Aside from marginal differences in talent, culture, expertise and methodology, almost every other $1M to $5M competing IT services firm can do a job as well as any other.

So when we talk about trusted customer relationships, we’re talking about founders who are friends with their new clients. They have leveraged a deep pre-existing relationship to become entrepreneurs. This relationship was built over many years through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.

Because of the relationship, the founder brings speed and nimbleness to problem solving. This is due to the fact that he or she has an intuitive grasp of the project goal (i.e. benefit to the company) AND the culture’s style of generating support for the goal AND the culture’s preferred style of organizing execution toward the goal.  Together all this means a relationship that is hard to duplicate.

The problem of scaling this kind of relationship begins when the founder wants to find another major whale sized account that is just as profitable and farmable as the first major account.

The entire problem for finding the second whale is creating what was “second nature” with the founder’s former employer.  How do you replicate in the selling and marketing process the relationships that were created over time through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency?

The answer (and the currency by which the trust is established, earned and scaled) is USEFULNESS.

In sales-processes, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency. If people buy from people and if a brand is really the sum total of a customer’s interaction with a company, then it follows that in B2B, the personal brand of the founder is really all that matters when it comes to finding the next whale.

And, if you accept the fact that, for IT services firms of this size, the definition of a successful marketing and sales campaign could be the addition of one new whale per year. In this context, the sales and marketing discussion takes on an interesting new perspective.

The web and social media did not create the idea of a personal brand. Leading with value and emphasizing relationship value over a quick-transaction have always been the hallmarks of successful professional services organizations.

The only difference that social media makes is that the technology finally got granular enough and accessible enough and instantiated enough to be useful in facilitating this level of the ageless human dialog of value exchange.

The tendency of people to become known through repeat encounters is as old as walking upright – and establishing a brand of credibility and openness to repeat transaction is earned by being accessible and broadly useful to the challenges prospects face – across the whole lifecycle of the problem solution.

Unfortunately, many founders of professional services organizations somehow got disconnected from this simple truth. You can see this in their marketing departments – day after day churning out me too SharePoint webinars with co-op Microsoft funds. If everyone is using the same campaign materials and selling the same products, then there is no differentiation.

For that and many other reasons, a dedicated emphasis on personal branding may overlap and replace some of the “traditional” tactics in marketing’s tool chest. The highest value of these personal branding activities is how they reach past the product attributes and into the underlying human issues beneath the problem the prospect company is experiencing.

Professional services marketing needs to take the next step to scale personal branding. Marketing’s ability to speak to, or at least package the pitch, to speak to this broad set of human issues feels like the leg up that the sales organization needs in order to stand out, be remembered, and be valued as sources of solid thinking, not just products.  Again, before trusted advisor, before regular meeting, even before someone recognized your name comes USEFULNESS – which we believe is the new universal of finding and growing a business through new sales.

At first, this approach is not a substitute for the “core” business building activities. Over time, however, it will replace the shopworn marketing tactics that just aren’t working like they used to. Marketing will soon be measured by its ability to reach into the inner recesses of the decision process around every significant buying decision. The way buying decisions are made is so complex within major accounts that nothing other than pure USEFULNESS could penetrate the dialog.

Great sales people have always done this – communicated the solution when it was time, and then spoken in specific about how it could be sold inside by the champion, and how it would be implemented, and described the benefits that would accrue. Equipping the internal champion to carry the message further and generate some kudos for himself in the process is natural.

Tom Searcy, author of “Hunt Big Sales” says “People only buy what they can safely sell to others, or defend if challenged. Our job as whale hunters is to equip and train the buyers to defend themselves from the attacks that will come later.”

It is in such a discussion where you first get to cross over into the advisor role, almost coaching the internal champion on how to make the case succinctly for your solution. Not only is this valuable, but you quickly pick up other cues about the company’s comfort level with the disruption that comes with change, entrenched interests and some of their agendas, priority of the need against other investments the company is making, etc.  These are exactly the kind of things that are “walking around knowledge” for the recently exited employee when he hangs out his shingle and sells services to his former employer.

In transferring this knowledge to new whales, over time, the more useful encounters you have with the prospect/customer, the more quickly you can get to equipping them to defend themselves and eventually co-own your goal. Co-owning a goal is not just implementing the solution, but helping your internal champion adequately share and evolve the problem and its solution.

Co-ownership is an exploration of how the whale’s culture generates appropriately widespread concurrence on this problem. How does it get on the priority list of problems to be attacked? How does the company’s culture establish resources for those sufficiently high-priority problems it decides to attack? What is the current decision-maker’s role in those deliberations about priority and resources?

When these questions are answered, THEN, only THEN can the sales machinery begin sketching a proposal that speaks to prospective solutions AND how to help steer consideration of those solutions through the company’s internal machinery, equipping the current decision-maker to advance the dialog, not just show a product list and price sheet from a vendor.

Trying to short-circuit this natural process is much like getting married on a first date. It only happens to a lucky few.

The sales process must itself be value-add if it is to stand out from the competition’s.  As satisfying as it would be to sit in a prospect’s office and take an order, most substantial-dollar transactions cast a 6 to 18 month shadow in front of them. Helping with the decision dynamics of getting your solution chosen is a way to equip your internal champion, to lead with value, and to stand apart from the show-up-and-throw-up types.

In our experience working with IT services organizations, the one true differentiator that separates one IT services firm from another is the relationship it has with clients. Unfortunately, this aggregate concept is tired, shop worn and not even a memorable cliché.

Yet, if the personal relationships of the firm are the true differentiator, then the co-ownership of problems that keep the project on track, on the priority list (to preserve resource allocation) and interim results appropriately socialized to maintain support.  These dimensions are what is inside the “relationship” concept and the goal of ever more familiarity is ever faster grasp of the goal of co-ownership.

The ideal scenario for finding the next whale begins with discovery of the client’s pain-points, or challenges, or problems – because then the dialog can begin about possible solutions.  All too often, in the rush to “close the deal” we’ve seen too many founders jump straight from this discovery to an internal mapping back to his company’s potential products and services for addressing the prospect’s problems.

Instead of rushing to a solution, co-ownership should begin with fresh perspective about the issues surrounding the problems, the solutions, the challenges, the benefits, untethered to promotional push to sell the products.  It’s the intellectual property that is related to the solution-provider’s area of specialty that can be scattered around like seeds, to find fertile ground wherever they can.

This really is where the payoff is when it comes time for the customer to source his next solution – it shows when the sales person gets the call telling him of the need, it shows in the degree of involvement in helping shape understanding of the need, perhaps even contributing to the internal defense document to secure funding.

This is far beyond “will the prospect know whom to call” when he needs something.  In every case, the IT services firm that wins disproportionately is the one that has established trusted relationships with clients, possibly  many years in advance of projects.

Recurring features of such a relationship include:

SKIN IN THE GAME.  Perhaps this is better framed as alignment. Do you have skin in the game? Are your fees tied to the client achieving their project goals as well as their business goals? How closely is your success tied to the client’s success?

TRANSPARENCY. This is another component of co-ownership. When your profitability is aligned with the client’s goals, there is a level of transparency and trust built into the transaction.

RELATIONSHIPS. Invariably project success will involve interactions beyond just the sales person and the internal champion – to what degree does the sales person have relationships with sources of special knowledge or experience when helping refine a solution?

ACCUMULATED LEARNING.  The essence of repeat-interaction is that no one has to start from a blank sheet to establish a baseline understanding of the challenge, the resources, the culture, the goals.  The sales person with a trusted relationship is this “on steroids.”  Not just having access to previous purchases, but having notes about issues learned while implementing the solution, technical notes, people notes, management hot-buttons, etc that broaden the reach of the internal champion as he navigates the project.

The items listed above, when appropriately investigated, can lead you to the answer of what is different. It can help you help the client mitigate risks (and in some cases share risk) as well as understand your critical thinking abilities.

If product specs, delivery times, rates, and service level guarantees are all very close and can be put on the IT “menu,” where can the differentiation come from?  As all veteran sales stars know, the differentiation happens when youhuman beings finally make sense of chaos –  when data becomes information, specs are aligned with goals, project timeline get fleshed out and dollars are allocated.

The IT Menu of services can be neat, clinical and rational; the messy part is in the eating. No one ever gets nourished consuming the menu.

In that spirit…MARKETING AND SALES FREAKS UNITE. What’s on your mind? How are you? Who are you? Where are you?

Can you take a few minutes to respond to our B-to-B Sales and Marketing Snapshot: 2010?

Take the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7NZMPVX

In concert (no pun intended) with ZoomInfo, we’ve created this survey to get a better handle on the alignment of sales and marketing.

We’re hopeful the responses will give us a sharper sense of the kind content we can provide that will help b-to-b sales and marketing pros perform their jobs better, grease the sales funnel, and, like, the Grateful Dead realized a long time ago, create life-time value with their customers. We’ll share the results in a few weeks.

To respond to the survey, please click http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7NZMPVX

Maybe this is why CSO Insights reported that only 52% of sales reps met their quota in 2009? 

Selling is the management of a very complex business process. It is complex because customers aren’t predictable, they don’t always act reasonably. They need sales because they value the continuity of contact.  Customers can’t have a relationship with your brand; they need a person to have a relationship with.  

Do the math, a top closer with a $2 million annual quota creates value worth $1000 per hour ($2,000,000/2000 hours=$1000/hour). Asking your top relationship managers to turn over stones looking for leads and updating CRM is costing your organization big. Prospecting is expensive.

In the 2010 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, fewer than one out of five study participants reported they use a prospecting plan. Yet, a full three quarters of top-performing sales organizations said they are consistent in this activity.  There is a disconnect somewhere.

At some point, as your sales organization grows, you’ll find it more cost effective to insert specialists into the process rather than ask your closers to manage the entire process. To triple sales, instead of tripling the size of the sales organization, the smart money looks for ways to triple the effectiveness of the best closers.    

So how should you do this? What is the fastest way to break away from the old habits and build new, scalable, repeatable and affordable processes for creating new sales opportunities for your best closers?

• The first task is the task of definition: Don’t fight it anymore. Go ahead and ignore the marketing purists who believe sales and marketing are different. For you, now, as you think about taking the next step in the evolution of your sales organization and as you try to stretch your very limited budget, the job of marketing is to create new opportunities for sales.  Period. The end.  The job of sales is to carefully manage those opportunities and relationships until they are ready to become customers and provide feedback on ways to streamline and improve the marketing activities.
• Get on the same page. Get on the same page with what a customer actually looks like… less than a third of Miller Heiman’s study participants agreed that their sales and marketing organizations are aligned in what their customers want and need. 
   
• Decrapify your marketing: a January 2009 Customer Experience Panel conducted by IDC Global asked “which of the following is the #1 thing a rep can do to improve the value of your relationships with the sales team and the vendor they represent?” More than 40% of respondents said: “Put aside the generic sales pitch.” This means – it is okay to go ‘off message’ or off-brand as you help your people build sustainable relationships with your customers.  
   
• Give sales people time to do what they do best: It is easy to under-estimate the amount of work required to convert a qualified lead into a sale. From justifying ROI, recruiting and coaching an internal champion, managing expectations and competitive positioning, the skills required for successful selling are very different from the skills required for successful prospecting. Expecting the same person to excel at both is unreasonable.
   
• Lead generation must become a core competency: Cold calling, tradeshows, advertising and other big marketing tactics still work for lead generation. However, the time is not far away when a consistent program of long-tail content, SEO and word of mouth marketing will become your primary source of leads.  The time is now to start understanding this reality and begin preparing your organization for the inevitable.
   
• Simple data matters: In B2B, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know that you can’t sell something to someone unless you know their email, title, mailing address, company affiliation, title and phone number. In other words, you can’t sell something to someone unless you know who they are. Getting the right data, keeping the data clean and cultivating the contact data until the prospective customer is ready to have a conversation matters more than most think.  If you love your data, your data will love you back.
   
• Slightly more complex data is even better: once your data is clean, you are then ready for the big time with lead scoring and modeling “online body language” by tracking a prospect’s visits to the website, webinar attendance, downloads and other behavior to determine the best times to enage the sales team.  You can’t do the fun stuff until you get your data under control.
   
• How many net new names did you add to the CRM each month?  Don’t be content with the existing database. Every month there should a concerted effort to bring new names into CRM.  Even if you have a huge flow of inbound leads into your website each month, the acquisition of new names ensures your marketing remains proactive as you hunt for new key accounts.

The type of person comfortable cleaning data, that understands key account selling and is happy being the guardian of data is very different from the type of person happiest in front of customers. It may be the best qualified person for this role is not a sales person at all – but rather a specialist that understands the tools and techniques of marketing AND selling

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxNaperville, where x=independently organized TED event. At our TEDxNaperville event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

Ready to sign up to attend our event?  You can register here:

http://tedxnaperville.com/Register/tabid/1878/Default.aspx

Every reptilian instinct in my body wanted to find a way to bad mouth the agency’s work. But their creative, positioning and the execution was brilliant. We couldn’t find fault in the agency’s work.

We dug deeper and asked to look at their new CRM – the foundation for the entire product launch and the basis for all of their prospecting efforts. It fueled their direct mail, email newsletters, catalog mailings and sales outreach.

The problem was immediately obvious. The turd in the proverbial punchbowl was data quality. The client had spared no expense building world class creative and but left the task of data hygiene to a group of marketing interns who would rather mop the floors than scrub data.

In the post mortem, we learned the interns received various Excel files containing old data, questionable lists, incomplete lists and exports from a variety of personal contact management applications. Then, with bubble gum and bailing wire, the master list was normalized, checked for obvious data format requirements and imported verbatim into the million dollar CRM.

In hindsight, the client was incredibly candid. No one wanted to own the data hygiene. It wasn’t sexy and it cost a lot of money to do right.  So, in the hopes of prevent future CRM data quality disasters, here are few tips you can use to get the biggest bang from your CRM dollar:

1)    Data quality is not a one-time event. Your data will get dirty and cleaning it is an ongoing set of activities so it helps to design processes that keep data clean. For example, after an email blast, a single individual should be responsible for removing or updating undeliverables. In addition, sales people should also be responsible for keeping data clean. They own the accounts and it is in their best interest to champion the data. Additional quality checks such automation of duplicate record checks also stops problems before they get out of hand.

2)    Duplicates cost you. A single company record should be tied to a set of addresses and contacts. Failure to tie together information about an account to a single company record dilutes the effectiveness of the data – especially in key account selling.

3)    Humans matter. While automation of data clean-up is useful, humans are essential to the process. Computers miss things that are usually obvious to a human such as a division’s relationship to a corporate entity.

4)    Protect your data from good intentions. With CRM, it is far too easy for individuals without an understanding of data hygiene practices to import data from external sources. An equal opportunity automated and a manual review process should always be applied to external data before it is imported.

5)    Find a balance. It is easy to be compulsive about data quality but it is not practical. Your data changes every day, making sure it is always accurate is not financially feasible. That is why it is important to strive for “good enough.”

Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.

It hurts. Now what?

1) Ask why? What didn’t we do? It is important to ask the client for candid feedback. The candid feedback is an important opportunity to improve things going forward.

2) Ask “how were we being measured?” Did we both understand the measurement criteria? Was it the right measurement criteria? Where did we overpromise or under-deliver? Was communication properly managed? What about expectations?

3) Ask “What did we learn? What was the root cause of the breakdown?”

4) Ask yourself “was the client a good client? Were they profitable? Did the underlying lack of profitability impact motivation? If so, why wasn’t the relationship renegotiated?”

What do you do when you lose a customer? What do you do to make things right? Or what do you do to prevent it from happening again?

Please share your experiences.

We just signed a new statement of work with a client (now in a new job) that we once fired.

She appreciated the fact that we stuck to our guns.

Doing a bad deal with a customer is not worth it. Doing the right thing sometimes hurts. No sales person wants to say “no” to a new deal. No one wants to walk away from revenue.

But sometimes, you must. When you put the customer’s interest ahead of your own, the good karma comes back to you. Unfortunately, it may take a while. We wrote about this last year in our article about stupid deals.

Do the right thing for your customers. Walk away if the deal doesn’t work. 

Good karma rocks!

To properly evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns, it is important to know your real cost of a lead.

Forrester Research recently revealed that about 50% of b-to-b marketers don’t use e-mail metrics to measure their campaign results(1). Do you know what your real cost of a lead is? If you are thinking about building a pay for performance (p4p) marketing campaign with your vendor, it is important to know this number before speaking with a prospective vendor.

Email campaigns are simple to measure. In fact, most email marketing tools have built-in measurement dashboards.

Overcoming inertia aside, once you start combining marketing tactics, it is deceptively difficult to determine your true cost of a lead because you must add all your costs – your tools, time and vendor costs for going to market. Assessing the real cost of lead generation requires an deep understanding of all the costs and expenses involved in the process. Think about all the activities you employ to make the phone ring: website optimization, direct sales, email newsletters, press releases, direct mail, networking, speaking engagements, etc.

There are very few companies that are using just one tactic to drive new business. In other words, I know of very few companies that are just using just cold calls or just PR to drive their entire business. The successful marketers layer multiple tactics to achieve stable lead flow.

So it should come as no surprise that the true “ballpark” cost of a lead is between $200 and $4000 depending on the market and difficulty reaching the decision maker.

Some clients think this ballpark is reasonable. Others run screaming for the door thinking that these numbers can’t possibly be true.

So the next time you think about building a p4p campaign, ask another question “where and how should we spend our money to get the best, most stable cost-per-lead” not “what do you charge for a meeting?”

This is a good article from Mark Ghosh about splogs and Content Theft.

What Mark doesn’t talk about is the impact of plagiarism on corporate blog content. How is this content being policed and protected? Do sploggers deface the brand? How can corporations curb content theft?

One of my clients, BrandProtect, is sponsoring a “Trademark Dangers on the Internet Webinar” on May 20.

Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/447375994