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.

Compensation for value received makes sense.

We wrote about our compensation model late last year.

Pay for Performance (P4P) is the alignment of our revenue to actually delivering value for a client.  This concept looks and sounds good on paper because:

• Everyone agrees on metrics/expectations before the agreement is executed
• Risk is shared
• Client communication improves

But when you dive deeper into a discussion about P4P, assigning value to a single marketing tactic such as a newsletter or a single press release can sometimes be difficult.

• Some clients don’t have reliable data or methods for measuring campaign performance
• The value of certain tactics may he hard to quantify
• How does the agency protect itself if the client does not deliver?
• Should there be a cap on P4P compensation? What would happen if we significantly outperform marketing goals?

So my questions for you…feel free to respond to any of these questions in the comments section of the website (below)…

• How do you measure the performance of an email newsletter? Is lead generation the goal of an email newsletter?
• What is a single press mention worth? How do you measure the value of a single press mention? Do you measure advertising equivalency? What if you are mentioned by a blogger? What is that worth?
• How much risk is fair for the agency to assume? How much upside is fair?
• Should clients be held accountable to the agency? Should client share the power of approval? What if the agency develops a break-thru campaign but the client doesn’t accept the recommendation? Should the client have the power to sterilize the idea and tone the ideas down? After all, the agency is now an investor in the client’s marketing.

Let us know your thoughts below…

• You have a marketing operations model (not just a collection of tasks)
• You understand the key inputs and outputs from each marketing tasks
• You use the model to understand where you should spend your time or focus attention when key metrics don’t hit the right thresholds
• You know when you need to add staff or other resources well before you get caught short.

Curious, how are you measuring? What are you measuring? How are you quantifying and justifying the unmeasureasble investments?

We provide a one-stop solution to all your data hygiene needs. Macon Raine will:

·         Clean your data with 100% business data.

·         Duplicate Data: Find and flag duplicate records for consolidation.

·         Expired Data: Identify and remove records that are no longer valid.

·         Incomplete Records: Append your incomplete records with 100% business data.

·         Junk Data: Identify and update junk data with business data.

·         Standardize your contact and company record fields.

Data cleansing is offered as a subscription so you can regularly clean and maintain your database.

How our process works:

1)      We analyze your data for quality and completeness and then we identify records that qualify to be cleaned by name, title, company, etc.

2)      We compare all possible matching records to our master data and count the matches.

3)      We append incomplete records, flag or remove all dead and duplicate records, standardize the data and import it back into your system.

During this process, we might also enhance your data by updating an incorrect record with more current and accurate information. This process is repeated on a quarterly basis to improve database churn management.

Minimize Returned Mail and Bounced Email

Every marketing professional’s worst nightmare is to develop a brilliant campaign, send it out to contacts from the CRM database-and then watch hundreds of envelopes and emails return as undeliverable.

With access to more than 1.5 million graveyard records, we helps you positively identify your dead records and reduce the expense of returned and direct mail pieces. You gain greater assurance that your campaigns will reach decision-makers-not dead-ends. In addition, we append useful information to your incomplete contacts, increasing your ability to run multi-channel marketing campaigns and enabling your marketing staff to reach out to prospects through multiple modes of communication.

Sifting through dead, duplicate, and incomplete records can kill your sales team’s morale. Meanwhile, your best prospects go unreached.  Your sales people should be selling.

For more information, contact Ben Bradley.

Thanks to the fact that many of these tools are hosted, the infrastructure and information technology costs of implementing and supporting these tools are far less than running and installing comparable in-house enterprise applications. Unfortunately, the costs associated with integration, business process analysis, user training, user adoption and application support are the same as any installed application. 

Perhaps due to the ease of “turning on” these applications, many organizations often overlook the importance integration, business process analysis, user training, user adoption and application support.

Macon Raine provides support for all of these activities and can help to ensure the successful implementation and adoption of hosted CRM and lead automation/nurturing tools within your organization.

ADMINSTRATOR PROGRAM

Macon Raine created the ADMINISTRATOR PROGRAM to help organizations fully leverage their CRM investment and overcome the implementation and administration challenges experienced by some customers.  Macon Raine will provide your organization with the business and technical expertise required to successfully utilize Salesforce.com for a fraction of the cost of a full time employee.  Plans start for a little as $1000 per month.

ANALYSIS

Hosted CRM tools are powerful and flexible. These tools can be configured address the requirements of any organization.  Macon Raine can ensure that your investment in CRM is meeting your needs by performing a thorough analysis of your sales process and your use of CRM.

IMPLEMENTATION

A successful implementation of any hosted CRM platform requires disciplined coordination of all activities from defining business requirements to final release and everything in between.  Macon Raine provides an end-to-end solution encompassing all aspects of a successful implementation including ADMINISTRATOR SUPPORT following release.

SYSTEM INTEGRATION

Integrating hosted CRM systems with existing enterprise applications can be challenging.  Macon Raine has extensive experience using the latest technologies to expose legacy applications through web services. Our development team has expertise in Service Oriented Architectures.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Hosted CRM tools provide flexible reporting tools to allow users to easily create simple, online reports.  Complex analytical reports are more difficult to create and may require access to data in ways your selected CRM tool does not natively support.  Macon Raine can develop and implement sophisticated analytical reports and dashboards to deliver the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for your organization to the people who need it.

TRAINING

Proper training is essential to user adoption and user adoption is essential for a successful implementation.  Macon Raine is a leader in iterative training methodologies and can deliver the custom in-person training your company needs.

DATA MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE 

Macon Raine can help implement controls to reduce outdated, duplicated, or improperly stored information and improve data quality.  Macon Raine can also develop systems and processes to move data back and forth between your hosted CRM platform and other systems or help transfer legacy data into your CRM platform. 

CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING

Macon Raine has a creative services team that can help your organization develop and run a full marketing program.  Macon Raine can help with activities as simple as email blasts and direct mail to multi-national media campaigns.

For more information about these services, please contact Ben Bradley.

Account Intelligence: Monitoring prospect or competitor press releases, tradeshows, conferences and seminars to keep your sales force up to date and informed on the activities of high-level accounts and industries.

Customer Research: Our market research capability is entirely focused on the identification of actionable, market level intelligence. Services provided include: Opportunity Scanning Program, Channel Marketing Partner Identification, Lost Account Tracking and Trade Show Intelligence

New Product/Concept Development Intelligence: Obtain competitors’, customers’ and other stakeholders’ assessment of a proposed new product features, functionalities and/or product concepts. Identify aided and unaided product trade-off decisions, preferences and reasons for product acceptance or rejection. Recommend a product development roadmap based on research input.

Competitive Analysis: A complete competitive analysis which includes identification, profiling, product features of the competitor along with identification of prospective competitors and overall understanding of the players in the market. We can also profile competitors based on their strategy, annual spend, brand value proposition, key customer values, and messaging tactics for different target markets (e.g., corporate vs. small business). Identify the channel’s and end-users’ perceptions about competitors, their brands and the associated messaging. Define appropriate messaging to achieve optimal competitive differentiation, maximum customer recall, and desired association of brand with key customer perceptions.

Strategic Account Intelligence: Identify a short list of accounts known to be early adopters, then investigate their purchase criteria and “hot button” issues, decision making processes, budgets, planned projects, etc. to pre-qualify them for the client’s sales force.

Market Research and Strategy Validation: Macon Raine will survey your target market to help you better understand the impact of your sales message. Savvy marketers test their value proposition with actual decision-makers prior to launching a full-scale marketing campaign.

Target Database Assembly: Your direct mail and telemarketing programs are too valuable to waste on out-of-date prospect databases or over-used commercial lists. BWMG will craft a highly accurate database of your best prospects — companies and contacts — as matched to your specific sales criteria.

How are fees structured?

Our fees are structured with specific performance milestones (with success fees, commissions, and or bonuses) defined for each task.

Before you contact us, understand a few things…

·          We specialize in serving business-to-business organizations, not consumer-facing.

·          Our customers have relationship-centric sales processes.

·          We typically report to the President, CEO or VP of Marketing & Sales.

Our specialty

We focus on impacting the sales pipeline. The sales process begins with the identification of targets and ends when the target becomes a customer. It follows that all (okay, most) B2B marketing should mirror this natural process that includes five progressive stages: Targets, Suspects, Prospects, Proposal and Customer.  We help B2B companies increase their lead flow with a smart combination of direct mail, research, e-mail, PR, user groups/roundtables, the web and killer content. What we do better than anyone is tie all these things together.

What does a typical project look like?

Here’s an example of a typical project…

·          To migrate Targets into Suspects into Prospects, we execute a series of monthly mini-campaigns as part of an on-going outreach effort.

·          These campaigns are monitored and managed using an existing CRM tool. We’ll connect via the web or sync to your ACT!, SalesLogix, Goldmine, Microsoft CRM, SugarCRM or SalesForce.com system.

·          Each mini-campaign tests a different segment (market, offer, approach, door opener, response device, etc.) while maintaining your corporate marketing message and the consistency of your brand.

·          In addition, when necessary, we also perform many needed “blocking and tackling” steps:

o    Help you harvest email addresses via telemarketing, event registration, white paper downloads and third party programs.

o    Optimize your website for self-registration, newsletter sign-up/unsubscribe, addition of a blog, improve SEO, etc.

o    Database segmentation – splicing your current database to properly identify each contact’s position in the sales cycle.

o    Move Targets, Suspects and Prospects into a drip marketing campaign fueled primarily by lower-cost email, telephone, fax and direct mail.

Getting Started

Getting started is easy. Just call and schedule a free telephone consultation with Ben Bradley at 630-221-9844.

Our graphic designers and programmers have created many unique campaigns and can efficiently meet any organization’s needs for logos and other graphic identity elements, as well as search engine friendly event promotion materials, newsletters, print and electronic advertising, Web site design, HTML and Flash email.

Our years of experience as media relations counselors ensure that our clients’ marketing messages effectively reach key stakeholders in order to educate the appropriate targets about your products and services.

We recognize that strategic public relations must often extend beyond the ability to drive awareness and generate media coverage. In order to effectively complement direct-to-market efforts, PR efforts must be aligned with your marketing and sales efforts. 

This is imperative because a PR program can impact response in a number of ways.  One company may need to differentiate itself in a cluttered or maturing market, while another may need to reposition itself in order to enter a surging market, and other companies often leverage our media relations skills in order to prompt new behavior from a target audience.

Our team understands how to effectively develop and leverage media relationships within a specific industry or profession. We are skilled at using media relations to promote a variety of news, from events like product launches and new executive appointments to mergers and lay-offs.

Our expertise extends to the following practices:

• Communications Strategy
• Positioning
• Audience-specific Messaging
• Media and Analyst Relations
• Media Coaching
• Media Kits
• Case Studies and Testimonials
• Speech Writing
• Bylined Articles and White Papers