The Last Mile: Making the Dream a Reality
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Michael McLaren, CEO, MRM/McCann "B2B companies have heard the hype: Modern marketing means delivering personalized experiences across a connected customer journey - all fueled by data-driven customer insights. The marketing industry has subsequently exploded with new technology and services - all with the end goal of delivering on this promise. But while marketers have made huge strides, this promised nirvana still exists more in slideware than the real world. In this session, we discuss how companies are closing the last-mile gap between the dream and reality, including the following: • Realizing the full value of platform investments • Achieving a true end-to-end customer view • Delivering relevant and impactful experiences • Optimizing content and offers through the channel • Doing it all in real-time"
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- 9. Three Overlooked B2B Realities
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Editor's Notes
- We all know what the vision looks like— Simply put, the goal we’re all aiming for has three parts: A connected, real-time customer journey that leads from awareness to purchase to advocacy
- 2. Through which we deliver completely real-time and personalized experiences to our audiences
- 3. All fueled by customer insights derived through a rich and comprehensive treasure trove of data (Michael--Here’s where we can give a nod to DemandBase—DemandBase’s role in enriching the data, helping us get to true account-based marketing.)
- And this is of course the right vision. It’s not a pipe dream. Because it is what we have to do given the challenges that marketers face: Relentlessly growing customer expectations Two thirds of B2B companies say the way they interact with customers must fundamentally change as a result of B2C (Forrester) Today the single biggest driver of B2B customer loyalty (53%) is purchase experience—compare that to value-to-price ratio, which is only 9% (The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, 2011) The vast majority of B2B buyers start the process with search—an in-bound journey. But most companies still focus their marketing budgets on outbound journeys. (The 90% stat we have comes from a source that doesn’t list a source…so I wouldn’t use the exact %)
- So we can all describe the vision we want to reach, and why it’s imperative we get there. That’s all becoming motherhood and apple pie. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe this already. But we all know it’s so dramatically easier said that done. What’s fascinating is the different ways companies are tackling this strategic marketing imperative--how companies are getting there—and what we can learn from those stories. From successes and mistakes At MRM, we’ve had the privilege to work with B2B customers on this marketing trajectory for more than (25?) years. This experience has given us a vantage point from which we can see common frustrations and also map out common blueprints for the best way to achieve the vision.
- MRM & DemandBase hold in common
- No decision is made alone. The larger the purchase, the more decision makers in the process. This means: we must create consensus to drive sales. You need to understand the entire “decision stack” and how the conversation flows among them. There is no such thing as an impulse purchase. The average purchase takes between 16-24 months. So, we must inspire and captivate people through every phase of the sales cycle. Business decisions are filled with anxiety. There’s a lot on the line. Careers can be made or broken on a key business decision. It is more emotionally taxing than a typical B2C purchase decision. Yet, B2B brands tend to default to the rational. A recent PWC report said that 58% of all buyers use intuition or advice from peers to make their decisions, while only 29% use data and analytics. So, we have to balance the logic with the emotional needs of our audience.
- From this experience, we see good news and bad news So the bad news first: No one in B2B has yet really reached the goal. All of our clients ask us: Who in the B2B world is doing this right or well? The answer is: No one has really mastered it. But we have a lot of good examples to look to on the B2C side. Of note, Starbucks. Starbucks is a clear leader in mobile, digital, and loyalty. Starbucks has over seven million mobile wallet payments per week, and roughly 1/5th of their transactions via their mobile card app. As a customer, here are the things we’re learning from Starbucks (and B2C largely): Learn about me and remember: Starbucks employees make a serious effort to connect with customers, instilling a personalized experience and securing customer loyalty. Starbucks employees not only know their customers by name, but also their regular orders. Greeting Michael with a question like, “So, the usual?” and a cheeky smile does wonders for customer loyalty. And from a loyalty perspective, over a quarter of Starbucks revenue are made from pre-paid loyalty cards. They use card information to segment consumers and set up business rules based on purchase behavior. This allows Starbucks to pump out customized offers immediately, often via their mobile devices. In the past, that purchase information may have only been available on a weekly basis, but now it’s instant. Pick up where we left off. As loyalty pioneers, Starbucks effectively “digitized the punchcard,” opening the doors for a seamless, engaging, and “stickier” experience. And you won’t find the Starbucks app in your underwear drawer. And do it across channels // across devices. Starbucks launched its complete mobile platform on January 11, 2011 and is regarded as the most successful mobile payment system in the U.S. The app is ubiquitous and works on the majority of smartphones. Provide me with relevant information and experience I want: Starbucks stores are everywhere, coffee is purchased habitually, and the app incentivizes regular purchases through its rewards-loyalty program. It’s worth noting that the app's success is not due to the ease of payment with a phone - it has been successful despite the fact that it is not more convenient than credit or debit cards or cash. It’s clearly offering some true value to the customer. Starbucks also gives the customer a voice in the development decisions. Through MyStarbucksIdea.com, customers and Starbucks-app lovers have a forum to submit and share ideas to make the Starbucks experience better. With this crowdsourcing approach, the Starbucks development community has an innovation pipeline of ideas – straight from the people that matter most. Recommend products/services that I actually want: Starbucks is even teaming up with other companies, like the car-ride service Uber, to offer even more expansive experiences through the app. You could say Starbucks is creating a kind of VIP experience for its customers. Straight from the app, you can order your black car service to pick you up and take you to your local Starbucks, where your drink is already waiting for you when you arrive – all because you’ve already ordered and paid ahead of time through the app. It will also have your favorite daily newspaper loaded on your phone ready to read along with your coffee, and then have your private driver return you home, all without ever leaving the app. Now that's the kind of app (and experience) that stands out. Sounds great. But why can’t we do that in B2B?
- On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: Proliferation of technology—it is almost impossible to keep up. Gartner has famously predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs When Scott Brinker first began publishing his Marketing Technology Supergraphic in 2011, it had 100 companies on it. The 2015 version has 1,876 companies in 43 categories—and he admits this list is not comprehensive. 2. Which leads to a second common frustration—how do you figure out which of these 1,876+ solutions is the right fir for the your company’s marketing automation “stack”? On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 3. The third common frustration is marrying people and process in a corporate environment still rife with siloes. We’ve been talking about about people/process/technology for more than 30 years. But because we work in siloes—we build “process by evolution” and have very little ability to build the end-to-end processes we need to deliver a completed and connected customer journey. On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 4. Another outcome of siloes is that governance becomes a real issues. When a company decides to stop “spamming” its customer lists and get to an orchestrates communication process—who gets to decide the business rules? Whose rules win out? And who gets to enforce those rules? Who gets to decide & enforce tagging & tracking policies? This is a real issue for our clients.
- On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: Proliferation of technology—it is almost impossible to keep up. Gartner has famously predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs When Scott Brinker first began publishing his Marketing Technology Supergraphic in 2011, it had 100 companies on it. The 2015 version has 1,876 companies in 43 categories—and he admits this list is not comprehensive. 2. Which leads to a second common frustration—how do you figure out which of these 1,876+ solutions is the right fir for the your company’s marketing automation “stack”? On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 3. The third common frustration is marrying people and process in a corporate environment still rife with siloes. We’ve been talking about about people/process/technology for more than 30 years. But because we work in siloes—we build “process by evolution” and have very little ability to build the end-to-end processes we need to deliver a completed and connected customer journey. On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 4. Another outcome of siloes is that governance becomes a real issues. When a company decides to stop “spamming” its customer lists and get to an orchestrates communication process—who gets to decide the business rules? Whose rules win out? And who gets to enforce those rules? Who gets to decide & enforce tagging & tracking policies? This is a real issue for our clients.
- On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: Proliferation of technology—it is almost impossible to keep up. Gartner has famously predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs When Scott Brinker first began publishing his Marketing Technology Supergraphic in 2011, it had 100 companies on it. The 2015 version has 1,876 companies in 43 categories—and he admits this list is not comprehensive. 2. Which leads to a second common frustration—how do you figure out which of these 1,876+ solutions is the right fir for the your company’s marketing automation “stack”? On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 3. The third common frustration is marrying people and process in a corporate environment still rife with siloes. We’ve been talking about about people/process/technology for more than 30 years. But because we work in siloes—we build “process by evolution” and have very little ability to build the end-to-end processes we need to deliver a completed and connected customer journey. On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 4. Another outcome of siloes is that governance becomes a real issues. When a company decides to stop “spamming” its customer lists and get to an orchestrates communication process—who gets to decide the business rules? Whose rules win out? And who gets to enforce those rules? Who gets to decide & enforce tagging & tracking policies? This is a real issue for our clients.
- On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: Proliferation of technology—it is almost impossible to keep up. Gartner has famously predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs When Scott Brinker first began publishing his Marketing Technology Supergraphic in 2011, it had 100 companies on it. The 2015 version has 1,876 companies in 43 categories—and he admits this list is not comprehensive. 2. Which leads to a second common frustration—how do you figure out which of these 1,876+ solutions is the right fir for the your company’s marketing automation “stack”? On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 3. The third common frustration is marrying people and process in a corporate environment still rife with siloes. We’ve been talking about about people/process/technology for more than 30 years. But because we work in siloes—we build “process by evolution” and have very little ability to build the end-to-end processes we need to deliver a completed and connected customer journey. On the B2B side, we see our clients wrestling with common frustrations: 4. Another outcome of siloes is that governance becomes a real issues. When a company decides to stop “spamming” its customer lists and get to an orchestrates communication process—who gets to decide the business rules? Whose rules win out? And who gets to enforce those rules? Who gets to decide & enforce tagging & tracking policies? This is a real issue for our clients.
- But now for the good news: We’ve made big strides We’re seeing B2B brands start to close in on the last mile. Some we’re helping and some we’re intently watching from a distance. So how do you close that last mile? If it were easy we’d see much more of it in the B2B space. Let’s get into this
- As we’ve worked with clients, we’ve found four essential things we need to do to close the gap: Finding the moments that matter – GM: if we know the moments that matter most to our customers, we know their journey with out brand and where and when we need to engage them. This type of view allows for the prioritization of technologies that focus on delivering on the moments that matter. Codifying a strategic blueprint – Cisco (or “numerous clients”): Once we know the moments that matter, we then need to understand HOW to engage in those moments. The strategic blueprint clarifies how a brand can engage with relevant messaging, content, and experiences, which also makes it clear in turn the best technology “fit” in the stack. Breaking siloes – Cisco: B2B companies have been on a technology buying spree, but they haven’t been able to connect them in a way to deliver on the connected journey. Much of this is due to marketing technology being implemented in a siloed, fragmented way. Getting to governance using a carrot and a stick – CSC: It takes constant vigilance to enforce the strategy, methods, and rules behind the connected customer journey
- Lots of brands say they are putting the customer first – it’s a huge buzz word. But it takes more than fancy talk. It takes a serious, company wide commitment. An obsession. As demonstrated by GM’s Customer Experience Mapping initiative. This is a case for finding out what to solve for. Building a connected customer journey requires answering specific questions about the moments that matter most for customers.
- Closing the last mile
- Two important issues we saw with many of our customer: Codifying a strategic blueprint – Cisco (or “numerous clients”): Once we know the moments that matter, we then need to understand HOW to engage in those moments. The strategic blueprint clarifies how a brand can engage with relevant messaging, content, and experiences, which also makes it clear in turn the best technology “fit” in the stack Employing all of these sophisticated systems—but still being ineffectual because they weren’t being clear on the problem they were really trying to solve with those systems, and Every time they set about trying to point all of these systems as a problem—absolutely reinventing the wheel on the way they went about it.
- So: this is a model we’re starting to use with a lot of our clients—for every marketing initiative or campaign. It’s a way of bringing together all the individual strands that have to come together to create the optimal connected customer journey. Most importantly, it’s a way of establishing the problem we need to solve, and to build institutional muscle memory around the best way of achieving success. Strategic foundation: Who are all the people we need to reach who are going to be involved in the purchase decision? What do we know about them—from a data set perspective and a mindset perspective? How many of these do we already know—and how many new prospects do we need to go find? And—incredibly important in a B2B environment—how do all those individual agents interact during the purchase process? What is the compelling story we have to tell—and how should that story unfold across the journey for each audience? 2. Engagement: what is the experience we need our audiences to have at each point of the journey? Where wan we find our audience? What is the right outbound journey—and the right inbound journey? 3. What is the data and analytics foundation What’s our learning plan and our testing methodology? What are our data requirements? How are we going to report and optimize? Finally, how are we going to ensure creative impact? We can have a stellar engagement plan in place, and an awe-inspiring data & analytics structure in place—and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference if we can connect in a meaningful way with our targets. And that requires creative that speaks to our B2B audiences not just rationally, but also emotionally.
- Objective: Get to a coherent strategy on measurement, tracking, and performance optimization Problem: Huge number of stakeholders doing different things, with different opinions, and different visions of the desired outcome. The problem wasn’t the technology; the problem was getting different siloes within the organization working together toward a common goal. We requested a meeting with the 5-10 key stakeholders on the subject. 45 people showed up to the call. After a confusing first few minutes of the meeting, the senior client said: “It’s like you are all lined up at the same goal and trying to kick the ball into the same net…but you don’t even know where the ball is or what it even looks like.” The great thing about Cisco: They are eager to make the changes necessary to get this right. After this chaotic meeting, we worked with them to get to a clear & actionable path: Designing a current state model—which identified 5 key breaks in the system that prevented their goal of end-to-end performance tracking. Crafting a multi-track project with initiatives aimed at closing all 5 gaps. The project was designed with clear track owners, responsibilities, and communications lines for resolving issues. Designing the “Optimal Solution” as a vision for the end-state. This provided a clear articulation of the vision, methodology, and governance needed to get from current state to future state. Designing a phased roadmap—enabling us to show quick wins and improvements while also working toward the long-term vision Including change management throughout the process—working with stakeholders to get bottom-up buy-in while also keeping executives informed of direction and progress. This couldn’t have happened without a strong senior executive at the helm who was instrumental in moving his organization from dysfunction to a clear path forward.
- Tangible Outcomes of Breaking Down the Siloes: 1- For the first time, established a clear, cross-department/channel view of the current state and the real gaps in customer data flow and the customer experience. 2- The cross-department team has aligned on a vision of what the optimal state method to tagging and tracking and multi-channel attribution 3- The team has aligned on a cross-department concept model for instrumenting the optimal state methodology AND
- 4- A pilot has been identified with a full implementation plan for launching and testing the method and instrumentation
- Original Notes Below: CSC story: still needs to be fleshed out. CSC has made great strides in getting to personalized content experiences for their customers. They are a DemandBase customer—they are able to match inbound customers to their Web site with known account information—which allows them to surface the appropriate content depending on the specific needs of the individual and the account. One of the major accomplishments is that they’ve figured out how to do this across a very extended purchase process—12 to 18 months and beyond. This required a coordinated effort across the company—including a corporate-wide framework for tagging & tracking and a significant governance effort. How to get to this kind of governance? CSC was successful by using both a carrot and a stick. The stick: A senior executive who understood the problem, understood what was at stake, and was willing to issue a mandate: This is how it will be done. As you know, however, this is not always an effective strategy. The trick was to combine it with an appealing carrot: Data. The group working on this was able to go to the individual stakeholders and say: This is the data I know about your customers. If we can all work together on this—this is the additional data I’ll have on your customers. And when we have this data, this is what you’ll be able to do. It was a very strong incentive to get everyone onboard. Chris’ content below: Background Briefly, the CSC story is one of a site redesign gone terribly right. The initial RFP was for a site redesign based on an existing brand, but to support an entirely new business model. CSC was primarily a US government and military contractor with revenues in the $16+BN range. They realized that the US Govt would not be able to continue to spend at the pace they had been spending, especially in military spending with two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beginning to wind down. At the time of the RFP, CSC had decided to make a serious run at the enterprise market – they were, after all, a very capable and competitive enterprise software and outsourcing shop on par with the Accentures and Deloittes of the world. Thus, a key component of the RFP was not only to redesign the site but also to create a long-term platform that would support their enterprise growth objectives. The Challenge Nick Panayi, who will be at the DemandBase conference, led the effort and we met with him extensively. He challenged us to develop a platform that would support long-term digital marketing efforts, regardless of where those efforts might take the company. And we had a very short time frame for the site – about 5 months total to re-do a site of about 20K pages. Chris Marin was, at that time, a relatively young, but rising star and over the next several months, Chris Marin, myself, and a joint UX team from SLC and NY engineered every interaction of the site into a purposeful user experience. (We also did all the coding of new templates, integrated approx 35 external applications, and generally did yeoman’s work 24/7). The Importance of content and data At the time, CSC had almost no data on their prospective customers and had no authoritative voice of their own. What they did have was a veritable plethora of scientists writing long and dry technical papers. These are great when answering a multi-billion meteorological services support contract for NASA, but loses something when re-purposed for the civilian enterprise world. Jori Waterman from the NY office taught the SLC content writes a new trick called linguistic profiling and SLC developed a new CSC “voice” and wrote many hundreds of pages of content using the language appropriate for the intended audiences. It should be noted that the new enterprise focus was accretive and not a replacement for their government/military business. Thus, the multiple “voices” needed to (and still need to) coexist within the same experience framework. We accomplished this by developing personalization strategies that were based on data that they didn’t have at the time, but that we knew they would get in the future. This was a fairly novel approach at the time – building for a future that we couldn’t see very well, but were able to make educated guesses about. Since MRM’s involvement, CSC has solved for a very significant problem – they have developed a method for tracking and attribution of user behavior over sales cycles that can last for up to 2 years. This is an unheard of length of time to track a single user and attribute their every interaction against conversion events. MRM has had a hand in this through our post-launch support and consulting work, but mostly the honors go to Chris Marin. DemandBase About a year after we finished the site, DemandBase entered the picture as a way to inject additional information about anonymous visitors that were hitting the site. CSC was able to start a very basic account-based marketing approach that to this day allows them to make highly relevant content recommendations to anonymous uses, or known users who may not have expressed a preference. It also helps them know how active a particular account may be in researching information delivered by any member of the CSC sales team. In the meantime, CSC launched a series of newsletters that leverage all these brilliant scientists they have. Papers are re-written in the style and tone established by MRM, and made into more snackable formats for syndication to search and social channels. DemandBase’s primary purpose at CSC is data enrichment, though they experiment with other ways to inject data and content into off-domain channels. Results 1st year growth in Sales Accepted Leads of 267%. Year over year numbers are not shared but we have heard “under the table” that the YoY trajectory is in this range and consistent. It is an astonishing growth record. It is also a testament to the site’s well founded design that they have not significantly tinkered with it since we completed it. UX, creative and content are all pretty much the same as when we launched. I guess if it ain’t broke… One of the more impressive accolades the site has received (and they have received many “beltway” awards) is a quote by Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and the Occam’s Razor blog – a highly regarded personality in the digital marketing industry and a personal hero of Chris Marin, our client. “A good example, for e-commerce and non-ecommerce sites, is CSC. Look at the colors. Look at the icons. Look at the way the text is laid out, how video is incorporated, the structure of the site and everything else. Your first job is to beat them at everything.” - Avinash Kaushik Other Notes Chris Marin has been asked to be a guest speaker at the Adobe Summit in SLC for 3 years running, even though the site is not based on Adobe AEM. His only Adobe product is a rather tepid use of Adobe Analytics. This because of the total approach to user experience design and management portrayed on their site. Chris and I meet when he comes into town and, to this day, he thanks me that MRM was part of the project. We launched not only a great site, but a couple of really bright careers.
- NO GIMMIES – many haven’t closed the last mile yet because it isn’t easy. It takes some heavy lifting and organizational will power (in addition to some trail blazing assistance along the way) NO SILVER BULLETS – the technology is great, but there isn’t a magic button that eliminates the Tech Soup and connects the stack across the customer journey PASSION – it takes effort and focus to overcome organizational inertia
- NO GIMMIES – many haven’t closed the last mile yet because it isn’t easy. It takes some heavy lifting and organizational will power (in addition to some trail blazing assistance along the way) NO SILVER BULLETS – the technology is great, but there isn’t a magic button that eliminates the Tech Soup and connects the stack across the customer journey PASSION – it takes effort and focus to overcome organizational inertia