I’m not sure we quite achieved that at Velocity’s first live (streamed on Ustream) Marketing Masters one-hour-long interview with John Watton,  Director Global Brand & Marketing at Expedia Affiliate Network. But it was tremendous fun and John was terrific. As Goldwyn also said “we spared no expense to save money on this one”, but, despite that, the session seemed to work well.  (You guys can be the judges on that since we intend to make most of the discussion available over the next few weeks, broken up into chapters covering the subjects we talked about.)

So what did we discuss? A bunch of stuff:

–like the changing role of the CMO in B2B tech (John’s qualified to talk on that one having had senior marketing roles at Oracle, Microsoft, Ariba and others as well as EAN.);

–the shape and skills  for in-house teams in the digital B2B world;

–the importance of marketing automation and how to get the most out of it (answer: start small, use common sense and don’t try to overreach);

–why it’s important to experiment with social media, even if you’re the most senior marketer in the room (as John says, social is not going away anytime soon, so senior marketers have to understand it in order to deploy it);

–content marketing strategy (mainly what content works best where and for whom)

–and marketing’s changing relationshipe with the sales force.

An hour spins past quickly when you’re having fun, but I wish we’d spent more time talking about the last of these. We meet lots of sales driven companies as part of the business development process here at Velocity. A lot of them are really dis-satisfied with marketing and have had two or sometimes three senior heads of marketing in the recent past. When we talk to them, it’s often really clear why. Sales is looking for compliant marketing, marketing that just does what its told and more often than not marketing that’s locked in the 20th Century. They haven’t realised that buyers don’t buy like they used to and competitors don’t compete like they used to. And that the best sales people don’t sell as they used to.

John was the first user of Marketo in Europe back in 2008, when he was at Shipserv. A big achievement there was his transformation of the role and position of the marketing department. Because he was able to apply marketing thinking and strategy to the company’s web site, digital campaigns and content, he was able  to turn marketing – which until then had been seen as just a service to sales – into the organ that owned and filled the sales funnel. Because he delivered the leads that the direct sales force needed, marketing became the force that it should be. Marketing transformed from simply making the arrangements into making the rain.

Anyway, you’ll be able to see the discussion over the next few weeks. We declare the initial experiment a success and we plan to do more. If you have suggestions about B2B marketers we should invite, please send them to us. If you see ways we can make the output even better, feel free to let us know. But remember we are all acolytes of  Goldwyn at Velocity: “I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.”

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Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B Marketing Automation, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, B@B marketing, Content, Content Marketing

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I’ve long had the wish to sit across a table from some of the world’s best B2B marketing minds, and fire questions at them. I want to find out what makes them tick, what makes them succeed and what knowledge they can share with you and me about the dark art of technology marketing.

We’re making this happen now with John Watton, a long-time friend, a client (first at ShipServ, now at Expedia), an award-winning B2B marketer, a panelist in Econsultancy’s Innovation Awards and a fan of Chelsea and new gadgets.

John and I will have a 1:1 video interview here at Velocity on the evening of 2 February, which you can follow live on Ustream (tech gods willing!), on twitter (@velocitytweets, for sound bites) or in subsequent v-log posts here. If you want a reminder of the interview, fire us an email (actually send it to Ryan - ryan@velocitypartners.co.uk) and we’ll push an email at you that morning.

In his understated way, John’s become a giant and leading light among us B2B technology marketers. He single-handedly brought marketing automation kicking and screaming over the Pond. He was the first user of Marketo in Europe. His pedigree reads like a top 10 in B2B tech: Oracle, SAP, Ariba and Microsoft. And he’s an experimenter and innovator par excellence.

So we’ve asked him to come in for an exclusive video interview. I’ll sit with John for a good hour and pull out every insight I can manage, and see if I can put him on the spot for some predictions and expectations for the future of B2B technology marketing.

So here are some of the kinds of things I plan to throw at @jwatton (but not all of them; I’ll keep some hardballs up my sleeve):

• How are the marketing organizations of B2B technology companies changing?
• I know you’re an active user of social media (twitter, blogs, feeds, etc.). Do you feel like social media is a channel that can scale in B2B marketing?
• What’s become achievable to B2B marketers that wasn’t achievable before?
• What kinds of things, in terms of services, products or solutions, would you like to see for B2B marketers that you’re not seeing today?
• What are the qualities in a B2B marketer that would make you think “I’m hiring that person tomorrow”?
• B2B and B2C seem to be converging in the software space. Do you think the two will be separable in 5-10 years?
• Do you feel like there’s a unique B2B marketing community in London? Why?
• B2B businesses typically don’t believe in or trust marketing? Should they?
• Who in the B2B technology marketing field would you most like to interview or talk to?

If you have any specific questions you’d like me to make to John, drop a comment and maybe we’ll put it to the B2B marketing master.

Hope you enjoy the show!

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Martha,  joins us after two-and-a-half years at Milestone Marketing in Utrecht in the Netherlands, a well-regarded B2B marketing shop specialising in all things digital. While she was there, she worked mainly with DSM,  the multi-national life and materials sciences company that sells into the global pharma, nutrition and medical devices markets, among many others. She advised DSM on digital campaigns, digital channels and building communities. She worked closely with creative teams to develop thought leadership and content marketing programmes across the various channels. Pretty much what she’ll be doing here in fact.

I’m sure she’ll do a post soon introducing herself, as soon as she has her feet under the table (though she doesn’t have a desk yet), but as well as being an expert in all things digital,  she speaks Polish, German and English like a native. And has fluent French (having spent a semester in Paris at University Pantheon-Assas). Oh, and good Spanish (having spent  a few months studying in Rosario, Argentina). Did I mention that she can also handle Dutch, having been there for a while before Milestone/DSM (she did a Masters(with distinction) in Economics and Business at the world-renowned Erasmus University in Rotterdam)? She also has a diploma in Latin. We now have more languages at Velocity within Velocity than we do people as Martha’s nap hand joins Ryan’s excellent  Norwegian (after nine years in Oslo) and Jim, who’s learning Czech so9 he can speak to his prospective mother in law. And Doug speaks American.

Here’s a picture of Martha eating cup cakes with Doug on her first day. Hopefully all Velocity’s friends and clients will run into her in the next few weeks.

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Hosted by BrightTalk, the other panelists are old Velocity chum, John Watton, VP Marketing at Expedia’s Affilate Network (and formerly CMO at ShipServ), Teri O Neal, NetApp’s EMEA marketing automation manager and yours truly. John Sweeney, UK managing director of DemandGen, the marketing automation experts is acting as interrogator in chief.

We’ll be talking about a bunch of stuff including how to build a successful lead nurturing programme, how to re-cycle existing content, how to get buy in from sales. And, I’m sure, a bunch of other relevant stuff.  50 or 60 people have already registered, so it should be a good one. Hope to see you there.

It’s free and taking place next Wednesday, 25 May at 2.00pm GMT (9.00am EST and 6.00am PST) and will last an hour and 15 minutes.

You can register here

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In discussions about the difference between marketing in a B2C, as opposed to a B2B world, these points are all relevant. But anyone who has debated this issue not only needs to get out more, but also usually ends up at what is perceived to be a self evident truth: B2C marketing, it is said, is much more about building an emotional connection with the prospect than the supposedly much more ‘rational’ B2B environment.

On the face of it buying a new cloud-based CRM system to replace that old ragbag collection of sales support apps feels as if it should be a completely rational decision. You identify the need, draw up a shortlist, evaluate the proposals and then select a winning vendor (see Doug’s Four Steps to a B2B Sale here). What can be more rational than that?

But weirdly, emotion may play a much bigger role than most people think. A TED video by Simon Sinek argues persuasively that in the new world, people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it; and then justify their belief with all the rational stuff you give them. He bases his argument on the different roles of the neo-cortex and limbic systems in the brain. The latter controls human decision-making, but not language (which is where the neo-cortex comes in). Using examples like the Wright Brothers, Martin Luther King and Apple, his argument is that if you talk about what you believe rather than what you do, you’ll attract people who believe what you believe. If you’re involved in B2B marketing, it’s definitely worth spending the 18 minutes or so listening to Sinek’s argument.

I’m not an expert in brain chemistry, but this argument really rings true. And it’s supported by some research on what distinguishes high performance salespeople from their less well-performing colleagues undertaken a couple of  years ago by Dr. Colin Coulson-Thomas under the banner of the Winning Companies; Winning People research programme.  (This was brought to my attention by Don Fuller of  Cotoco, a company that specialises in helping companies improve sales performance.)

Broadly speaking, Coulson-Thomas argues that the B2B sales process in most companies is as follows (see diagram below).

B2B sales process

Most companies start by explaining what the service or product they offer actually is and then follow up with why it makes sense for the specific prospect in question,  before moving on to explaining how it works. The hope is that over these three steps, the sales person will have built up enough trust to close the sale.

The Winning Companies; Winning People research, (based on research among 4000 companies) echoing Sinek, argues that the best sales performers actually start at the other end of the process. They start out looking to sell what their company stands for and believes in first. Then they use all the other rational stuff to support their case, or help their prospect make the case for the sale internally.

A recent blog by our good friend Jason Ball makes the same point, quoting Annette Simmons’ Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins:

“People don’t want information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith – faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell.”

The implication for B2B marketing is pretty clear: you can stand out from the crowd and sell more effectively if you concentrate on marketing that tells the world what you believe in. By doing that in the right way,  you can get prospects really excited and enlist them to your cause. You’ll attract people who believe what you believe and they’ll help you attract others like them.

It works for Apple, so why not you?

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Watton ships out

After three-and-a-half years, one of our favourite B2B marketers, top clients and all-round great egg, John Watton is moving on from his job as CMO at ShipServ, the leading ship supplies e-marketplace. Elected B2B Marketer of the year in 2009, he has transformed ShipServ’s fortunes on a limited budget over that period. He was one of the first European users of Marketo (ShipServ itself is the longest serving SalesForce customer in Europe) and drives Google Analytics like Lewis Hamilton on steroids.

We started working with John in December 2007 and he was effectively our first agency client. He is the source of much of our thought in these pages on lead nurturing and B2B marketing in general. We thought we’d take the opportunity to ask him some questions about his time at ShipServ and what he’s learned.

Some background

A typical shipping company spends almost $600000 per ship per year on operational supplies of spare parts, provisions, paint, and consumables. The industry in total spends over $70 billion every year – and the rate of increase in ship operating costs has nearly doubled in the last 12 months.  ShipServ helps the buyers and sellers of ship supplies to reduce these costs. It’s where buyers find suppliers, get quotes, place orders and manage their spending. It’s where suppliers access these billions of dollars  in purchasing power. The industry is highly fragmented, ultra-global and very conservative. It’s been slow to adapt to the Internet, but e-transactions are now growing rapidly.

In the early Naughties when talk of dis-intermediation was at a frenzy, over 50 maritime e-marketplaces were formed, supported by hundreds of millions of VC dollars. ShipServ is the last man flourishing, the undoubted market and thought leader. The rest have disappeared under its broadsides. The company has a flexible monetization model with some freemium elements, a buyer subscription model and seller listings and advertising. It has a dozen or so direct sales guys selling to ship managers and larger suppliers and a 60-strong Manilla-based telesales team converting the bulk of the supplier community. The company is a micro-multinational with over 150 people in six countries.

Stan: You had  marketing roles with companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Ariba before ShipServ. Why were you interested in the CMO job there?

John: I’d done the hard yards of working in the subsidiaries of North American-based tech firms and was looking for an opportunity to drive marketing from the top, to work with a founder-entrepreneur like Paul Ostergaard, and get close to the company strategy. I wanted a hard connection between what marketing does and the real performance of the company. In large firms, marketing can sometimes get lost in the matrix.

S: So what was the first priority?

J: The company was great at opening doors in shipping companies, was well-connected and reasonably well-known among some key industry movers and shakers.  But at the time it wasn’t closing enough deals. My initial task was to develop a more compelling value proposition. We had the right sales people and the right product, but sales cycles were too long. We had to create the ‘compelling event’ and the supporting messaging that turns suspects into advocates. The first few months were a flurry of segmentation work – actually who were we selling to and what were the meaningful differences that defined those segments? We had to identify the exact nature of the business pain they were suffering and we spent long hours in messaging work to identify how we could link our products to solving that pain. Then we spent effort in really quantifying the results we could deliver, and identifying the difference ShipServ’s e-marketplace tech actually made to the customers. We made our ROI story watertight. We had to make our offer replicable, relevant and believable. We had to work to simplify and clarify the message.

S: You had no marketing infrastructure and limited budget. And the market you are addressing is vast and fragmented. How did you get started?

J: The temptation when you arrive in a new job is to jump straight in and ‘do stuff’ like re-vamp the website, re-do all the collateral and produce new sales pitches. And it’s almost what the rest of the company expects marketing to do. Tempting but not wise. All of these are simply vessels for content and without the right content, that’s what they remain, empty vessels. That’s why we spent so long on honing and refining the message. As you know, we did overhaul the website in the end, but probably the most striking innovation in those early days was the introduction of Marketo. We took Marketo on trial and ran some test campaigns and proved we could get a better conversion rate than with other, more traditional campaign approaches.

Because we had limited resources, we had to find ways to do marketing tasks, easier, faster and cheaper.  That meant marketing automation, but we didn’t want a plethora of tools. We needed simple admin, great reporting and the ability to squeeze every drop of marketing juice out of what we could create. Our Marketo trial proved that we could run more campaigns more frequently, more cost effectively and with better rates of return using a new marketing automation palette. We’re a web-based business, so we invested heavily in analytics and together with Marketo we made sure no leads fell through the cracks. We were able to understand more about what our customers were interested in and gain intelligence about what their online behaviour actually meant. Tools like Marketo had existed before, but their price point was really too high for a growing business like ShipServ. There was too much bespoke CRM integration work that was required. With the advent of Marketo and other similar cloud-based tools, we were able to get really granular and scientific for a much lower cost.

S: How did sales react?

J: It was like a breath of fresh air to them. They had been used to being handed a bunch of random business cards from an exhibition. Now we were working with them to define exactly what a sales -ready lead actually consisted of. We introduced the concept of a ‘marketing qualified lead’ or MQL and this became a sort of contract between me and the sales team. We committed to delivering leads of the type that they wanted – in terms of type or size of company, its location,  and its requirements. And sales committed to actioning these leads and reporting back to us on progress.

What we learned was that marketing had to be involved in defining every stage in the funnel from generating awareness through to actual win or loss. We needed a total picture of the process flow, so we could calibrate our marketing activity to generate a high propensity to convert. We then got medieval on numbers: we tried to set targets for and measure everything. We worked out average deal sizes per segment and how many leads we needed at the top of the funnel to hit sales’ revenue targets. We established how many perished at each stage of the process. Then we designed campaigns to deliver the right number of leads. Our small field sales team handled high end sales worth several tens of thousands of dollars. And our 60 person telesales team in the Philippines were selling a variety of products ranging in price from a few hundred dollars through to several thousand. And they don’t do any tele-prospecting. We had to deliver all their qualified leads, thousands and thousands of them.

S: What about lead scoring?

J: Well the first thing to say is that it’s more of an art than a science.

We implemented lead scoring very quickly and the more experience we got, the better we were at it. The good news is that if you invest in marketing automation and CRM tools, you never lose the data even if your campaigns don’t work. That means you can change or refine the lead model based on new insights and market feedback. I guess that’s one of the key things I’ve learned over the last few years: all marketing people should think of themselves as marketing scientists (a term I first heard Pete Jakob at IBM use), working at their own bench in a marketing lab somewhere, testing out hypotheses and trying to turn those hypotheses into universal theories. It’s early days for marketing automation in B2B, so a ‘test & learn’ culture is pretty much essential. At ShipServ, an experimental  philosophy let me prove various tactics on a small scale and mitigate financial risk. When I discovered stuff that worked, I could prove that spending more on it was worth it. I also implemented a transparent scorecard mentality across the company, where it was OK to admit when outcomes were less than expected. That allowed us to take some marketing risks and break out of the straight-jacket of traditional tactics.

S: So, is there anyone that shouldn’t use marketing automation?

J: That’s a tough one. Before ShipServ I did marketing at Cramer, a middle-sized leader in OSS Solutions for telcos, subsequently acquired by Amdocs. They had 400 potential customers in the world and knew the inside leg measurement of every one. I guess someone could make a case that for a company like that – where lead generation is not a high priority – the need for marketing automation tools is lessened. But even here, where the real need is to build rock-solid community in order to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling, lead nurturing tools integrated with CRM can be really vital.

S: You’ve got involved in doing  just about everything at ShipServ, things like blogging, social media marketing, hands on driving of Marketo. Is your scrappy, entrepreneurial approach the way B2B marketing is going?

J:  Today it feels as if senior marketers need to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in to marketing execution. It used to be that the normal career progression of marketers in large tech firms meant that they got further and further away from the execution side of the work. Now marketers need to be far more collaborative with customers and prospects. They’re online all the time now and feel empowered to criticise what you’re doing freely and openly. They did that before Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn of course, it’s just that marketers never really got to hear about it. Now those channels offer a quick way for marketers to get engaged and address a customer’s issues directly and immediately. That feels like a good thing, but it means senior marketers need to invest in learning about social media, about marketing automation, blogging and monitoring blogs, driving analytics and all the other tools that are springing up. In the world of always on campaigns, it’s only the more connected and more tech savvy marketers that are going to be needed.

It may take what seems like a disproportionate amount of time to learn, for example, about Twitter or how to make Facebook groups work, but it’s worth the investment even if that channel proves to be less useful to your particular company. After that initial investment, things will settle down and you’ll be able to understand where that tool fits in your marketing mix. And you’ll be more experienced and able to evaluate the next gizmo that happens along.

S: Any predictions for the next three years?

J: We’ll definitely see the maturation of marketing automation. It will become one of the key weapons  - alongside the best content – in the B2B marketing arsenal. Just look at the number of conferences and exhibitions, articles and blogs that are springing up around this area. And look at the explosion in tool vendors. Any B2B marketer worth her salt needs to understand what’s happening here.

Engagement with social media will also continue apace and go mainstream. Marketers cannot control when the conversation happens anymore. They need to learn how to dive in and engage with the market, to really understand what it wants.

Thanks for that one, John, and best of luck in the next gig. It’s been a steep learning curve and we feel privileged to have played Sherpa Tenzing to your Edmund Hillary.

Photo: Flickr Creative Commons

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He’s off on a world tour (well north, central and south America to be picky) for the next several months, mixing travel with some worthwhile volunteering and who knows thereafter… Stuart has been in the frontline for us, producing many of the websites, eBooks, eNewsletters, landing pages and the like that Velocity has delivered over that period and we wish him all the best and hope to see him again in the near future. (BTW, he just passed his driving test at the fifth try, so just be careful if you happen to be driving anywhere near Acapulco, Medellin or Guatemala City over the next few months.)

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Why, he vented, was it so hard to persuade the Limeys to implement cohesive marketing programmes that had been proven to work elsewhere? Why did we find it so difficult to do the hard yards of building a solid database of customers, prospects and suspects, segmenting them every which way, targeting them with creative campaigns and measuring results?  And then doing more of what works and ceasing to do what doesn’t?

His justified spleen reminded me of criticisms of British public policy in the post-War era. We denizens of Blighty have long suffered from politicians taking the non-strategic, easy choices. We prefer to muddle through rather than making decisions on evidence-based analysis. We have a long history of simply firing and calling what we hit the target.  Is this malaise also affecting B2B marketing too? And, if so, why?

As part of the download process for our recent B2B Marketing Manifesto we asked people to complete the sentence, “The hardest part of B2B marketing is…” (You can read the full results of the survey here). An eye-popping finding was that the hardest part of B2B marketing was convincing other people within the company to do the right things.

So, why? Two factors, I think, are key. British firms are either sales-led or engineering-led. Hardly any are marketing-led

Lead by sales

Much of the British tech industry happens to be entirely sales-dominated outposts of American technology companies. Or run by people who earned their spurs at such companies. American firms love the openness of the UK market and the fact that we speak the same language (though after 20 years, Doug is still confused by the difference between the top or bottom of a road. And he insists on bringing things when he should be taking them and vice versa. We’re hoping Velocity’s newest star striker Ryan Skinner, (born in Portland, OR, but brought up and educated in the Peach State) isn’t cut from the same Yankee cloth.)

American tech firms most often choose guys (and it’s nearly always guys) with stellar sales track records (usually from other American firms) to lead their Redcoat subsids. These people invariably cut their teeth in the pre-digital age. By and large, they see marketing as made up of people who make the arrangements, rather than the ones who make the rain. As our survey showed, most B2B marketers spend a lot of their time trying (and often failing) to persuade their boss to do the right thing. This was OK (though definitely not optimal) when we were locked into the broadcast, print-centric world of a few years ago, where the marketing pinnacle was launching Version 3.1.6, organising the next industry piss-up (I mean, exhibition) and inviting some  trade press to the company’s latest product launch. But in the new science-based marketing world, where you need to blend multiple tactics to move individuals through a complex sales funnel, it doesn’t cut the mustard. Sales fixated managers often don’t get that.

Lead by engineering

By contrast with the sales-led invaders, many indigenous tech firms were begun by engineers and techies. While these folks should  be open to the science-based arguments marketers can make today, most have experienced marketing as a discipline that dumbs down their products and solutions, reducing them to white noise benefits. This has largely been the fault of B2B marketers themselves, too many of whom have been happy simply to be the marcoms person, rather than getting so close to their company’s technology they can smell the benefits, let alone articulate them clearly and concisely.

A dearth of world-class product marketing

There’s a third reason that British B2B marketing is so hard. The obsession with sales and the preponderance of engineers has led to a dearth of true product marketing in the UK.

Product marketers are the people who are responsible for conceiving and defining a new product (based on customer interaction and insight), for developing and improving the product through its lifecycle, for its application in new market segments and solutions, and for, should the time come as it inevitably must, deciding to kill it. They tend to be people who are as comfortable talking to engineering as cutting edge customers. They are people who are responsible for the success (and failure) of any product. They are vital to any marketing department. They have been largely invisible in perfidious Albion.

Doug and I have been in the business a long time and have met many, many brilliant product managers in the US tech firmament. Many have become CTOs. But we can count the number of great ones in the UK on our fingers – and a good proportion of those were American in any case. This is not, despite what he says, because Yanks are inherently superior. It’s actually a painful symptom of the other two issues: an obsession with sales and engineering. And it really hurts B2B marketing over here.

The good news for my American CMO is that the situation seems to be changing. Most of our clients (and an increasing number of the people we run into out there) are embracing analytics and lead nurturing. And most are throwing their weight behind complex, mutli-thread content-led campaigns that motivate prospects to move towards a sales conversation. They understand the importance of the right positioning and messages (and keeping these refreshed in the light of changing marketing circumstances.) And they value creative that incites action.

It is true that Brit B2B marketers have found it traditionally difficult to earn an equal place at the sales or engineering table. In future, and in the best companies, that will not be the case.

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Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, Branding, Content Marketing, Corporate Positioning, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, Technology Marketing

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One blogger, the Ad Contrarian, acts as a bracing, acerbic and amusing antidote to all the hype. My grey hairs particularly like his aphorism that “Marketers always overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior.”  Even if you’re a hyperactive social media marketer or a died-in-the-wool B2B marketer (the Ad Contrarian talks mainly about consumer marketing), you’ll find real insight and humour on his site. Recent weeks have seen a fun debate about web advertising and its impact on brand building. I particularly like his ‘10 bullshit professions‘ (though what’s a third base umpire do when he or she is at home?).  And he’s written a beautifully written and insightful free e-Book about consumer advertising in the modern age.

Check him out. You won’t be disappointed.

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“People will continue to buy and pay more for reliable brand reputations that enrich the depth and breadth of their own identity. The future belongs to any product that can give users a unique identity and place, be it real or virtual. 2010 will be about combining an engaging story with an immersive experience so that the brand becomes an avatar and the communications investment becomes an extension of the brand experience. Communications technology is now the enabler, source and subject matter of human entertainment as a result the concept of the “Avatar” has crossed the chasm into mainstream culture and branding.”

Finally, confirmation that those of us working in marketing agencies are really contributing something important.

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