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.”

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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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We’re inordinately proud to announce the launch of a new microsite by Salesforce UK that Velocity helped with. The site is called Social Success and it’s all about helping businesses harness the power of social media. Our job was to find the considerable pockets of expertise within Salesforce (the place is crawling with very, very smart people) then help package up their ideas and best-practice advice into content assets for the site.

The core piece of content on the site is a chunky eBook called The Social-Powered Enterprise: how social media is transforming your three most important disciplines. The three disciplines are sales, marketing and customer service and the book presents plenty of action points and cases in each area. There’s a form to fill in to get the eBook — but it’s worth it!

If you’re putting social to work in your business, the rest of the Social Success site is full of best-practice content and expert advice for you, including:

Social Media Expert Interviews
With people like Jacob Morgan on Social Collaboration and Brad Cleveland on Social Customer Service.  These guys really know their stuff and the interviews capture their thinking really succinctly.

Social Media Resource Roundups
These are short curated pieces that summarise some of the best resources out there across the web on subjects such as Mobile Social Media and Social Business Metrics and Social Selling (among others).

Dreamforce Takeaways
Dreamforce is the hottest tech event in the world, attracting amazing speakers. Dreamforce Takeaways are our attempt to summarise the most social-media-relevant sessions in a quick, easy-to-digest way. And you can listen to the original sessions and see the slides here too.  Our favourite is the Social Roadmap session with Gary Vaynerchuk, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and Adam Brown of Dell.  But there are five more excellent ones to browse through.

Social Media Mini-Guides
These are more extensive articles on specific social disciplines including Social Selling and Social Customer Service.

Social Media Articles
Including this crowdsourced piece on Social Media Business Etiquette that had dozens of top-notch contributors or this one on Social Innovation.

A killer Social Media Infographic
On the Six Principles of Social Media Success from the eBook. It’s the social ethos captured in one rather tall graphic.

The site is a major initiative by Salesforce UK and it’s all about helping growing businesses (and businesses that are already massive) to get social media into their DNA – as Salesforce itself has done.  It’s not about selling software, it’s about evangelising something the company really believes in (working with them, we’ve seen how they walk the talk).

The project was the brainchild of Kieran Flanagan, the Search Manager for Salesforce EMEA and it’s an impressively ambitious play — the content will be rolled out to France and Germany this year. We’re not kissing arse when we say this (maybe a little) but Kieran has been hugely impressive through the entire process. He mined the considerable expertise and experience inside Salesforce to make sure we were capturing best practice strategy and real-world tactics. And did it with intelligence, focus and charm.

We loved working on the project and learned a hell of a lot on the way.

There’s a lot more to come on the Social Success site. Drop in, find the content most relevant to you – and do share it with your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Google+ circles. They’ll thank you for it…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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That’s why A/B and Multivariate Testing is one of the Six Staples of B2B in our B2B Marketing Manifesto.

And that’s why we did this quick A/B and Multivariate Testing Resource Map for B2B marketers who don’t know where to start.
Go full screen, ignore the annoying arrow on the right, and use the links – there are lots of good resources packed into one page:

This Resource Map is the second of our content spin-offs from the B2B Marketing Manifesto. The first one is the B2B Content Marketing Tutorial — a Prezi on B2B content marketing processes (you really will have to view that one in Full Screen mode).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B technology marketing, Lead Generation, Testing

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Calnetix Power Solutions has invented a technology that captures waste heat from engines, boilers and industrial applications and turns it into electricity. The process is called the Organic Rankine Cycle, and has been used in large-scale, big footprint applications for many years. What makes Calnetix’s product different is that it’s applicable to the hundreds of thousands of smaller-scale engines and boilers in use all over the world.

It’s a clean, green, efficient technology, so it was perfect for Velocity’s green tech arm. This kind of solution is the future as people look for ways to save money, reduce carbon emissions and cut down on their dependence on fossil fuels. A zero-emissions, zero fuel solution should get a lot of attention – but so far, nobody knew about it.

When they came to us, Calnetix needed to launch to the global market at the PowerGen show in just eight weeks.

What we did

Positioning

• Rather than a completely new technology, we recommended showing how it was based on a piece of trusted technology (ORC) already widely used for decades
• The breakthrough was to optimize it for smaller scale applications

Branding

• Completely new identities for the company and the product, emphasizing the green credentials
• New names for the Optimized Rankine Technology™ and the CleanCycle™ product.

Launch

• A new Stage 1 website in delivered in flat HTML in just two weeks – in time for the PowerGen Show.
• SEO strategy and execution to ensure that Calnetix are as high up the search rankings as possible.
• New collateral – a product brochure, a pocket-sized guide, and a 1-page information sheet – all with a graphic illustrating how Clean Cycle works. Plus a new presentation and document templates.
• The PowerGen show stand picking up on the visual theme of the identity, collateral and website.
• Three videos, two on-site case stories and a ‘chalk talk’ explaining exactly what Calnetix’s CleanCycle technology does.
• PR around the event – run by Bridget Fishleigh of Nomad Communications. She set up some key interviews and got coverage during and after show.

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The new website homepage:

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Brochure pages:

Front page

Inner brochure pages

Keeping the momentum

• The Calnetix PS website will evolve and develop as more content is added to become a more comprehensive, richer site and a platform for lead generation.
• Next: content marketing campaigns built around thought leadership material such as ebooks, white papers, videos and case studies.

CEO Brad Garner said:

“This was a great experience and a really fun project for us to be involved in. We gave Velocity a short timeline to complete a large number of tasks and they did a great job in accomplishing them all. They kept us involved at every stage, and made some great judgment calls that impacted on our idea.”

Calnetix Power Solutions was a really good client to work for. They needed us to get up to speed on a market fast, do a lot of different things, and apply our branding chops to get to market quickly. To help us deliver on such tight timescales, they gave us all the information we needed then let us do what we do best.  Onward and upward.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, design, Lead Generation, Marketing, Web Marketing

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Everyone’s always talking about ‘customer engagement’ and we can see why: fully engaged customers — the ones who comment on your blog posts, join your Facebook group, reteweet your tweets, eat all your content, give you testimonial quotes, participate in case studies and attend your events – add tremendous value to your business and your brand.

But there’s not much talk about one of the most important aspects of customer engagement: openly rewarding engagement so you get more of it. A recent blog post by Chris Lake on Econsultancy, our favourite source of digital marketing best practice, listed “25 ways to encourage and reward customer engagement.”

The idea is simple. If you want customers to become advocates, reward them for doing so and keep your best advocates really happy.  Some of the ways of doing this deliver tangible value and cost you money (well spent):

• Free upgrades
• Extended features
• Preferential terms
• Product or service add-ons
• Invitations to special events

Others cost you nothing but may be highly valued by customers:

• Mention them – in your blog posts, newsletters, tweets…
• Follow them
• Give them some status – some prestige in your community

When you see the list you realise how obvious this is — and also how rarely it’s practiced. Not all the 25 are relevant to B2B but most have at least an analogue in our world. I’d also add a few:

• Make them beta testers – of any new product or service
• Give them first peek – at just about anything you’re doing
• Talk to them more – personal emails, phone calls, lunches…
• Submit them for awards
• Recommend them to others

In other words, show them how valuable they are and reward their engagement with yours.

Worth asking: when was the last time you stroked your most engaged customers?

—

Photo: PutYourFlareOn – flickr creative commons

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, customer engagement, digital marketing, Thought Leadership

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The sales team owns the sales funnel.
But as a B2B marketer, you feed the top of their funnel.
So you own your company’s revenue pipe.
The success or failure of your company depends entirely on the quality and quantity of opportunities you generate.

This isn’t about how many business cards your team collected from the latest trade show. It’s about how many sales-ready leads you can generate. That’s where Lead Nurturing comes in.

We’re huge fans of Lead Nurturing because it:

• Closes the gap between marketing and sales – connecting us directly to revenue
• Never wastes a lead – moving the cold ones forward while acting on the hot ones
• Creates opportunities that the sales team really values – stopping them from cold calling (or ignoring undifferentiated leads)
• Makes it easy to treat people differently – based on their demographics (job title, industry) and their behaviours (web visits, downloads, email opens…)
• Automates a lot of boring tasks – like creating landing pages and linking them to emails and analytics

Brian Carrol, CEO of InTouch has a great 5-step way of thinking about lead nurturing:

1. Refine – work with the sales team to hone a definition of what  a ‘sales-ready’ lead really means. This entails lead scoring and prioritization (50 points if they download White Paper X; 100 points if they visit us at an event…).
2. Qualify – centralise all data about leads, offline and online.  Then decide who’s worth the effort. (Authority, Time Frame, Need, Budget). There’s often a non-automated, human aspect here (remember the phone?). But do it right and sales conversion rates double.
3. Nuture –work the early stage leads until they’re sales-ready; drip feed them emails, content & contacts and score their behaviours; It’s about a relevant ongoing dialog with potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
4. Define – create a defined hand-off process for moving leads from marketing to sales; CRM integration of your lead nurturing system will help.
5. Close the loop – via monthly sales/marketing meetings; get their feedback on the leads you’ve delivered; discuss what’s working and what’s not…

The upshot of all this: more effective selling time for your sales people, focused on people with a real business need – and more revenue for the business.

With lead nurturing process like this, you can track Cost per Opportunity (the ones the sales force is actively working on) instead of the clunkier, less enlightening metric, Cost per Lead.

There are an increasing number of Lead Nurturing systems that support this kind of process and automate a lot of the activities that go into it.  We’re getting up to speed on Marketo (pioneered in Europe by John Watton, CMO of ShipServ) and think you should be too.  This is where B2B marketing is going: actually generating business instead of undifferentiated names and email addresses.

(photo credit: Bram Reinders, Creative Commons)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring

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As B2B web marketing comes of age, a battle is brewing between some pretty big players (and a few upstarts) over who will become the primary dashboard for marketers.  The three combatants:

CRM – the first app to automate some of what marketers do (and a lot more of what salespeople do).

Content Management Systems – the coal face of web marketing and, increasingly, the platform for all kinds of digital campaigns.

Marketing Automation tools – email, lead nurturing, analytics, campaign management, digital asset management… each with its own dashboard and workflow.

As B2B marketers get more sophisticated, the tools they use are starting to merge.  CRM is adding rudimentary marketing automation.  CMSs are adding campaign and automation.  And the automation apps are filling out into proper ‘suites’.

Who will win?  Well, all three will be around for a long time but for my money, the CMS is the best place for marketing functionality — as long as the CMS vendors can get their acts together and realise they’re not just in the web editing business.*

More and more B2B marketers are learning to plan, execute and analyse their own campaigns with very little help from the techies.  Part of this will always be generating emails and landing pages; designing the campaign logic that strings them together; and analysing the results to keep improving.

The natural home for CRM is really the sales department. And, however valuable its contribution to the whole revenue cycle, CRM doesn’t really DO anything. It just holds all the information so others can do things better.

Marketing  automation tools are preferable now because they can each focus on one discipline and do it better than any generalist.  But as the platform players watch and learn, they’ll be able to replicate almost anything the automators can do (after all, it’s not rocket science). Then, the benefit sof integration will outweigh even ‘best of breed’ tools.

The CMS will always be central to the marketing department.  It’s easily extended with modules and plug-ins (especially if it’s based on an open platform). And it actually lets the market DO things like build landing pages, HTML emails and whole campaigns.

Agree?  Disagree?

* We know one CMS vendors that’s way out in front on this stuff but they’re a client so we can’t ethically mention their name here.  Oh bugger it: EPiServer.

(photo by chandlerparker, flickr creative commons)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing

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The company offers the best Microsoft .Net CMS on the planet (running nearly 10,000 websites worldwide for almost 3000 customers), along with tools for social media, eCommerce, marketing and sales and event and meeting management. The result: some really impressive numbers over recent years:

–Average growth of 35% per annum over the last five years

–License revenue growth of 49% in 2009 in the teeth of the downturn

–Revenues a spit away from $30m.

The company entered the US market in mid-2009 and has developed a huge community of partners providing add-on apps, plug-ins and extra functionality via its EPiMore programme and an open-source-like community with over 8500 members, called EPiServer World. Best of all, they are really top people that we’ve enjoyed working with on positioning and messaging and thought leadership over the last couple of years.

If you’re looking to move your web estate onto a new platform, you should check EPiServer out.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B agency, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Social Media, Technology Marketing, Web Design, Web Marketing

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When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale distribution, and asked Velocity to clarify their positioning, develop a new story and take it to market.

As part of this process they needed a swish new website and some fast thought leadership content and campaigns.

The Project:

The Consulting Bit:

We came in, made a lot of notes, drank a lot of their coffee, and listened really hard to what they (and their customers) had to say. Then we:

· Simplified and focused the story – to position the company as leaders in the distribution business

· Gave IBS a new language – so they can talk about their products and services clearly ad compellingly – including their new category name: Distribution Resource Management

· Rationalized their product portfolio – so customers know exactly what’s on offer

The Web Bit:

As the first step in getting the new story to market, we:

· Ran analytics and content audits – using personas to develop the site navigation, architecture and SEO

· Wrote and designed a new website – to work as a lead generation platform – all in 6-8 weeks. Which isn’t bad.

· Helped move to a new CMS – by EPiServer, the best CMS on the planet (and a Velocity client)

The Thought Leadership Bit:

Leaders share their views on the marketplace with their customers and prospects. We’re helping IBS with a range of content marketing campaigns including:

· Web pages that are more than just product descriptions – they offer opinion and views on the market

· A series of eBooks –the first one on ‘margin killers’ in wholesale distribution is just the start

· Web video –our perennial favourite — in this case for a user conference series. With more on the way.

The Future Bit:

The foundation is in place. Now it’s time to build:

· Lead nurturing – we’re exploring using tools like Marketo to automate campaigns, and build a marketing funnel

· A customer portal – a mini-Facebook for customers to share their ideas with each other

· Blogging and social media – to promote IBS and engage in the web conversation

· More video – because it really is a fantastic way to tell stories. Just ask George Clooney

The bottom line

It’s too early to report hard results but the new story is getting real traction in the market, the website KPIs are all trending (or leaping) up, and Neil can’t stop smiling.

We have to say this is our ideal kind of project –plenty of tough challenges to get our strategic and creative teeth into, working with great people who are really on our wavelength.

‘’As always with a website project, it wasnt just a website project. I wanted it to be the catalyst for lots of things; yes, a new website, but also a new message, to re-energise people, and to bring us into the 21st C. The Velocity team have been great. They quickly got under the skin of the market, helped us craft a crisp story, oh and yes they built a great website too.” –Andy Bailey, CMO

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Web Design, Web Marketing

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There she is. The 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions eBook from ClickPredictions — a crowdsourced effort by “39 of the world’s top B2B marketers, e-mail marketers and social media gurus” (including, erm, me). Ambal Balakrishnan, the tireless ClickDocuments founder, asked each of us a straightforward question, “What are key marketing trends and predictions for 2010?”

The answers are pretty enlightening. As Ambal says, “It’s a first-hand look into the future of content marketing from the people that live and breathe it every single day.” It’s also packed with over 100 recommended resources. All sponsored by our pals at Marketo — the daddy’s of lead nurturing.

Click for free download now and see the future…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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