The Funnelholic

I am currently trying to buy a couple pieces of technology (true story). I won’t tell you what kind of technology (to protect the innocent). But I will tell you that I am learning how much it sucks to be a b2b buyer. I wrote a little about my experiences and recommendations on the Savvy b2b marketing blog.

It’s really eye-opening to go through the process of trying to buy something in a comparable industry. As I live through my pain, I will chronicle our experiences. (I am including my partner-in-crime Lori Janjigian as she helps me in the buying process and is supplying me with her observations, aka complaints, about the process.)

Here are some important points:

• “The biggest innovation Marc Benioff made was to allow b2b buyers to buy complex software with a credit card.” (via Scott Albro) I have a couple of witty quotes from Scott on the issue of “ease of purchase.” This is so true ‑ think about how hard it was to buy enterprise software before the Salesforce.com/SaaS cloud revolution. It was big and complicated, and still is for many companies. Now, many “smart” companies make their pricing transparent; you can order without a salesperson or if you do, it’s easy. Here’s one: I just talked to my buddy who works at at a major software vendor where he sells business applications. He told me that he has to wait for legal to approve his contracts and it can take 30 to 60 days. Not exactly “easy to buy”
• Create “buyer-helpful” content, but don’t forget people also need to be able to actually buy your product. I am the biggest advocate for content that buyers want ‑ particularly third-party content. If you have read this blog in the past, you should know this. On the other hand, the goal here is sell people stuff (sorry, it is). A tip that you can act on right now is to ask yourself one thing: “If someone wants to buy from us, what do they have to do?” I know everyone is going to say “but b2b is so complex.” Sure, but most products are going the other way. Google Apps costs something like $50 per year per user. Pretty complex? I don’t think so. Guess what, there are times when we want to talk to the sales rep and we want to know that this part of the process will not be painful.
• “A perfect example of a complex product made simple is automobiles.” (via Scott Albro) Scott likes to say, “There is more technology in cars than a data storage box.” He’s right. Consumer marketing is so refined that it’s both marketed and packaged so you and I can understand what it is we are going to buy. Consumer sales is such that I can walk in and walk out with a car in a couple hours, even though it is a gigantic piece of technology and engineering.
• Oh, and the “contact us” box sucks. I see that, and I just think black hole. The dropdown you provide doesn’t make me feel like I am going to go in the right direction. When you walk into a good store, someone asks, “How can I help you today?” How about taking that methodology to the “front door” of your buying process? As you consider what it’s like to buy, “How do I get started?” is a good question to answer.

Let’s call this my take-away: If someone wants to buy your product, what must they do? Remember that this is not a question about downloading content and so forth, this is about buying. Is it frictionless, easy to understand, easy to find, easy to figure out? That is the question. More on this in upcoming posts.

I have resisted for the longest time becoming a news organization. I typically write what I feel. Guess what: I missed out. With the Focus.com platform, I can tackle topical issues particularly when I’m not sure I know the answer. (: For instance, I MUST not know enough because everyone tells me that Benioff could care less about marketing then he runs off and does THIS. I need to understand it. Here is what we have done, we reached out and got some of the most respected experts (All Focus Experts thank you) in the space to tell all of us what this all means.

I have 6 fundamental questions:

• Why did Salesforce.com buy Radian6?
• What is your analysis of the move?
• What is Marc Benioff’s plan? Where is Marc Benioff going from here?
• What does it mean to the crm/social crm space
• What does it mean for the social media monitoring space?
• Bonus:  What does this mean for the marketing automation space? (I invited Steve Woods from Eloqua purposely for this)

And I’m getting them answered in tomorrow’s roundtable teleconference: What the Salesforce.com/ Radian 6 Deal Really Means

I haven’t been this excited about an event in a long time. Here are the details:

WHEN
Friday, April 1, 2011, 10:00 a.m. PT/ 1:00 p.m. ET

WHERE
Toll-free Dial-In Number: (866) 951-1151
International Dial-In Number: (201) 590-2255
Conference Number: 4999006

Here is the crew (How big is this!)

Brian Vellmure is the principal and founder of Initium LLC, a strategic consulting firm specializing in increasing corporate value through customer focused business design. For more than a decade, Brian has been helping companies increase profitability through customer focused initiatives. He is an accomplished business leader, management consultant, and award winning and syndicated blogger. He is often referred to as a thought leader and pioneer in the emerging discipline of Social CRM.

Esteban Kolsky is the Principal and Founder of ThinkJar, an advisory and research think-tank focused on Customer Strategies. He has over 22 years of experience in customer service and CRM consulting, research and advisory services, and is currently advising vendors and organization how to extend customer interactions from the CRM niche to the entire organization in their efforts to become Social Businesses.

Steve Woods is the CTO at Eloqua and author of the book “Digital Body Language” which focuses on the transformation under way in our buyers and how we as marketers can respond. Steve is also deeply involved with the Eloqua user community, with whom he regularly interacts through the discussions on his Eloqua Artisan blog.

Michael Fauscette leads IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group which includes research and consulting in enterprise software applications, collaboration and social applications, software partner and alliances, open source, software vendor business models, cloud computing and software pricing and licensing. He also provides thought leadership in the area of social applications and the transition to the social business.

Mitch Lieberman is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Comity Technology Advisors, and has 15 years of experience in CRM domain. He has the social business expertise to offer analysis and strategic advice to companies of all sizes, helping them leverage social technology to better manage their relationships with individual consumers and their business customers.

This one’s gonna be a blockbuster. You should be there.

Background: I just did my annual “You Bought a List, Now What?” webinar with Netprospex. Literally, spur of the moment, I made up a phrase: the “tweetable moment.” More background: Part of the presentation includes ways to create remarkable content. At Focus, we ask our writers include “aha!” moments when creating content. Well, I’m changing that to “tweetable moment.” PS, that got tweeted. I used it again tonight in my preso at the Sales 2.0 Conference, and then Lisa Gschwandtner brought up the term “tweetable moment” a couple times afterward. I realized: It’s on. Write that down.

Webinars, PDFs, blog posts, social media, guest posts, videos, slide share presos - the overall content itself can be shareable, but are you creating “tweetable moments”? Definition: Sound bites that are begging to be re-quoted in 140 characters or less - memorable and consumable. Frankly, I don’t think about and devise sound bites, and I am not sure the true master of the tweetable moment does either; truly tweetable moments come out naturally. At any rate, a “tweetable moment” is like adding a dash of Tapatío Hot Sauce to your content. Shake well and season to taste.

Drumroll please …  I present the 210 B2B marketing tips for 2010. Let me tell you, this was quite an adventure, one that I will certainly do differently in the future.

Basically, the sequence of events went like this: Continue Reading »