B2B marketing is evolving again. The new frontier is social media: using multiple online channels to engage prospects, customers, influencers, partners and suppliers. For example, effective lead nurturing holds out the promise of transforming the performance of a marketing team’s contribution to new business sales. If a prospect completes an online savings calculator, it’s likely they’re ready to make the buying decision and are therefore the hottest of hot leads for the sales team.

How is this different from the past? Once upon a time, direct mail letters were king. Could you write a compelling first line that cut through the clutter? A pithy call to action? Next the focus turned to brochures, with the creativity challenge of layout and image to engage the prospects. Do you remember Harvard Graphics? With the growth of B2B sales force, presentation materials were in demand. At the turn of the millennium, microsites were the new thing, with the complexities of HTML and breadcrumb trails. And now email and digital content is the topic of every fashionable seminar.

Some skills and competencies remain the same: Drive for results, analytical insight and team working. But for social media, what’s new and what’s old? Clearly it’s important to understand the new tools and channels. There is also a skills and an organisational challenge. Now, your company’s message is no longer sent from the fax machine in the PR department, but from every employee’s tweet. Some skills for the new frontier are also back from the past. Knowing Twitter’s 140 character limit is important. But also is the ability to write an engaging message in 140 characters (or ideally less).

So do you have the right stuff?  Or in this case, the “write” stuff?

There will be more on the topic of skills for the new frontier at the IDM B2B Marketing Conference on 24 May, where the topic of the conference debate will be: What’s better for good marketing? Outsourced, ready-made skills, or in-house talent development?

What do you think?

Being asked to commit fraud in this way is a disturbing trend. It is driven by naked greed on the part of the claims management firms who typically take a quarter of the fees paid out by banks. So the more claimants they can sign up, the more they make. It is a multi-million pound business for them, with Lloyds alone setting aside £3.6 billion to pay back PPI premiums to former customers.

But while nothing justifies committing fraud, poor data management by the banks has made it too easy to get away with this crime. Validating claims is a difficult process, since it requires careful matching of a claimant against a set of historical product records. Like any  data matching process, the outcome is only as good as the data going in.

This is where banks are being exposed for having relatively poor data quality in many of their operating systems. PPI was not a core product, even if it was highly profitable one at the time (although that will no longer be the case once claimants have been paid back). So the systems holding customer data were not necessarily given the prime attention and resources that other operating systems managing current and investment accounts would have. Often, PPI was being sold by third parties under the bank’s brand, leaving the outsourced partner to operate to their own standard.

Bringing historical data back into focus in order to identify a customer and validate that they had indeed bought PPI looks like a challenging data management project. It is easy to suspect that the claims management firms are right and many banks are not actually bothering to check details.

If true, that would be a major indictment of their data – and corporate – governance processes. But it is tempting to believe the cost of proper validation may have put off many of them. So the claims will continue to come in and be paid out with nobody knowing if they are legitimate or not.

Banks desperately need to rebuild trust with customers, which is one of the major lessons from the mis-selling scandal. They have always placed great emphasis on proving customer identities and have an extra burden of proof to do so under anti-money laundering laws. If PPI claimants are not being put through the same rigorous checks, it creates a new trust gap which will delay even further the return of normal customer relationships.

David Reed is speaking on matters of trust at the IDM B2B Marketing Conference on 24 May. Read his session details.

Set sound objectives
Be crystal clear in what the objectives of the insight are, how they will be used and how frequently the insights will be applied. Do you want to, for example, want to understand how customers might behave in the future or what the best product and service combinations are for cross sell analysis? Or do you want to have real time adaptive, personalised offers on your website for visitors or nurture your leads better? 

Look outside your existing data
Don’t look at what data you have, look at what you need. The temptation is to look internally only and it is an obvious place to start, with transactional, product and customer data available across an organisation. Successful organisations share data across functions and systems to consolidate data and therefore insight. However 3rd party data providers, web applications and visitors to your website also provide invaluable data to either supplement your existing data or provide new avenues of insight.

Adopt a single customer view
Data collected within an organisation is often held in different systems, with varying degrees of accuracy and completeness. If you can standardise on a repository for the data such as the CRM system (which naturally contains data on customers and prospects with the added benefit of being used cross functionally) with a way of uniquely identifying each record, you will have a way of consolidating and managing the data that is consistent across an organisation. This makes linking other pieces of data and deriving insight much more of a repeatable activity which delivers more value to your marketing.

What things have worked for your organisation?

1. Test your touch points
Have you tested all of your customer touch points for mobile? As a marketing professional, many of you will use your mobile or tablet for the majority of your email and web consumption – and so will your clients. Does your website, email campaigns and customer portals perform on mobile? If they don’t, you could be wasting valuable opportunities.

2. Be proactive
Be proactive with your mobile strategy in order to gain a competitive advantage. Do not just think about how you can make existing processes mobile. Consider all the ways you could improve efficiencies through utilising mobile technology.

3. Empower your employees
Are you empowering your staff with mobile devices? Your own teams can realise huge benefits from mobile technology, from powerful, beautiful & interactive iPad sales tools or simply the ability to access your CRM or other enterprise systems while on the road.

4. Understand your customers’ habits
Do you know what platforms and devices your customers are using? Understand their mobile strategies to make sure you deliver value to the end users.

5. Test and trial
Make sure you do thorough user testing and take onboard user feedback wherever possible. App developer Mubaloo often advises businesses to run beta tests before investing to make sure that app meets customer expectations and an ROI is delivered.

Mark is delivering a session at the IDM B2B conference on 24 May which explores how leading brands are getting creative with mobile to maximise ROI.

The Informed Marketer
The cloud facilitates real-time insights and today’s marketer has a wealth of information at their fingertips to make agile, informed decisions.   The question is, are we using that information to our full advantage?  Are we more business focussed as a result?

The Connected Marketer
Joint marketing with partners has always seemed a good idea but has been challenging to put into practice.  Differing objectives, marketing skillsets and poor communications has often led to protracted projects with less than desirable results.   Interconnecting clouds and cross-company social collaboration will bridge communications and tools enabling marketers from different organisations to plan and work together as effectively as people in their own company.  The opportunities for pooling company expertise are vast and the cloud will help us make those visions reality.

The Global Marketer
Today’s marketing and content intended for a targeted audience is often placed on forums like YouTube and Twitter that can be seen by the world.  Are we, as companies and marketers, ready for worldwide demand for our products and services?      The majority of marketers have a narrow regional scope – a country or perhaps a region, but as technology compresses the globe, how do we prepare and develop ourselves for the likelihood of a larger patch and working with diverse and interesting new cultures?

The Extreme Marketer
Until now, cloud solutions have given marketers competitive advantage but the window of opportunity is coming to an end as cloud becomes mainstream.   So where do we find our next competitive edge? How do we keep our company out front?  Perhaps we should be looking within?   If we are competing for gold, then we should be devoting more time to being the best at what we do.  Training and development so often gets deprioritised against projects with deadline dates but companies and marketers owe it to each other to be best in industry. 

Meet Lisa at this month’s IDM B2B Conference, where “Trust in the Cloud” will be examined in one of the break out streams.

In B2B markets, they enable us to showcase our thoughts, ideas and positioning, to interact with prospects who we previously had no interaction with, to convince them to see us for a sales meeting through formal and informal testimonials from existing customers, to engage with customers outside of the normal sales contacts, to provide better proactive and reactive service to customers and to facilitate customers to provide service each other, to launch products and promotions faster and with a clearer idea of success. 

The benefits can be seen throughout a number of customer management strategies and we often measure KPIs against the ones illustrated in the model. 

Of course to achieve this level of customer management – we call the use of social techniques “customer management on steroids” – increased organisational capabilities are demanded in the obvious areas of data and systems.  But data and systems are perhaps only 30% of the challenge; new ‘people’ capabilities and a culture of real customer focus is required to plan, execute and analyse integrated communication plans and contact strategies;  re-engineered, agile processes is required to ensure that real time data is channelled to the right person in the right function in good time; a new philosophy of measurement is required to encourage a focus on customer engagement as well as sales revenue and cost.  In this way, ‘Social’ needs to be integrated across the customer management model.  The result is that we are seeing large organisations investing in:

• People capability development especially in the areas of customer focus, customer engagement and use of digital, social and mobile to support traditional channels
• Much more use of truly real-time customer management systems, in which data collected during dialogue is used to change how the customer is managed
• Much more self-service, leading to a more efficient self-administered customer experience
• Integration of interactions across channels, including social
• Customer data and its use more widely and deeply in the organisation, not just by marketing, sales and service, but also finance, logistics and other functions
• Practices and technologies to help colleagues and partners work across functional silos (e.g. between marketing, sales, service, PR, product, research, technical support).

To gauge of how senior marketers are feeling about the impact of digital, social and mobile on their business, our recent survey which is not yet complete (n=106; mostly CMOs or equivalent; mixture of b2b and b2c) showed that:

• 42% thought it has a significant impact across the whole organisation
• 35% thought it has a significant impact across marketing, sales and service
• 10% thought it has a significant impact but mainly within marketing
• 13% thought it had some impact on one or more functions
• 0% thought it had little or no impact

Do you think the impact of social, digital, near real time CRM and mobile on B2B companies is significant or just an extension of business as usual?

Neil is speaking on Becoming a socially enabled business: the impact on the organisation at the IDM B2B Marketing conference on 24 May.

Danny Bermant delivered a great session for the IDM at Internet World on ‘How to use LinkedIn to create brand awareness’. The theatre was full-to-capacity, great to see so many people had braved the atrocious weather conditions to arrive early for the first session of the day! We were advised how to optimise our LinkedIn profiles to inform, educate and engage and how best to share our knowledge with our peers. We were all quite astonished by the stat that LinkedIn is ‘277% more effective at lead generation than Twitter and Facebook.’

It seems that we’re all very keen to share knowledge, particularly now we have sophisticated and established social platforms for this. An interesting stat from the Learning and Performing Institute, presented by QA at the HRD show is that ‘75% of top performers encourage learners to pass on their learning to others (compared with 35% on average).’ What fantastic news for us at the IDM, when it comes to top performers we’ve got some of the best in our speaker faculty! All of our speakers are expert practitioners, keen to educate and inspire others.

I met a few new IDM Speaker Stars (look-out for our speaker line-up for Marketing Week Live) and first IDM Academy sessions delivered by Kelvin Newman and Tim Watson were resounding successes. Kelvin guided the audience through 5 Instantly Actionable Insights from Google Analytics and pointed out some key facts, with ‘the world’s information doubling every two years’ I agree that ‘the challenge is no longer “do I have the data” but rather “what do I do with the data?”’ Tim expertly took us through email strategy, covering the fundamentals of messaging hierarchy, mapping your customers’ journey, as well as customer segmentation and classification. Thank you to Rob Thurner for his fascinating session on Mobile too, a tantalising taster of his popular IDM Mobile Training courses.

All in all, an inspiring and insightful couple of days. I look forward to more exciting sessions and insight-gathering at Marketing Week Live. In the meantime please get in touch if you’re interested in finding out more about becoming an IDM trainer. It’s always great to hear from those keen to innovate with us, and inspire and engage our training participants.

You can contact Sheree at shereehellier@theidm.com

I doubt it, so I sent the 7 question survey to as many people in my network of vendors, partners consultants etc. that would (a) be interested in the topic, so as to take part and (b) be even more interested in the results.

It’s just a snapshot, with 51 individual opinions on 7 simple subjects that admittedly only covers a fraction of this topic, but I think it gives us a genuinely good indication of the thoughts within our industry.

I started with a simple question, (1) Where are you employed? This helps set the tone for the survey and how to then interpret the answers to the more in depth questions. The responses were as follows: Vendor 38.3%, Reseller 31.9%, Distributor 12.8% or Supplier 17%. Therefore 64% of the responders were from Vendors or Resellers which is the perfect base for answering the remaining questions and for providing the insight I required to summarise and interpret the results.

Throughout my vendor career we were always asked to ensure that the partners were aware of the rules and regulations that governed vendor funding models. My initial view was that not many partners took any notice, but I was wrong as when I asked, (2) Have you ever heard of the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Rules or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance? Surprisingly 72.5% of the responders answered ‘Yes’ and 27.5% answered ‘No’, which is a positive sign for vendors who are tightly governed by these various policies. This result is very positive for vendors as governance of funding programs is very tight and they need to ensure that everything is managed to the letter of the law.

The next question had to be simple and direct (3) What is the preferred funding model for partners? I wanted a definitive answer to this question so I only listed 3 possible answers, Accrued (earned as % of revenue), Discretionary (allocated on case by case basis) or Other. The results were as follows: Accrued 43%, Discretionary 41% and Other 16%. There were some additional comments that were added in the other section which I think need a mention, and that add to the debate…

1. “Hybrid, mixing both to support short & long term goals”
2. “Mixed”
3. “A mixture of both”.
4. “Split 50/50 between the 2”
5. “Mix of earned and specific projects”
6. “To run both in parallel is particularly useful. The accrued approach provides an element of predictability but there are occasions where the vendor can collaborate with you on activities with mutual benefit above and beyond the accrued %, as long as you are a ‘clean’ user of accruals!”
7. “Most reseller too small for accrued funds to be meaningful”
8. “They want to see a mixture of both”
9. “Discretionary allocated on long term agreed plan”

The audience is almost split on which system is preferable, plus a decent number advocate a mixed approach which might well be worth exploring for future vendor program changes.

For the next question, (4) What are the barriers to spending? I created a multiple choice question because I know people have more than one reason for not being able to spend their allocated Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF). I was interested to see where the answers would rank, and here they are in order of response:

1. Claiming Process (time consuming)
2. Types of activities allowed (restrictive)
3. Not enough funds to make it worthwhile
4. Guidelines change too often
5. Terms & Conditions (unclear)
6. Percentage of assistance

Clearly vendors need to address all of the items listed, but I would say the top two were easily the area of most focus from the responders. If vendors make it easier for partners to claim on activities that they would like to execute then the utilisation rate would increase and everyone would be happy, but this seems to be where there is a gap and everything slows down and momentum is lost from creating and executing joint marketing programs funded by the vendor.

Next I wanted to find out whether people thought, (5) Should marketing funding levels should be linked to a partners status within the Vendor’s Certification Program? And we would accept a simple, Yes 75%, No 10% or No Preference 15%. The consensus here makes perfect sense, if a vendor has a certification program, a benefit of that program and achieving a higher level of certification should be rewarded with more Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF) than lower certified partners. But that does not always happen, which I find a little bit odd.

The next question was (6) Should Partners match Vendor’s funding with contribution of their own to an activity? And the answers were a little surprising, nearly 32% of responders were from resellers. The answers were Yes 36%, No 7% and Depends on the activity 57%. This is a really interesting result as it shows vendors that resellers are open to new ideas and approaches. So if you are changing your partner program don’t just serve up the same old program rewards and guidelines, think outside the box and stimulate growth with your partners who are asking for a new approach.

And finally, let’s talk about how to get access to these Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF) statements. The question was (7) Are the online Marketing funding portals you have experience of easy to use? And the answers that came back were: Yes 20%, No 48% and Varies 32%. I think we can safely say that as nearly 50% of the responders were negative in response to this question then the vendors seriously need to take a look at the platforms that are used to access the fund balance and create the transactions. We must bear in mind that the vendors may be constrained by using a global system, but if the system is not used by the partners, then clearly changes are required.

As mentioned, this is just a snapshot of the topic, but I think it gives us a genuinely good indication of the thoughts within our industry Re: Vendor Funding: Accrued or Discretionary, what is best for the partners? As a next step I would encourage vendors that are thinking of changing the way they reward their partners to investigate the pros and cons thoroughly before making any changes, and most importantly consult your audience. If a vendor changes from discretionary to accrued it takes smaller partners at least 6 months to earn enough funds to afford to roll out a single activity, if the program then changes back they lose out again as the more highly certified partners will most likely always receive the discretionary allocations. Vendors need to think carefully around this topic, as they can help to make or break quarters and most importantly channel relationships and coverage.

Cultural differences are often the basis for international marketing communications as well as global brand management strategies, as they have a marked influence on purchasing decisions (remember, people don’t leave their emotions, values and beliefs at home when they go to work).  Take advertising for example; the success of the advertising depends on the culture of the people being marketed to.  Therefore, being aware of cultural norms can help your company narrow down the target audience and make marketing more cost-effective. 

Market research methodology has to be sound in a cross-cultural setting.  Researchers face complex methodological issues and failure to address these adequately will severely limit the usefulness of the marketing research project.  From a data collection viewpoint, variable response styles across different geographies represent a major threat to the correct interpretation of market research findings.  This threat is further increased due to samples of respondents from different cultural backgrounds.  Unfamiliarity with the cultures and environmental factors of the countries where the research is being conducted can greatly increase the difficulty of attaining comparability.

In conclusion, different country cultures do impact on responses and response rates and so this needs to be taken into account when designing any research study.  However, that is just one part of the equation and when the data has been gathered, a researcher needs to use their knowledge and judgment as to whether a response is based on different levels of product and service delivery or simply because of a result of cultural difference. 

[Nick is speaking on Global market; Local thinking at the IDM B2B Marketing Conference on 24 May 2012 and you can join a live Twitter Comms Chat on the topic on Mon 30 April at 8pm. Just log in and follow the #CommsChat tag]

We left inspired to harness the power of people talking to people:

@oferguetta Social Collaboration Leader, IBM UK & Ireland talked of the frictionless, agile organisation that taps into collective intelligence, advocacy and distributed talent to drive business results:

• Social has saved 11-30% in time & increased productivity
• 41% GenY say social media is important to them in the workplace
• 64% of GenY download unauthorised applications at least once a week to get their jobs done!

@hughboyle Global Head of Digital, OgilvyAction gave real insight into the behaviour of consumers today, reminded us that social and digital are important in marketing – but not more important than the principles you know; that the physical and virtual are already fused and suggested we are now in a post digital era. Look out for his analysis of a Tesco ad in the speaker videos next week.

@Zoe9 (Zoe Sands), Head of Digital EMEA at Juniper Networks, revealed her ongoing journey to ensure Juniper is socially skilled. She shared a great image mapping social to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and why education, humanising the brand, identifying advocates, training and praise are so important.

In the lively panel, the speakers, joined by Paul Cash (@Zagology), Chief Innovation Officer, OTM London and @MikeQuinn, Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, responded to questions including the importance of visuals and leveraging limited resources for content creation.

Continuing our people to people theme, we closed with a buzzing networking session. A great night and many thanks to D&B for sponsoring the evening and to IBM Forum London for hosting the drinks and venue!

Video highlights from the event are available on YouTube and you can still cast your eye over the #socialskills twitter stream. Look out for upcoming events elsewhere on our website; next up is the always-buzzing IDM B2B Marketing Conference on 24 May, where some of the above key themes will be examined in depth.

Meanwhile, I’d be intrigued to get your thoughts on what “social skills” means in today’s new world…