In 2016 the Vendasta  was named 42nd in the Profit 500, the definitive list of fastest growing companies in Canada, from Canada Business Magazine.

Powering the growth is a robust marketing strategy. The company, which sells omni-channel marketing platforms to SMB´s via local media resellers, applied its marketing skills to its own plan.

Today a sophisticated marketing engine  generates 1,000 to 2,000 leads a month. Sales have grown by  50% per year for the last three years with projected sales of $30 million in 2017 and a team of 300.  The company now supplies SMB marketing tools to 1,100 reselling partners in the U.S. and Canada.

Here’s how they did it.

Location: Saskatoon, Canada

Core Team: Brendan King, CEO; George Leith, CRO, Jeff Tomlin, CMO,

Founded: 2008 Projected  2017  Revenues: $30 million

Background

In 2012 Vendasta started selling online reputation management tools for media and agency resellers. Their basic business model was three-tiered subscription, plus wholesale pricing per product.

“Today when a consumer sees an ad, they go into the research phase and go online before they ever go to the door of the business.

“There is this entire additional stack of products that local businesses need. We enable the media to sell the entire stack,” Leith said.

“We made the decision consciously or unconsciously that we needed to put ourselves in the shoes of the salesperson, or a day in the life of the agency…Nobody had paid any attention to those people.”

“We finally made that connection, to build out the platform into a complete stack that includes a CRM, that we were already a long way down the road.”

The upgraded platform can send a snapshot report or conduct a needs analysis “without a call on the client.”  Sales increased by 50% to a projected $30 million by the end of 2017.

The role of content marketing

The company’s success, Leith contends, is based on marketing “muscle.”

“A new way to get in front of the customer is with content… We could not do what we do in the organization without marketing.  They create content for inbound marketing and, also, curate it for nurturing so that salesperson can send it easily to the end customer,” Leith says.

The Vendasta team that will top 300 by the end of 2017  is composed of 100 developers, 60 sales reps and 16 marketers, supporting an ecosystem of  14,000 salespeople in the field.

Leith says that a core philosophy is to let ideas “bubble up from the customer,” as well as from the marketing team. The content is organized into a powerful lead generation system that produces 1,000 to 2,000 leads from the website monthly.

They also design “content and lead generation for partners,” Leith said.

There are three tiers of audiences for marketing: the media company that buys the software, anyone in a sales role calling on small businesses and the third tier is content marketing developed for the small businesses themselves.

With 100 developers in R&D, “innovating at a blistering pace,” a  huge task is just educating and delivering information through the ecosystem about new products, services they provide,” Leith said.

All content created for salespeople also builds credibility and becomes a differentiator when media and agency resellers are deciding which digital service provider to use.

The result is a virtuous cycle, more of a content web than an indexed library.

Here’s a quick tour of how the marketing works:

• The Website

“The sales department are storytellers. But a good web presence is going to do some of this work,” Leith said.  He advises to “Identify your customer base and give them something that shows them that you are someone they can trust.”

Vendasta’s home page is primarily aimed towards media and other resellers; a “Request a demo” is a colored button, not just a tab, at the top right of all pages.

Numerous pop-up case studies

Numerous case studies on the site give critical information about strategies that  media companies have used to be successful in growing revenues.

Numerous case studies on content are aimed at all three levels of customer.

Plus pop-ups for best practices

Reports on “best practices” help both sales reps and their SMB customers. A portion of the most important are also used as pop-ups to capture leads.

• The blog

The blog has a critical role in keeping both the internal sales team up on the innovations, plus communicating to 14,000 sales people logging into the platforms around the world.”

“With 100 developers, we are innovating at a blistering pace,” Leith said.  “It’s a challenge to keep internal sales and the 14,000 sales reps up to date.”

All new innovations, press releases and content are posted on the blog in order of recency.

Where relevant, interstitial ads embedded in the blog promote related case studies and best practice reports with email capture.

For example, three recent blogs include an infographic on “163 stunning social media stats,” a press release on being ranked #42 in Canada’s Profit  500 and  B2B Audience Targeting Tips for LinkedIn and Facebook .

In the center of the B2B targeting blog is a promotion for a “Customer profile worksheet,” one of the recommendations before creating an ad campaign.

There is also a pop-up at the end to obtain a LinkedIn best practices report on using Autofill, also in return for an email.

Each promotion and blog includes shareable links and counters.

• Helping SMB’s with content aimed at their customers

Content designed for SMB’s to use is also available with a Partner Log-in.

“The same (marketing concepts) apply to the businesses we help. They should have a content engine and we are helping to provide content in a vertical-specific manner. The vertical content is white labeled so the agency or reseller is the trusted provider of that content.”

All sales resources are housed together in a what the company calls “the single source of truth.”

• Distribution

As important as the content itself is magnifying its visibility via multiple distribution channels including conferences, email newsletters, social platforms and paid advertising.

• LinkedIn advertising

Vendasta uses both Facebook and LinkedIn advertising in their lead generation strategy. However, a notable recent success has been the use of LinkedIn advertising for a lead generation program. The 1.1% CTR was so unusual that LinkedIn headquarters called Vendasta‘s marketer, Jamie Taylor, and took him to lunch. Of course, he wrote a blog about it, with two related email capture pop-ups.

• Email

Critical is email, which effectively “re-markets” to new leads and keeps all the constituencies up to date.

An opt-in to the email can receive a notice every two to three days. These  fall into a few categories:

• Product and sales webinars/videos

These are all educational webinars and videos on new products and concepts:

• Local Media Scoop

These are colorful blog posts that inform in a highly digestible format, like Dear Agencies: You’re Screwed based on a pep talk from CEO Brendan King. It includes observations learned, and company announcements.

• Product Insider

This email showcases new products and what’s in BETA. Blogs are promoted at the end of the newsletter.

The result of the content and distribution is a virtuous cycle of leads creation and development supporting 60 Vendasta sales reps and 14,000 media and agency reps around the country.

“My advice is to market your organization with relevant content and see who is interacting with the content,“ Leith said. “The days of fitting the package to the needs of the media company are gone.

“The right mix of content you supply should be the one the customer needs.”

Companies who are interested in building or adding to their own content marketing capacity, we can help with strategy, B2B writers and distribution channels.

Use our free tool to create customer personas, the building blocks of  successful marketing strategies.

The slider walks you through the process, then generates a four color one sheet you can use immediately, to inform new employees, designers and marketers about who your customer is and what they want.

So what is a customer persona?

A customer persona is simply an imaginary person created to replicate a typical purchaser.

The format is a condensed, one page description of a sample client, who is actually an aggregate.

Customer personas allow team members to fully understand the customer on a human and emotional level, even when the sale is highly analytical.

They are so powerful as a foundational element of marketing that companies like Vendasta, whose marketing powered rocket-ship growth of 50% year over year for the last three years, hands them to every new marketing employee.

While a few marketers are extremely intuitive about messaging, best practice is not to rely on genius when you can share accurate intelligence with your team.

 

Which persona should you add first?

We recommend starting out by creating the most obvious persona that  your sales team already understands. Then segment your customers into large and small, and into different verticals.

For example, if your company develops marketing software, it may license the platform both to local media and to digital agencies, some small, some very large. Make a short list of the groups your customers tend to fall into.

What will you be asked about your customers?

The basic information is title, company size, age, education, and then delves more deeply into motivators and concerns.

The meat: Adding customer goals

What are key goals they are tasked with this year, long term? How will they measure success? Will it be a revenue goal, a cost-saving goal, a productivity goal or a competitive alignment? The Persona Machine will help you walk through and share critical motivators.

The potatoes: Adding challenges and fears

Just as important as motivators are your customers challenges and fears.  Your team needs to be able to recite by heart the customers challenges and obstacles to purchase. 

What slows down on the job? What are their top obstacles to making purchases, or making a purchase from your company versus a competitor? Which competitors are they likely to be talking to?

What are they looking at for information?

Once your content and advertising teams are on message, it is equally important to distribute these messages on the platforms that your customers are using for trade information.

Which associations, blogs, social networks and trade media are they reading? Who else do they rely on internally or externally for recommendations?

The image

The last important piece of the Persona Machine is uploading an image. Your customer’ images convey a variety of demographic and emotional information.

We have one huge rule about images:  please start with real photos of customers, before going to Google images for a fashion shot.  Don´t guess. Don’t visualize who your customers are without seeing them. Rather, obtain real images, even if you cannot use them in internal materials, you will be way ahead go the game.

We looked for images of brand loyalists at the VP levels in corporate local media – that is, people who control hundreds of millions in revenues and can make or break a software company. These are real images of these VP´s from case studies this month on LocalMediaInsider:

 [

How do you get the information

There are a number of ways to obtain information that makes a customer persona into a critical building block for marketers, versus a random guess.

A quick and dirty way is to bring a lap-top or mobile device into a sales meeting and fill out the form with sellers over muffins or pizza.

Maybe you also want to bring in support teams that take customer calls. Have some fun discussing your customers personalities!

What if you need more data

There are other ways to create data on your customers. One technology company had an intern make a list of top ten customers – i.e., the actual people who managed purchases –  and looked them up on Facebook and LinkedIn to create a spreadsheet, which was then used to create a composite.

He was able to identify a variety of data points, including  job title, educational background, last few jobs, age and male versus female,  to feed into the aggregated model.

If the customer type needs a more detailed analysis, an email survey with a phone follow-up can do the trick. If your company needs custom survey support please let us know at the end of this article.

Need more help? We are committed to helping journalism based media connect with transformative technology.

We don’t like the term either, but it it does describe a super useful practice:  Using your own products, services and expertise for your own company.

Makes sense, right?

If you make beautiful sales funnels, your site should have beautiful sales funnels. If you provide content marketing, you should write blogs like this one. If you serve beautiful and unique ad templates, you should advertise using your own beautiful unique ad templates. Make sure the marketing team gets it!

Rather than our standard case study format, we decided to show you a timeline of  corporate dogfooding practices, as  the word evolved through technological history.

1981 –  Apple removes all typewriters from its company in an effort to prove an electronic universe is the future of the written word.

1990’s –   By 1991, in  general, Microsoft is mostly running on its own Windows operating  system, virtually “self-hosting.”  It is “called out”  for using Unix for email. It switches.

1999 – Hewlett-Packard’s employees refer  to a project using its own products as “Project Alpo.”

2000 –Mozilla does, too.

2007 – Jo Hoppe, the CIO of Pegasystems uses “drinking our own champagne” instead. It does not catch on.

2009 – Toney Scott, the new CIO of Microsoft, argues the term should be changed to “ice-creaming,” since their products are “like ice cream to its customer,” even though the phrase sounds vaguely disturbing.  It also does not catch on.

2011 – YouTube allows users to choose a Creative Commons license, instead of a commercial one, followed by the message (Shh! – Internal Dogfood), posted on all products internally tested.

 2012 – “Self-hosting” begins to replace “Dogfooding” at companies who upgrade their systems every night to their latest software iterations.

 2016 –  Developers of IBM’s mainframe operating systems, a conservative crowd, still use  the term, “eating our own cooking,” the go-to-phrase for people who are bothered by the dog food aspect.

The odd thing about dogfooding, the word, is that it seems to imply something unappealing about your company’s products: Before you actually used it yourself, It may only have been fit for a dog.

Plus, are those “dogs” your customers?

But at the end of the day, dogfooding provides a basic answer to a visceral issue: If you won’t eat it why should they?

Why should clients be served anything less than you would want to be served  in a SaaS platform?

In our aesthetic hearts, we would rather use the metaphor about Escher drawing his own hands drawing his hands. Or explain how Bach’s fugues mathematically circle back over themselves like Godel’s math theorems.

But we have “dogfooding.” Everyone knows what it means.

So yeah. We eat our own dog food.

You should, too.

 

 

 

First the data: The average large IT purchaser considers just three to five vendors out of dozens or even hundreds of software providers as strategic partners, (IDG, Survey of IT purchasers, 2016).   So what turns a vendor into a partner?  

Here’s the data from IDG, which  defines a strategy partner in this way:

A strategically important vendor that has gone beyond effective delivery of systems and services to become a consistently responsive, agile, and trusted collaborator in creating value.”

They list  five important considerations: 

1. Rapid response to service requests
2. Understanding of business goals and objectives
3. Post-sales support and service
4. Long-term viability
5. Vertical industry knowledge

In the media technology industry, which helps media companies transform their business models,  some but not all, tech companies meet this criterion.  

However,  most successful strategic partners do, and a few like Second Street Media, iPublish Media,  Vendasta and TapClicks not only do they meet but exceed these criteria. 

Among other competencies, they all are a few best practices: 

1.  Publish a deep catalog of case studies and best practices shared by clients to train teams who use their software.  
2. Produce newsletters that do more than “sell” but also help to keep customers up-to-date on best practices and webinars.
3. Sponsor their own events and invite customers to attend and share best practices and new ideas for using their platforms.  
4. Their software itself is solid, easy to use and dramatically increases revenues, saves money or both. It is a “game changer.”
5. Their company is deep on the development side, with robust development teams adding new products and integrations that make them more valuable, based on customer feedback.

The transition from a platform and/or vendor to a strategic partner requires increasing marketing and customer support capabilities in stages, starting with a simple roadmap so your team can take on workable milestones.  Let us know how we can help, just book a time here at your convenience. 

 

B2B marketers are not great at using social media to generate leads. It’s not just our opinion, only 7% of technology purchasers say they are influenced by the social media that  76% of technology companies are creating (Walker Sands, Marketing Charts).

For the most part, marketers repost content on social platforms, without building  a clear lead generation strategy, or creating content valuable enough for a prospect to trade for an email. But there is another way to using social media that is often overlooked: Advertising on LinkedIn. Like Facebook for the B2C market, ads are super targeted, and a relatively cheap source of leads if used correctly. Here is a case study that shows how to do it. 

Company: Vendasta

Key executive: Jason Taylor, Demand Generation Strategist

Initiative: LinkedIn advertising

Challenge

When Taylor set out to create a LinkedIn advertising campaign,  it was a relatively new experience for the company. The challenge was to drive  a significant number of actionable  leads for agencies and newspapers for the sales force to close at an acceptable ROI.

He wanted  lead generation program, not a clicks to the website or blog posts, but valuable information his market wanted enough to trade their email, and which also qualified them as a prospect.

Strategy

Some of the work creating campaigns was already created by a competency in understanding customers and a deep knowledge of messaging. Here are some of the tactics Taylor deployed:

1.  Utilized a customer profile.  Customer profiles are already deeply embedded in the Vendasta culture. Ever new marketer is given a set and you can see the evidence in the clarity of messages  (shameless self promotion, you can create as many as you want, edit, download, share and archive on this site, here. We just want your email).  So Taylor had this piece to start with.

2.  Identified a data driven component in the message. “Agency churn exceeds 50%” is a statistic this market is paying attention to.  Again, the massive content strategy and blogging that Vendasta engages in allowed Taylor to more easily surface this  kind of compelling data.

3. Found an amazing image. Taylor notes images increase engagement by 200%. The empty office (a failed agency) helped focus on the pain point (ouch!) and engage agencies.

4. Selected the the audience “type in”  the job titles. There is a drop down for this, but Taylor says the options are overly broad and competition for “senior” executives is fierce.

“You only want the right people clicking or your budget will be gone in no time. Really narrow down your personas (e.g., small business owner, digital director, founder, etc.)”

5. Selected groups as part of the target. When Taylor deselected “groups”  his CTR dropped from 1.1% to .3%. Best practice is to keep group selections turned on.

6. Understood that the content, not the ad, gets the leads. Taylor did not suggest exactly how he creates lead generating content in the crowded marketplace for digital information, but he did say that generic content like “50 Social media tips” will not perform.

7. Created a lead generation-based ad and landing page. 

Here just the 6th and 7th top performing ads created for the program. The landing pages matched these ads with an email capture in return for valuable information.

 

Results

Results from the approach were so impressive that Taylor was able to  write  a content marketing blog with the classic headline,   “How I Got LinkedIn To Take Me to a Hockey Game (Without Spending a Fortune)”

• Taylor says he generated 1000 MQL’s (marketing qualified leads)  over a six month campaign
•  CPL was $70 and a 93% qualified lead rate.
• LinkedIn, perhaps interested in creating case studies of their own, was so interested in the 1.1% CTR, that they contacted him to find out how he did it, and even took him  to the Maple Leafs hockey game – a big deal in Toronto, where tickets can cost $500 a seat and a beer is $20. You can read his full blog here.
• The first ad was more effective than the second one,  as “Churn” is more  specific concern than “challenges.”  Identifying these hyper specific issues can be picked up with careful attention to the customer persona (you can build one from our tool on this site here).  This in the agony business can almost  feel their heart rate increase at the word “churn,”  it is an emotional hot button issue in business. No one likes it.

With so many competitors sure to read  his blog, it is not surprising that Taylor failed to disclose his top five ads in this blog.

Conclusion

Taylor succeeded in part by getting  into the heads of prospective buyers – a hyper competitive space with low barriers to entry  – and fully utilizing the targeting power of LinkedIn ads.  The four data collection reports he listed all focus on the pain-points with words like “churn,” “challenge” and “survival.”

 

Technology purchasers consume a lot of different kinds of content before making a purchase. So which types of content should the marketing team focus on?  The following list uses current data to show what and why  C-Level, VP, IT and and sales leaders are looking at when making decisions, and which kinds of content are most important.

1. Press​ ​releases​ 

The first source of information in the pre-search phase, besides peers and colleagues, are trade journals.   Make sure your  press releases  do not bury the lead, but have a  “news hook” and are sent to all a curated list of editors. What goes into the press release?

•  Major upgrades, and new products and verticals.
• New accounts.
• Industry information that proves your story. Example: If you sell email platforms,  statistics that use of the type of email functionality your company provides has has grown  by 50%.
• General markers, has business grown by 200%  YOY? Did your platform process $600 million in transactions (as one of our client’s did) That helps sell the validity of concept.

2. White​ ​papers​

White papers are the second most-used way that executives “keep up” on technology in the pre-search stage (Walker Sands Survey, 2016).  These are longer,  and typically more statically-rich and/or  include best practices. The more general they are, the less useful, so if you can curate data from your own customer base,  that is a win-win for everyone. White papers should be useful enough for ads and onsite lead generation programs.

3. Blogs

¨Blogs¨ are  a way to collect all your case studies and shorter bits of information,  build SEO, and  help educate key executives in how their industry is changing.  Typically you can house all the content in a running blog, then separate out the more  important “evergreen” content into a Resource Center, or list under each vertical.

Here are some of the kinds of content that go into the blog

•  Short write ups and images of  key data  points on mega-trends that support your company’s value proposition. Example: iPublish media pulled seven blog pieces from data on the rise in SMB´s DIY purchases of marketing and two trend articles on the importance of trusted content.
• Negative warnings on the problem your platform solves. Example: The  #1 reason (your market) is losing (fill in the blank)  is (fill in the blank).
• Company news too small to warrant a full press release. Welcoming smaller customers onboard, added capacities, client webinars.
• Attendance at upcoming events.
• All the other content as it is released, including PR, case studies, etc.

4. Newsletters

Newsletters are designed to distribute links to this information more widely without spamming them by delivering every individual blog post and announcement separately.  Some companies get their newsletter going quarterly newsletter,  as a report that shows  couple of new clients, case studies,  product upgrades, other blogs.  Later on you can run newsletter more frequently and segment so that customers receive more of the internal information, and prospects in the discovery and research  phase receive the more external messaging

5. Case​ ​studies​: The #2 influence on the technology purchase decision

Along with product demos,  companies who purchased  marketing technology said that case studies are the most important influence on the buying decision (Walker Sands Survey, 2016).

Using a third party can overcome reluctance by making it a win/win for your  customers, who are also motivated by peer recognition for  “best practices” using your platform.

6. Product demos

Product demos  the #1 influence on technology purchase decisions (57% Walker Sands, 2016). If you are not getting some kind of  outside feedback on your product demo, you are losing out.Use your product demo, to answer “main concerns” as well as build the case for a purchase.

7. Internal and External Peer recommendations

By the time that key executives are actually making a decision, the role of the sales person typically goes quiet. Only 5% of executives rely on representatives at this stage of the game. Instead they are talking about the demo and the case studies internally, and getting more recommendations externally, as they  decide either whether to do this, and/or which company to choose.

Peer recommendations from inside and outside companies are always top five factor in both instigating a search, selecting a vendor and deciding which company to select.

Internally, the product demos and case studies are going to be the most influential on the internal group. Their main concerns are typically cost and ease of use. Build these concerns into the presentation.

Externally, make sure you have great references from the case studies, or from clients that have not given you one but who are willing to vouch for your team.

Where is the website in all this? The website  is critically important, especially in the research and engagement  stage, as potential purchases are deciding if they should continue to the demo. Studies shows that the website is in the top five influencers in making a decision between companies. This passive search needs to discover your  key messages, and the users should  understand the products and verticals, and find demo buttons right away.  See this report for a more detailed analysis of how content influence the technology purchase at each stage, and what internal constituency care about. 

From its inception, TechRefs decided that transparency was a core value.

To ‘walk the walk’  we are publishing this policy.

Most of these initial “rules” have come from questions we’ve experienced over the years, having been on both sides of the issue.

So what exactly is transparency in a business context?  And why is it important?

Transparency is a higher level of disclosure that is typical in the circumstance. It means more than just telling the truth; but rather telling the whole truth.

No surprises. No hidden agendas.

The key reason for transparency is that builds trust.

But it is also the right thing to do. There is nothing worse than finding “something you once said” unexpectedly appearing as an endorsement on the website of a company you do not, actually, intend to endorse. This has happened to us, and we did not like it.

Transparency also saves time.  People are proud of their contributions to their industry, but they will speak more freely if they know when and where the information they give will be used.

Our policy is to let people we interview know:

• Who we are calling for, and why

Let’s say Ms. Smith VP of X has assigned us to gather some case studies and along the way, see if we can obtain a testimonial.

We will probably never contact a source and tell them, “Mr. Smith the VP of X Company asked me to contact you to get a quote bragging about how great their software works.”

But we will tell them,  “Ms. Smith, VP of X  is sponsoring a program to share best practices using the platform,  and has mentioned you have had some great success, can we schedule a time to talk? ”

After the case study is done, we’ll request permission to use excerpts in other ways if needed.

If we are writing for a third party, the same rules apply. “Mr. Jones, VP or Y, has nominated your company for a Sample Award. We like to write up an article/entry to submit.”

Our company is co-owners of LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecTech, so we write direct submissions to those media if they fit the standards and criteria. If not, they can still become part of the “Brand Insights” program and run as native content.

• Where the content will be published initially

Sometimes executives would love to share, but don’t want competitors to see what they are doing, or they have other concerns.

We let interviewees know if the content is intended for the back page of a client’s resource center, an email capture program, or a cover story for Forbes magazine.

• If the content is being repurposed, we send a ‘heads up” email.

Even taking a few lines from a case study to use in a testimonial requires courtesy email, but not a formal “yes.”

Rather we will send a  quick, “Hey, we are going to put this up on our website. Let me know if you have any objections.”

• No “on the record, off the record”, is used.

In the years we’ve spent writing case studies, we’ve never found a time when it was appropriate to override a professional’s request to kill a quote or even a whole story.

If a source asks “don’t include that” after they said something, or in an email a week, it is taken out.

• If a problem arises with the story itself, we take it down.

It is more important to keep the circle of trust intact, even if we have to pay for content we cannot use now and then.

Having said that, here is what we will not do in the name of transparency:

• Send a note to the source saying, “Please edit.”

That’s just asking for problems, as well as asking people who have spent time on the project to do more than their share of the work.  If they look it over and have no objections, that is plenty.

• Send a note asking: “Is it’s OK to publish this?”

We will send the article with a publication date on it, so they can respond by that time.   They will let you know if there is a problem

• Itemise every channel the information may be used in advance.

Saying that “we plan to use this interview in a webinar, the best practices one sheet, and lead generation case study on LinkedIn. Do you agree to that?”  would scare the heck out of anyone. Use the place, and most public place, the information will appear.

Afterwards, we just send notification of future uses, with a “Let me know if you have any objections.”

• Engage in multiple requests for ‘style changes’

Occasionally we find someone who loves to edit! At some point, there has to be enough respect for the client or source to just leave the copy alone.

Finally, we realize that trust is earned. It builds the same way any brand does, over time, with consistency across all of the relationships.

How business and IT executives decide to make B2B purchases of technology platforms involves multiple people and stages. There are always invisible influences that make it difficult to understand what customers are paying attention to at which stage of the purchase funnel. This report looks at five research studies that answer these questions:

• What information purchasers use to stay “up-to-date”
• Who is involved in making decisions
• How they use your  website
• What are the most influential types of content 
• What purchasers want from technology sales executives
• Qualitative factors purchasers use to decide
• Top obstacles that prevent a sale
• Why companies decide buy from one company versus another

How key executives ‘keep up’ with options in the discovery phase

Key executives in a variety of roles – both on the business side and IT – need to keep up-to-date on technology that can transform aspects of their company.

The latest IDG survey of IT purchasers (September, 2016) shows that executives use more than ten sources of information in the discovery phase, however  five most used information sources used to “keep up” are:

1. Independent news and reviews (66%)
2.  White papers (58)
3.  Webinars (58%)
4. Newsletters (47%)
5. Technology vendor websites (48%).  

The top source for most is actually colleagues and peers – a net 73%.  Most used peers outside the company – by phone, email and in-person – at this stage as a source of information. However the most trusted sources are reading first source materials. The role of trade journals continues to be important.

40% also said trade show attendance are part of the mix.

Another net 73% of those surveyed said they some form vendor information and content that helped them keep on on industry trends. That’s the good news.

However, at this stage, passively looking at content  (56%) is relied on as a source of information. This report shows that the  sales person is responsible for 44%..

The Walker Sands study of the “pre-search phase” for purchasers of marketing technology said the sales executive is even less significant in discovery, only  (5%) said a sales rep help them to instigate a search.

In the Walker Sands study, peer recommendations also tied for first, followed by online reviews (44%) and analyst reports (33%).

Print trade magazines (24%,IDG) were not used by more than 75% of purchasers. They are clearly getting their information online. 

Software companies  social media is also not the best way to reach new customers (29%, IDG). Walker Sands confirms that only 7% of buyers said social media influenced them at any stage of the sale and more than half said it had no influence at all, in spite of its use by 72% of tech marketers.

Who is involved in making the purchase

The decision-making process involves a mix of people from the business side, the IT side and “colleagues” whose departments will be affected.

Corporate buyers have different processes. In some companies the decision-making is more centralised, in other it’s more distributed.

A 2015 recently-released study from SiriusDecisions shows one way to look at  three types of corporate buyers: Independent, Consensus and Committee.   We advocate creating a customer persona for each of these groups your company sells to. 

Independent

These are  smaller corporations in the Owned and Operated (O&O) category, who may buy in less than 8 weeks, for platform  <$50,000 and include 2 to 4 people in the decision loop, including 1 to 2 buying centers and 1 to 2 colleagues.  

Consensus

These sales take place over a longer time period – 1 to 2  quarters – and involve a technology purchase of $50,000 to $500,000.

The decision- making for this style takes place across “teams functions or departments” so more buyers and colleagues were involved, 3 to 4 buying centers, with 3 to 5 colleagues  who may be attending product demos.

The number of interactions with the vendor  also increased to 14, with 8 human and 6 non-human interactions.

The majority of respondents in this category said sales exectuives helped inform their decision at every stage.

Committee

These are the largest sales, starting at $500,000 and running into the millions. They require  1-2 quarters or more to make a decision, have 5 or more buying centers plus 6 to 10 colleagues who are also involved. There many be 9 or more  human and 8 non human interactions. The sales representative was also more important as a source of information at every stage.

We have seen verticals vary from this model, with sales under $50,000 still requiring 3 to 5  buying centers, ten to 20 total employes, and taking 2 quarters or more.

But in general the larger the sale:

• The larger the number influencers
• The  longer the sales cycle
• The more human and non-human content-oriented  interactions

In general, however, expect to appeal to many people within the company whose opinions count, even if they are not voiced to the sales representative.

The role of peers as a source of information is critical

Peers inside and outside the company,  remain information sources in all stages of the sale. Companies are talking internally about new platforms and listening to what others around the company have to say.

Here’s where peers rank in five (1 is high) most used  sources of information at each stage of the buying cycle, from “Keeping up to date” to “making a purchase” :

Keep up to-date –  Peers outside the company, 4

Determine business need –   Peers inside, 1 to 3 peers outside the company, 3

Evaluate products – Peers inside the company, 3

Recommend and select vendors – Peers Inside and outside, 3

Sell internally – Peers inside the company, 1

Make a purchase –  Peers inside the company, 1

Notice how information from peers is always used  in the final stages of the sale. Later in this report, data shows what they are talking about: Ease of use, difficulty of implementation, and price. The sales person who appears as highly important during the research phase will drop out at the end when these conversations are occurring.

What purchasers want from sales people

As we noted, few companies said that sales executive gave them information that instigated a search (5%, Walker Sands), although this make underestimate the role of salespeople interacting with influencers (peers) at trade conferences and other groups.

But that changes radically as key executive begins researching a solution, and the role of the sales person becomes critical.  

IDG’s 2016 survey of IT Purchasers (both hardware and software)  shows that purchasers said want a lot from sales reps:

Speedy answers(67%).  

Free trials and test drives  (64%).

Advice and best practices (52%).

Case studies (50%)

Educational assets and references (46%).

Ask them questions and show ROI (30%)

They dislike direct sales pitches.

Note that four of the kinds of information wanted by more than half of all purchasers include these top types:

• Free trials and test drives
• Relevant information delivered on a timely basis,
• Advice/best practices
• Case studies

A conclusion from this data is that as the purchase cycle moves from research to product demos and onward,  two or more purchasing decision-makers need to answer questions “bubbling up” – or down – from colleagues and bosses, and want speedy answers from reps.

Having the top resources available to send in an instant – and an expert who instantly reachable by phone is a best practice.

The sales rep was also  included as one of the five top sources of information (with 1 being the most used) at every stage after a search began:

Determine need – 4, in-person along with trade conferences

Determine technical requirements  – 3

Evaluate products and services  – 2

Recommend and select vendors  – 1

Sell internally – 3

Make a  purchase – 3, by phone, email

At the “make a purchase phase” a key factor for IT managers is “customer experience” – and this really means how the sales department is responding.

The role of vendor website and content

Research from Hinge Marketing concluded  that 81% of companies in in B2B purchased have researched the vendor website.  The quality of a website was also a reason given for excluding a company as an option.

Walker Sands show a similar result: Purchasers of marketing technology said that during the research phase they were equally influenced by Website (29%)  and Vendor content (29%) just a point behind Independent reviews (30%). Put the content prospect need to differentiate your platform, plus case studies and reviews that prove the value proposition on the the website!

A final data point on the importance of  websites: The company website is was as important as the product demo for CMO’s and had some influence for  about 9 out of 10 buyers.

Below is where the website is one of top five information sources (with 1 being high) for purchasers along the cycle:

Keeping up to date  – 5

Determine business need

Determine technical requirements – 3

Evaluate products and services  – 1, ahead of sales rep

Recommend vendors  – 5

Sell internally

Approve, authorise purchase  

So prospects are not only looking at website to line up possible vendors, they are also actively using it to evaluate products and services.

So what kinds of information should be available on the website, besides the list of products and services?

Studies show that executives said they were  most influenced to make a purchase by the Product Demos (52%) and Case studies/testimonials (47%)  (Walker Sands).

In fact case studies/testimonials were the most important factor for VP/Directors and Coordinators, followed by the product demos. The reverse was true at the C-level.

So while “white papers” are used to “keep up to date” in the pre-search phase, the website should also include easy paths to sign up for a product demo, and use case studies that prove ROI, or other key benefits.

Incidently, Videos (15%) and webinars (14%) are  further down the list of what was most “influenitial.”

Only 7% saw social media as influential and almost half said social media  had no influence at all on their decision. Marketing Charts, which also conducts research also found this in MarketingCharts’ B2B Digital Marketing Insights Report found the same thing.  

Why companies decide to make a purchase

In the IDG survey, companies met with 3 to 5 vendors and spent  nearly three hours meeting with them. So how do they make a decision between companies, or whether to make a decision to purchase at all?

At the decision-making phase price and ease of use were cited as the most important factors for buying marketing technology, (Walker Sands).

Price  was the most important factor in the decision for CMO’s. For VP/directors and other employees ease of use was the most important consideration in deciding to buy.

IDG survey also showed that IT executives place the greatest value on customer experience, with two-thirds rating it as the most important element of a quality relationship.

Business managers differ somewhat, favoring helpful answers to questions.

What prevents companies from making a purchase

Companies cited budgets, difficulty of implementation and internal resistance as the largest obstacles to buying marketing technology (Walker Sands).

This is why colleague and peers are so important, including the opinions of non-C level employees, do in fact count ( MarketingCharts).

However, the influence sales person drops off at this stage –  In other words, the company is now discussing options internally, based on the information they already have.

The lesson to be learned here, is that answers to anticipated objections such as price and difficulty of implementation should be built into earlier stages, including the important content: Case studies and product demos.

It is also critical to find a budget – even if it is coming from another source, and if the money will come strictly from ROI to have those case studies to back it up.

Matching marketing to how purchasers buy

So are tech marketers matching their investments to these needs?  An older study is the 2015, Regalix survey of  640 senior marketing executives and business leaders about their product marketing practices. The group included a range of B2B technology companies (software, hardware, cloud computing, and mobile).  More than half were already using blogs, social media and paid search and online display ads.

Technology companies investing their websites, case studies, demos, webinars and email are doing this right. The stand-out observation here again is that 76% used social media that rarely influences IT buys at all.

In the introductory or growth phases of the company, video, events, and presentations were most important.  In mature companies, case studies and blogs gained a central role. In-person events are important across the board.

As companies when into decline, the priorities shifted again, backing off of marketing  overall.

Conclusion

So what are the takeaways from these insights for marketers of technology companies?  First, begin with the end in mind, technology companies should be creating the right kinds of content that purchasers want at each stage of the marketing cycle, and have these materials on their website and available to the sales executives.

Here are a few takeaways and “best practices”  based on this research

• Pre-research and part of the initial search and research is going on without your sales representatives.

They are keeping up to date with information from peers, publication of  content in trade journals, peer recommendations, white papers and newsletters. The content plan should include these, along with a public relations strategy to stay in the more important online journals, or use of native content in trusted sourves.

• Have an impressive product demo.

Rather than just showcasing the technology, tell a story and make sure that everyone’s questions are answered. Build “ease of use and implementation” and pricing issues into the “story.” Demos should be flexible enough to respond to the client and the more people from within the company who see the demo, the better. 

• Develop case studies/testimonials and best practices

More than half executives wanted case studies, references and best practices from sales people, and the most influential content was case studies/testimonials.

 

• The company website will be used in competitive research.

 

One of the surprises of the research is how much the website is used by buyers. Rather than being just a static brochure, it can help differentiate your company, showcase products and services described, and make case studies and testimonials available.

• Plan to capture email lists deeper into companies.

The importance of peer input at every stage, and of internal resistance as an obstacle, was also a key takeaway from these reports. More people are influencing the sale, even if they are not decision centers.

• Address price and find budgets early on

Assume your platform is being “price shopped” with three to five other companies, and that budget may prevent any sales from happening. The time to “find a budget” is before the decision “goes upstairs” where budget are a key concern. Us specific percentage increases in revenues, reductions in employees from real clients.

 

• The role of the sales executive is educational and representational of customer service.

 

Purchasers want to be in the drivers’ seat. The most interest prospects have started research and they  want information quickly. Product demos should be customized and  allow executives “drive” by asking questions.

The sale is made when the buyer understands not only how the problem will be solved, but also:

• Why the price makes sense
• Where the budget will come from
• How the implementation will work
• That peers agree on the purchase
• That Internal constituencies will like using the platform
• What other companies have had success

Information sources

• IDG Survey of IT Purchasers, September 2016 (IDG). This is a directly related study across IT industry including hardware and software.
• Walker Sands study, which  surveyed 313 U.S. corporations in 2016  to find how they made a decision to purchase a  marketing technology platforms.
• Marketing Charts – They provide a variety of surveys on B2B purchasers. (MC)
• 2015,  Regalix survey of  640 senior marketing executives and business leaders about their product marketing practices  from a range of B2B technology companies (software, hardware, cloud computing, and mobile).

A 2015 recently-released study from SiriusDecisions (Sirius)