Concepts

Chaos brings opportunity: MoreDemand™ grew out of a convergence of several significant sales and marketing trends in the complex business solution marketplace. These trends have created chaos and golden opportunity. The companies that change and evolve to take advantage of these trends will prosper. The companies that don't change, that continue to deploy obsolete marketing and sales tactics with an expectation of new results, will become more and more marginal. These companies will feed another trend – acquisition and consolidation.

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."

- W. Edwards Deming

Concept #1 – What used to work – doesn't

In a recent survey of 1,100 Chief Sales Officers average quota attainment dropped to 60% - third decline in three years – CSO Insights, 2007 Survey Results. This is just the most recent data that documents a change in how your buyer perceives your solution and the value you deliver. Y2K is over and the Internet bubble has popped. Have you changed your marketing and sales practices (and culture) since then?

Concept #2 – If you don't add value – you're a commodity

There is solid research to support the hypothesis that the reason for this decline is the gap between the value we think our solution provides, versus the value perceived by our customers. Unless your product is this year's "big idea", your solution is probably perceived as a commodity. How can you add value to your Buyer and differentiate your company and solution? Thirty years ago IBM trained all their sales people in a methodology called "Customer Oriented Selling". Do we need to return to the basics?

Concept #3 – Demand Creation adds value to your buyer

Find a prospect that has need, budget, time frame, decision maker and agenda; get selected to the long list; get selected to the short list; pull a rabbit out of your hat and win the deal; negotiate contracts – how exactly does this type of "intercept selling" add value to your solution versus your competition?

If you engage with your customer early in his process, before he is even sure he has a problem, you can help him understand that an opportunity exists to improve his business and there is a feasible solution available. Demand Creation requires that you know his business (one of the advantages of vertical sales) and you engage early with your buyer to help him formulate his buying vision, value and process – you become a trusted advisor.

Concept #4 – The Internet has the potential to add value

The Internet changed everything and continues to evolve at hyper-speed. At the very least you should be prepared for a much more demanding customer. They want what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. They do a significant amount of their "buying" on the Internet before they even talk to your salesperson. If your buyer starts his buying process on the Internet, when does your company start its selling process?

The Internet offers the highest value way to improve communications with your buyers and customers – via the highest frequency, lowest cost media. Technology enables you to engage in personalized and automated 1-to-1 interactions with your buyers, and to "learn" from the interaction. The net result is that your internet can capture your buyer interest, profile his needs and preferences, and in a high personalized fashion help him with his process. B2B websites that "generate leads" are of limited value. B2B websites that interact with your buyer and generate segmented, interested prospects who would like to engage in your sales process – these websites are the gold standard.

Concept #5 – Sales & Marketing, the last efficiency frontier

Person-to-person "tacit" interactions now represent 41 percent of all U.S. worker activity (measured by number of jobs) and are growing the most rapidly – Software 2006 Industry Report, McKinsey & Company. We have optimized and automated processes in our manufacturing, distribution, financial and supply chain operations, it is time to view marketing and sales from an "enterprise resource planning" point of view. The ERP revolution was based on a simple concept – work center efficiency is not as important as maximizing the amount of product that gets shipped and invoiced. You invest X amount of resources in your "Marketing Plant". All that matters is the number of qualified sales opportunities that result, and how many convert to contracts. If you focus on the end result, it becomes much easier to align marketing and sales messages, and to integrate, optimize and automate an efficient marketing-to-sales process.

Concept #6 – Robots work cheap – but aren't very bright

If a person applied for a job, and he had the ability to respond personally to every single buyer or customer that came to your website, and he could send 20,000 personal emails in an evening each with a tailored message, and he always did exactly what you told him to do, and he kept meticulous records of every contact, and he worked 24 X 7 with no breaks and no benefits; BUT, the kid is dumb as a box of rocks. He can only do what you tell him to do. Would you hire him?

It is now possible to build Marketing Robots that use an integrated marketing database to drive dynamic processes, forms, content and surveys. Buyer behavior is recorded and triggers the robot based on an event or by the buyer moving into a dynamic segment (example: buyers that opened our email and clicked on the link to the website micro-page). The Robot can be programmed to do any process that you can put on paper. And processes can be linked to other processes, electronic and human (put the buyer into a nurturing process and send a follow-up task to the salesman's sales system).

Unfortunately, we can't build a marketing brain. Technology has opened up vast creative opportunities to add value to your customer and differentiate your company. It will take a while for marketing and sales professionals to catch up with these capabilities. In the mean time, the industry has started to develop "best practices" interactive automation. Many of the high ROI applications of the technology can be inexpensively deployed via subscriptions to on-demand "canned" marketing robots that are programmed for "best practices". The B2B solution seller can then build more custom robots based on his customers and markets.