NETTING IT OUT

B2B marketing has fundamentally changed. Customers now control their buying process. Competition for customer attention has increased significantly. In addition, technology now enables marketers to track customers’ behaviors, infer their intentions, and present personalized offers. Today combining traditional and new marketing skills with new processes and appropriate deployment of technology yields better quality leads, reduced sales costs, shorter sales cycles and improved reliability of the sales forecast.

This case study draws on the experience of a B2B marketer who set up content marketing and lead management processes, enabled by technology, at two very different companies. Her work points out the critical importance of understanding the customer deeply, developing good processes, and using technology to facilitate experimentation.

THERE IS MUCH TO LEARN

Business Education Lags Practice

“Rookie marketers are graduating from college today with good knowledge of Facebook and Twitter but no real understanding of the new B2B marketing.” The core of Pamela Casale’s willingness to tell her story comes from her frustration that today’s marketing education is still focused on lead generation, selling and telling, and undifferentiated messaging. Pam remembers what it was like to be that kind of marketer. Today, business customers have 20 or more choices in each product category and they hone their buying processes by using real-time information readily available on the Web. In this customer environment, “that kind of marketer” is doomed.

Pam recognizes that today’s customer has often defined a short list of relevant options before inviting salespeople to meet. As a result, in far too many meetings, sales people face the challenge of unseating, rather than introducing, a way of thinking about a problem. Marketers now hold the key to molding customers’ thinking about their problem through provision of timely relevant content at the multiple “access points” where customers educate themselves. Today’s marketers draw inferences from customer behavior to identify their readiness to buy and thereby pass better quality leads to sales.

This case study focuses on the way Pam Casale, Director of Marketing at CSC, has handled two critical aspects of the new marketing: 1) developing the right content to keep the customer engaged and 2) nurturing and scoring leads to engage prospects and pass leads to sales at the most appropriate time for follow up.

Two Different Companies…One Marketing Leader, One Automation Platform

Pam leads marketing for CSC’s Trusted Cloud Computing Division. Her marketing department operates relatively autonomously and has built a reputation as a laboratory for new marketing ideas. Pam had implemented Manticore Technology’s marketing automation platform at her previous company, Intellitactics, and has introduced the same tool to CSC. She knew from experience that she couldn’t cost-effectively sustain marketing programs that depend on personalized content and lead scoring without automating. She has also introduced salesforce.com and the first inside sales team to her Division at CSC.

Pam’s current and former companies are quite different. Intellitactics (acquired by Trustwave in March 2010), where Pam was Chief Marketing Officer, was a young, small, fast-moving company offering a new product in a highly competitive market. Doing more with less was the mantra at Intellitactics. They actively experimented with marketing tactics, seeking more efficient, faster ways of prevailing in the marketplace.

By contrast, CSC is a $16 billion company with a 50 year history and large, loyal client base. CSC typically spends heavily on traditional postal direct mail, print advertising, and face-to-face meetings, placing a major focus on current customers. They have had little experience in competitive environments as intense and fast moving as they now face with cloud computing. The Trusted Cloud Computing Division is charged with aggressive growth objectives through acquisition of new customers, a task CSC knows will necessitate new approaches.

CONTENT MARKETING CHALLENGES

Why Content Matters

Timely, relevant information has been shown time and again to be the most effective way of drawing customer attention on the Web. What information is timely and relevant differs depending on the product/service and the customer’s role, company, industry, and stage in their buying cycle. Customers also differ in how they want to receive information and in multiple other dimensions that affect their perception of the information. For the marketer, this means ...