 Featured Articles
Take Advantage of the Epiphany Phase
By Chris Koch, ckoch@itsma.com
We’ve just completed a new report entitled The Epiphany Phase: The Missing Link in the Buying Process. We were driven to write the report because we see marketers engaging prospects and customers too late in the buying cycle. Marketers are missing opportunities in the epiphany phase, which occurs long before any discussion of products, services, or RFPs—indeed, it occurs before customers have even begun to think about a purchase.
The epiphany phase is the point at which customers come to the realization of an important business need. For example, it could be the moment when the executive team realizes that it needs to enter a new market or develop a new product. Or it could be the moment when the business unit leader sees how the innovative application of a newer technology can solve a previously unidentified business problem. It’s a golden moment for a provider to be there to offer valuable advice and support.
Helping customers realize that they have a business need confers a tremendous advantage. You have the opportunity to create a deeper, more enduring relationship with prospects and customers and to influence the direction of the project before competitors have even entered the process—perhaps securing a role as the preferred provider.
But it isn’t easy.
We have identified three steps to become a master of the epiphany phase:
1. Refocus your thought leadership strategy. In the epiphany phase, thought leadership should be focused on revealing future trends and articulating the business challenges and opportunities that will likely result from those trends. Thus, marketing owns the epiphany phase. It’s up to marketing to create a research network that generates the trends and business challenges that customers and prospects are looking for at this stage.
2. Align the sales and marketing processes with the customer’s buying process. There is typically a big gap in time between the point at which a prospect recognizes a business need and the time when sales typically engages them (in the interest phase). Marketers need to help sales better understand prospects’ internal buying processes so that sales moves from simply reacting to RFPs to helping prospects discover and respond to the most important business issues they face.
3. Change sales’ emphasis from transactional to consultative selling. The goal for salespeople in the epiphany phase shifts from making the sale to building trust. Customers invest their trust in the relationship when they see that a provider is willing and able to provide knowledge and experience that rivals and exceeds their own—in other words, to put the needs of the customer first. That trust increases when the provider does not allow knowledge and experience to be bounded by its own four walls.
The Best Way to Qualify Leads: Have Them Do It Themselves
 By Jeff Sands and Ajit Maira, ITSMA
Good lead nurturing means always leaving your prospects wanting more.
Unfortunately, few marketers are doing lead nurturing at all. According to a recent ITSMA survey, just 42% of marketers said they were responsible for lead nurturing, and fewer than half had formal programs in place.
In part this is because marketers are under incredible pressure to generate new leads and keep the pipeline as full as possible. In this kind of environment, nurturing often takes a back seat.
But focusing only on lead generation reduces the efficiency of sales. The pipeline will be full of prospects who aren’t ready to be pursued or aren’t worth pursuing. This is one of the reasons that 60–80% of leads simply fall by the wayside.
However, if the prospects themselves had a say in determining their fate, they would not go gently into the black hole. Marketers need to create a lead-nurturing process in which prospects qualify themselves. After all, no one knows better how to match their needs to your solution than the prospects themselves. For marketers, it’s a way to save money, resources, and frustration.
Nurturing Is Necessary to Self-Qualification
But to do this, we need to nurture prospects more than we do today. Lead generation is the way to get your company’s foot in the door. Once that door opens, marketing needs to keep it open. Not by haranguing prospects, but by giving them enough interesting content so that they will want to leave the door open—even if it’s just a crack.
Think of the nurturing process as a kind of narrative journey. From the moment you first reach a prospect, gradually begin to fill in the story of your company and its specific advantages. Each contact needs to be interesting and informative, but it must leave a gap in knowledge so that leads are always tempted to want to learn a little bit more—like a good mystery. For example, rather than presenting Webinars or white papers as one-offs, create a series of related content that builds interest over time.
This parallel progression of increasing curiosity and deepening information about your company builds toward the ultimate goal of nurturing, which is qualification. Maintain prospects’ curiosity during the nurturing phase and they will eventually qualify themselves.
Remember that while we are trying to qualify prospects, they are also qualifying us. At each contact point, they are determining whether there is a fit between their need and our possible solution. This is why marketers shouldn’t try to put an arbitrary limit on the number of touches required to convert a prospect into a sales-ready lead. Prospects are the best judges of that, and they will signal their readiness through their increased interest in specific solutions for their business needs.
Get More Personal to Maintain Interest
The best way to generate this interest is by getting gradually more personal with the prospect. Value propositions should be tailored so that they speak to individuals. With each interaction, you need to convince them that you truly understand what their issues are and what role you can play in helping them—as individuals—contribute to addressing those issues. We tend to dismiss the role of the individual because B2B is always a committee decision. But committees are composed of individuals. To win the vote of the committee, we need to win over the individuals first.
Self-qualification eliminates the murkiness that surrounds the handoff process between marketing and sales. When prospects make it clear that they are ready to buy something, then—and only then—should marketing hand them off to sales. For B2B technology buyers, readiness to buy is the sum of four attributes:
- Budget. The company has budget approval to do a project of the size and scope necessary to include your products and/or services.
- Authority. The prospect has the authority to purchase or has secured authority through the necessary channels.
- Need. The prospect has expressed a clear business need for the kinds of products and services your company provides.
- Timeline. The prospect’s company has established a timeline for when it wants to implement the project.
When these requirements are met, sales assumes the primary role in the relationship. Marketing takes on a support role, providing information and sales tools that can help further qualify, propose, and close business.
Build a Closed-Loop Process
Inevitably, leads will fall out of the sales process—for example, projects are cancelled or business conditions may change. There needs to be a closed-loop process so that qualified leads do not disappear if sales can’t close the business. Marketing needs to catch those fallen leads and insert them back into the lead-nurturing process.
The best safety net is a computer system capable of tracking prospects across the organizational boundary between marketing and sales. That way, when qualified leads drop out of the sales process, they can automatically be routed back into the lead-nurturing process.
Remember that someone who has expressed interest in your company is a corporate asset and should be treated as such. Marketing needs to take on the burden of making sure that those assets are not lost or wasted.
If you’ve left them wanting more, that should be easy to do.
Jeff Sands is vice president and Ajit Maira is senior vice president at ITSMA. They run workshops to help marketers improve their demand generation programs. For more information, go to itsma.com.
The End of the Boondoggle: Customers Want Business Content in Their Events
By Julie Schwartz, ITSMA
In this tough economic climate, we might be seeing the demise of high-end hospitability programs. No more three-day junkets to the Caribbean or celebrity meet-and-greets at the golf tournament. More and more, business content trumps hospitality.
Of course, clients will continue to accept those plum tickets to the game if you keep handing them out. But the odds are getting longer that the audience you really want to reach—CEOs and other C-level executives—will actually attend. We’re hearing anecdotal evidence from our program clients that more and more, senior executives hand off those tickets to underlings as prizes, or to family.
In fact, to attract the most senior participants, client relationship-building programs must center on business content. ITSMA research shows that senior executives also are looking for programs that enable peer networking and dialogue with the provider. We have found that in-person seminars and executive briefings are the most preferred types of events, followed by advisory councils and online seminars.
Relevance, Not Roulette
Senior client executives want to learn about new ideas and new approaches to tackling different problems they are facing, and they want to be in the room with peers and subject matter experts. The specific topics chosen are important draws.
Of course, this gets back to an important point we’ve been making since the recession began: You must know your clients and their business issues.
In all likelihood, you and your competitors are vying for attention from the same pool of senior executives. It is getting harder to attract that attention. How can you ensure that your relationship programs stand out? Relevant, compelling business content is the source of differentiation.
An Existing Relationship Helps
Moreover, senior executives are more likely to attend programs when they have a relationship with the sponsoring solutions provider. In addition to learning and networking with peers, senior executives want the opportunity to influence the strategy and direction of their providers. The one thing senior executives don’t want is a sales pitch.
Hospitality won’t go away completely, but it is getting harder and harder to justify. Even hospitality will need to be directly linked to demonstrating business value and thought leadership. Indeed, from marketing’s point of view, it might be best to leave pure hospitality in the hands of the sales force.
For more information about what senior executives are looking for from events, contact Julie Schwartz, ITSMA’s senior vice president of research and thought leadership.
Ask ITSMA: How can marketing make it easier for happy customers to spread the word?
By Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Research and Thought Leadership, ITSMA
Each month, ITSMA receives a number of queries through Ask ITSMA, a resource designed to give program clients a quick and easy way to get insight on important services and solutions marketing questions they face. In this column, we will publish some of our favorite questions along with excerpts from our replies.
What are IT companies doing to aid the recommendation and reference process? How can marketing make it easier for happy customers to spread the word?
 Successful reference management requires more than just a program that reaches out to customers; it also requires internal metrics and processes that encourage employees to keep customers happy. For example, one of our clients tied consultants' compensation to the customer becoming an enthusiastic reference. Thus, the onus was on the delivery people to make sure everything came out right. But they also built into the process many checkpoints to make sure that everything was going great along the way. They generally made a big effort to keep in close touch with customers after the engagement and actively made use of them as a reference, to keep the relationship fresh.
 Another useful reference tool is to do collaborative PR with the client—such as joint press releases, case studies, and thought leadership articles. You both win because references can use these pieces internally or with their own customers.
Some companies offer incentives to references, but providers need to tread carefully here. For example, the reward should be limited to compensating references for their time and effort—not for results with prospects. These incentives are usually in the form of discounts for products and services, such as a free seat at the provider’s next conference, or support credits. Stick to soft-dollar donations that help promote your offers—cash should never change hands.
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