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VOLUME I

BY SHELLY LUCAS

DIS U

PTIV

E

READERTHE

Three Urgent Questions for B2B Marketing Innovators

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This reader is dedicated to the marketing misfits.

The interrogators. Because marketers who are courageous

enough to ask probing questions are the ones who

transform their businesses and ignite their careers.

Introduction

When Was Your Last Bold Move?

Do You Have Any Idea How Bad Your Data Problem Is?

How Long Will You Continue to Create Sales Content Nobody Uses?

Parting Thoughts

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12

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

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Disr

uption is

the art

of iden

tifying w

hich part

s of th

e past

are n

o

l

onger re

levan

t to th

e future

and ex

ploiting t

hat delt

a at a

ll costs

.

@levie

‘‘‘‘

I N T R O D U C T I O NIf you’re looking for marketing best practices, you won’t find them here…at least not in the way you might expect. Whenever anything “tried-and-true” appears in this reader, it’s for one purpose: to be poked, prodded and pulled apart.

I’m not knocking best practices altogether. They’re great standbys for melting indecision and moving forward with confidence. As guidelines, they’re definitely handy. But best practices were never intended to be imitated to the letter (or number, as the case may be). And they’re certainly not evergreen, despite marketers’ compulsion to drone on nasally about “recent” best-in-class approaches (from 2014).

Of course it matters what other marketers are doing. But it matters equally (if not more) what they’re not doing. One thing’s for sure: It’s difficult to get ahead of the market when we’re busy imitating others and staying within the guardrails they’ve set for themselves. Beyond best practice guidelines, business shifts, pitches

and rolls. Buyers switch loyalties and redeem flash deals. As marketers, we can’t afford to insulate ourselves from these

changes. What worked best for B2B marketers last year may not help us optimize a moment with a customer or prospect today. All too often,

our baked-in processes get in the way of delighting customers.

We must take time away from automating and optimizing our “best” marketing to rethink what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. For that matter, why are we doing X (and not Y)? Ultimately, how is what we’re doing helping our customers succeed and grow their businesses?

The very act of posing these questions disrupts marketing’s flow of business-as-usual, creating breathing space where sparks of innovation can come alive and thrive. It’s in this spirit that we’ve created this reader.

Inside, you’ll find a collection of essays inspired by three questions I’ve been chewing on for a while. Whenever I’ve tossed out these lines of inquiry, they’ve never failed to set off an impassioned conversation (online or offline). In itself, this make them shareworthy. But even more compelling is the conceptual bucket these questions fall into for me, which I would label “impetus to disruption” – or, if you like, a prelude to innovation.

If you’re a B2B marketer who truly wants to become a value creator and a game changer, you can start by answering the following:

– When was the last time you made a truly bold move in your marketing?

– Do you have any idea how bad your data problem is? – How long will you continue to create sales content nobody uses?

Exploring these questions might just set your marketing on fire.

At the very least, there’s a gleeful chance it’ll incinerate the status quo.

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This isn’t the year for yellow-bellied marketers.

@annhandley

Image credit: “Henry’s Takeoff” by @popofatticus, Flickr http://ow.ly/XQWAX

We need to be bigger, bolder and braver.

It’s an always-on, noisy world. Every minute, B2B buyers are pinged and pelted by mediocre marketing messages. (No wonder feed fatigue is becoming so chronic.) The marketers who manage to rise above the din to connect and resonate will choose the uncommon over the familiar.

This takes more than gumption. Want to be a B2B marketing rock star? You need to be bold – with what you dream as well as what you do. Bold marketers constantly expand their vision and explore new avenues. They collaborate with customers to re-imagine what their business should be. They ask smart questions of their data and review their discoveries. Then, they go for it. Even when the path ahead is unclear, they push forward.

What fuels their determination isn’t all that mysterious. At least it’s not for Dun & Bradstreet CEO Bob Carrigan. As he told me once, it’s a simple belief: Good things come to those who get moving.

Q U E S T I O N

When was the last time you made a truly bold move in your marketing?

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We can’t afford to let the possibilities paralyze us. The data- and content-driven digital age moves fast, and we must learn how to deftly navigate through oceans of information to learn more about our customers. And we’re not going to do that by sticking to our daily routines. Clearly, you can’t transform your marketing organization alone. But you can catalyze your team, setting the stage – and the tone – for holistic change. This can be achieved by practicing a few bold leadership habits.

LET GO. Resting on the laurels of past achievements won’t sustain your brand. Be proud of your company’s history, but don’t let nostalgia lure you into complacency. I work for a company that’s been around for more than a century, but – borrowing from Carrigan’s words again – I’d rather Dun & Bradstreet be known for what we do for customers today than for our 170-year-plus heritage. Past successes are terrific, but we shouldn’t automatically strive to repeat them. Today holds more possibilities than we could imagine even a short year ago. Technology is a great enabler; it makes our environment more flexible and our dreams easier to realize. Don’t hold on to brands, markets, solutions and processes that aren’t useful for your customers. Instead, think about how to consistently deliver unique value.

STRIKE A BALANCE. You’re leading an organization in flux, so you’re likely to be pulled in multiple – and sometimes opposite – directions. For example, if you’re transforming a conservative culture, you need to encourage people to share ideas. But it’s also important to challenge their thinking, especially when they start citing a well-worn playbook. Break open entrenched thinking with curiosity. Ask questions, affirm your understanding and invite alternatives. Also realize that while some employees will welcome fresh ideas, others may feel threatened by any disruption of business-as-usual.

E M B R A C E D I S C O M F O RT. As a leader, your first impulse may be to fix what’s not working, but remember, a marketing transformation is owned, shaped and manifested by everyone on the team. Holistic changes rarely happen as orderly transitions. They’re filled with ambiguity and chaos – and leaders should experience this along with everyone else. You want employees to think differently. Why should you be exempt from the same challenge? How can you encourage others to become comfortable with disruptions if you aren’t open to them yourself?

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BUILD COMMUNITY. Unite team members and business partners by creating experiences that reinforce marketing’s new vision and the strategic imperatives for realizing it. Keep everyone’s eyes on the horizon, so potentially unsettling changes can be viewed within the broader business context of serving customers. Get employees to own, participate in and catalyze change so that it’s something they do – not something that’s done to them. Social tools like Chatter can be particularly helpful in jumpstarting conversations, crowdsourcing ideas and gathering feedback. It’s also a great way for leaders to stay plugged in to teams across time zones and around the globe.

BR IDGE GAPS . As your organization embraces its ownership of the customer experience, it will likely require new offerings and/or capabilities, which may require employees to work differently or do different work. Are your current leaders adaptable enough to embody a modern marketing culture? What training do they need to move forward with the marketing transformation – data analysis, sociology, psychology or relationship IQ? Think also about employees with new leaders: How can you help them adjust to different objectives, expectations and styles? Do everything you can to keep employees in shifting or evolving roles engaged, yet accept that not everyone will be willing to join you on the journey.

DEL IVER ON PROMISES . Trust isn’t timeless; it’s something you earn from your customers and employees every day. What are you promising during and after marketing’s transformation? Is your current brand in line with where your business is headed? Be sure to articulate your employee brand commitment; address compensation, benefits, career and learning opportunities, office environment and leadership. Internally and externally, promise only what you can deliver, then deliver more than you promise.

We live in a brave new world that requires uncommonly bold marketing leaders. Essentially, we’re

charged with guiding our organizations through an ambiguous business landscape where rapid

change and blurred lines rule. We can’t afford to be paralyzed at the site of unexplored territory.

We need to stay informed, think expansively and – most importantly – keep moving.

When it comes to marketing’s transformation, inertia is the enemy. Err on the side of action.

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Q U E S T I O N

Do you have any idea how bad your data problem is?

2Besides maybe Chrissie Hynde, B2B marketing executives are the greatest pretenders ever.

We embrace the Moneyball theory. We believe “data-driven” marketers are more successful. We invest in marketing automation tools, CRM systems and analytics technologies to improve how we collect, manage and leverage data. All this so we can understand – and serve – our customers better.

Sounds about like what every B2B enterprise marketer is proclaiming, right? Kind of like “Brass in Pocket.” We know the words by heart.

Beneath this devotional litany to data quality, the enterprise reality is quite different. We don’t know our customers very well. And time after time, the customer experiences we deliver fall painfully short of buyers’ expectations. Dirty data misdirects our messages and drains our budget dollars.

When pressed, we admit these things. But shockingly, most of us don’t do a darn thing about it – except adding another “cutting-edge” tool to camouflage our data quality floundering.

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‘‘

The CMO of tomorrow is the data nerd of today.

@gargashutosh

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Yes, yes, these martech enthusiasts insist, we understand the importance of data quality to personalized marketing. After all, we’ve been talking about marketing to a segment of one for years now, haven’t we? If you’re not data-driven, you aren’t in the game. But what good is data if your team isn’t talking about how to act on it? Speaking of collaboration – let me ask you something: How good is Slack for that?

Too many enterprise marketers continue to embrace the concept of good data quality without the commitment to really carry it through. When asked how often they cleanse their database for accuracy/quality, 29% of B2B marketing executives say “quarterly” and 27% “don’t know.” A 40% fail rate on prospect data shouldn’t be the industry norm.

Certainly, we’re distracted by technology and seduced by the promise of a “solution.” But this huge challenge can’t be solved by taking small steps or repeating the same practices. Maybe a fear of the unknown is also a factor. (“Big data”– even when it’s clean – seems ginormous when you don’t know what to do with it or how to act on it.)

However, I suspect the more likely reason is more banal: They simply don’t care. Or, at the very least, they don’t care enough – which, to data quality purists, amounts to diddly squat.

Distracted, Careless or Couldn’t Care Less?

Source: B2B Marketing Data Report 2016, Dun & Bradstreet

87%

85%

77%

of B2B records lack revenue information.

lack company size by employee number.

lack industry information.

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T O P B 2 B M A R K E T I N G P R I O R I T I E S F O R 2 0 1 6 *

51%

41%

36%

31%

28%

Aligning sales and marketing teams

Driving more awareness to our brand

Turning more qualified leads into customers

Generating MORE leads

Improving customer data quality

*Respondents were asked to name their top three marketing priorities. Source: Data.com Marketing Power Hour Survey, Dreamforce 2015

Unconvinced? Consider the troubling results of a simple survey conducted during Dreamforce 2015. Distributed by Dun & Bradstreet partner Data.com, the questionnaire asked B2B marketing executives about their greatest marketing challenges and opportunities in 2016. I’ve shared a few highlights below.

– Improving customer data quality was the #5 marketing priority. The top priorities, in the order of importance, were: aligning sales and marketing teams, driving more brand awareness, turning more qualified leads into customers and generating more leads.

– Respondents’ confidence that their marketing organization “knows customers” was 5.82 on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest score).

– The #1 reason for their organization not understanding its customers was “poor customer data inside Salesforce or their marketing automation system.” Other reasons, in descending importance: Reps input wrong or NO data into CRM, poor or lack of a data quality strategy and lack of the right customer data (no industry information, location and/or business title).

These B2B marketers, 61% of which were director-level and above, acknowledge that good quality data is important for understanding customers. Yet they prioritize converting qualified leads – and generating more leads – above improving customer data quality.

But how can marketers achieve these goals without high quality data?

Keeping this question in mind, let’s take a closer look at these marketers’ top priorities for 2016.

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What data is missing or unusable?COMPLETENESS

CONFORMITY

CONSISTENCY

ACCURACY

DUPLICATES

INTEGRITY

What data is stored in a non-standard format?

What data values give conflicting information?

What data is incorrect or out of date?

What data records or attributes are repeated?

What data is missing or not referenced?

Source: 2016 Allant Group, LLC

HOW GOOD IS YOUR DATA QUALITY?

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Data: A Silent Partner to Marketing Priorities

Customer data is the foundation marketers use to target the best prospects and customers and nurture engaged connections into relationships. On the sales side, teams use data to create conversation-starters, customize pitches and close deals. Why, then, don’t marketing and sales continually share customer interaction and behavioral data with each other? Too often, it seems bidirectional data-sharing starts and stops with marketing’s lead “handoff” to sales.

If marketing took the initiative to share a data-rich roll-up of the lead relationship with sales, think how much more “aligned” the two groups would be. If the two teams worked from the same accurate customer picture/relationship map, imagine how much smoother the marketing-sales transition would feel from the customer’s perspective! For a buyer, few things are more annoying than being pulled back to square one in a vendor relationship – especially when it’s necessitated by the vendor’s internal hand off. (Talk about stalling buying momentum!)

Data-sharing between sales and marketing not only puts the two teams on the same page, but also paves the way to a seamless customer experience. Goodness knows, we can do better here. (Case in point: the marketers in Data.com’s Dreamforce survey rated their effectiveness in providing a positive and effective customer experience as 5.54 on a scale of 1 to 10.) For sales and marketing to align with each other is good, but aligning together – behind the customer – is the ultimate. Thank you, data!

P R I O R I T Y # 1 : Aligning sales and marketing teams

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Those who still think brand awareness happens by outbound marketing alone probably got into Nirvana only after MTV Unplugged came out. The days when brand awareness measurement relied on push campaigns and primary market research are long gone. In the words of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

What sticks in people’s longer-term memory is not your witty tagline or guffaw-worthy Super Bowl commercial. It’s their direct experience with your brand (via sales, customer care, social forums and other interactions). And this customer experience is captured by both internal tools and external sources, from your CRM and marketing automation systems to Yelp reviews, Twitter streams and third-party data providers. Yup, we’re talking about customer data. And the better the data quality, the better you can measure your brand’s impact – and how well its authenticity resonates with buyers and influencers.

Good data quality clearly propels marketers forward to achieve their most important goals. Why, then, isn’t it a higher priority for enterprises?

When I asked B2B marketing strategist and author Ardath Albee this question, she shared her observations. According to her experience, data quality initiatives are sparse because:

– Data is siloed and dirty, making data quality difficult to tackle.

– Budgets for this work are lacking.

– Marketers aren’t prepared to deliver a data quality payoff – i.e., they lack the skill to analyze data to gain useful insights.

Albee believes this lack of skill explains why few B2B marketers are practicing lead scoring and progressive profiling. (After all, why augment or enrich data you already have if you’re unsure what to do with it?)

Am I giving the Data.com survey too much weight? Maybe. It’s very possible more enterprise marketers are making data quality a top priority. Certainly you can find surveys that make this claim. But troublesome facts remain. For example, only 66% of B2B marketing executives are investing in a data-driven marketing initiative within the next year.

While we can’t change budget realities, we can change minds. Don’t let shiny new technologies distract from the hard foundational work we need to do with the data assets, core technologies, people and processes we already have.

For those who are true believers (and doers) in data quality, keep pushing. For the pretenders out there, isn’t it time you got real?

P R I O R I T Y # 2 : Driving more brand awareness

Data Quality Imperative: Do As You Say

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Q U E S T I O N

How long will you continue to create

sales content nobody uses?

3Both of my parents grew up on farms. It’s not surprising that when they moved to the suburbs, their vegetable gardens flourished like nobody’s business. Who knew these gifted growers would give birth to a bona-fide plant killer?

Yet that’s exactly what I am. It’s not that I neglect my horticultural duties. Quite the opposite: I excessively minister to all things green. My main transgression? A primal compulsion for watering plants to death.

As I was mourning my latest plant casualty (an ornamental cabbage with flaccid, yellow leaves), a troubling thought wormed its way into my head…about the ailing state of sales enablement, and how it seemed to be headed for the same demise as my dearly departed cabbage.

Call me an analogy-obsessed marketer, but the comparison seems eerily apt: Although B2B marketers are doing plenty to nourish sales enablement, it’s doomed to die under our fervid care.

‘‘‘‘

No content should ever have

a dead end.@HeinzMarketing

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What I’ve just said probably runs contrary to many marketers’ observations. Judging by content creation activity alone, sales enablement appears to be flourishing. And marketing technology is keeping pace. Revitalized by account-based marketing (ABM), sales enablement claims no less than 12 categories in Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape. There’s also been a 69% increase in sales enablement technology spend within the past two years.

Alongside these signs of growth, we’ve seen marks of decline. Perhaps the most compelling: discouraging reports of usage rates. As much as 90% of marketing-produced sales content is not used by sales. (I’m pretty sure Bigfoot garden statues get used more often.) It doesn’t help that sales reps struggle to locate sales enablement assets and often fail to understand how the material fits into their sales process. It’s no wonder Winners Circle reps eye our sales enablement content like it’s a slab of Grandma’s garden-grown rhubarb pie (great for welcoming newbies to the neighborhood, but heaven forbid they would actually consume it themselves).

How Does Your Garden Actually Grow?

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Only 9% of marketing-produced content is used more than five times.

2016 State of Sales Enablement Report, Docurated

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Sales enablement isn’t working – at least not the way B2B marketers are doing it. We pour an incredible amount of energy into personalizing our marketing – and scaling/automating that personalization (by individual, industry, account and/or buyer’s stage).

Why aren’t we working equally as hard to customize sales enablement content?

Quite simply, marketing must create content tailored for actual sales situations. The sooner we create content that actually works within specific, authentic sales contexts, the sooner we’ll earn the credibility we need with sales teams. Imagine being able to show sales teams how each piece of content can be used in their next five calls and three meeting scenarios. Suddenly, “How does this help me on my next deal?” becomes moot and pointing to the revenue contribution of marketing-produced content becomes much easier.

Essentially, what I’m proposing is for marketing to use contextual intelligence when developing sales enablement content. Of course, this intelligence includes the buyer’s reality, but adds another contextual layer, which is the actual sales interaction. No sales enablement effort is complete without considering both contexts.

As we develop sales enablement material, we need to ask two questions: 1) Will this resonate with buyers? and 2) Will this piece be truly useful for sales? In other words, does this content make sense, within the buyer’s journey and within the way our reps sell?

Designing materials around sales conversations is what we should be doing already. I’m pretty sure most marketers already subscribe to this in theory. But here’s the problem: It’s not reflected in how we typically work, nor in the content we develop.

We claim to create material that sparks and enriches sales conversations, but our actions don’t appear to be aimed at that goal.

When a sales enablement need surfaces, what’s our first impulse? Reach for a template so we can create or update

materials…without rethinking them.

Templates are handy. But how often do we take time to completely reassess

their format, function and content? Sales strategies evolve; prospect and customer interactions develop organically. Yet when creating sales content, B2B marketers tend to stick to a customary approach – thereby disconnecting with real-time actions on the sales floor and conversations in the digital

zeitgeist.

We might as well attempt to “enable” the growth of a high-rise

garden with an ox and plow.

Cultivating an Additional Context

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I’m exaggerating to make a point. For the most part, B2B marketing has continued to view sales materials by the way they’ve been traditionally used (or, more accurately, by the way we, as marketers, have intended for sales to use them). As a result, the development of sales content has become too formulaic.

It’s about time B2B marketers buck up and admit that sales content’s low usage rates are partly our fault. We’re stuck in a mental rut, and it’s partly due to what psychologists call “functional fixedness.” This bias happens when we become so fixated on the (marketing-defined) use of sales enablement content that we fail to view the content in itself. In other words, the function we ascribe to sales content (i.e., a “data sheet” template answers prospects’ product questions) overrides innovative thoughts that arise when a template/format is out of the picture – for example, “What’s the best way to answer prospects’ product questions?” or even “What are the right questions to answer?”

Over time, functional fixedness can do considerable damage to our marketing. Chief executives from public-private national entity Innovation Accelerator cite an extreme, but nevertheless instructional, example: We’ve been conditioned to think of the iceberg as the cause of the Titanic disaster, but we could actually view it as a life-saving solution. Here’s how: It’s conceivable that the ship could have pulled close enough to the iceberg for Titanic passengers to scramble on and avoid the icy waters. No one thinks of this because we’re “fixed” on the iceberg’s fatal “function” within the Titanic tragedy.

Sales enablement is an iceberg for B2B marketers, but few of us see it. We’re too busy executing sequential campaigns to notice that our customers are moving closer to expecting “on-demand” personalized services and experiences. It sounds like a likely-to-sink situation: How can sales teams contribute to an “on-demand” experience if most of the content they have is templatized? But if we can unfix our minds for a moment, we’ll see that a life-saving opportunity in the very thing that threatens to kill prospect relationships. (What about modular, dynamic sales content, for instance?)

Who creates the content that closes deals? S A L E S

61% 26% 13%

M A R K E T I N G O T H E R

Source: 2016 State of Sales Enablement Report, Docurated

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If we continue to fortify established goals and procedures based on past successes, we’re likely to fall out of step with buyers and their emerging (unmet) needs as well as our competitors. To lead our marketing teams into the future, we must work outside these established goals and procedures to contemplate what we should be doing.

Here’s the ultimate question: What’s the design and purpose of B2B marketing in the future? Getting at this involves architecting a working context for that vision. It requires disrupting business-as-usual attitudes and methods as well as bridging existing gaps – among teams, technologies and skill sets.

Before we tackle all of this, we must create new space for change. So go ahead – disrupt, ask and explore. Change the conversation…and start modernizing your marketing.

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‘‘

@HooverSteve

Innovate in ways that hurt your business. If you don’t do this, you’ll end up a victim.

Thankfully, buyer orientation is commanding more of B2B marketing’s mindshare, a disruption that will hopefully loosen marketers’ automaton-like grip on sales content. Developing content tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey will add diversification in marketing’s overall content portfolio.

But when sales gets some of this content, do they know what to do with it? Or are we introducing something foreign to the sales environment? This, in itself, may not be bad – especially if it’s a catalyst for much-needed change in the way teams sell.

We just need to be careful not to push marketing’s “strategic” (buyer’s journey) content agenda at the expense of sales materials that can nurture revenue growth now. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves force-planting tomato vines in a Tudor garden of gilliflowers…compulsively watering the new arrivals, wondering why our sales content isn’t taking root.

Always be mindful of how you’re tending to sales enablement. As a good litmus test, ask yourself, “Are we cultivating growth or drenching what’s dying?”

– Be bold every day.

– Treat customer data like the business asset it truly is. Invest in it.

– Create sales content that works within actual selling contexts.

PA RT I N G T H O U G H T S

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About the Author:Shelly Lucas Content Marketing Director Dun & Bradstreet

Shelly Lucas (@pisarose) has 15+ years of experience delivering value and results through B2B social networking, public relations, corporate communications, analyst relations and marketing programs for organizations ranging from global Fortune 200 companies to small, not-for-profit businesses. Shelly holds a B.A. in English from Central College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Literary Theory from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

ABOUT DUN & BRADSTREET

Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB) grows the most valuable relationships in business. By uncovering truth and meaning from data, we connect customers with the prospects, suppliers, clients and partners that matter most, and have since 1841. Nearly ninety percent of the Fortune 500, and companies of every size around the world, rely on our data, insights and analytics. For more about Dun & Bradstreet, visit DNB.com.

© Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. 2016. All rights reserved. (DB-4705 3/16) www.dnb.com