If you are not one of my connections on LinkedIn or following me on Twitter you probably don’t know that I recently left a tremendous opportunity with the leader in Marketing Automation for a DC based start-up in the not yet defined or well known category of Marketing Competitive Intelligence.
I spent the last 3 years directing and supporting the efforts of a sales team with the company whose name was a combination of Eloquent & Loquacious. I must say that it was the experience of a lifetime. When it comes to Modern Marketing best practices for aligning sales & marketing and moving towards empirically tying Marketings’ efforts to revenue, I felt like no one did it better. Today, with all of the marketing & customer experience clouds that are forming the marketing meteorologists are all forecasting a rain storm of activity and revenues.
For the highly aware & prepared sales professional there seemingly no better place to be. So why would I leave the white hot marketing automation space for the undefined world of Marketing Competitive Intelligence?
In the words of the late John Wooden, the tireless UCLA Basketball coach, it lead to my immediate response of …
“Hope is Not a Strategy”
This phrase has for the longest been used by Sales VP’s, Directors and managers to hold sales people accountable for learning more about their prospective clients and having a plan that advances the sales cycle to closed deals.
Yet, as much as it resides in sales, Marketing holds as much as 70% of the sales pipeline, so these discussions would be now be appropriate with every content marketer, blog writer, social media manager and the CMO whose #1 measure of success in 2015 will be MROI (Marketing Return On Investment) according to Forrester Research.
Here are 3 reasons that I chose Marketing Competitive Intelligence that I hope inspire all marketers to do the same.
1. Relevance = Conversion = Revenue
We all know that “Content is King” and if you are in the 94% of marketers who have made this a priority, you are probably constantly seeking ways to make your content impactful & engaging.
One of the leading challenges that my sales execs heard from prospects when selling marketing automation was that marketers felt like they didn’t have enough content to target their perspective personas. What they really meant in most cases was that they didn’t have relevant enough content. They were “hoping” that the content they provided would “do the trick” and produce the impact & engagement that their Executives are demanding.
Marketing Competitive Intelligence (MCI) gives marketers a head-start on the creative process by identifying the content that is working for them and their competitive brands across all channels based on both impact and engagement.
2. The Convergence of Media
Much of my teams discussions when facilitating buying processes for Marketing Automation were primarily around email marketing.
While many B2B & B2C buyers still rely heavily on email it’s clear that other channels are now increasing in popularity and importance. Today, there are more than 30 possible channels through and to which marketers are rushing to create and push content — 57% of B2B marketers plan on increasing content in the next 12 months.
You have to be there because your competitors are there. You could “hope” that your content is more impactful and engaging or you could know empirically that a particular type of message on Twitter within your industry is 5x more impactful than another.
Marketers Rank Owned Social Media channels for which one is most effective
The risk with the former is like a sales rep hoping that all 7 deals in their pipeline will close and that they will make up in one quarter the previous quarter’s shortfall towards quota. Like in sales, there won’t be a lot of opportunities to get this right.
True Marketing Competitive Intelligence gives marketers a single view across all channels (owned, earned & paid) that allows marketers to not be forced behind a barrier of complexity or singularly focused on one or two channels but allows them to gain contextual and substantive insights into their direct competitors and/or groups of competitors across all or a specific channel. (Owned, Earned & Paid)
3. Leadership
A leader knows, goes, and shows the way.
Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work under the leadership of some extremely smart and talented leaders. I always say that “more is caught than taught” when it comes to leaders .
Marketing Automation & Marketing Competitive Intelligence when used properly have something in common with good leaders like these. They not only perform but both highly aware. It is said that it takes a high level of awareness and performance to be in the coveted leadership quadrant.
Over the years, I have heard more stories than you can imagine from sales people who worked really hard through a quarter only to have deals push out on them or be unexpectedly lost.
Sometimes it was within their control and sometimes outside out if their control. However, more often than not they just weren’t aware of things that they should have known.
Conversely, for the salespeople that succeeded the most, they knew things about the buyer that allowed them to navigate the sales cycle far more effectively than those who lost.
To increase in awareness about the things that you care about, Marketing Competitive Intelligence allows Modern Marketers to avoid “ostrich marketing”. You can take your head out of the sand and focus on creating content that you empirically know is both impactful and engaging within a specific channel.
So I’m off to the new chapter in my career working with Modern Marketers and I’m not “hoping” it works out at all. I’m highly aware, and confident Sales Leader and the Marketing Competitive Intelligence category (although not defined today) will help to move Marketing Leaders from hoping to knowing and from knowing to seeing the results that they want and expect. After all, “Hope is Not a Strategy.”