The CEO has a revenue number they’d like Sales to commit to. Sales, in turn, looks to Marketing for a pipeline commitment and throttles the revenue target up/down according to its’ confidence in Marketing’s pipeline. We all know how the story plays out. In tight times, sales gets budget at marketing’s expense. In the face of clear growth opportunities, marketing may get more budget at sales’ expense. But it’s always a fight leaving all involved bruised and sore with a good amount of lost trust. This ‘zero sum game’ mentality damages culture and morale. Oddly, people wonder why Sales and Marketing don’t get along?

The irony is that both Sales and Marketing are wrong.

At the core, the fight is over leads – which team can generate more bookable leads, cost efficiently. That deeply engrained, age-old premise assumes Marketing and Sales is actually in control of the purchase process. They aren’t – the buyer is.

Buyers took control when information became ubiquitous on the Web. No longer dependent upon marketing for information on trends or new ways to solve problems, and equally no longer dependent on Sales to navigate the pros and cons of solutions they were considering – buyers threw off the shackles and rewrote the rules.

Today, buyers engage in a self-directed, trust-based, social purchase process for everything from commodities to software and trains. They no longer buy products or solutions; they purchase outcomes. With their new-found freedom, they have redefined vendor relationships and interaction expectations. They are fully in control and know it.

(c) 2012 New Business Strategies

In fact, in a recent B2B Sellers’ Compass study we conducted with the Fortune 100 we found that regardless of industry, eighty percent of the purchase cycle is completed before the buyer contacts vendors. That means they had already completed the initial business case and conducted one to two rounds of vendor short-listing. When they did contact vendors, buyers knew more about the product and company than most sales people did.

I’m often asked by vendors how buyers can do that when pricing and other key information isn’t on their website. It’s out there on the web and in the social sphere. Trust me, it’s available.

Which brings me back to the problem with the budget conversation. With the buyer in control of the purchase process, focusing on leads is like trying to implement new management rules with New York cabbies in a snow storm.

Constantly pushing more cabbies to be on the streets won’t work, they will do what is best for them regardless of what you say.

Instead of pounding on deaf ears with all sorts of creative marketing and sales development campaigns to ‘drive leads’; marketing and sales should focus on building preference. Preference, which is built over time, drives bigger deals, shorter sales cycles, at higher margins.

Buyer preference is rooted in trust, credibility and an understanding of the vendor’s unique differentiators and value. For vendors, preference is a heck of a lot cheaper to achieve than harvesting leads from complex, multi-touch/multi-channel campaigns or paying $800K for a good spot on DreamForce’s Expo show floor.

Preference is established time when you consistently offer the specific information (tool or activity) your buyers are looking for, in the places they go to get informed, at each step in their buyer’s journey.
How do you do that?

1. Understand the detailed steps your buyers’ take from when a new business issue is recognized all the way through implementation and adoption.
2. For each step, understand the information they seek, where they go and whom they talk to get that information, and how they define value.
3. Align each and every marketing, sales and customer service asset, role and process to these steps.

Social media is defined by Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein as “a group of Internet-based applications … that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” The technology gave everyone a 140-character megaphone and the ability to build a community around themselves or their causes. Innovation exploded as individuals, brands and organizations grappled with ways to compress time and distance.

Social Media pushed the boundaries of possibilities and showed us the power that democratized information can wield and how much more we really needed to know (and innovate) to reap its potential. “Social media gave companies first mover advantage,” states Carter. “Time became and still is the primary competitive advantage.”

But that was Social Media 1.0 and try as everyone might the ROI was elusive. Social media pioneers and early adopters learned that not all conversations are equal, relevant or valuable and engaging customers in a public dialog can backfire in costly ways if organizational processes and cultures are not appropriately aligned.

But these pioneers also saw strong financial rewards from embracing social technologies: Cost reduction, operational efficiency, faster innovation through co-creation, and increased customer satisfaction.

Lessons learned along the way brought the end of Social media and shaped the next era. Using Facebook for customer support or as a B2B sales channel was a great experiment that didn’t really pay off. Yet it fundamentally changed the balance of power between the buyer and seller as well as redefined how work gets done. The next stage of social’s B2B evolution focuses on ROI not because it is ‘cool’ but for the significant leverage it can have on achieving business objectives.

The rise of enterprise social networking is becoming the next IT battleground. This shift of consumer to business networking, also known as “Social Business” has caused a ripple affect for organizations looking to adopt these skills into their businesses to better reach clients and suppliers, while swiftly gaining insight on the data being created in these networks. The winners in this challenge will be able to react more swiftly to customer trends, and out innovate competitors.

“Realizing a meaningful ROI depends on how you deploy social,” shares Carter. “The key to remember is that you will not see results out of the box.”Companies that look for opportunities to replace and optimize their internal processes through social technologies are realizing a ROI. Carter cited some two examples from IBM clients:

• Lowe’s Home Improvement realized a $1Million in additional revenue from a new way of selling paint that came from an employee’s idea that was shared and vetted through an internal social collaboration system.
• Royal Bank of Canada realized an 18% improvement in customer satisfaction from implementing a social customer care system that was integrated with their traditional call center applications.

Early social businesses will tell you that the place to start is NOT with your customers. Instead start by replacing inefficient internal processes with social-based practices supported by technology. TD Bank Group is a good example of how to drive ROI.

TD Bank Group realized that to effectively compete it needed to evolve beyond social media. It had to become a social business and the place to start was inside its four walls. It needed to crack the collaboration nut. The 85,000 employees across TD needed to easily find internal experts, gets questions answered, recognize team accomplishments, share ideas, communicate and effectively collaborate across geographies.

Along the way the bank realized it couldn’t make the transition alone and partnered with IBM.  What IBM brought to the table was not justcollaboration software but also the experience gained from unlocking its own social business benefits. Some of ROI that TD Bank Group is realizing includes:

Time Saved:  Senior district leaders need to continuously coach, motivate and lead their sales and customer service teams across each of their 10-15 branches.

Impact: By eliminating layers of approvals and dissemination steps, they are now using Connections to recognize team successes and excellence in customer service via Status Updates, Board Posts and Community engagement saving each district leader and branch manager an hour a week. Doesn’t sound like much but it adds up.

Increased Productivity: Field Marketing Managers plan Community or Market specific events to drive business to TD branches/stores.

Impact: By using IBM Connections to plan events like branch openings, successful programs can be easily replicated across different regions thereby saving time and money. Marketing managers can quickly and easily share their event plans, promotional materials and lessons learned in social communities.

Streamlined Communication: Colleen Johnston, TD Bank Group’s Chief Financial Officer, needs a direct line not only to her organization but also to the Women in Leadership initiative she leads.

Impact: Through forums on IBM Connections, Colleen is able to expand leadership opportunities for women by coaching on networking, mentoring and career development. Through the social platform, Colleen answered 181 questions and comments during a one-hour live interactive conversation held on International Women’s Day.

With more than 4,500 blogs and 4,000 Communities created since TD Bank Group’s November 2011 Canada launch and January 2012 roll-out in the USA, the company has started to see the business value of social business – fewer meetings and email, and improved internal coordination. All of which benefits TD’s bottom line and employee experience.

(c) 2012 IBM

Having been down the transition road itself, IBM and Carter have leveraged the lessons learned into a suite of services that help their global clients evolve into social businesses. The primary lesson that Carter shares is that social technology is just an enabler. Without changes to an organization’s culture, leadership model and processes, the transformation will not bear fruit.

For those who believe that social business ROI only comes in the form of new revenue or sales directly from social interactions – you’re missing the message. This second era of social is all about transforming the nature of work and how organizations are structured. Like renovating a building, the real value comes from updating the inside rather than the exterior façade.

Carter shares six pieces of advice:

1. Pilot your social business initiatives.
2. Benchmark processes before you begin your pilot.
3. Don’t skimp on training.
4. Understand how new social processes impact your organization’s leadership models.
5. Redefine your metrics to measure the soft and hard benefits; skip the traditional social marketing metrics as they don’t apply.
6. Communicate, share, and evangelize the results and learnings.

Underlying this advice is a core message, success comes in increments. The proof points of real financial results along with best practices of how social business can architect change are there.
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IBM has, itself, made the transition with more than 400,000 IBM employees collaborating through IBM Connections. Their leaders are active daily users of social media to communicate more effectively and directly with all levels within the company. As a result, more than 67,000 communities have been developed, 475,000 files shared globally have generated more than 9 million downloads. Every day, IBM generates 35 million instant message chats.

If IBM, a Fortune 19 company can reap real ROI from social business, what are you waiting for?

Social media is not a destination; it is an enabler of business strategy.  In and of itself, social media will not drive customer satisfaction, robust collaboration, or revenue.  It’s like putting a toy sailboat in a pond and huffing and puffing into the sail to make it go. It will go but randomly for it lacks a rudder.

The rudder is a deep understand of the experience your customers want (and expect) from you. That understanding forms the foundation for a clear business strategy and set of objectives. Which, in turn, drives culture, internal alignment, and investment priorities needed to deliver that experience.  Social media becomes execution tools in operationalizing the business strategy.

Finally a social technology vendor has heard the growing chorus of pundits, asLithium Technology’s Chief Marketing Officer Katy Keim likes to call them.  For the past year “the pundits” and thought leaders like Brian Solis have been calling for social technology vendors to rethink how they deliver on the social promise.   Lithium heard them and delivered a compelling vision at today’sLiNC conference.

While Lithium’s roots are in the social community market, today they announced and demoed a compelling new company direction.  One that is tightly aligned to enabling the transformation companies need to embrace and execute on.  A combination of new cross-functional applications and packaged transformation services, Lithium moved beyond the noisy, crowded social community market.   The new application is Lithium Response, an enterprise-grade social agent-based solution that can quickly sift through millions of posts to identify which ones warrant a response, automatically route it to the right agent or expert, and even suggest content based on past patterns of correct issue resolution.

Lithium’s deep integration between popular enterprise CRM applications like SAP and Salesforce.com and Lithium Response delivers a true 360 view of the customer.  The integration enables posts to be matched to the CRM database and flags customers and prospects.  Additional partnerships were also announced with VMware’s Socialcast, Shoutlet, and SapientNitro that further differentiate Lithium’s social marketing suite along with out-of-the-box community templates to minimize the need for customization services.  To help customers transform and realize the benefits of social business, new packaged professional services were co-developed with Geoffrey Moore and aptly named “Social Tornedo”.

Rob Tarkoff, Lithium’s new president and CEO, has his fingerprints all over this new business strategy.  Behind all the glitz and showbiz of the LiNC conference is a solid, well thought through approach to disrupting the market, gaining a lead and protecting their flanks.  Lithium’s strategy is to white-label products and technologies from others to enable them to lily-pad over competitors like Jive as well as offer their own products up for white-label.

For instance, Lithium Response is a white-labeled product from an unnamed, super-secret “technology component provider”. Lithium is so bullish on this technology that Tarkoff claimed his company is now the “standard for social customer support” by offering peer-to-peer, self-service, and agent-based customer care.    I’m sure everyone would like to know just who this super-secret vendor is but Lithium is not telling.   Other partners, like Ipsos, are white labeling Lithium’s marketing solutions as part of their own social marketing offering.   Coupling the white labeling strategy with a robust ecosystem, Tarkoff should be able to ride multiple market waves as he looks to drive significant growth.  The hope is that the strategy and the $53Million in the bank will mitigate some of the inevitable risks that come with unpredictable market shifts, consolidations and white hot technologies that go cold overnight.

Broadening out of the traditional boundaries of social community market with purpose-built applications, extending the platform’s breadth and depth, and offering new social intelligence analytics show companies a path forward to delivering a holistic customer experience, as defined by their customers.

Lithium’s market timing for the strategy should be spot on.

The frustration from unanswered posts, blatant self promotion tweets, and a lack of demonstrable ROI opens the door to a new perspective on just what the role of social media is and how to deliver the experience customers want.

That’s important because customers are, after all, in full control of your destiny.

Sales remains a black box.

Ever know a sales person that doesn’t ‘manage’ their pipeline? They don’t report on some potential sales opportunities, underreport others, and on occasion are overly optimistic as they manage how their leaders perceive their pipelines.  This makes the head of sales’ job hard as they try to optimize their team’s productivity, and it has a ripple effect from finance to marketing.  The way most sales leaders manage this lack of visibility is to add layers of managerial oversight, daily reporting, frequent detailed account and pipeline reviews, and to generally micromanage the whole process.   According to Jim Burleigh, CEO of Cloud9, a SaaS sales forecasting solution vendor, “CRM systems do next to nothing to help the manager do this.  Spreadsheets are the state of the art tool to help sales managers.”

What was an inefficient process in prior economic cycles will become a major stumbling block to success in the fast paced, transparent world of social business.  Prospects and buyers are no longer dependent on marketing and sales for advice, best practices and help in solving their business problems. In fact, most B2B buyers would rather not ever talk to a sales rep.  And they don’t have to anymore.   Buying today is social, trust-based, transparent and self-directed.  Buyers don’t need marketers to tell them they have a problem nor is Sales’ advice welcome.   Burleigh sums it up well by saying “buyers tend to educate themselves and don’t want the supplier spin.”

So how does a sales leader take the guesswork out managing the revenue number?

Becoming a social business redefines Sales’ role. Buyers have expectations about doing business with a company shaped by interactions with marketing content, comments made on social media, participation in webinars, etc.  Consistent buyer experience through the Buyers’ Journey translates into trust.   Part of Sales’ new role is to ensure the buyer experience is consistent.   “Sales need to participate in the attraction and education activities which have been traditionally marketing responsibilities,” said Burleigh. “In social business that partnership between Marketing and Sales extends beyond leads to shaping the end-to-end lifecycle experience of buyers.”

Driving revenue in the social era can only come from better execution and win rates.  Burleigh sees two big trends in 2012 that will help Sales be successful in the social era: Social selling and big data.

“Traditional CRM systems are of little help in executing better on pipelines,” shared Burleigh.  “Social technologies can give Sales richer information and better access to enterprise buyers.”  Social maps, like www.reachable.com orwww.branchit.com , enable sales to leverage referral selling and identify more touch points in prospect accounts.   Burleigh makes the case that “the traditional annual sales training ritual of putting a rep through their Nth version of some methodology training from a new vendor, that is in reality the same as the last methodology from another vendor is part of the problem.” Driving better execution in the social economy comes from deeper, actionable insight into patterns, not from repeatedly drilling into sales reps how to fill out account planning forms.  To drive increased output from sales teams, managers rely on their insight to identify risk and weak spots in their teams.

“Sales managers drive performance through their insight which is based on pattern recognition,” shares Burleigh. “Their insight allows them to identify risk, bogus deals and underperformers.  The manager takes action on that insight to improve the outcome/output of their team.  CRM systems do not provide insight; actionable insight into patterns only comes from Big Data apps.”

Big data tools and applications enable Marketing and Sales to spot changes in buyer behavior and sales cycle patterns at macro and micro levels.  Knowing that a buyer is about to disengage from a sales cycle, based on past patterns of behavior, enables a sales manager to either quickly disqualify the opportunity or get it back on track to win.  Being able to spot a change in a sales rep’s performance enables contextual coaching  to be delivered when it can have the most impact, in near real-time.  That’s a more effective strategy than ‘one size fits all’ sales training or the quarterly termination of the bottom ten percent of the sales force.

Companies that manage by focusing on changes in business patterns have a valuable early warning system; a core success factor for social businesses. These companies are able to respond faster and smarter. Cloud9’s newIntelligent Forecasting Suite includes tools to incorporate management judgment, multi-dimensional forecasting, and granular assessment of forecast risk.  Marketing can use big data tools to identify ways to improve marketing ROI by fine tuning alignment of content and programs with changing buyer expectations.   These same insights enable Marketing to teach sales reps how to have more successful and informed conversations with prospects.

Burleigh shared that he’s seen customers “look at patterns between marketing leads and closed business to spot which campaigns and content produces easier to close leads.”  “The same level of insight happens when sales management can link sales activities and sales tools to closed deals by vertical, company size, territory and sales rep”, said Burleigh. “A Sales leader’s day is now radically different. Instead of figuring out what is real in the pipeline, they spend their time enabling and acting as advocates for the right buyers.”

Here are 7 tips on taking the guesswork out of managing sales:

1. Match your selling processes to how your buyers want to buy.
2. Clean up your data otherwise you’re insights will be wrong, and that’s more costly.
3. Optimize your campaign-to-cash processes.
4. Automate everything to free up Sales time to spend with buyers.
5. Build Sales Ops to act on big data insights versus building complex spreadsheets
6. Train sales on how to make that first call more successful by leveraging social media.
7. Invite Marketing to use your big data application to improve the quality of your leads.

The riddle is rooted in social media’s affect on how buyers purchase.  In today’s socially engaged world, over seventy percent of the buyer’s purchase process is completed before a sales person is every contacted. The process is self-directed and leverages the transparency of markets as buyers research their problem, potential solutions and the efficacy of those solutions without needing, or wanting, to talk with a sales person. By the time the buyer engages with a sales person, they have a preferred solution, a list of open questions and a price in mind. Sales, in turn, finds they have limited influence on the buyer’s process.  What most B2B marketers overlook is that the experience the Buyer wants as a customer is as important in the purchase decision as the capabilities of the product or service. If CMOs want to drive growth, they need to engage with the Buyer on their terms.

Solving the riddle requires a new mindset, one that is rooted in aligning to the Buyers Journey.  A core principle of the Buyers Journey is that everyone is a buyer all the time, even customers.  A set of organizing principles, the Buyers Journey aligns company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers.

By adopting the Buyers Journey, there is a clear opportunity for B2B CMOs to achieve two significant goals: Proactively shape the buyer’s experience and, by doing so, accelerate revenue growth.  Since the buyer self-defines their journey, it is Marketing’s responsibility to intimately understand and enable the buyer by offering the right content and calls to action through the information channels the buyer prefers at each step in the Journey.  Done correctly, vendors can achieve the twin goals as well as build the trust and credibility needed to earn preference when the buyer enters the Purchase stage.

How can marketers align to the Buyers Journey when it is largely invisible to marketers?

There are four major steps that buyers typically go through: Enablement stage: Problem Definition, Solution Search, Evaluation and Validation.

Buyers begin their Journey not by looking for a vendor but by understanding the issue’s root cause, exploring best practices, and learning how peers have addressed the need.  In the Problem Definition stage, buyers are doing the homework necessary to decide if and how they might want to approach solving their problem.  In the Solution Search step the organization agrees on target outcomes and success metrics, the desired approach, and any particular constraints that need to be addressed.  It isn’t until the Evaluation step that buyers being researching vendors.  Requirements have been agreed on, selection criteria are finalized, and discussions begin around the type of customer experience and lifetime value streams the organization wants.  Through social media they connect with peers and learn what it is like being a customer, if the product performs as promised, and the actual outcomes others have realized.   At the end of this step, the buyer has a short list of vendors and a preference along with a list of open questions.

Up to this point the Buyers Journey has been self-directed by choice with limited vendor involvement. At the same time the buyer’s experience has been shaped by their interaction with vendor content, social media, customers and others. As far as the buyer is concerned their experience to date defines their expectations of what it will be like as a customer.  That perceived experience may or may not reflect what it actually is like be a customer nor may it match the experience the buyer is looking for.

How can marketers align to the Buyers Journey?

he key to revenue growth is to enable the buyers by directly aligning marketing programs to the actions of buyers at each stage in the Journey. The first step is to leverage the enormous amount of data that companies have in their marketing automation, CRM and sales automation systems. Analyze the data in a data mart and look at it longitudinally.  By looking at how buyers have engaging with the company over time, a pattern emerges.  Fine tune the patterns by separating the data by industry and role/persona.  Second, augment these insights with market research. Interview customers, new accounts, and lost sales opportunities to uncover their steps in the Problem Definition and Solution Search stages.  The end result is a detailed Buyers Journey timeline map for your target markets and personas that outlines, beginning with the trigger event, the actions they took, where they went, what were they looking for, whom they ‘spoke’ with, and how they evaluated the information they found.

Next, map current marketing activities directly to the Buyers Journey map.  If marketing is currently conducting an activity that is not identified on the Buyers Journey; stop investing there.  Likewise, if buyers are looking for specific content or interactions that marketing currently does not provide; fund that activity.   There should be a one-to-one relationship between the Buyers Journey map and marketing activities.  However, alignment to the Buyers Journey is an ongoing process and the map should be updated quarterly.

The answer to the riddle of demand generation lies in aligning to buyer expectations. Only by being where buyers go and enabling their self-directed journey with value-generating interactions will companies succeed and grow.  The pay-off is well worth it:  Three to five times velocity of sales cycles and reduced cost of sales by thirty percent or more.

Post-purchase buyer engagement is the charter for customer service.  It’s a tough job though when B2B Sales closes the deal handing the customer off to the support organization often with very little information other than what they have purchased.  The result of this ‘over the wall’ toss is a disruption in the buyer’s experience from what they had during the evaluation and purchase stages of their journey.

Trust is broken. The buyer feels betrayed. Yet B2B companies baffled by the seemingly unwarranted dissatisfaction immediately question what’s wrong with the product or customer service.  They should, instead, look at the overall experience the buyer is having.   The artificial internal boundaries of Service, Support, Marketing, Sales, Finance, etc. are unnecessary barriers to buyer satisfaction.

Harold Goldberg, chief marketing officer of Merced Systems, a sales and service performance management solutions vendor, sums it up well, “customer service is all about aligning to customer behavior.”

A core principle of the Buyers Journey is that everyone is a buyer, all the time.  The Buyers Journey is a set of organizing principles for aligning company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers. “Customer” is an artificial label for counting and segregating buyers that have purchased your product.  The notion of “customer lock-in” is, in today’s world, a myth. Customers don’t stop evaluating their purchases or their vendors just because they bought. It’s actually the opposite; buyers are always buying even when they’ve just bought.

Companies are realizing buyers are more likely to talk about their buying experience and ask product questions on social media.  Likewise, they’ll turn to social media first to complain or share a bad experience.  Companies that are able to “hear” those comments first and thoughtfully respond, quickly, with facts and actions win loyalty and credibility. That’s gold.  Companies also gain real cost savings in the form of deflected customer calls.  According to IBM ‘s Institute for Business Value, Best Buy realized $5Million in annual savings from social customer service.  Even more gold can be found when Social Media is used to redefine customer service.

But before you set out to evaluate the over a hundred social CRM and customer service vendors, the place to start is to understand how social aligns to your buyers’ service expectations.  The traditional vendors have stretched the definition of social customer service to include chat, co-browsing, SMS, and even video.  The “social” customer service vendors only support a few (like three) social media channels and relatively low volumes of interaction.   Fully automated social customer service solutions that seamlessly integrate with CRM, contact center, ERP and other enterprise systems and can support high volumes of social interactions across a broad set of diverse social channels are hard to find.  I don’t think they exist yet.  Today, high volume customer service organizations cobble together multiple point solutions with a lot of elbow grease.   For example, a premier digital media search company uses over ten point solutions only to find they still can’t get their arms around it all and respond fast enough.

Aligning to buyer expectations on service can only come from “across the board visibility into metrics up and down the organization”, said Goldberg.  His mantra is a simple one, “transparency comes from empowerment which comes from information.”   How do you get transparency? Empower front line employees with better information and insights based on analytics and qualitative information such as resolving the customers issue on the first call” Most of the customer experience in Service comes from dealing with an agent or sales associate.  They have to get it right in every encounter.  Analytics and big data are the core enablers of empowerment.  The other enablers are company leadership and culture change.  “Many companies do not really know what it means to live in a socially-driven world.  Their CEOs need to recognize how customers want to be talked to,” shares Goldberg.

Whether it is looking at buyer engagement chronologically to gain a holistic view as to why they are contacting customer service or understanding customer behavior and determining what the best next steps are, only through big data analytics can buyer interactions be analyzed and deciphered.  With over 140 big brand customers that have large, high volume contact centers that handle hundreds, if not millions, of interactions a year, Merced Systems’ turn analytics into empowerment by identifying ways that an individual agent or entire center can drive better performance.   For social customer service, Merced’s analytics and metrics enable companies to understand the context of the customer conversation.

To leverage social customer service, Goldberg’s advice is that companies need to view buyer engagement holistically. He recommends having a dedicated group of agents to handle social media.  Let them experiment and learn because the rules of what constitutes world-class social customer service haven’t been written.  Figure out the type of customer comments and requests, what type of infrastructure is needed to empower those agents, and how to most effectively move public interactions into private channels.

To mine the gold of social customer service, deliver a consistent experience across Buyer Enablement and Engagement Stages by tearing down internal boundaries. While a company’s goal maybe to cut costs or reduce churn, social customer service will only be successful if the interactions and motivations are understood from the buyers’ perspective.

The big “T” will fizzle as quickly as a wet sparkler on the Fourth of July if becoming a Social Enterprise is just another strategic initiative added to the laundry list of corporate imperatives.  If, however, we step back and consider that the underlying dynamics of our lives, relationships, work and economy have changed, we can approach it with a fresh perspective.   The “T” becomes the roadmap to a reinvigorated company that is more successful, harmonious and, just maybe, more ‘fun’.

Joe Payne, Chairman and CEO of Eloqua, a marketing automation and revenue performance management platform vendor, believes the Social Enterprise big “T” transformation is rooted in four tenets: New leadership models, the Buyers Journey, alignment and technology.   According to Payne, “The number one impediment to economic growth today is time and knowledge.  The way businesses buy products and services in the new internet-enabled, social-enabled, mobile-enable world is very different than the way they bought products 10 years ago.  Companies need to evolve their selling capabilities and processes to match this new world.  A large part of the workforce doesn’t understand the new enablement and engagement expectations of a socially interconnected economy so it’s easy to see how companies, industries and communities are being left behind.”

But all is not lost as Payne has high expectations for the 20-something generation. As they become leaders, he expects them to be the catalysts of change within their companies and communities.  ”Young people have grown up in this highly fluid, uber-connected world and they are quick to use new technologies to better serve their customers and prospects,” shares Payne.

For organizations who cannot wait for the next generation, leadership from the very top is key.  “CEOs can do a better job of managing Marketing and Sales,” said Payne. “They need to encourage marketing to report on results — this means acknowledging that half of all campaigns are “below average” by definition.   CEOs should treat Marketing like it does Sales — don’t focus on the losses or underperforming campaigns but build a culture of accountability and focus on the wins and how to get more of those.  When Marketing and Sales are aligned and both are judged on the same metrics (and not by anecdotes), it is amazing the results that can be achieved.”  He goes on to emphasize that CEOs shouldn’t be so lenient on Sales, the lessons learned from understanding what is not working in Sales are critical to transformation.

Payne’s advice shouldn’t be interpreted as Marketing is on top of its game; it isn’t.  CMOs are just as challenged as CEOs in understanding how best to lead.  Most CMOs do not understand how to drive and measure their impact on pipeline.   “They view this as a tactical activity delegated to a marketing manager when actually demand generation is a strategic responsibility,” said Joe Payne. “This is the primary reason why CMOs are losing credibility.”

CMOs should manage the revenue pipeline with an obsession comparable to the one the head of Sales has.  Marketing must be able to generate revenue pipeline two to three quarters out and reconcile with sales’ forecast to improve predictability. To achieve that, Marketing has to build a marketing funnel and, together with Sales, define the rules for moving marketing leads through the funnel.  Focusing on the whole funnel from marketing through win/loss and measuring along the way provides the transparency needed to understand what is happening in the business.   That level of transparency sets the stage for Sales and Marketing to have the right conversations and technology like Eloqua’s Revenue Suite can play an enabling role.

(c) 2011 NBS Consulting Group, Inc.

Payne believes the seeds of actualizing the Buyers Journey lies in alignment.  If Sales and Marketing are not having the right conversations about the right things, supported by automation, aligning to the Buyers Journey is not possible.  “Technology, like Eloqua, can help companies understand the knowable,” said Payne. “It helps them build better knowledge about the Buyers’ Journey.” When Sales and Marketing talk about driving better results together, the conversation should focus on deciphering the behavior of Personas involved in the Buyer’s Journey.  Payne’s experience is that typically “seven to eight people are involved in a company’s Buyers Journey and these people do not always follow logical, sequential steps.  The real world is messy as buyers move back and forth across the Buyer Enablement stages of the Journey.”

Based on that knowledge, technology helps companies understand, evolve and align to their target markets’ Buyers Journey.  In the end it comes down to knowing your buyers and delivering value at every point of interaction, regardless of communication medium.  The result is accelerated revenue and that in and of itself becomes a competitive advantage.

Understanding what your buyer is expecting and having a company culture that naturally aligns to those expectations is a ‘must do’ if you want to become a Social Enterprise.  Joe Payne’s parting advice is “do this well and you will dominate your industry; don’t and you will not be in business.”