Congratulations on your recent book. It looks interesting.

You are right on the money. We live in the age of transparency. Buyers can and will learn everything they need to know about you, your products, and your reputation online. Buyers also have the freedom to ENGAGE companies, brands and people online as part of their research process. So you are right, selling and marketing has moved towards buying facilitation and away from advertising and pitching.

In my book, People Buy You, I discuss how Sales Professionals must learn how to connect with their clients and customers emotionally in a way that allows them access to problems that can be solved with their products or services. This engagement, or buying facilitation, occurs because the connection and subsequently a level of trust exists.

Marketing must learn the same lesson. In her book Age of Engage, Denise Shiffman offers excellent examples of how marketers should change how they view potential customers. The live web, which is driven by social media has afforded marketing an incredible opportunity to become an active part of the buying facilitation process.

Marketing has the real opportunity to build emotional connections and trust with potential customers. However, marketers must lead the way in providing even greater transparency to products and services and more authenticity to brands.

Whatever term you choose, engagement, connecting, problem solving or buying facilitation (no disrespect to Sharon who apparently added these two words to the dictionary), it is important to understand that buyers, at the core, still make decisions based on emotions; though, how we shape those emotions as sellers and marketers is changing.

Jeb Blount
CEO
SalesGravy.com
Author of People Buy You

I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

The most impactful part of “Ogilvy on Advertising” for me was his discussion of what he learned from direct marketing. That lead me to “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins.

The great thing about the web is you can apply these techniques more broadly, at lower cost, and at lower volumes then historically with direct marketing or the application of those techniques in traditional marketing.

I’ll look up the book you mentioned.

I think marketing measurement was only viable to large B2C companies, only for certain aspects of marketing, only at great expense, and only over longer time periods. So you are right, but I think it’s fair to say that marketing as a whole wasn’t testable in comprehensive manner- especially for smaller companies.

According to Mark Jeffery in Data-Driven Marketing, 80% of Companies don’t make data-driven marketing decisions, raising the question Why Don’t Marketers Test More. You raise the key points why that is- access to meaningful data, and the analytical skills to make that data meaningful to decision making. In my post I should qualify that an amazing metric is a relevant one .

Avinash Kaushik’s Analytics blog is a great resource for focusing measurement on outcomes, and he makes the humorous distinction between analysis ninjas and reporting squirrels. Two themes he visits often are that looking at web metrics without factoring in outcomes and goals (e.g. reporting versus analysis ninja) gives you insight the size of a pea compared to the possibility of a dinner plate, and that even if you have the great data, you need to translate it into a presentation format that matches your audience (e.g. executive team).

Similarly, Hubspot makes the distinction between web analytics and marketing analytics to emphasize the same idea.

I think Ed’s last point is particularly important. Avinash Kaushik makes the point that after a few months, you won’t get any benefit taking action on your top ten metrics or top ten data points per metric. You need to look at the metrics buried in the middle of your data and look for trends and opportunities there. Many companies optimize for their current traffic, which isn’t where the growth might be. They need to look for long-tail keywords, and keywords they aren’t optimized for but provide value for.

In my many years in B2B software, I often came across customers who were far into an evaluation and were very surprised to find a new vendor they had missed.

My marketing career began more than 25 years ago, and my first job required me to understand what efforts were attracting potential buyers to the business, and why some bought when others didn’t.

This taught me simple ways to measure key marketing and sales metrics – cost per inquiry, cost per qualified lead, cost per new customer, average order size, order frequency, annual purchase …

And this experience taught me about audience segmentation so we can select the most appropriate media, messages and offers so costs were managed and results improved.

I still do this – for the few companies that understand that spending $1 needs to generate more than $1.

Just as in software development, you also need to be careful not to optimize just what is easy to measure. You get the most benefit by the big paradigm changes, not minor tweaks (in software development, the analogy is to coming up with a better algorithm, rather than trying to optimize existing code).