The Dawn of the Hyper-Literate Society

In Why Marketing is Becoming Like Software Development we discussed how marketing was becoming Test-driven and Agile, driven by the demands of the Internet business environment.

The basic reason for this was that the Internet has created hyper-literacy in buyers, radically changing the sales process in ways companies have been very slow to respond to.

Much like how the printed word extended the reach of general information to the masses, the Internet has extended the reach of specialized information to the masses. Literacy has been replaced by hyper-literacy, and this has radically influenced many of our institutions and behaviours. Patients know almost as much about their illnesses as their doctors, dieters are reading primary research on nutrition and arguing about causation versus correlation on diet websites. And buyers in B2B marketplaces are driving sales people crazy.

This raises the question- how much are sales and marketing changing? Will sales still matter?

New Channels of Communication Change The Game

Sales used to be the primary conduit for the customer to learn about a product or solution. There were essentially no other channels. A few brochures and white papers would be produced, but that was only in support of the sales interaction- that collateral wasn’t meant to sell, and never fit that closely to the customer’s specific reality. And this was the necessity based on reality- to do it any other way would have required the sales team dropping a file cabinet off at a customers site.

As a result, marketing wasn’t that important. Couldn’t be that important. Marketing worked on lead generation and trade shows because that was the best they could do through the limited customer communication channels available to them. Brochures were background value-add to the sales process, but often unread due to their being so generic.

That has changed, and companies are just starting to get it. The Internet has opened up many other channels for the customer to get information, and provides an encyclopedia of knowledge that allows him to find it.

When you hear about about “buying cycles” replacing “sales cycles” in sales strategy, this isn’t just an improved understanding of purchasing psychology. It’s something that has been enabled by a fundamental change in the environment.

Customers buy on their own terms because they can. And as a result, marketing has become far more important then it was 10 years ago, and the role of sales has changed – or should have changed- dramatically.

Marketing Has Become a Larger Part of Selling

The result of the Internet channel dominating the sales conversation (especially when we, the vendor aren’t present) means that Marketing has to become a much larger part of sales.

To do so, Marketing must do two essential things- support the Internet customer communication channel, and measure that channel through analytics.

Marketing Needs to Generate Content That Sells Rather then Supports Selling

Why? Again because the customer is consuming this information on his own via the Internet. If you aren’t providing it, someone else will.

This content also needs to be more specific and relevant to the buyer. There is no sales team present to interpret and communicate a deeper message- this is your chance to get your message through. Traditionally marketing content was marginally relevant due to no delivery channel to the customer (reference the awkward file cabinet point above) and a resulting generic message. That channel is now there, and better yet, it allows content to be filtered for the customer. It may be a huge virtual filing cabinet, but search engines and other technology allow the customer to quickly find what appeals to him, leaving him feeling like he’s reading a nice little on-demand magazine.

The Content Must Fit the Customer Need, No Interpreter Needed

Another challenge is that your sales team isn’t there to interpret the content or get feedback from the customer regarding the content. So, the content must be a near exact fit for the customer, necessitating a much different type of marketing collateral then has been previously the norm. This is the most significant challenge of the online marketing environment, and brings us to our next topic.

Marketing Needs to Do Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing use to be clearly a sales function. It requires a soft touch, an understanding of the customer, and solution selling to present the information in a meaningful and manageable way.

This fails today for two reasons, one traditional and one purely a result of the modern marketing reality.

The Economics of a Sale Are Becoming More Challenging

A 30% cost of sale can’t be supported by most companies. It’s as simple as that. You can’t spend enough time with the customer to help with his education, and that means he’s on his own more often.

The Customer is On The Internet While You Are Busy Doing Other Things

The customer isn’t paused until the next sales meeting, waiting to be feted and wowed by your solution selling greatness. That’s now a small channel to his mind. He’s on the Internet, researching, browsing your website, browsing your competitors websites.

10 years ago the Internet was 4 years old from a business perspective and there wasn’t much content. The Internet was a small channel to the customer, smaller then the sales engagement.

5 years ago the Internet was 9 years old. There was some content, but it was still classic corporate brochureware. However, blogs were starting to take off, and more print industry articles and insights were available on the web. An expectation of useful information started to blossom in customers, and almost all of our customers were now active Internet users.

Today, the internet is 14 from a business perspective. It’s got attitude, and it thinks it knows everything. It doesn’t but it’s getting really close- at least outside of B2B marketing.

The expectation of content from people who use the Internet is now extremely high. It’s the first stop for information.

Marketing Needs to Do Analytics

The other side effect of the customer pursuing information on the Internet is that you aren’t there to interpret the customer reaction. Broader, deeper content is being put out to the Internet so the customer finds his knowledge from you, but what is his reaction?

That’s why analytics are essential. Without it, you are flying blind.

Online content allows you to measure your audience’s response and gain critical insight into customer outlook and behaviour. Five years ago this may not have been so certain- poorer content and a uncertainty if your buyers were represented in your website traffic made measurement hard.

Marketing Needs to Go Where The Customers Are, And Where They Are Listening

The Internet being the dominant channel of communication to customers clearly explains why there is now an exploding market of marketing automation vendors. Your customers are online, doing research, and becoming experts- your sales channel can’t compete. You can talk to them for an hour a week, but the Internet is there for them 7×24. They want to find answers, and they aren’t waiting for you.

This changes the value and purpose of content radically.

Is Sales Becoming Marketing Technical Support?

10 years ago content had to be presented face-to-face to customers because there were no other viable channels of communication.

Now, most content needs to be presented indirectly through the Internet because it is the most prevalent channel of communication. This also means that content (and marketing) end up doing more of the selling.

What does this mean for sales? Are they destined to become technical support for automated marketing efforts?

Not likely. Some radically new very early markets may be beyond effective marketing reach. And in all non-trivial markets relationships are still central to any sales or buying process, . In fact, properly managed, sales can focus on more value-add activities in marketing-sold markets, handling more accounts and driving more business. In most cases, the early soft touches guiding prospecting and lead nurturing need human contact. The flow of marketing content to the prospect needs guidance and filtering based on human contact. Facilitation, problem discovery, solution mapping- sales is becoming a lot more about consulting and project management. But the fact remains- that beast called the Internet is sitting there, humming away 7×24, always ready to hop in as a sales advisor to your hyper-literate prospect whether you participate or not. There is no stopping it, and this change in marketing is becoming a necessity, not a choice.

Software development is influencing marketing a lot these days with the emergence of Agile Marketing and Test-Driven Marketing- Agile and Test-Driven concepts being two concepts that have dominated software development for the last 5 years.

The reason is not a fad crossing over, but rather a more fascinating and powerful phenomena. As the Internet has become pervasive in our lives Marketing has become testable, much like software, as well as more impactful due to the amount of reading buyers now do during the buying cycle.

Agile software development embraces change and measurement, allowing responses to “market” signals that are leading indicators of failure. Signals include early customer feedback, early robustness feedback from automated tests, and ongoing feedback from regression testing, which captures failures due to the landscape changing.

But so what, you might ask? Marketing has become testable. Whoop-de-do. I’ve been marketing for twenty years, and we’ve done just fine without testing.

My answer? Marketing mostly sucked from a customer perspective. And this was effective and professional because there wasn’t much other option. Marketing wasn’t sales, and sales was the group responsible for strongly targeting messages to buyers. Marketing was background support. Marketing didn’t have access to the customer mind, by message or by volume of content (diversity in customers makes available volume of content critical for targeted messaging), and as a result marketing was largely product focused.

That’s no longer the case. Where sales was once needed to deliver targeted content, buyers now look for the content themselves online. And if they don’t find yours, they’ll find someone else’s. Last generation marketing that was background to the targeted sales message is now leading in the foreground, and landing with a awkward thunk.

In the new marketing environment, we need marketing to work well or we’ll fail. The Internet has changed how we sell, and marketing does a lot more of the selling because that’s where the customers are- at their computers researching their own needs. Selling has become buying facilitation, and if marketing doesn’t step up and do more of this type of selling with relevant targeted messaging, failure is almost unavoidable.

The other massive influence in the new marketing environment is that we can now measure if marketing is working. Considering that we now need marketing to work, that is very good thing.

Inbound marketing, Internet lead generation and Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) all test marketing through conversion rates on multiple website goals such as newsletter signup, RSS subscription, Facebook fans, white-paper downloads, requests for a demo, successful multiple touches, purchases, and so on. There are literally hundreds of amazing measurements and tests that can be applied- either on existing data or on data created from intentional tests.

This is enabling marketing to be test-driven, and in complex markets, it’s providing the tools for marketing to become agile. This is exactly what happened in software- the focus on feedback from customers and tests enabled software development to become agile. Indeed, the concept of Agile Software Development was somewhat meaningless until the feedback mechanisms were there.

Marketing has become like software. You run it, test it, and it either works or it doesn’t.

The bottom line is that today we must sell with marketing, and we can now measure our marketing. These two incredibly strong influences have combined in a way that will fundamentally change the entire business world.

And that means we can start applying some of the same processes- agile responses to market signals, testing for user adoption, testing for relevance, and actually building our marketing collateral so that it is in fact testable.

If you think marketing automation and automated lead nurturing are a fad, you better have lots of brand equity to ride on. Because if you don’t, you are not going to be able to build it in this brave new world.

For more on this topic, I recommend checking out some of the new wave of marketing automation vendors- Marketo, Manitcore, Eloqua , MarketBright or Hubspot, as well as the Analytics vendors such as Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and Omniture and see what they are saying.

And if you are convinced and want more details, or unconvinced but open to the possibility, subscribe to this blog via the Test-Driven Marketing RSS Feed or subscribe with the simple email subscription form over there on the right sidebar. Our next post, Is Sales Becoming Marketing Technical Support?, goes deeper into the changing roles of Sales and Marketing.

The universe is made of stuff. The fancy term for the basis of this stuff is matter. But based on some calculations, we can only account for 10-20% of the matter in the universe- the other 80-90% is missing. The common term for this missing matter is Dark Matter.

The same concept applies to selling. Only 10-20% of selling is visible to a vendor, and the rest is hidden and unaccounted for in our sales and marketing processes. This is the Dark Matter of Selling- the missing 90% of the sales process.

This is what happens when we aren’t in front of the customer.

Vendors do only 10% of the selling in an enterprise sales process. The other 90% of the selling is done internally by champions and other stakeholders in the company.

This is a good point to keep in mind- I meet many sales professionals who seem to think potential customers only think about your product when they are talking to you.

So how do we handle and manage this scandalous fact. Well, lets consider communication channels.

We communicate to customers 4 ways:

1. we talk to them
2. we write stuff that they read
3. someone else talks to them
4. someone else writes stuff they read

One loose way of categorizing this:

1. sales  (we talk)
2. marketing (we write)
3. brand (someone else talks)
4. P.R. (someone else writes)

This is probably in the reverse order of long-term influence. Nothing beats conversation for sales, but those moments are limited and forgotten. The written form is often being used when we aren’t at the account.

The internet and your website are now a 7x24x365 trade show. Even if you perfectly sell your champion, how well will communicate your fine words to his coworkers and managers? And what happens when they go on the Internet and visit your site and other sites online.

Maybe it makes sense to consider these secondary audiences as a specific target for marketing collateral and effort? Those people you never get to present to but who nevertheless are involved in the buying process and end up researching you and visiting your site.

Also, what happens when your champion actively sell and market. How do they create THEIR support materials?

In this case, it makes sense to make reusable content available from your materials and your website. How about posting and distributing slides in PowerPoint format with encouragement to reuse? How about pointing to 3rd party sources that enable the same?

There is a potential downside to this. Is there a risk you only get involved in 5% of the selling now that you’ve empowered your champions? Information is one card you hold to gain a further audience.

The answer to this depends on the customer. Are they actively communication and working internally? If so, it’s happening anyway, so provide information. Are they passively interested and not actively involved yet? Then you are still building demand and need all the meetings you can get.

There is no easy answer. However, this secondary selling is happening, and it is impacting you. It’s something to keep in mind.