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New Vendor Spotlight
As the resident “Lead Analyst” within their Propolis service, I’ve been working with the B2B Marketing organization for many years now. Launched in March 2021 as an exclusive digital community for B2B marketers, Propolis has collected, by design, a very diverse membership, not just marketing executives but entire marketing teams in companies of all sizes.
I think that Propolis has proven to be nothing less than a game changer for B2B marketing as an industry, as a profession, and most of all as a community. After all, the way that business professionals want to consume and discuss industry and disciplinary trends has changed to become much more:
- Digital. Meaning that there is interactivity, not just website documents.
- Democratized. Where all job levels can afford to benefit from the information.
- Discussion-based. Where peer inputs are valued just as much as the so-called experts.
In the next weeks we will be extending our coverage and publishing our first B2B Marketing Martech Vendor Spotlight report, this edition focused on vendors supporting Account-Based Marketing (ABM).
When I was asked to design and research the Spotlight report, I realized that here was a great chance to create something different than the classical research analyst reports available so far. Those waves and quadrants score and compare the vendors based primarily on their product offering. My experience helping B2B marketers in their vendor selection process (I often recommend using Design Thinking) has been that the supplier itself is equally, or perhaps even more, the focus of attention and evaluation. No, the make-or-break questions that I get asked in my workshops are more about how a vendor will work with them as a client:
- “Will they help us to set up and run the solution?”
- “How do they react when something goes wrong?”
- “Do they have programmes to help ensure we get a return on our investment?”
So, first we select and spotlight those vendors we feel are most relevant and important for the Propolis members (a mix of both large enterprise and small-medium sized businesses). Then we profile each vendor and score it on four criteria relevant to the topics listed above. We also field a detailed vendor questionnaire asking about the resources in place to ensure successful implementation, integration, user adoption, and even value management of their ABM solution. Not every vendor responds and completes the survey (yet – as this is the first report after all) but my 20+ years of working at META Group, Gartner and Forrester Research, plus seven years of user surveys and report writing for Research In Action, is experience enough for me to craft and score all the profile pages.
These four criteria are critically important to potential buyer teams when evaluating and shortlisting vendors and the stress being on CUSTOMER SUCCESS more than individual product features:
• Market Momentum. Here, we have assessed how well a vendor helps prospective buyers to understand the solution offering and how it fits into their environment.
• Customer Focus. Almost all software solutions are now delivered as-a-service and the most successful SaaS vendors are those who help their clients on an ongoing basis, not just in response to support calls.
• Price vs Value. As with any business investment, marketing executives need to be assured that the investments they make in technology are providing an appropriate payback.
• Implementation Success. The true test of a business partnership is the commitment from a vendor to supporting the integration of their system with whatever the client has in place already.
We score each criterion as Strong, Good, Medium, or Low.
The B2B Marketing Martech Vendor Spotlight Report on ABM will be published to Propolis clients during the The Global ABM Conference from B2B Marketing in London in November. Further Spotlights will follow over the next year covering topics like Marketing Operations, Marketing Resources/Asset Management, Digital Content Management, Digital Experience, Customer Data Management, Digital Event Management.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
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Employee Churn: Challenge or Opportunity?
We are about to publish my next B2B Marketing Propolis Premium Report, titled The Great Resignation: Dealing with Employee Churn and New Expectations.
I enjoyed working with Jarmila Yu, Propolis Hive expert for Teams/Resourcing/D&I while the interviews were with marketing executives across several B2B sectors.
Here is the opening chapter; “The Great Resignation forces marketers back to management basics”.
“Yet another challenge for marketers. They are already dealing with the shift to more digital marketing channels; to more customer-centric and personalised content marketing; and towards using new technologies such as predictive analytics, advertising retargeting and account-profiling. Now, as if that wasn’t enough, they are also facing widespread changes in the working conditions across their businesses. They are not only seeing significant personnel churn in their marketing team, but also dealing with radical changes in the expectations of their teams when it comes to the working environment.
This is not a trend unique to the marketing department. Business employees across the board are quitting their jobs at a rate not seen in over a decade. The chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank in London reports that analysis of official data suggests people are resigning at the highest rate since 2009, with “historically elevated levels of workers leaving the labour market entirely”.
The data shows that a so-called ‘Great Resignation’ wave is happening around the world in the wake of the pandemic. In the US, where the government produces official data on the so-called ‘quit rate,’ the record 4.5 million people that resigned in November 2021 was followed by another 4.3 million resignations in December.
Employers across the UK complain of struggling to both hang on to and recruit staff. Redundancies in the UK are at their lowest level since the mid-1990s, while the level of open vacancies is the highest on record. The employees are leaving for a variety of reasons:
- Some are frustrated. Employees want to change their working environment because they are no longer satisfied with their current situation. Some have experienced inconsiderate leaders, unrealistic expectations of work performance, and/or a lack of career advancement. Those who saw colleagues being furloughed often had to shoulder greater workloads and work more time to help keep operations afloat.
- Others are just tired. Burnout and stress, family-care demands, and personal life-reflection after the Covid-19 pandemic are prompting many employees to reconsider their overall work-life balance objectives.
- Seizing the opportunity to move on. Many business professionals are now reconsidering where they want to live, let alone where they want to work. There is an increasing numbers of job opportunities that can be fulfilled remotely without ‘The Great Commute’ to deal with anymore.
The marketing discipline is one of many feeling the impact of this trend, which LinkedIn, the professional networking and career development platform, calls ‘The Great Reshuffle.’ The company reports a 31% growth of members with marketing careers changing jobs in 2021 compared to the previous year. That translates to a whopping 618,000 marketing job changes in 2021. And this at the same time as many firms are also ramping up their marketing departments. The past year saw a mind-blowing 374% growth in marketing jobs, with 1.3 million marketing jobs posted to LinkedIn.
So, is the ‘Great Reshuffle’ or ‘Great Resignation’ an opportunity or a challenge for marketers? Perhaps it’s a bit of both, offering an opportunity to re-build the business in a better manner, and ensuring that people are better placed in more rewarding and engaging careers.
For years, most B2B marketing organisations have been working with a ‘do more with less’ approach, with burnout and a lack of mental wellbeing all around. So, was the great resignation about to happen anyway and just accelerated by the pandemic?
The number of open marketing roles is at a seemingly all-time high in 2022. Is this because there is an overall increased need for marketers, or is it that there is a greater recognition for the role marketing plays in supporting business? Alternatively, is it a case of ‘where have all the marketing people gone and we need to replace them’?
The focus for this Propolis report is to answer some of those questions by examining and documenting how The Great Resignation has affected B2B marketing. We have held long interviews with several senior B2B marketers for deep insight into the topic. Hopefully, their comments will provide actionable advice for other marketers facing similar challenges. As you will see, these executives dropped a series of advisory nuggets in our conversations, so they will take the main stage throughout the report. Both Jarmila Yu and I have worked (and continue to work) with many clients on these issues, and so those experiences also feed into the report.”
The report will publish to B2B Marketing Propolis clients next month and a shortened version to the non-premium members later in the year. Contact me if you would like to get more details.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
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Branding in B2B is Important
We are about to publish my next B2B Marketing Propolis Premium Report, titled
Building an Authentic Brand: Defining the Building Blocks for Brand Success.
It was great fun working with B2B Marketing colleagues Sue Mizera and Darren Coleman and the interviews were with marketing executives from Atos, Deloitte, Ideal, The IET, Kalibrate, Pension Insurance Corporation, and PwC.
This is the opening chapter; “Branding’s journey from logo to message to authenticity”.
“Even as B2B marketers become more precise and targeted up and down the funnel, brand strategy is still the starting point for many companies’ overall go-to-market approach. Why? Well, B2B companies that do not take an active role in crafting their brand are leaving perception up to chance. Having a defined brand allows companies to guide their narrative and the public’s opinion.
Branding is much more than building awareness; it establishes and maintains credibility with prospects, customers, employees and partners.
I well remember leading a multi-year project back in 2002–2005 helping the software giant SAP to understand how they won, or lost, their more important deals. For each deal, we would interview the customers about how they came to their buying decision. Every deal involved partners like business consultants and/or system integrators, and it was clearly important to SAP that we record not only what their customers were thinking, but also how those partners were communicating SAP values and their offering. Although the word ‘brand’ wasn’t used (B2B vendors did not talk about brand then; I am not even sure if the client worked in marketing), they were really checking on their brand consistency throughout their sales channel. Simply put, were the partners telling the same story as SAP?
Branding begins with consistency of presentation across all channels of communication, whether that’s digital or human, direct sales force, or business partners. But it’s not just the messaging about the product or service being offered; branding should also reveal a consistent value system that a business wants to present to the world. Not only what a company offers, but also what it believes in.
With that in mind, we held extensive interviews with several senior B2B marketers to help us obtain deep insight into the topic of brand authenticity – what it means to marketers, how they approach it, the value it can deliver, and the challenges they face. These interviews serve as the basis of this report.”
The report will publish to B2B Marketing Propolis clients next week and a shortened version to the non-premium members later in March. Contact me if you would like to get more details.
Always keeping you informed! Peter