Albert (Ally) Motz

Ally is a senior sales, marketing and general management executive with more than 20 years experience spearheading the rapid and sustained growth of b-to-b organizations. Ally has a high level of proficiency in launching new ventures and developing growth strategies, including market share enhancement, market expansion and new market segment penetration. He is skilled at working with senior executives to identify and align strategic and financial goals to improve company performance.

Ally gained his expertise in formulating business strategy, developing senior executive relationships, consultative selling, and setting up and motivating effective sales teams during his highly successful career in several leadership roles. Prior to founding SiriusDecisions Canada, Ally was Country Manager for Gartner, where he led the company's Canadian subsidiary to record sales (400 percent growth to 41M), increased profits and world-class client retention results. During his tenure he orchestrated and executed a growth strategy focused on market expansion, new client acquisition, account growth, executive-level relationship development and client loyalty.

At Pitney Bowes, Ally was a top performing sales manager and the senior project manager responsible for the company's first foray into customer relationship management. As general manager at Carpita, he oversaw the company's successful expansion of large-scale retail operations.

Ally has an extensive network of influential senior-level contacts in Fortune 500 companies, as well as in large government organizations. He sits on numerous committees of key business and industry associations, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and industry association events. Ally is the Vice-Chair of the Canadian Marketing Association’s B-to-B Council.

The Evolution of Public Relations

In a world of rapidly increasing costs and diminishing return for what seems like everything marketing, there is one word that should always be top of mind for senior b-to-b executives: Leverage. The notion of spending once and deriving value multiple times not only stretches limited budget dollars, but begins to link what were previously disparate efforts into a cohesive, impactful strategy that drives results. Exhibit A of the all-too-common lack of leverage within b-to-b marketing is public relations. Despite both its importance and potential power, this function’s lack of integration into other marketing – and sales – activities significantly reduces its leverage, and thus its impact.

There is a wide chasm between those that apply a PR strategy purely as a general communications vehicle, and those that begin to weave it into the rest of the sales and marketing mix. The key variables that work together to form this chasm include:

Functional Alignment. While the role of acting as the liaison for senior management will not go away, impacting the revenue generating support capabilities of marketing will require PR to branch out beyond its historical comfort zone.

Functional Approach. Best-practice PR functions cultivate a sense of back-and-forth community with their audiences, enabling them to not only drive awareness and support demand creation programs on a regular basis, but to also become a more credible source of information in the face of negative concerns that can quickly manifest into reputation-damaging events.

Deployment. True PR leverage is gained by driving systematic awareness and reinforcement of positions throughout the buying cycle, rather than one-and-done message campaigns that do little to engage customers or prospects.

Metrics. A large number of PR functions continue to rely only on legacy metrics that include total impressions, brand awareness, clip counts and positioning versus the competition; the measurement of newer social media tactics tend to revolve around quantifiable Web activity metrics and analytics.

Technology and Services. The ability to measure the integration and impact of PR on other marketing and sales functions means a reliance on more than traditional media technologies and service providers.

When PR is merely the mouthpiece for an organization, its ability to demonstrate value is limited. While broadcasting press releases was once the key component of driving awareness, it now only serves to point out just how out of touch an organization can be. Leveraging the social media world by simply using it as another channel to push your message out is not the way to evolve the PR function; instead, fitting PR efforts into a highly integrated strategy that leverages its activities into the overall focus of sales and marketing is the surest path to success.

Reputation and the B-to-B Buying Cycle

Communications executives often view reputation management as a set of consistent efforts to maintain awareness and a positive impression of their organization. Get this right, they think, and buyers will be convinced to engage. Trouble is, connecting A with B has been nearly impossible, leaving these executives exposed when it’s time to cut both budget and headcount. While it’s true that communications functions have historically had a higher-level charter, this is rapidly changing as organizations learn that materials created for awareness, branding and even crisis management can be retooled for use throughout prospect buying processes. In this post, I will share some ideas for doing so, and in turn bring communications to more closely align with key goals of demand creation, sales enablement and revenue generation.

A Buying Cycle Primer
If an organization does not understand the way prospects buy what it sells, it will never be able to use marketing to facilitate these decisions. This is due to the fact that as prospects move toward a purchase, the tone, message, offer and even communicator for a specific marketing effort should be altered. Buyers don’t go through a straight-line process of getting information through the Web and other sources, weighing one solution against another and finally making a decision. Instead, a b-to-b buying process typically comprises a series of smaller decisions involving a variety of audiences that move into and out of the buying process. SiriusDecisions has created a model that describes six macro stages that b-to-b organizations typically go through. These six macro stages can be rolled up into three higher-level phases: education, active buying, and closing.

Buying Cycle Impact
Given the importance of buying cycles – and the role of the entire marketing organization to facilitate (rather than fight) them – better alignment of key reputation-building efforts with these cycles will result in more targeted, measurable communications.

Education. Many communications functions spend an inordinate amount of time blindly flooding the market with awareness messaging through public relations (PR) and analyst relations (AR), using both traditional and social media outlets. While a broadcast strategy can generate general awareness, taking a more surgical approach will generate incremental leverage. As an example, the work that goes into securing quotes for press releases and testimonials can be used to reinforce the connection between a specific offering and core business issues within a vertical market, then repurposed into content made available in a central repository for reuse. Multimedia content can be encapsulated into Web-based podcasts that both marketing and sales can distribute and track for effectiveness. These efforts should also be tracked to determine possible impact on organic search, a key element of prospect activities early in buying processes.

Active buying. The active buying stage finds buyers looking for solutions to problems they have decided are a priority, matching solution types to their specific needs and uncovering vendors that offer their solution of choice. An organization’s communications activities can be used to drive focused awareness not around brand, but around specific decisions made by current customers that drove them to choose the solution you offer, and subsequently your organization in particular. Reuse quotes, testimonials and case studies in a variety of deliverables (including social media outlets such as blogs and microblogging sites such as Twitter) that are cooperatively created with product marketing and subject matter experts, and provided to field marketing and sales. For deals that move into the opportunity phase but then stall, specific pipeline acceleration efforts sponsored by marketing in conjunction with sales can be effective in helping these deals to get moving again. Communications functions can help even further by tracking key issues being discussed in online communities that are sponsored by their organization or outside entities; emerging or changing issues can be quickly identified and converted into deliverables as warranted.

Closing. The closing phase includes activities such as negotiations and terms/conditions creation required to seal a deal. While there may be less traditional communications content reuse potential here because prospects have much of the information they need, a key leverage point is the communications function’s ability to act as a liaison to the executive branch for their participation in critical deals. Directly addressing any issues that a prospect may have about your organization by facilitating prospect interaction with marquee references also could help tip a decision in your favor, as can repurposing any ROI-related content into tools. Communications also should stand ready as a liaison to deal teams working feverishly to close deals in order to potentially create (or adapt) content as needed.

The more the communications function links its reputation activities to demand creation goals, the more reach and value can be demonstrated to the overall organization. While traditional communications activities in the branding, PR and AR arenas will still occur, the leverage available to other marketing functions is often minimal if these activities remain general in nature and myopic in execution. Instead of merely releasing your communications content to become available to other marketing roles, proactively match your deliverables to specific stages in the buying cycle; not only will you gain additional mileage out of your initiatives, you will raise the visibility and impact of your function to the business.

Rising Above the Downturn

Succeed by focusing on what you can control and what won’t demand big-dollar investments: Process, readiness and a few new tricks.

There’s an old saying about technology that goes something like “analysts invariably overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.” It’s fair to say that with recent economic developments staring them in the face, more marketing and sales leaders have begun to make decisions about resources and strategies based on what they’re hearing now rather than what they know will drive success over time. In this post, I will focus on five key activities that will help get you past today’s hype and maintain your focus on systematic, predictable revenue growth.

ONE: COMPLETE A BENCHMARK
Companies that focus on continued excellence have long understood the power of benchmarking, but also know it’s not enough to simply measure what and how you spend money, or how your demand funnel performs in a vacuum. You must understand how a group of peers that look like you – with size or industry not the only comparatives – as well as a group of companies that you aspire to be like are spending and performing. These comparitives are a fantastic tool to protect budgets, to justify spending and to set realistic goals for performance improvement. It’s easy to start cutting when times get difficult, a strategy that is penny wise and pound foolish for most. The best organizations, on the other hand, embrace what is difficult and keep distancing themselves from the pack as a result.

TWO: ENABLE SALES
Marketing is legendary – or better yet, infamous – for prioritizing its efforts on the top of the demand waterfall, primarily in the form of sourcing leads. In fact, we estimate that the typical b-to-b field marketing function spends nearly 92% of its budget at the funnel top, leaving the remaining 8% to support sales in its efforts to take good-quality leads and bring them to opportunity and close. This balance should change in any economy, especially one where sales cycles elongate and “no decision” becomes your strongest competition. Depending on the demand scenario, spend ratios should range anywhere between 80/20 and 65/35 between the waterfall top (sourcing, nurturing) and the bottom (sales enablement). Marketers that continue to endorse the imbalances are not only jeopardizing their sales forces, they are jeopardizing the chance that leads they source will propagate into the waterfall and truly make an impact on the business.

THREE: FOCUS ON PROCESS
One of the most underrated routes to better results is process improvement, something that often doesn’t require a budget line item at all. Every company employs sales and marketing processes that don’t work well, those that employees spend the most time creating excuses for or workarounds to avoid. Think about your lead flow process (or lack thereof), your linking of reputation activities to demand creation (or lack thereof) or the formal ways in which sales tries to apply tools and content to the buying processes it finds itself trying to shepherd (or why it doesn’t, or can’t). Taking on just one of these areas to improve the process that surrounds it may be an investment in time, but is one that is low in dollars and significant in potential return. An additional positive outcome of fixing the processes that are most broken is freeing up wasted personnel time, something that is almost certainly no longer a luxury for organizations.

FOUR: MAXIMIZE VENDOR INVESTMENT
It’s a natural inclination of companies when they struggle to try to turn to a third-party vendor – be it for technology or services – for some “instant” help. Often, they wind up disappointed because they sought to automate a process that didn’t exist, or to simply outsource a job in the hopes that results would follow. In these times, b-to-b organizations must choose their partners with a newfound care, and realize that they may have to live with these choices for a lot longer than normal. I often counsel clients to make sure they have sound, collaborative processes in place before they attempt to select or deploy technology, no matter how reputable the vendor, or at the least understand that they will have to work with the vendor’s services function (or another vendor) to create these processes. If your organization does not understand what it needs, how what it is buying meets those needs and what will need to be done on your end to prepare for a purchase, the chances are that you’ll waste funds that are way too precious to waste.

FIVE: EXPLORE COST-EFFECTIVE TACTICS
One budget bright spot for b-to-b organizations is the emergence of social media tools, from blogs to Twitter to LinkedIn. These tools often require a greater amount of effort and consistency to make them work than they do money, perfect for tighter budget times. Finding the right social media outlets and testing them – or at a minimum monitoring the buzz on your company – is a requirement you can meet without draining significant dollars from other projects. An example of where social media may help reduce cost is testing feedback via social media in place of traditional mechanisms, or trying an online event rather than a live one. Depending on your market and where they turn for knowledge, you may find trying new ways of influencing the conversation is the best bet you make this year.

I can’t tell you what the stock market will look like in six months; heck, I can’t even figure out what things might look like six days from now. What I do know is that the success of sales and marketing over the long term lies in the ways they choose to work together, or better yet, choose not to. These are words to live by in the best of times; they certainly hit home even harder during the worst.

A New Holistic B-to-B Reputation Model

For any b-to-b organization, reputation is a tenuous thing; no matter how long it takes to build up, it takes but one bad quarter, poorly executed product launch or customer support disaster to knock it down. These days, the building part is even more difficult as the number of channels to manage and breadth of demands to measure impact from management continue to grow. Despite all the recent buzz around social media, the average b-to-b organization still earmarks sizable portions of its marketing spend – in some cases, more than 15% according to our data – to traditional communications. Many of these organizations have struggled to blend social and traditional activities with one another, not to mention the demand creation activities they should be systematically seeding. In this post, I present a new holistic reputation model that depicts the fusion of new and old media approaches, and the baseline strategies, metrics and tools/services that surround them.

The Reputation Spectrum embraces two key realities. First, though social media may be exciting, it doesn’t mean the end of branding, advertising and public relations. Second, the more that communications initiatives are isolated from demand creation, the harder they will be to measure in terms of real business impact. On one axis, there are three key zones, including:

• Foundation. This zone includes legacy communications used to build and maintain an organization’s awareness and identity, primarily through mass vehicles (print publications, television and radio). While once an effective means to establish differentiation in the market, a foundation approach by itself is no longer sufficient, and certainly not economically viable. These activities have tended to be the most disconnected from revenue creation, and as such seem to always be in the budget-cutting crosshairs when times are tight.

• New. While it has become cliché from vendors in the space to state that social media drives closer alignment with customers and other stakeholders, many organizations have approached these channels very carefully. Some social media options have proven valuable in the demand creation and sales enablement mix, while others tend to be better for driving awareness. Regardless of the option and its intent, sound strategies around participation, frequency and transparency are required or failure is practically guaranteed.

• Convergence. The final zone reflects the movement of activities once judged to be solely traditional or new in nature toward one another. This movement is largely generated by the realization that communications activities in the b-to-b world are difficult – if not impossible – to tie to revenue generation. If designed properly, however, they can in tandem form the foundation for more effective demand creation, particularly if aligned with buying cycle phases and buyer roles. Focusing on the convergence zone will also impact the level of sales readiness, as communications activities can be leveraged for internal enablement use.

In order to drive reputation convergence and impact demand creation in the most positive way, communications executives must focus their efforts in four areas, including:

• Strategy. An isolated reputation strategy typically involves creating a messaging foundation, the rules and governance for communications, as well as selection models for choosing agencies for a variety of delivery channels. A converged strategy that impacts demand requires a defined plan for bringing old and new media together, the creation of message elements that can be adapted for various markets, audiences and buying centers and an approach for delivering messages to prospects and customers indirectly through both traditional and new intermediaries.

• Tactics. Whether tied to messaging for public affairs or for distinct vertical industries, traditional media outlets still serve a useful function. On the new communications front, many social media efforts are well established, from customer communities to YouTube channels and internal wikis for knowledge sharing. Activities that were once thought traditional such as advertising, branding, analyst and public relations must now be used in conjunction with select social media applications within different stages of a buying cycle to influence stakeholders beyond reputation building.

• Measurement. Traditional communication metrics focus on brand awareness and clip counts, while newer social media communications rely heavily on quantifiable Web activity metrics and analytics. To gauge the impact of your reputation efforts on demand creation, organizations need to focus more on key performance indicators (KPIs) rather than a laundry list of metrics. These KPIs should include benchmark results that compare sales and marketing waterfall conversion rates before and after they are seeded by/integrated with reputation campaigns and activities. While you will still need to track media placement to monitor the impact of your efforts compared to your competitors, it’s equally important to collect social media impact data beyond the Web metrics that tell you how many people read your blog or posted in your online community. Instead, you’ll want to determine customer satisfaction and loyalty, how much buzz and awareness your social media efforts are generating, and the external influence on stakeholders.

• Technology and Services. Building a process and strategy to converge reputation and demand won’t be easy, but technology and service providers can help. You may find that your existing analyst or public relations firms are good at helping with traditional communications but have no experience with social media. In turn, firms you may be using to help measure your brand reach or social media optimization efforts may be less effective in leveraging the value of traditional tactics. Best-of-breed agencies and communications vendors will have at least some demand generation experience, and understand the convergence goals you are trying to reach.

At a fundamental level, we believe that organizations that continue to equate branding and advertising with reputation – with little regard to their impact on any demand creation initiatives – will have a very difficult time making long-term, sustainable communications change. They do this at their own peril.

Reputation Survey:
We're collecting data on b-to-b reputation and communications activities and would value your input. Everyone who takes the survey will receive a summary of the results and our findings. Thank you, and here's the link: SiriusDecisions Reputation Survey

The Dawn of the Demand Center

Of all the desires emanating from the C-suite in relation to marketing quickly becoming the most dominant is the desire for leverage. CFOs and CEOs want to know where efficiencies can be found so that cuts can be made. CMOs are looking for answers so they don’t have to gut their function. It is the desire for leverage that is driving large organizations toward structures that maximize field marketing at a global level, and smaller organizations toward enhanced centralization.

The demand center is a central or regional hub of shared marketing services, infrastructure and process that enables organizations to bring programs to market by leveraging key corporate assets and best practices. It is a hybrid structure between centralization and decentralization, leaning toward a pragmatic “center of excellence” approach. B-to-b marketing has evolved dramatically in recent years, with field marketing leading the pack in terms of both performance and budget (typically 40% to 60% of overall marketing spend). What seems to be most frequently missing, however, is a go-to-market model that enables consistent field marketing performance across disparate geographies or lines of business. At the heart of this requirement are four key factors, including:

• A new campaign model. The old days of taking a response, looking to qualify it quickly and pass it on to sales are over, replaced by an integrated multi-touch, multi-channel model centered around prospect and customer buying cycles. Such an approach requires significant change management; leveraging a center-of-excellence approach can accelerate this change.
• Technology. The new campaign model focuses heavily on digital relationships that often leverage a marketing automation platform (MAP), emphasize the Web and require significant data management. Marketing campaigns that are designed to automatically serve offers based on a prospect’s behavior require a technological backbone, one that is both complicated and costly to deploy multiple times on a one-off basis.
• A marketing skills gap. Most b-to-b organizations have historically hired marketing managers with strong skills in designing one-dimensional campaigns that didn’t require sophisticated technology. With a new campaign model and new technology now required, these marketers are challenged to catch up. Replacing them is often not an option; with the concepts I’ve discussed so new, a strong talent base hasn’t had a chance to develop. In the end, these marketers need help, something that a center of excellence is specifically designed to do.
• A lack of best practices. I have observed many organizations that attempted to implement the strategies and purchased technology we originally classified as “Field Marketing 2.0” back in 2007 have only been partially successful. As a result, senior management has perceived the moves to be a waste of investment. By having marketing personnel equipped with the appropriate skills in a regional center that can deliver learnings and best practices to the remainder of the organization, more rapid success follows.

As an integrated regional marketing organization, the demand center should provide three core services.
1. Infrastructure. Regional centers from which marketing infrastructure can be deployed and accessed will provide the expertise and tools for a region or country, ensuring it is deploying best practices. Core infrastructure at the demand center level includes a MAP, data quality tools, media measurement tools and Website optimization technology.
2. Marketing services. Includes help for local marketers to assemble a best-practice campaign from corporate assets, or to provide the execution services to implement the campaign on their behalf. While often handling the campaign assembly and execution, the demand center is also allowing access to highly specialized marketing roles, including Web anthropologists, marketing automation power users and data management experts.
3. Teleservices. Providing telemarketing and teleprospecting services at regional inbound and outbound centers will allow an organization to leverage best practices and infrastructure, as well as to benefit from a central management approach that tends to be more effective for call centers. Such an approach, however, depends on the scale of the business and may be difficult to afford and execute.

Without the demand center approach, corporate or global marketing often creates assets and sends them to either a skeleton regional marketing group or directly to country marketers, hoping that the assets are effectively used. In the demand center model, corporate or global marketing creates the campaign strategy and marketing assets, then sends them directly to regional demand centers. The demand centers assemble the campaigns, adjust them for local markets and either hand them off to country marketers or execute for them. The demand center model is not appropriate for every company. Organizations under $250 million typically should implement a hybrid approach of country marketing and a demand center that is centrally managed but less regionally deployed.

The demand center model is usually not deployed without controversy. Regional marketers are often frustrated receiving assets they can’t localize or strategies they can’t effectively implement; as a result, any form of regionalization or centralization is not overwhelmingly popular at the outset. However, the demand center model is designed both to execute campaigns where marketing resources are limited as well as offer best practice advice. In many ways, this can provide the global community with the balance of applying unique marketing strategy to specific markets while leveraging best practices the company has learned.