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.

Social Media in B-to-B Survey

Our most recent b-to-b social media survey examined a wide range of issues, including strategy, budget, tactics and measurement. While social media appears to have moved past the “shiny new toy” phase, clear goals are still evolving. Companies must understand opportunities and limitations as they move beyond trials to integrate social media with more established marketing functions

During the past 24 months, SiriusDecisions has collected data and insight about the evolution of social media in b-to-b as related to awareness, adoption, measurement and much more. In this post, we review a few findings from our 2009 Social Media in Business survey.

A cross-section of b-to-b organizations that sell complex, enterprise b-to-b products and services participated in the quantitative portion of the survey, which was co-sponsored by social media vendor Visible Technologies. Appropriate data and insight from SiriusDecisions benchmarking activities, consulting engagements and client inquiries were added to the sample as appropriate. As observed in prior surveys, all phases of marketing – including reputation initiatives – are now being more closely evaluated to determine return on investment. While there is a general understanding that social media is not necessarily the most efficient direct demand creation engine (especially in the short term), leading-edge organizations are increasingly testing new ways of integrating social media initiatives with other key marketing activities. Once organizations have gained working knowledge of how various social media activities can impact their prospects and customers at which particular points in the buying cycle, they can better align social media content to demand creation and sales enablement.

Our survey tracked the behaviors of b-to-b organizations around a number of social media activities. Specific observations in two areas include:

One: Usage and Objectives. We asked organizations to rank order how they are using social media, with the most important objectives listed first. While there was no dominant consensus, generating awareness ranked highest (26% of respondents) followed by engaging with customers to promote loyalty and retention (18%), and interfacing with analysts and other influencers (16%). Marketing specific products finished fourth in the rankings (15%). Each of the top four responses points to active, information-to-the-market type activities; monitoring and responding to customer support issues finished immediately behind the group. Perhaps this information feedback use is assumed to be part of all social media initiatives; however, the value of social media to constantly take the pulse of the market and its perception of your organization’s reputation should not be underestimated. Without a formal process or dedicated resources to monitor market perception, a company can be easily overwhelmed by misunderstandings or misinformation, hindering its ability to make any headway in the social media space at all.

Two: Demand Generation Support and Alignment. Studies by SiriusDecisions of broader reputation activities during the past 24 months have revealed a growing trend toward integrating reputation and demand creation. In our last survey, 33% of organizations reported that more than half the time, they linked their reputation with demand creation activities. In our social media survey, only 15% of respondents reported that more than half the time, they use social media to support their demand creation efforts. More than two-thirds of respondents reported that 25% of the time or less, they align social media with their demand creation activities. Clearly, organizations are still in need of a strategy to best leverage social media within the demand creation process. Organizations must begin to consider the ways that social media tactics can be applied beyond the top of the demand waterfall, such as for pipeline acceleration efforts and more comprehensive, just-in-time sales readiness.

Slowly but surely, social media technologies and systems are emerging from their initial perception as just a shiny new toy to be played with, then discarded. As organizations identify and recognize the risks and rewards of social media, they have begun to clarify best usages and objectives for specific initiatives, as well as to learn both the nuances and positioning of various social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook. Knowing which watering holes are frequented by which audiences – and what types of content can best influence them – can help marketing and sales organizations better customize messages. All of this guidance and information helps organizations understand the optimal role of social media for supporting broader demand creation and sales initiatives.

Product Marketing Trends for 2010

While your mechanic might want you to believe that your car needs an oil change every 6,000 kilometers, automobile and oil technology has progressed to the point where recommended service intervals are now 15,000 kilometers or more. While this saves money and time, the downside is that minor problems often go undetected and become major issues; thus, it probably makes sense to have someone pop the hood every once in a while. In much the same way, product marketing should conduct periodic checks to ensure things are running smoothly. A perfect time to do this is during the yearly planning and budgeting cycle. In this post, I will reveal three key trends that should be on the radar of every b-to-b product marketing executive in 2010.

One: A Role in Sales Readiness
Many organizations have a dedicated sales readiness function that resides in sales and owns coordinating, synchronizing and integrating field, inside and channel sales with a variety of marketing functions. Product marketing must work with this function to define a common lifecycle management process across product lines/business units and to develop field requirements for sales tools, which will help sales reps understand what will be available when a new product or service is introduced. Product marketing will also need to work collaboratively with field marketing and communications to build the tools and collateral necessary for sales to more effectively facilitate buying/selling cycles. Product marketing can also play a key role in the evolution of the sales and marketing portal still prevalent in many organizations. Newer sales enablement platforms give reps the ability to intelligently search a content database for opportunity-specific content and customize it. These platforms also encourage collaboration across sales and marketing functions through community features and support for embedded social tools.

Two: The Rise of Hypersegmentation
Effective b-to-b organizations target at a sub-vertical level rather than stop at macro verticals, as buying triggers, trends, regulations and propensity to buy often vary wildly. This calls for increasingly defined target-level segmentation, or hypersegmentation, then choosing the strongest targets relative to one another. As product marketing tends to serve as the go-to source for information on an organization’s target markets, it will primarily fall to these marketers to educate the rest of the organization about deeper industry segmentation possibilities and how they can help provide a competitive advantage. Tighter targeting helps product marketing deliver better intelligence in such key areas as markets and roles, competitive threats and opportunities, win/loss analysis and pricing. Product marketing should help develop processes to take advantage of a hypersegmentation model without having to continually recreate individual programs to target.

Three: Program Interlock
One common theme for every marketing role is program interlock, or the process of marketing counterparts building integrated programs that align reputation, demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence goals under a common campaign framework. Besides streamlining activities, this level of integration supports the reuse of content and best practices across marketing programs. Working together to align campaigns will also help raise the visibility of product marketing within an organization. Product marketing can provide field marketing input on product/solution positioning and messaging to ensure consistency, but also share its customer knowledge with field marketing to take advantage of hypersegmentation, which should improve the performance of demand creation programs. On the reputation side, product marketing can contribute to communications programs with unique value propositions for various audiences, then work collaboratively to define the mix of tactics that deliver them.

Product marketing is a hub of marketing, providing a foundation of intelligence and content that can be leveraged by the entire marketing function. While its capabilities and value to sales and marketing processes are often overlooked, product marketing can take concrete steps to integrate its expertise across a wide range of marketing programs.

B-to-B Reputation Trends for 2010

While time spent enjoying the cool days of fall is flying by all too quickly, so too is the time allotted to meet those inescapable work deadlines. For b-to-b communications professionals, this means before you blink, it will already be time to reflect on the current year’s accomplishments and submit budgets and plans for the next year. Part of this process requires evaluating strategies and tactics that have been employed during the past year, retaining some and replacing others. In this post, I will share three key trends that will impact b-to-b communications in 2010.

One: Program Interlock
Is working with your marketing counterparts to build integrated programs an uncommon occurrence? How many times have you created a press release or secured a customer or analyst quote, only to use it in just one piece of outbound collateral? Unfortunately for many organizations, communications programs are developed and run in isolation, leading to not only disjointed efforts and duplicate offers, but also to a fatigued prospect and customer base bombarded with messages through multiple channels. To derive the most impact from reputation programs, these programs must be interlocked with major marketing initiatives that align with the company’s overall goals and objectives. Best practice organizations operate from an overall campaign perspective, aligning reputation programs with those from demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence functions.

Two: Social Media Grows Up
For too long, marketing has considered social media as a set of tactics executed outside of usual workflow. Social media tools should be considered part of the overall portfolio of tactics that marketing leverages to optimize their true reputation, demand creation and sales enablement value. We advise positioning social media in two key ways, including as an additional channel to engage your existing target market and as a way to target segments that prefer to communicate in an entirely different way. While the second approach demands a consistent application of time and resources to become accepted as a trusted member of a community, the first one can be tackled immediately. Instead of simply posting a new white paper, parse its content into a series of short (five-to-seven minute) podcasts where you interview the subject matter expert on certain key points. This not only offers users a choice in the way they can access the content but also significant incremental leverage. Add the ability to subscribe to the podcast series and you have a higher level of qualification in the form of an individual that wants to be notified of new content proactively.

Three: Measure Results, Not Activity
Many communications functions have an extremely difficult time proving their value, as they only collect activity-focused data. In a sense, this is no different than filling out a time sheet; it means you’ve had a busy day, but it won’t demonstrate the impact of what’s been done. Instead, communications should track these activities as drivers of both original demand and the facilitation of sales/buying cycles by benchmarking the performance of demand creation programs with and without reputation support. A mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics will demonstrate the true impact of reputation efforts, particularly when applied to interlocking marketing programs I discussed above. Collecting the appropriate metrics will require not only a monitoring technology or agency to track your reputation-specific efforts (both in traditional and social media channels) but also gaining a level of visibility into your organization’s demand creation reporting. In the end, demonstrating that a well-organized, well-executed reputation strategy that fits tightly into demand creation efforts drives response and qualified lead rates is the key to long-term viability of b-to-b communications.

A key theme for the communications organization in 2010 is leverage, as the ability of other marketing functions to leverage your activities and insights will do much to break the insular perceptions often directed at communications. While more organizations are integrating their reputation and demand creation efforts, these are often more opportunistic in nature and don’t reflect an integrated strategy across the marketing organization. Without this level of integration – not only from a program perspective, but also from standpoint of systems and processes – the impact of communications impact will never be fully realized.

Demand Creation Trends for 2010

As 2009 begins to wind down, most of us feel like we just need a breather. A breather from the breakneck pace of change over the last year. A breather from what at times seemed like a non-stop torrent of bad news. And a breather from feeling on many days like things were simply out of control. Planning season is a perfect time to take that breath, not only to reflect on what is now behind us, but more importantly to consider what is to come. In this post, I explore three core demand creation trends for 2010 that should be top of mind when key strategic discussions begin.

One: Proactive Waterfall Management
The rapid, steep decline in business over the last year has convinced most marketers that a role for their function throughout the demand waterfall – vs. only at its top – is anything but optional. In a growing number of organizations, sales is requesting help with pipeline acceleration, lead nurturing and account-based marketing (ABM), pinpoint programs that when put into place help organizations actively control waterfall performance rather than passively observe (and try to react to) the results that come out of it. Still hindering progress in many companies is the lack of common nomenclature around the types of ABM, pipeline acceleration and lead nurturing potentially at the disposal of an organization. Simply starting by understanding their options, sales and marketing can work together to determine which will address specific issues within the waterfall best, leaving others to be pursued at a later date.

Two: Automation Takes the Next Step
Though SiriusDecisions estimates only 8% to 12% of b-to-b organizations (up to 19% in the high technology space) have implemented a marketing automation platform (MAP), we do expect this number to grow to nearly 50% by 2015, fueled by an increasing number of options available as well as everexpanding functionality. Following recent briefings with a number of organizations within the MAP vendor community, we have honed in on some of the more interesting advances that will be driving the category in the near term. These include ties between social media monitoring tools and the MAP to capture and score these interactions; support for multiple scoring models (both by product and for individual prospects interested in multiple offerings); and greater predictive capabilities. For larger organizations that require it, the tighter integration of marketing resource management (MRM) functionality with the MAP adds a more robust layer of budgeting, planning and tracking. At this point, it remains troubling to us that a number of organizations that have purchased a MAP are still struggling to implement core functionality, including basic lead scoring, lead routing and portfolio marketing. With features being added regularly, these organizations risk being left far behind if they do not get help from external MAP partners, or bring in human resources that have implemented this functionality in other organizations.

Three: Measurement Missing Links
Despite all of the advances in b-to-b marketing technologies over the past 10 years, key areas of measurement that help field marketing, operations and the executive function make better tactical and resourcing decisions have been elusive. Lack of visibility into and connection with CRM/SFA systems; weaknesses in these systems that “credit” only the first or last touch with a prospect; and a weak (if any) closed loop are just three reasons why many marketers still feel like they are operating with one hand tied behind their back. Over the last 12 months, however, a growing number of marketers are finding ways to break through these barriers, typically using a combination of back-end manual processes and lighter-weight, desk-top-based business intelligence (BI) tools to do so. Though these processes help directionally, it is in the greater use of this next generation of BI by marketing operations and field marketing analysts in conjunction with sales operations that we believe the most actionable results will be generated.

For many, 2009 was frankly a year to forget. For those organizations that had put the right people, process and technology in place to drive systematic demand creation in place before the bottom fell out, however, it made all of us remember how best-in-class companies became what they are in the first place.

Avoiding the Dark Side of Social Media

An unfavorable negative comment on your blog. Reports of service disruption by your customers on Twitter. Too aggressive of a demand creation positioning in a community. All of these missteps can cost you big-time in the social media environment if you are ill-prepared to handle them. In this post, I will discuss four potential pitfalls that face organizations using social media and how to avoid them.

1. Adherence to company policies and procedures. As more people engage in sites such as Twitter and Facebook, an organization’s reputation grows increasingly distributed; a general first impression of a particular company may be connected to a specific employee’s interactions on a social site. Add to this the time and productivity that can be lost by employees spending time on these sites and the benefits of social media begin to dim in the eyes of some. It’s becoming increasingly unrealistic to simply block access to these sites; however, you can build policies for how employees represent themselves as a company agent or expand the scope of existing media guidelines. These guidelines should be part of the employee handbook and clearly outline the areas that are off-limits online, including financial information, competitors and specific customers.

2. Outsourcing content development. The point of using social media is to engage with a market rather than to broadcast to it. This engagement typically comes at a high cost, not necessarily in dollars but in the time and resources it takes to write blogs, monitor and deal with issues that arise in online communities, or respond to posts from users and other participants. Faced with these daunting tasks, a growing number of organizations have looked to outsource some of their social media efforts to either a public relations agency or a boutique firm specifically in the business of driving social media participation. This is a strategy we believe is both risky and unsustainable. If you pay someone to write positive comments in response to blog posts or engage in discussions on your behalf, strict oversight will be required to make sure these participants stay on message and don’t engage in spamming community sites. Realize also that by outsourcing these activities you not only can paint a false picture of the company, but run the risk of alienating at least a portion of your community if they discover your social media efforts have been underwritten or ghostwritten.

3. Dealing with negative content. It’s as inevitable as taxes; create any social media presence and rest assured that some of the first comments directed at your organization will be negative in nature. In some ways this is to be expected as dissatisfied customers are often the most vocal and now have another outlet to express their views, particularly if they have issues that have not been resolved through other mechanisms. As a result, before making any social media splash, check with your support organization to make sure you understand the extent to which technical issues are an issue with customers. Use negative responses and issues as an opportunity to publicly engage with your stakeholders; the lengths you go to solve individual issues and the time it takes to resolve them will go a long way in demonstrating how you deal with (and feel about) your customers. At the same time, there will be detractors that often use these social media channels to attack you for no discernible reason. The best advice we can give is that if warranted, respond to criticisms once, then let them lie; if you have an engaged user base your best defenders against such negativity will be your own customers.

4. Demand creation comes last. An effective social media strategy targets customer engagement and loyalty first, awareness second and demand creation third. While high-profile brands understand this approach, many organizations will not embark on using social media if they can’t prove it generates more leads. The same rules that apply for outbound marketing regarding the ability to opt in or out of your communications are even more important in the social media world. Over time, once your organization has become a trusted member of a community, the tolerance level for soft selling grows, specifically the ability to point out solutions and success stories when appropriate. As long as you do an effective job in the loyalty and awareness departments when engaging in social media, demand creation opportunities have the best potential to follow.

The potential benefits of social media are significant, but all too often these advantages can be undermined by reactionary missteps. While outside expertise can be beneficial in implementing a sound social strategy, external execution has pitfalls that may be hard to overcome. The most effective way to avoid the dark side of social media is to have a holistic strategy built on three principles: frequency, consistency and transparency. This strategy offers an approach for not only leveraging social media but also participating regularly on a consistent and open basis with your customers, prospects and partners.