By John Steinert

In the two previous entries, I talked about the importance in building momentum of getting internal teams working together (e.g. marketing and sales; headquarters and field).  I hope that resonated with colleagues living with the daily challenges of fragmentation and silo-ing.  I also hope that many of you said “hey, this is all beside the point, we’re really supposed to be focused on the customer”.  Ain’t that the truth?  But it’s easier said than done.

Here’s some undeniable logic from Marketing 101: In B2B, success comes from building products that solve customer needs.  Marketing and sales are the roles and processes we use to connect customers to us so we can solve those needs.  Customers are constantly seeking solutions to their needs.  So if we can understand their needs and locate these customers, in theory we can establish the necessary connections and close the new business.

Somehow, at many companies I’ve looked at, it doesn’t work this way.  In the ideal case, you would be sending messages to and calling on only those customers who had a need your products will meet.  You would be producing products based on needs that were clearly identified and under-served.  I don’t want to boil the ocean here, so I’m not going to tackle the whole problem.  I want to focus only on the communication part.  I want to get us thinking about leveraging success and eliminating failure – doing more of what is working and less of what isn’t.  This is the basic idea behind “Demand-Driven”.  Anything not in demand should be discontinued.

Another Comment About Momentum
We’ve talked about the importance of removing barriers to momentum in order to get the right marketing done.  We’ve discussed how important building momentum is to implementing marketing programs successfully.  Yet there is a dark side to momentum as well.  When certain things have always been done or always done in a particular way, they take on their own momentum.  They can easily continue long after their original usefulness has faded.  (I am not speaking here of executive directives! These are exceptions that need to be dealt with differently for obvious reasons).  Legacy-driven momentum is not “Demand”.

Before you do anything for any historical reason, can you agree to this?  That the messages you put into the market should be a) created wisely – meaning based on a market insight -- and b) if not resonating with customers, you will retire them quickly.  The key thought is that good momentum should be maintained by backing strength and avoiding weakness.  Good momentum is “Demand-Driven”.  It’s the same in marketing as in the rest of the business.

Some of you will ask “what about strategic programs – won’t this cripple them?”  By strategic, you must mean new ideas that the market doesn’t yet fully grasp.  For the purpose of this discussion, please set those aside.  For now, I will simply say this about that:  A strategic program has a higher risk than a tactical one and a quite different core set of objectives.  From a sales perspective, it is much riskier – it is a speculative investment.  This kind of investment should always come with a) a defined limit to spending and b) a clear set of measures that differentiate its purpose from that of everyday business practices.  Momentum in strategic programs is maintained by continued willingness to invest in the future.  Momentum in tactical activities is maintained by willingness to spend today in order to earn today.  So with the kind of tactics I’m talking about, the more you spend the more you should earn.  If earnings are not going up, spending shouldn’t.

Introducing The Demand-Driven Content Supply Chain (DDCSC)
This is the guiding idea I want to present for the optimization of marketing communications spending in B2B.  It is very, very different from CPG advertising approaches.  As well, the discussion here leaves out anything about brand building.

A bit of exaggeration to make a point:  At many (most?) companies, someone tells the marketing communicators to do something and we do it.  Or, we marketing communicators think we should do something and so we do it (whether anyone else wanted us to or not).  The point is, people are constantly trying things because they think it’s a good idea.  Well, to get your marketing spend under control, to make your marketing more effective, there really is only one constituency we all should be listening to: The Customer. Duh. I think it’s because of the personal ramifications that this seems in reality to be so very hard.  We want to do what we know how to do or what powerful people want us to do even though these actions may fly in the face of what customers care about.

The Customer will tell you what product to build, what to say about it, what medium to say it in and when and how to say it.  The customer will tell you that he/she is interested and if he/she wants to hear more.

This is the essence of building a Demand-Driven Content Supply Chain.  To be really efficient and effective, you should be sending out only the content people want, in the media they want it in, when they want it.  Everything else is wasted (remember I am not talking about strategic programs here).

A Demand-Driven Content Supply Chain defines what communications you should be making and sending.  You shouldn’t be making much of anything else.  It is the antithesis of the supply-driven world in which most of us live – a world in which we do what we are told or what we have the budget for and know how to do – a world that as business people, we know will hurt our long term health.

The First Operational Step to DDCSC is Rationalization
You might have thought I was going to say the first thing to do is to make sure your Voice of the Customer (VOC), research or other functions are really humming.  I’m not.  I’m focused here on tactical marketing communications.  I’m focused on controlling what you can control. 

Yes I know that a lot of marketing communicators don’t have the ability to choose what to do or not to do.  To those of you experiencing this, I can only say:  if not today, when?  When are you going to stand up and say:  ‘Why are we doing this – it isn’t working!?'.

What I’m saying is that if what you are doing is not clearly driving the results you know your sales colleagues require from you, you need to turn it off.  Focus on the results.  The results are the customer speaking to you.  Cut out anything that doesn’t generate results against the agreed, sensible measures of value you have put in place, Then save that money or reinvest it in expanding what is working or in testing new ideas.  But prune the tree first.  It’s better for everyone.

Building the Demand-Driven Supply Chain depends on responding aggressively to demand from the market and just as aggressively to the lack of demand.  No matter who is telling you to do it, if the customer doesn’t respond, you need to stop and try something different.  As Rita Mae Brown, Einstein, Kipling and an old Chinese proverb tell us:  “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome”.

If your total activity is all complicated by too much stuff, you’ll have a hard time figuring out clear alignment of program design with demand signals.  So I believe, it’s better to clean up some of the mess before you try to perfect your actions.

The Second Step to Operational DDCSC is Standardization
We could talk all day long about the merits and demerits of standardization for creative organizations.  I’m not going there.  Since I just put forth the ‘Rationalization” idea as the first step, some of you will ask: “shouldn’t we just cut everything and start from scratch?”.  In a perfectly safe world, or in a laboratory situation, I might say yes.  In the real world, my “rationalization” statement is a call to first do less.  I think this is radical, because most marketers I know somehow always want to do more.  Once you are on track to do less, it’s time to look at what you definitely should be doing.  I believe this is the beginning of standardization.  A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a method understood to be worthwhile for everyone to do.  There are two basic types of standard:

• (A) The “Vertical” Standard:  For a given set of customers, in a given industry, with a given product, there are things you must do.  That’s a kind of standard.
  
• (B) The “Horizontal” Standard:  Likewise, for all customers, for all industries, for all products, there are also some things you must do.  That’s another kind of standard. 

If you are in an environment where you need to think about efficient scaling of activity, I suggest you look at the horizontal case first in order to optimize your practice at a macro level.  It’s because that is the minimum set common to all the customers you need to target and all the constituencies you need to serve.

Here’s my logic:  If you had a constrained budget and were allowed to choose a single medium from among all you have at your fingertips today, which would you choose to use?  I believe that this choice defines your core minimum standard.  If you had to cut every other method, this is the one you would protect.  If you had to build from scratch, this is the one you would do first.  And this is the one that everyone across the organization can probably agree on.

How many out there said: “it’s the web”?  I know I did.  And how many of you out there can honestly say you build your marketing programs thinking of web presentation first?  Not as many I would bet.

So which is it?  I think B2B customers have spoken:  The web is where they go first and most frequently.  It is where you can understand what they “demand” because you can know clearly what they respond to.  So the first step (after the pruning) in building to a demand-driven content supply chain is to make sure you standardize all program planning to build first for the web.  (While I am using the web as the general term, I definitely include in this the idea of any form of internet-based digital communication.  When the messaging is set and created digitally, utilization across different internet-based delivery mechanisms becomes remarkably easy).

In future notes, I will talk about the importance of getting to standards for the use of “test and control” optimization, for automation and scaling etc.  For now I just wanted to introduce the idea that is staring us all in the face:  the web is the standard now, so let’s start there.

Using the INE to Shape Your Web-First Demand-Driven Supply Chain Approach
If you get a chance, compare INE5, 6, 7 and so on with an eye towards the evolution of internet information consumption in B2B.  I think it will blow you away.  The INE can tell your whole organization not only how important and central the internet should be to your tactical marketing activity, it can tell you which type of internet action reaches who and much of what needs to be covered by the content.  So if the web is the minimum standard (and if you can’t see this through your own company’s activities, the INE spells it out clear as day), you can accept that and quickly move on to modifying your program designs to deliver the right content to the right target mapped to the right lifestage in the right internet media outlet.  The INE can help you with all of this. It’s a great way to get all the constituencies aligned, whether or not your internal processes provide a supporting view.  By accepting this outside-in objective information untainted by our internal natural predilection to using data for self preservation, we can free ourselves of legacy approaches and jump forward into a new phase of significant innovation and improvement.

John Steinert is a seasoned global B-to-B marketer who has worked with leading companies including IBM, Motorola, SAP, Dell, Microsoft and others to overcome systemic barriers to marketing performance.  He specializes in improving demand generation  through rigorous application of CRM and marketing automation systems, analytics, planning and both content creation and executional process optimization.  Please email John with comments or questions on this blog and stay tuned for Part IV.