EXHIBITORS DAILY: Blurred Lines 2– Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Marketing

Posted on March 13, 2014 by KaonTrendSpotter

Exhibitors DailyMarch  13, 2014 – Byline by Gavin Finn, published by Exhibitors Daily

Blurred Lines 2: Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Marketing

Both event marketers and sales representatives are tasked with creating memorable experiences that educate prospects and generate emotional connections between prospects and the brand that will ultimately result in successful buying decisions. In 2014, marketers will be challenged to provide more interactive and personalized customer experiences over an increasing number of channels, while maintaining consistent brand and product messaging.

Customer engagement tools are an increasing trend at trade shows and events, and now sales representatives are clamoring to have access to similar solutions that they can use OFF the show floor, to bring the same type of experiences to their prospects. I recently asked a senior director of marketing at a very successful high-tech company which, out of all of his deliverables, were the most effective and the most valued by his marketing and sales teams. His answer was simple – anything interactive – online AND offline.

Transitioning these interactive experiences from the trade show floor to remote sales demonstrations has been a perennial challenge for enterprise B2B companies. This article will investigate how both a network telecommunication equipment and an analytical instrument company successfully deployed interactive sales and marketing experiences cross-platform, across mobile devices, touch screens, websites, laptops and more, to any customer-facing venue.

Lack of physical products for demonstration

A major international networking and telecommunications equipment company was preparing to do a global product launch at an industry trade show; however, due to unexpected delays, all the physical products that were to be shipped to the event and for sales demonstrations across the globe became entirely unavailable. With the product launch already announced, the company needed a tool that would not only demonstrate their product to prospects, but also educate internal teams on how to best differentiate and sell the equipment. Crunched for time and lacking physical products, the marketing team turned to photo-realistic 3D interactive product models that look and behave just like the actual product.

“We were just weeks away from a major trade show where we planned to display our latest product — a breakthrough ethernet services router — but all available systems were spoken for by customers. Kaon was able to develop a fully interactive 3D model that looked exactly like the physical product,” said the company’s field marketing manager.

Frequently at large networking trade shows and events, physical products are present, but a large majority of servers and routers look very similar to the naked eye, and the hardware is generally protected behind glass due to the fragility and cost of the complex systems. The Kaon 3D Product Models, paired with interactive solution storytelling, provided a product demonstration that broke through the trade show clutter, drawing prospects into their booth and providing a differentiated demonstration that can be truly explored and tailored to the interest of prospects. Not only was the company able to get its products into its trade show booth by using virtual product demonstrations, but was also able to get the products into the hands of its globally dispersed sales channels on iPads.

By creating a non-linear, user-driven application, the company’s prospects could control their own experience, exploring the content, product models, solution stories and collateral in a sequence and level of detail that they feel is most appropriate to their needs. Putting the customer in the driver’s seat better highlights their interests for sales representatives, enabling sales teams to tailor the discussion to best solve the customer’s business challenges. By using the virtual 3D products within their trade show booth, the cost of giving a product demo was driven down from $100 per minute to an impressive $7 per minute (eliminating shipping, drayage, labor and power costs). Once the iPad App was made available to global channel partners, the users of application vastly increased, while the cost for demonstrating products went down to an astonishing $2.33 per minute.

Ability to demonstrate workflow, features and benefits of large, complex, fragile products

Marketers are often challenged to educate sales teams and channel partners on the value, differentiation and positioning of their offerings, as well as communicate these benefits to prospects at trade shows and events. When complex physical products are being sold, this task is not trivial.

A leading global instrument and materials analysis company needed a tool to assist in the demonstration of its sophisticated analytical instruments. With scientific and medical laboratory devices, product accessibility is often limited, as the physical products can be large, fragile and expensive to ship. Even when physical products are present, they often can’t be operated outside of a clinical environment, meaning large exterior shells of products are shipped simply to sit inoperable on trade show floors.

In addition to exorbitant shipping and drayage costs for such large products, the potential costs associated with the product being damaged during shipment to events or demonstrations is an enormous risk. Due to these challenges, this company found it difficult it to communicate and differentiate complex product features, benefits, workflow and processes without a new solution.
Turning to interactive 3D product applications, the company was able to have its demonstration products remain at the corporate lab for customer site-visit and demo purposes, resulting in approximately $150,000 of cost avoidance, in addition to eliminating the need to manage international shipping and logistics. The company was also able to increase the effectiveness of the demo lab for sales purposes, resulting in an increase in sales of $250,000 per year. The cost of damages and equipment downtime was dramatically reduced through the cutback in the number of actual instruments shipped to exhibitions, seminars and short courses.

In addition to these financial returns, the greatest benefit that this instrument company experienced was a more personalized and consultative customer experience. Now sales and marketing ALWAYS have access to even the most difficult to obtain products and can use these interactive tools during meetings to succinctly deliver the information that each customer needs. This allows employees in any corner of the globe to learn about and interact with any product as if it were physically in front of them on a variety of convenient platforms, including websites, tablets, smartphones, laptops or touch-screen appliances.

“Unlike in the past, with Kaon’s 3D interactive applications, prospects now have the opportunity to look ‘under the hood’ and gain far more knowledge and understanding of the capabilities and benefits of our products,” said the vice president of marketing. The greatest benefit that the team is experiencing is the ability to show more products in a meaningful way without the products being physically present at trade shows and all customer-facing venues. “By meaningful,” the VP concludes, “I mean in a way that’s interesting, and that gives customers the ability to interact with the product. Before, when our products weren’t available for demonstrations, we had only a static brochure, which was not at all effective.”

Reaching customers everywhere

Your customers participate in the buying cycle in a wide variety of venues, and your tool must function well in any situation to be truly effective. Marketing tools need to be able to reach prospects anywhere they seek information, from individual discovery on websites and mobile devices to face-to-face events, to intimate sales meetings or briefing centers.

The end goal is to provide engaging informational knowledge exchanges that enhance the sales experience regardless of whether or not a representative is present. Repurposing the applications that engage customers in your trade show booth to run on smartphones, tablets and laptops for sales meetings ensures that prospects are experiencing a consistent and memorable experience at every touch point.

By creating interactive, non-linear applications, users can control their own experience, exploring the application in a sequence and level of detail that they feel are most appropriate to their needs and challenges. Putting your customer in the driver’s seat better highlights their interests for your sales representative, enabling them to tailor the discussion to best solve the customer’s business challenges.

With interactivity proven to increase product knowledge retention by 78 percent, it’s no wonder that companies are turning to digital engagement marketing strategies that put the customer in control.

Gavin Finn is president and CEO of Kaon Interactive.

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Why B2B Marketers Don’t Innovate More: There’s a Scientific Explanation

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Gavin Finn

This article was originally shared on LinkedIn. Follow Kaon Interactive on LinkedIn to discuss the hottest trends in B2B marketing!

Last week, at a major trade show, the division President of a scientific instrument company stood in his luxurious 100’X50’ plush-carpeted booth and lamented: “We had a really bad year in 2013. But we have to create a certain image in the industry – our booth has to project success. What we really want to do is more interactive digital marketing. We simply don’t have the budget.” Looking around at the many inactive instruments on mocked-up lab benches, the custom wood trim, the comfortable rented lounge chairs, the numerous show-specific bespoke graphics, and other expensive trappings that were abundant throughout the booth, it was clear why they didn’t have the budget to create solutions to help them sell more. They had spent all of their budget on things that made them feel good about they way they were projecting their image.

Unless the company is bankrupt, when they say “we don’t have the budget” for something, what they are really saying is that they choose to spend their money elsewhere. Of course, a great deal of management is prioritizing decisions, so clearly even some reasonable requests are going to be turned down. But are they making the right choices? Would spending less on the trade show glitz so that they could free up some budget for an engaging customer experience (that could also be re-used by sales teams after the show) really hurt their image? And which choice is likely to have a greater impact on meeting sales objectives?

And here is where the science comes in. When people hold two contrarian beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, the stress of the irreconcilability of this conflict is known to cognitive scientists as cognitive dissonance. The two contrarian beliefs that many B2B marketers hold can be summed up as follows: “I know what we are doing is not achieving the results that we need, but it’s too risky to change what we’re doing.”

A global industrial equipment company recently began an initiative to deliver interactive mobile apps showing the advantages of their products and solutions to their sales teams, channel partners, and customers. The project was delayed by nine months while the marketing team focused on a complete redesign of their portfolio of slide presentations. Think about how often marketers explicitly or implicitly apply this reasoning: “We can’t stop doing this [fill in the blank here: making more data sheets, rejiggering slide decks or making more10-minute videos, building large trade show booths, etc.] because not doing those things might have a negative effect. These marketers are fully aware that the sales teams use less than 50% of the materials that they create. And yet they make conscious decisions to keep creating these materials.

In a purely objective sense, it is logically inconsistent to spend time, money, effort, and focus on activities that don’t achieve the required level of results, while eschewing innovative ideas and strategies because they are “too risky.” This is an example of another cognitive bias that many B2B marketers have: “loss aversion” – the tendency to do avoid a loss, rather than seeking to acquire gains.

The truth is that it is riskier to keep doing something that is guaranteed to under-achieve than it is to innovate and try something new.

If a marketer honestly wants to achieve better results, then they have to be willing to do new things. You don’t have to be a cognitive scientist to understand this. It’s that simple. Everything else is just rationalization.

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Target Marketing: 3 Keys to Creating Device-Agnostic B-to-B Content

Posted on February 12, 2014 by KaonTrendSpotter

target marketing logoFebruary 12, 2014 – Byline by Gavin Finn, published by Target Marketing Magazine

3 Keys to Creating Device-Agnostic B-to-B Content

Today’s buyers, marketers and salespeople use multiple devices in the course of buying and selling—iPads, laptops and smartphones, to name a few. Shouldn’t it be the goal of all B-to-B marketers to create engaging interactive content that can be created once and reused across as many devices as your budget allows? With today’s purchaser completing 57 percent of the buying cycle before engaging with sales, it has become the responsibility of marketers to adopt the technologies needed to implement the process of one-to-one experiences everywhere, without paying to reformat it for each use.

This article will focus on the top three elements needed to create engaging marketing content that will effectively capture your customers’ attention at every stage of the buying cycle on any device they choose.

1. Reusability: Cross-Device Distribution Platforms
It has become very clear that the multiscreen world is upon us, changing the face of marketing rapidly, and B-to-B marketers must adapt to this evolution. They must immediately begin to create engaging content once that can be reused on all of the devices that buyers are now accustomed to using in their everyday lives (tablets, smartphones, laptops and other interactive touchscreen technologies.)

One option is to make sure marketers are leveraging universal “application delivery networks” that allow them to easily disseminate and repurpose their interactive content, without paying redevelopment fees per device, regardless of operating systems. Doing so will allow marketers to put consistent experiences into the hands of prospects, customers, sales teams, channel partners and marketing personnel, without paying to redevelop or reformat the applications. As a result, they will cut needless expenditure and increase the reach of each marketing effort.

2. No User Restrictions: Unlimited User Access
You never know where a prospect will first encounter your products and services. Therefore, you want to make sure your content gets the broadest reach possible. That’s why giving users unlimited access to your interactive marketing content with no restrictions is so powerful. Making content universally accessible (cross-device) will not only empower all of your prospects, but it also provides consistent messaging and accessibility to internal teams and channel partners who otherwise might not be able to obtain all of your organization’s content at the moment it’s needed.

While getting your content and messaging out there is key, you may need to partially restrict access when creating competitive sales enablement tools. Clearly, you do not want to make confidential information available to all audiences. Be sure to choose a marketing tool that will allow you to selectively protect this content by making it only available to authenticated users, while allowing unrestricted access to public domain information.

3. Personalization: Intimate Non-Linear Interactive Experiences
Tablets and mobile devices are quickly becoming prominent sales-enablement tools, due to the intimate one-to-one touch-driven experiences they provide. However, these devices are actually most effective when the user—rather than the sales representative—drives them. Sales needs to utilize devices that customers can engage with and “drive” during meetings. Digitally delivering the same standard video, PowerPoint presentations and brochures to your sales team is simply not enough to captivate buyers. When prospects use these tools themselves, it is possible to capture analytics on a customer’s interests. Create a self-driven, non-linear user engagement that results in a personalized experience every time, delivering relevant transfer of knowledge to each individual in the buying cycle.

Not only does creating device-agnostic marketing applications and content engage prospects, but it also optimizes marketing expenditures and significantly increases sales effectiveness and reach. Learning by doing has long been considered one of the best ways to retain information, and new interactive marketing applications are now enabling B-to-B companies to offer compelling and memorable experiences. With interactivity proven to increase product knowledge retention by 78 percent, it’s no wonder that companies are turning to digital marketing strategies that put the customer in control.

Gavin Finn is president and CEO of Kaon Interactive. 

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