American Marketing Association: 5 Tips for Putting B-to-B Buyers in Control Today

Posted on February 11, 2014 by KaonTrendSpotter

February 10, 2014– Byline by Gavin Finn, published by the American Marketing Association

5 Tips for Putting B-to-B Buyers in Control Today

B-to-B buyers are empowered like never before, and marketers are in the midst of the most dramatic disruption in their industry in the last 50 years. With the growing prevalence of mobile devices and digital channels, buyers exert more control and strategies that worked in the past no longer work now. The average B-to-B buyer completes around 60% of the purchase decision process before engaging a sales representative. It is imperative that B-to-B marketers give buyers effective and engaging tools to better research and analyze the company’s products independently.

B-to-B marketers now are required to rethink the importance of customer self-guided buying journeys. Buyers demand control of their purchasing experience, and successful B-to-B marketers will facilitate this trend by delivering dynamic content that truly allows the prospect to drive his own personalized engagement experience. Here are five tips on what marketers can do today that will help sales accelerate the “self-serve” sales cycle and close more business. 

1. Research and understand your buyers at a deeper level. Develop buyer personas to identify their problems, what drives them to purchase, what affects how they make decisions, and the new path to purchase for their particular organization. As buyers come to expect more personalized experiences, irrelevant information is quickly disregarded, which means that marketers need relevance (a unique understanding of their prospects’ challenges, objectives and needs, and how they operate as buyers). Outlining buyer personas will allow marketers to hone their messaging to each unique purchaser, making for a more meaningful and impactful sales process.

2. The sales process isn’t linear and your marketing content shouldn’t be, either. To eliminate this one-size-fits-all messaging, create non-linear, customer-driven experiences that allow each prospect to investigate only the information that is relevant to him, at whatever level of detail he desires. Typical animated Web pieces and videos provide the same information every time, but no two prospects are looking for exactly the same information. By letting prospects control the direction and pace of their interaction, your customers will learn more. Give them the ability to directly interact with your products, content and messaging. This will result in a much higher level of knowledge transfer than a canned sales presentation would.

3. Leverage the new wave of cross-channel engagement. Users are accustomed to using multiple devices in their everyday lives, and the B-to-B buying process is no different. Rather than developing unique content for each hardware platform or venue, marketers must create reusable content and provide this level of engagement, interaction and education for prospects and customers at every turn. By allowing your prospects to have the same engaging experience no matter where they encounter your brand (website, mobile app, face-to-face events, sales meetings, briefings, etc.), the buying process will be consistent and familiar, regardless of which venue or channel they choose.

4. Arm buyers with information, not just content, to give them (and your sales force) a deeper understanding of your products at a more accelerated pace. Instead of static brochures, collateral or PowerPoints, provide buyers with truly interactive tools containing your company’s most updated business benefits, solutions stories and relevant product content. Many innovative companies are leveraging virtual 3-D product models that look and behave just like the physical products for a highly intimate, hands-on buyer experience. Customers can access these virtual 3-D product demonstrations anywhere, on any device (iPads, laptops, touch-screen appliances, websites), to investigate features, benefits and competitive differentiation in ways that might not be possible even if they were to have the physical product in front of them.

5. Use analytics to develop buyer insights. The best way to know your buyer is to look at hard data showing how he chooses to interact with your brand. Take advantage of any user data that you have, including information regarding his product offering interest and geography, and the hardware devices that he’s using to research your products and solutions. This will enable you to modify and improve your sales and marketing processes.

Gavin Finn is president and CEO of Kaon Interactive Inc.

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Global Marketing Alliance: The Blurry Line Between Marketing & Sales Enablement

Posted on January 29, 2014 by KaonTrendSpotter

January 29, 2014

Byline by Gavin Finn published by  The Global Marketing Alliance

The Blurry Line Between Marketing & Sales Enablement

When was the last time your sales team applauded when your marketing team delivered materials or content for them to use?

If this is not happening frequently enough (or at all) then perhaps we should consider the reasons.

I recently asked a senior director of marketing at a very successful high-tech company how he spends his time and, after a long pause, he told me he spends the majority of his time managing the process of putting materials together for the sales team. Brochures, specifications/data sheets, white papers, presentations, etc. I then asked him what, out of all of his deliverables, was the most effective and the most valued by his marketing and sales teams? His answer was simple: Anything interactive – online AND offline. We both sat in silence pondering the ramifications of these last two (perhaps incongruent) points. A visionary global vice-president of marketing for a leading telecom equipment provider said recently: “None of my sales guys ever thank me for making brochures.”

It is axiomatic that useful and effective sales enablement solutions will be used by sales teams and ineffective tools will sit on the shelf (or in the file folder on their laptops.) Where are you spending the majority of your time? What kinds of content/tools would your sales teams really use?

Here are a few things to consider when creating sales tools:

WHERE IS YOUR CUSTOMER? 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. Sales enablement 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 centres.

The end goal is to provide engaging informational knowledge exchanges that enhance the sales experience regardless of whether or not a representative is present.

Geographical location and local languages are also important factors to consider when developing sales enablement content. If you have globally dispersed representatives, customers and channel partners, you will want marketing content that is easy to translate. Look for marketing platforms that have modifiable text and don’t require content to be re-created for each revision or translation. This will significantly expand the reach of your investment while keeping content relevant for even the most remote sales representatives.

HOW COMPLEX IS YOUR SOLUTION? Marketers are often challenged to educate sales teams and channel partners on the value, differentiation and positioning of their offerings. When complex physical products are being sold, this task is not trivial. Many companies are turning to virtual representations of products to improve the expertise of their sales, marketing and technical teams. The ability to quickly train internationally dispersed people gives organisations a huge advantage.

For many companies, physical products (especially ones that are newly manufactured) aren’t always readily available for training and demonstrations, due to their size, cost, and limited supply. This results in many employees not being well-versed in the features, benefits and specifications of the company’s latest innovations, which is obviously detrimental in many ways. When virtual 3D products are available, users can access these products in useful and meaningful ways. Sales personnel and customers can view your products from every angle, explore options and features (open drawers, change batteries, add components, etc.), investigate internal workings and even run animations showing processes.

Now, sales will ALWAYS have access to even the most difficult to obtain products (size, fragility, limited supply) and can use these tools during meetings to succinctly deliver the information 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.

HOW PERSONAL ARE YOUR SALES EXPERIENCES? Because no two prospects are exactly the same, personalisation of content is what makes sales and marketing messages fully resonate. Therefore, the goal when creating sales enablement tools is to provide all prospects with the ability to view and experience content that is targeted and relevant to them, and accessible at their own pace. By creating non-linear, user-driven content, the prospect can control their own experience, exploring the content and messages in a sequence and level of detail that they feel are most appropriate to their needs.

Cognitive research has shown that when users drive their own experience they retain significantly more information than when they are watching a presentation. Tools such as videos do the talking for you and put the sales encounter on autopilot, creating a forgettable experience and inhibiting a true conversation with your customer. 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%, 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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HTML5 Finally Becomes Viable for B2B Marketing

Posted on January 14, 2014 by kaonalphageek

HTML5 is a buzzword more than a technology. It is a shorthand for a collection of other web technologies that together can make web sites more interactive and engaging, and mobile apps easier to author and cheaper to deploy. The big contributors to HTML5 are:

  • CSS3, which lets you provide fluid, hardware-accelerated animation
  • the VIDEO tag, which lets you use video in a lot of interesting ways
  • the CANVAS tag, which lets you do real-time vector animation
  • WebGL, which lets you include hardware-accelerated 3D on web pages

In other words, HTML5 is a tool set that now lets developers do all the things on a web page that used to require Flash and/or Java. And that is critical, since Flash and Java are browser plug-ins that are not available on mobile. And, increasingly, are being dropped from standard desktop installs as well.

While this suite of technologies has been available on mobile for a while (with the exception of WebGL), they haven’t been a viable choice for enterprise, B2B marketing. The problem has been Internet Explorer. It has a vanishing market share among consumers, but it is still king in the enterprise. And until last month, Internet Explorer didn’t support HTML5.

That all changed with IE11, which came out with Windows 8.1 in October, and was released for Windows 7 in November. IE11 has excellent HTML5 support, and remarkably few bugs. There is a catch, of course: Enterprises need to actually deploy the new version of IE. The vast majority of enterprises have moved off Windows XP to Windows 7 already, so the only thing holding them back is inertia. As of this writing, IE11’s market share (3.2%) is currently smaller than the ancient IE6 (4.9%). But a combination of security improvements and the support for HTML5 should help to drive deployment.

We predict that IE11 will be the standard enterprise web browser by mid-2014.

At Kaon, we’ve used Java for more than a decade to deliver 3D product model experiences in the browser. We have been doing research into updating our underlying technology platform for quite some time now, and just last month, we started trials of deploying our new platform that includes HTML5 technologies as a replacement for Java as the 3D viewing platform. The results have been tremendous. The elimination of security warning dialogs alone makes it a much better tool for marketers than Java is today; but in addition to that, the new hardware-accelerated technologies load faster, perform better, and can feature more visual effects (reflections and shadows, for example), than were possible in a purely software-based Java solution.

All new Kaon applications now use this new platform. For web-based 3D models, there is still a Java fallback (which is automatic in our solution) for those users who have not upgraded to modern browser versions. Penetration rates for the updated browsers are growing so rapidly, that we are now at the point where we feel comfortable recommending that enterprises skip the Java fallback for 3D altogether, and simply deploy new Kaon 3D content exclusively in HTML5. And they should probably have Kaon update their existing 3D models to the HTML5 platform to replace the earlier versions currently running on their web sites.

On mobile, there still is no good in-browser 3D solution available, because WebGL has not been enabled on the majority of mobile devices. This should change in the coming years, but for now, the best answer for 3D marketing on mobile continues to be native apps, like the Kaon 3D App. Apps have other benefits on mobile, in particular the ability to run offline, which can be crucial in enterprise selling situations. So we anticipate that even after WebGL appears in mobile browsers, there will still be strong demand from Sales teams for stand-alone apps as well.

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