B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner
Do you want to fulfill your true marketing potential? In “B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner,” you’ll learn actionable strategies and tips around digital marketing, sales enablement, MarTech, demand generation, and more. As a B2B Marketing consultant, author, and global speaker, Pam emphasizes that marketing should leverage sales as another marketing channel and sales should use marketing as a hidden salesforce. In each episode, she shares her personal stories, templates, and frameworks that you can immediately put into action to help you support your sales relationships and make you look like a rockstar! For more information, visit pamdidner.com.
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142 - ft. Michael Brenner: Marketing in the Age of Disruption
10/20/2020
142 - ft. Michael Brenner: Marketing in the Age of Disruption
Today I have a special, special, special guest. It’s a very good friend, Michael Brenner. And he's a CMO influencer, motivational speaker. You have to check him out! Also, he owns the Marketing Insider Group. And I use that website quite a bit, actually. There's a lot of useful contents regarding content marketing, search marketing. So anything digital marketing related. So welcome Michael. Michael Brenner: Yeah, Pam. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Pam Didner: Am I loud enough? Michael Brenner: No, you're perfect. You're perfect. Pam Didner: So, 2020 has been an interesting year, especially for all of us marketers. Obviously for me, I want to be 100% transparent when March hit, like all of my pipeline just like disappeared. So what have you been seeing in the past four months? Your observations? How is the B2B marketing landscape doing as a whole? Do you have any insight to show with us? Michael Brenner: Yeah, a couple of things. One is I think that there was a pretty early on a shift out of, let's say, blatant promotional ads. And it started in B2C. I think even the CEO of Coca-Cola said “brand advertising is completely ineffective,” which I love that quote. I'm like, says the largest, most recognized brand in the world. And I always explained the context for that quote with, during the pandemic, but why is it not applied normally? You know, like why does he think brand advertising isn't effective now, but it is in other times? So I think B2B, marketers shifted budget out of those kinds of display ads and things like that. Pam Didner: More promotional centric. Yeah. More promotional things. Michael Brenner: Yeah. I think they shifted away from sort of, you know, having a banner ad next to a bad story on online about people dying and stuff like that. But also event events weren't happening--as you and I know, cause that's where we always get to catch up and see each other--either shut down or moved online. And so a lot of brands I think, shifted their budget out of events. I mean, we got a couple of clients who just basically said, “Hey, I was going to spend this 30 K on this event, but can I buy your services for a whole year? And so we got one or two clients just because they shifted out of an event spend. Pam Didner: Fantastic! That’s fantastic Mike. Way to go! Michael Brenner: I feel very, very lucky. And, um, to have been able to support some fun clients with that stuff. Uh, what else? We also saw I think marketers were really, really struggling just emotionally and mentally, but, really feeling the pressure of delivering, you know, ROI. Pam Didner: 100% agree. Yeah. Michael Brenner: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I did like Jay Baer and asked me to do like a video. He was working with Oracle or some company, I think it was Oracle. And he's like, what's what are you seeing? And I said, we're seeing a return to focus on the corporate blog, which I think is really interesting. It's cause it's, you know, and lucky for me cause it's what we do. But, um, you know, it's just, it's, it's SEO, it's organic traffic. It's measurable. It's not spammy ads. Just original thought leadership, helpful kind of content. What I'm hoping is that it continues and, you know, I love telling people like “the future of marketing, ain't what you thought it was.” It's what it was always supposed to be. And that was helpful content to live deliver consistently. You know, it's not going to be AI and AR and VR and all these fun, voice search. And all of those things are trends that we should all be paying attention to. I think it's just back to the basics, focus on customers, deliver content that they want and try to figure out how to convert them. Pam Didner: Yeah. I, uh, I saw similar trend, as well, in terms of the marketing needs to actually showcase the ROI. At least from my perspective, you are talking about the content--that shifting back to the basics--which is the original content, creator content. What I have seen is to show your ROI is an another approach, which has worked very closely with your sales team. And that's a thing I see that the more and more marketers, especially actually on the B2B side, they actually why to make an effort to align with your sales effort, whatever seems to be doing, we try to compliment, compliment that such as account based marketing. And even they do re-targeting ads nowadays. It's pretty, pretty, uh, specific. Michael Brenner: Yeah. Isn't that funny that it's sales and marketing alignment, you know, you and I were talking about that 10-15 years ago. Pam Didner: Don’t you think that’s kind of basic (laughs) but anyway. Michael Brenner: It's true. And a lot of it's because I think salespeople who are used to being out on the road and going to events and shaking hands with people. And they're sitting in their front of their computers like you and I have been, and they're like, “wow, I think I need the marketing team to help me with content.” And with, like you said, account based marketing, you know, all of those kinds of things. Um, the sales and marketing alignment conversation came back to the forefront. Pam Didner: Yeah, I totally agree. Totally agree. Michael Brenner: Yeah. It's kind of fun. Pam Didner: Yeah. In terms of the shift, I have seen some challenges I heard from at least my clients or talking to some marketing peers. And obviously one of them is the buyer’s purchasing behaviors have changed like 50% of the buyers, especially on the consumer side. I'm using this as a data data point that they actually tried a purchase through a new brand. I mean, the first one I have to can tell you is probably everybody's using Zoom, but before the pandemic Zoom was not a popular, right? And that's the new purchase. And also another thing that everybody's using is the, this selfie ring. (makes ring sound) Right? So that's also a new purchase. Obviously, if the customers are spending money on something else, that means they are not necessarily buying stuff from the existing brand. So, with that being said, what do you suggest that marketers should do? Because they obviously like, like,us, they probably see some of the existing customers disappearing or going somewhere else. Michael Brenner: It's a great, question. I've always talked about retention as the sort of stepchild-- it's the lost, lost child of marketing objectives. There's only four: reach, engage, convert, and retain. But we never talked about retention. And I think in what we're seeing now, it exactly to your point is we need to make sure that we're keeping the customers we have first and foremost. Pam Didner: I totally agree. And the sales goal has changed as well. For the longest time is always a net new. Right? Try to get the net new, which is the new customers. But during a pandemic, they shift their strategy is basically what can we do to retain our existing customers? What can we do to cross sales and the post-sales? So it's a similar strategy. Michael Brenner: We have one client where we worked with them on a gifting strategy. You know, we talked about, you know, instead of sending pens and pencils and, you know, um, you know, t-shirts with logos on them. I actually have somebody on my team is really good with puns. Pam Didner: Really? Do you know a tool called Aoyce? A-o-y-c-e ?. So check it out Michael. It’s algorithms to actually crawl customer’s social media profiles, and then the machines will come up with some interesting ideas and the marketer to suggest what kind of ideas you should gift them. Michael Brenner: Interesting. Pam Didner: Yes, I know Michael Brenner: I’m checking it out. Pam Didner: They’ll do fulfillment as far as I know. So check that one out. Michael Brenner: I like it, Pam Didner: But keep going. Sorry to interrupt. Michael Brenner: No, no, no, that's great. I'm, I'm going to check that out because it's, like I said, it's something we've been asked to do for clients. It's something we're doing with our own clients. Um, I'll, I'll tell you one of our strategies. So John and Kira’s does a chocolate it's a bumblebee. It's kind of a famous sort of gift thing of chocolate. And so I send it to our clients when we first sign up with them and say, “looking forward to creating buzz-worthy content with you!” Pam Didner: I like it! I love it!. So that’a also kind of aligned with your message and what you offer. Michael Brenner: Exactly. So, yeah, so I, I, you know, but I see large brands trying to figure out how to do that at-scale. It's kind of like account based marketing in a more personal – Pam Didner: In a different way. Yeah. I was going to say that: it's another form of account based marketing. I know we don't use that term for like, you know, gifting, but it's a different form of account based marketing and full retention. Michael Brenner: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like account based marketing and personalization and being more human, you know, just kind of being more, more like literally personalized, not just like “Dear Pam” in my email, but like actually Dear Pam, I'm sending you a personal gift that might be, you know, something you like. Pam Didner: Yeah. But on top of it, everything, all the benefit you say plus on-brand. Yeah. Michael Brenner: Yeah. And it all comes back to relationships. Right? I mean, I think that's, what's, that's, what's winning, what's winning in these days. Yeah, the AI can help, but in the end it's really because it's… Pam Didner: … it’s building the relationship. It's a full circle. So. Obviously marketers are all making changes, small, large, right, to accommodate the current situation. And we know that we probably in this for a long haul. (laughs) Michael Brenner: Yeah. Pam Didner: Do you actually have any suggestion in terms of if they are making changes right now? Obviously there's so many things we have to tackle first, right? What are like one or two things that needs to be done first? Michael Brenner: One is I think marketers need to better define what marketing is to the rest of the organization. And what I mean by that is there's always been two kinds of marketers. There's the strategic value driven, “I'm only going to do stuff that drives value” marketer and that's kind of what I've always tried to be. And then there's the people--and we all know them, we all, we've all worked with these people--they're the ones that just, they just want to do what they're told. And we, you could say that the brown-nosers are, they're the, the butt kissers or whatever you want, whatever analogy you want to use for them… Pam Didner: But you know I have to be … the thing is Michael, I have to be a devil's advocate sometimes like in the big enterprise--both of us work in the big enterprise for a long time--you have to deal with politics. And sometimes you just have to play the game. I mean, not all the time, but in certain situations. Michael Brenner: Sure, yes So like, if your boss says, I want you to go pick up my dry cleaning, do you do it? (laughs) Pam Didner: Probably not, I was like, someone else do it. But I'm talking about like content, like sometimes your boss want you to create, but sometimes he was just like self-serving. That's the things I struggled the most, a lot of times. Michael Brenner: So this is--and I talk about this in Mean People Suck-- there's this, I call it the “you can't have your cake and eat it too” problem. So, um, basically, and I use this analogy with, with a difficult stakeholder a couple of years ago, when I was at SAP, she was asking for leads. And I said, “Great. That's what I know how to do. This is the program is how we're going to do it. I'm going to use existing budget. You don't need to spend anymore. We're just going to shift away from the stuff that you liked to do, but didn't work and put it into this other thing.” And she said, “No, I want a chocolate cake, but I want you to use vanilla icing.” And I'm like, Nope. Or “I want a chocolate cake and I want you to use the sand from the beach.” Like I, so I, I remember telling her I'm like, “you can't have a cake and tell me how to bake it.” Pam Didner: Yeah. Michael Brenner: If you want a chocolate cake, I know how to bake a… Pam Didner: Like let you do your job.. Michael Brenner: Yes, exactly. So, sure. There were things we did for her that weren't adding value, but it was only after we made sure we were doing things that were going to give her the goal that she wanted to achieve. And that that's a conversation I think marketers need to have today. It's listen, we, we can't just be the team of people that go do stuff for you at the whim of any executive. Um, we can do things like you said, and playing devil's advocate, I think that's important. There's always going to be times when you have to play the game. But it should only happen in let's see over time, right? Like in the four quarters, you know, again, following the same analogy, um, during the heart of the game, you need to make sure you're going to win. And if that means doing a little dance in the end zone or what, you know, or whatever, then you can do that. But, but it has to only be after you've met the business goal. That's the first thing. The other side of that coin is so we have to redefine marketing as strategically delivering value for the organization. The other thing--and this one's even probably harder--I think marketing needs to help lead the cultural transformation inside companies to focus on customers. And it's just like, it's just like we, you know, the people that are butt kissers at work? that we've worked with before? In the same way, we know the companies that don't give a crap about customers and, you know, they'll say, “well, I'm here to support the brand. And the brand has to drive profit.” The best way to get profit is to focus on customers and the best team that can lead that transformation is marketing. It means that they're talking to the CHRO. It means that they've got the mandate from the CEO to deliver employee engagement policies that focus on customer service; they are training on customer service; they're enabling their employees to not only be engaged at work, but also to make sure that they're engaging with customers and driving value there. Pam Didner: Yeah. But that's a total older, would you say? I mean, in terms of marketing, a lot of times we focus on content creation. We focus on the marketing outreach and I don't think that is something that the marketing usually takes on. Right? It’s usually HR’s job to drive the cultural difference, the cultural transformation, and even is Operations job to kinda make sure everybody focused on processes. But the customer part of it, uh, some, some of them actually within the sales team because they've worked with, uh, uh, customers and those will key accounts. Yeah. So I liked that. And that's actually, like I said, um, it's something that marketers needs to focus on internally. Michael Brenner: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, I mean, I have a client who's CMO is a product marketer by training and wants to bring a product marketing, focus into all of their marketing. And it's the opposite of strategic. It's the opposite of customer focus and it's shortsighted. And it sounds great in the ears of the CEO, but it doesn't work. And you and I have talked about this, Pam, is bringing together the product marketing and the content marketing mindset to work together because we have to work together. Content marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists to sell more products. But it, it works because it doesn't lead with that message. It doesn't lead with, “we have great stuff, you should buy it: because no one wants to listen to that. No one cares about your speeds and feeds and, you know, texts and specs or, whatever, whatever phrase you want. Pam Didner: What? That’s not acceptable. (laughs) Michael Brenner: But, you know, when we let product marketers run the ship, it's a disaster and we all know it. We've all seen it. And it's, it's why we have to redefine what marketing is, focus on results and put customers first across the entire organization. And that's a winning strategy for marketers. It's a winning strategy for marketing. So what's the opposite? The opposite is marketers are just people that do shit that people ask him to do. And what's that mean? It means creating brochures for products and making the banners for when we go back to do events. I mean, that's what marketers are going to end up being and that's what marketing is going to end up doing in those organizations that don't make those changes now. Pam Didner: Yeah. Any other additional point that you want to add in terms of planning 2021 discussion? Michael Brenner: I think the two things that marketers should be doing at a tactical level for 2021: ask your customers, what are their greatest challenges for 2021? Pam Didner: I like that. I love that. Yup. Michael Brenner: Have a plan to address those challenges, create the context for your solutions. And ask the sales team what their greatest challenges are. They're going to say leads. They're going to say having leads more qualified, they're going to say, you know, net new, they're going to say what retention strategy, whatever those, whatever they are, ask them what they are. Quantify it and create strategies to address them. That's it? Simple stuff. Pam Didner: Understood. So tell our listeners, how can they find you? Michael Brenner: Well, I would love to say just Google me, but you know, the problem is, is, um, is there's a really famous, I swear to God, there's a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon that show up first in Google. Pam Didner: As a Michael Brenner? (laughs) Michael Brenner: And then there's a historian. Well, there's actually two there's the political writer and a Jewish historian who writes like a book every three months it seems like. Uh, so these folks come up for me. So I, I wish I wish I came up first, but I do think the brain surgeon, the rocket scientist, the political writer and the historian probably should come up before me. Um, but yeah, MarketingInsiderGroup.com go to LinkedIn. And if you do search for Michael Brenner on LinkedIn, it should show up. Pam Didner: Awesome. Hey, I want to ask you one question. All right. Kind of silly question, but I love it. What is the useless talent that you have? Michael Brenner: This is, this is the most useless talent, and there's gotta be some sort of a name for this, but I, for some reason, even as a kid, um, read words backwards. So when I see like a billboard, I read it backwards in my head to see if it creates funny words or funny sounds. Pam Didner: I love that! I absolutely love that! Michael Brenner: Yes, So your first name is "map" backwards, right? Very, very simple. Yeah. So I'm Leahcim Rennerb, Michael Brenner. So, yeah, so, Pam Didner: Oh my goodness. So when I see you, the only thing that pops into your mind is map. Okay, great, fine, I feel the love. Michael Brenner: No, no, no. It's not that it's not that crazy. It's just, when I see words, I see my brain just does this, like little it's, like I don't have a boredom or something, I don't know. So I told my kids that this morning, and they were actually using bad words backwards to kind of make a joke about it. (laughs) Pam Didner: (laughs) Isn’t that the saddest, when you tell something like this to a kids, the first thing audio into my...
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141 - ft. Jeff Coyle: AI-Based Content Management with Market Muse
10/13/2020
141 - ft. Jeff Coyle: AI-Based Content Management with Market Muse
Today I have a very special guest: Jeff Coyle. I'm not going to tell you why he does. I'm going to have him tell his story and we will be talking about AI-based content management tool and let's get started. So welcome, Jeff! So happy to have you on my show. Why don't you tell everybody, who you are and what you do? I know you have awesome, awesome product. And I have seen the demo in the past and I loved it. I can't afford it, but I love it. Jeff Coyle: Well maybe we'll talk about that today too. I'm Jeff Coyle. I'm the co founder and Chief Product Officer for Market Muse and a little bit about my background. I've been fortunately or unfortunately in the content strategy, content marketing lead gen and search engine optimization game for about 21 years. Pam Didner: All good things. I love everything you said: lead gen, the content marketing, the demand gen. Yay. My favorite topics. Hard to do it well, but you have a lot to share. Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I worked at, I’m one of the first people who were selling leads to B2B technology companies before he believe in that people even had content. You know, we were convincing large multinational B2B companies to write white papers and syndicate them like, cause they even have them at the time, you know. Pam Didner: They probably focus on sales, collateral. That's only thing (laughs) Jeff Coyle: A lot of white papers and that's it. Right? And so we kind of enhanced that space. And then we were acquired by a major publisher. I worked with them in house for a number of years and during the late phase of that, I was doing basically editorial teams, content teams, product marketing teams, and SEO teams don't always work together. Pam, are you aware of that? They don't always work together? Pam Didner: My God. Don't talk to me. Whenever you talk about those topics in terms of how to create a good content and the multiple teams that needs to come together. Yes, I understand. I understand the pain so well. Jeff Coyle: And so I went through that, right? And I knew, that there was a better way to provide insights from research. And I found my cofounder at Market Muse had taken one of those workflows and automated it, the workflow researching topics. So truly telling the story about what it means to be an expert on a topic. And when you turn that and you integrate that information into a research process that speaks the language of the editorial leadership, that speaks the language of the subject matter expert, because you're not giving them a word because of some esoteric data point. You're saying, “Hey, if you're going to cover this topic comprehensively, you want to make sure that we have pages about this, sections about that--the language of the user” and that became Market Muse was the solution that brings those teams together by providing insights that are going to be awesome, exciting amplifiers for editorial leaders, writers, but also have the same benefits that SEO want--traffic conversions, leads engagement. So everyone's happy and everyone's working together towards the same data driven goal for the first time. So we've created an objective measure of content quality and comprehensiveness. So because, hey Pam, I can look at your site and I can say “you are obviously the expert on sales enablement, but here's a few things you haven't really covered comprehensively. And you're like, “Oh yeah, those are obvious that I should write about, but I just shot you a spreadsheet with words in it it’s like, “yeah, I'll get to that next year.” That's the difference? Pam Didner: I hear you. So I actually, for listeners, I have seen the demo is actually pretty impressive in terms of taking SEO, taking the initial preparation that you need to do to determine a topic and also create a draft and then move your content along the production stage, if you will, not necessarily like when I say production and it's not video production, but like creating that draft to get to the finish line. Jeff Coyle: Yeah. So if you are the person who's coming up with, what should we create or what should we update today that's going to have the biggest impact on a business? or let's say you have a business goal: I want to own this topic by the end of the year. Market Muse can tell you what articles need to be built or what articles need to be updated. And then we follow through with the content briefs. So we actually build the content briefs at scale. We have teams that get thousands of content groups and they basically provide an outline or a single source of truth for the writer. So when the writer produces, they can focus on being creative. They can focus on being the expert that you're paying them for, not doing stuff that they don't want to do. Pam Didner: Like SEO, like doing a lot of research and finding the title. What works whatnot. Jeff Coyle: Yeah, exactly. So then when they give you that draft, it's highly likely, because you built the brief, you ordered the content with the brief, they're going to give you something that's going to have less feedback cycles. And it's likely going to meet the guardrails, the guidelines that you've set. That's what a brief does. It creates a point of reference. We automated all of those processes, so you can say, “okay, the best article I can write today, Pam, is on how do you make the best product marketing materials for events. I just made that up. Maybe that's not a good idea that it is, and we will build the outline and you can write it and you know that it's going to be successful. Pam Didner: Awesome. Love it. Love it. And one of the key product features is to use artificial intelligence, AI, to build content planning, optimized content. Like you said, such as your blog, white paper, your thought leadership pieces. So, can you elaborate a little bit how Market Muse uses AI and how does that help, uh, the content marketers? Jeff Coyle: Sure thing. So we built our own natural language processing platform effectively. One of the components is in a branch of AI called topic modeling, in natural language processing. And we are a machine learning think tank. We have our own data science lab in Montreal called the M4 Lab. Those are spending nearly all of their time on back in engineering on this platform that can assess effectively what it means to be an expert on a topic. We tell the story that if you were to cover this topic comprehensively and truly be an expert, how would you do it on one page? How would you do it in one cluster of content? How would you do it across the entire site? And then we're able to overlay that information into common workflows. So we can take that model and map it to your page and say, “Hey Pam, here's a, here's a page level audit of thing you wrote. You had a few blind spots.” Pam Didner: Okay, we'll fix it. Jeff Coyle: Or we can go up to the competitive dynamic and go, “Oh, across the 20 competitors who you're researching, here's the stuff they did and here's the stuff that Market Muse says is very relevant and no one's done. And there's your area of differentiation. So we don't just tell you how to do everything like everybody else. We tell you how to differentiate yourself from them. That's very special. That's unique to Market Muse. At the site level, or the network level if you've got a lot of sites (we work with a lot of large publishers) we give you basically an on-demand content inventory and audit and all the value that goes along with that. And it's all personalized. So we're the only in-market application that can tell you how hard it will be for you to rank for a topic. Not just how hard it is, cause that's not valuable to me. If I have a brand new website and I go write the best review of the new iPhone ever. I have no chance of getting any traffic from market, but I've seen that, I go write that article and I win. Market Muse answers the question of why behind that dynamic. So Pam, if you go write sales enablement tactics for first year BDRs, it's going to rank. Pam Didner: Your platform or you are tool can actually identify some of the gap Jeff Coyle: Areas of opportunity as well. Pam Didner: That's what I call it a niche, but you say “areas for opportunities.” I like that term much better. Jeff Coyle: And the gaps and the gaps, too. And the gap could be a variant. So you covered this with a great long -form thought leadership piece, but you missed a few details or it could be vice versa. You wrote a, something that answered one question and you never spoke to the big picture. So we tell a story of what that true user intent profile is and everywhere you've done it everywhere you haven't. Where are you the most important pages to lean into for links, uh, to point new pages to, what are your, um, your risk areas? So we, this is a big area for us. It's risk. You have a page out there it's doing well, you don't even know why, and you can need to support it. You might have a page that's out there--I call it the arm, a hand without an arm it's just out there. It just gets a bunch of traffic and you have never supported, you never built the foundation. You’ve gotta build that foundation. Pam Didner: Yeah to amplify and expand that. So it sounds like that your are using artificial intelligence to do kind of like a very holistic assessment, identify the areas for improvements, identify the gaps that you need to do you look at a site level at a page level, or even at a specific content. Is that correct? Jeff Coyle: Any level of specificity, even networks we can say, like we tell our publisher, if you're going to write an article about this TV show, right? And you're going to write about the actors on the TV show. You put that over here, and if you're going to write about ways to stream it, you know, put that over on the other side, right? So we can even get into that level of detail. We set guidelines for content. We set guardrails for intent. We build a topic model. The next step is obviously to start to build out drafts. Pam Didner: It's a virtual editorial assistant, in a way. Jeff Coyle: Absolutely. Giving you the inspiration so that you know, if I focus on this and really put my energy towards it and I write it, great production value, high quality, wonderful narrative that meets these guidelines, it's going to be so successful. And now we're building out drafts that give you inspiration form of completely original drafts. Pam Didner: Yes. Yes. With that being said, you kind of touched the topics I want to ask you next. Obviously the latest buzz in the field of AI is GPT3. And I read article, or a blog post you guys wrote about expose GPT, in terms of what it can or can't do. And the GPT3 is this very powerful language model that uses machine learning to generate human-like text. Are you leveraging GPT3 at all? Or you are doing stuff on your own? Jeff Coyle: All of our natural language processing and natural language generation is all proprietary, built by us. All the models built by us. GPT3 is one of the most amazing innovations in artificial intelligence, of all time! Pam Didner: Yeah. Up to date. Yeah. There may be something that's coming in the next year, but as of now, yes, it's quite amazing. Jeff Coyle: It's, it's amazing. And it, the amazing scale that it works at in the applications out of it are significant. Pam Didner: I 100% agree with you. I address that a little bit at my general session at Content Marketing World 2020. And I specifically talk about content pretty much can be written for you if you use artificial intelligence. Jeff Coyle: Yeah. And so that's the thing. It can be written. But is it telling the story you want it to tell? Pam Didner: Yes. Does that meet your objective? Does that resonate with your audience? You know, does that bring a hook? Yes. I hear you. Jeff Coyle: It's a general purpose language model. And so it's not a solution. It is an API. It requires, you know, now in its current form, a lot of programming skills. It lacks structure, it degrades over time. It is, you know, not considering your workflows. It suffers from degradation. GPT2 suffered from degradation, a severe rate, right? It was, it was “Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam” and makes some really kooky stuff. GPT3 is shockingly better. And there you can begin to work with it, but it is still subject to that degradation in long form content and a short form content. Pam Didner: I do agree with you. I think having a machine generate say a draft, just like you said, is a draft that humans still needs to take over and to do conduct the quality checks. Still need to edit as you see fit. You still need to make sure that you read it, that aligned with your objectives and what you want to accomplish. Jeff Coyle: Yeah, exactly. And that's where, so the solution Market Muse First Draft versus of GPT3. First of all, you know, like you were, you mentioned, I believe that, you know, the Guardian post. That is an output of eight generations and it's curated by editors. Pam Didner: They provided, they brief GPT3, they provide a specific instruction, you know what they want GPT3s to write at the same time, they also provided the opening paragraph. So they provide kind of like in depth instruction for the machine. So machine can process and determine how they want to write it. Jeff Coyle: Yeah, what I'll tell you, though, is if you saw all eight of those generations back to back, you wouldn't have been all that impressed. The outcome's amazing. It's curation, right? You had to do work on it. So the human brain now has never experienced the outcome of generation at this level. Washington Post--these are the problems that content marketing people need to solve, or like Washington Post solved with Helio. Pam Didner: Right. I was, and they did that back in 2016 and 2017. Jeff Coyle: Right. But the thing about the problems, right? The problem was: I can't cover the election. Pam Didner: On the local level, right? Jeff Coyle: Right. I cover 8%, but now Heliograph lets us solve all of it. That's solving a business problem. You've got platforms out there that can do data-driven template content. It's not this right. But GPT3 isn't doing either. It's not producing content that is meeting specifications. It's not producing content that is connecting with your goals as a content marketer. aAtemplate might even do a better job than that, but you're not hitting targets for tone. It's not training it, training on your content either. So Market Muse First Draft’s value is we can train it on your blog. It can write like Pam. Pam Didner: Yeah, understood. Jeff Coyle: It can write on spec. Pam Didner: There's another question I would like to ask you. Can you tell us what features your teams are working on in the next six to eight months that you see is additional features that you want to add? I understand that’s a product roadmap tend to be confidential and, uh, but if there's anything that you can share, that would be fantastic. Jeff Coyle: Yeah. So the big things that we will be, first of all, Marketing Muse First Draft, it's in private alpha right now. It launches into public beta, most likely, Q4 it’s coming out. That's a big splash for us. Also for the first time Market Muse is putting new offerings for at a couple of lower price points. Pam: Yay! Jeff Coyle: I know. I know. Pam Didner: Jeff I remember I was talking to you guys last year and you will tell me like, “Oh, we focus on enterprises and our average price is this.” And I was like “I thank you so much. It's very nice talking to you” and that quiet walk away. (laughs) I love your product. I still went and did a demo to me. I was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” Jeff Coyle: Yeah, it'd be, so that's going to be a big deal. So we have those things. That's all happening in October. So many people who, you know, we have some demand and we didn't have a place for a solopreneur, or a small team, even, you know, a startup or a small agency. Now easy decisions are there for you. We're also upgrading a lot of our current clients based on that. That's exciting. So those are huge things. Pam Didner: What are two pricing points? Can you say that again? 79 and … Jeff Coyle: $79 a month, $179 and $499 a month are our self-service agreements and then we have our premium product line, which will remain at those price points. One of the exciting things, there are some options for going annual, which makes us even more attractive. And so some of those features that I'll mention: we're going to have the most accurate measure for potential upside with content and topics. Pam Didner: So you can actually forecast how the content will perform? Jeff Coyle: Yeah, we're going to have to get where to basically say you are here. Here's the estimated traffic and value that this page has. And the value is if you had to buy that traffic. We're going to have some customization for getting even more specific into the actual return on investment, right in the application. And you're able to see what Market Muse thinks your potential upside is right now. And then what's your upside is if you were the best. So we don't think you maybe might not think you can be the best, yet. But this is where you could get with an easy, quick win. So we're basically trying to get into predicting your likelihood of success, because then that tells the story of when you using it you can justify the expense very easily. Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. So you actually quantify that ROI? Jeff Coyle: Direct quantification of value. We already do it for our clients with things like QBRs--quarterly business reviews--through custom reporting. But we need that in the self-service offering, right? It has to be automated. And so we've really focused on that. You know, it's so fun to go in and look at your content and go, “Oh, wow. Like, if I had to go buy the same traffic that this page generated, it would cost me 10 grand a month.” Holy cow, right? So all of that is those are our big, our big moves. We're really stretching the market down market as well as releasing innovation for the generation side. Pam Didner: Very, very good. Jeff is so wonderful, so wonderful to have you on my podcast and the show. You know, I hope to see you soon, hopefully at Content Marketing World or like in a physical events. Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I did my Content Marketing World presentation. I think we're going to be one and two in the best. I’m the second best one, you obviously the best one. (Pam laughs) We'll see how that goes. Yeah, Content Marketing World going to be amazing. The lineup, I'm so excited to just veg out and watch all the recordings, frankly. Pam Didner: Very, very good. I'm going to see you at the virtual event. Jeff Coyle: Thank you so much, Dan. We really appreciate it. Pam Didner: I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’d appreciate that you leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or my website, . If you think this is useful, please share with your colleagues and friends. I also love to hear from my listeners. So join my Facebook community, . I'd answer any marketing questions you may have. I mean, any marketing questions you ask? I answer. All right? See you there. Have a great week.
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140 - SOLO: Does My B2B Company Need a Sales Enablement Team?
10/06/2020
140 - SOLO: Does My B2B Company Need a Sales Enablement Team?
Hello, everyone! A listener, Ron, sent me a question. He asked me, “Hey, my company doesn't have sales enablement group. Do we need one?” Well, Ron, that's a great question. The need of sales enablement really depends on your sales team and who is doing what to support sales. Chances are, I would say that you already have sales enablement type of functions in your company, but it's really not called sales enablement. Does that make sense? Probably it's part of sales, operations, it's part of marketing or it's part of the product marketing team. They are jobs being done, but it's just not necessarily calling it sales enablement. For example, most of the sales enablement is about training sales how to sell and to know the products or even onboard them when they start. Someone or a group of people are probably already doing that. Right? In some cases, marketers are working very closely with inside sales to supply them messaging, sales collateral, a sales deck, or email templates to enable the sales team. Maybe you have marketing people pretty much stay on top of that and doing a certain function or portion of a sales enablement job, but they are not part of the sales team. Part of sales is about making sure that sales have necessary sales tools and the processes so they can do their jobs. And that can also be part of a sales enablement or sales operations job. Possibly somebody is already working on sales tools and sales process sourcing and also implementation. I suggest that you check who is doing what and how the sales team is supported to determine if you need a sales enablement group. Like I said, sales enablement is defined differently by different companies. Also many companies have sales supports being done by different internal groups. Right? Kind of like a virtual team: marketing is working on collateral finance, maybe helping on sales forecast, HR is working on sales incentive. They are all doing their job to support sales. You need to identify the gaps that the sales need help and then determine who should do it. If you can get other stakeholders to do it, great. If not, do you need to hire someone or build a team? And that's pretty much a head count and budget discussion with the management. So I hope I answer your question Ron. Do you have a sales enablement team in your company? And what do they do? Share that with me. If you enjoy my podcast, I’d appreciate it if you leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or my website: . If you think this is useful, please share it with your colleagues and friends. I also love to hear from my listeners. Join my Facebook Community . I’d answer any marketing questions you had—I mean any marketing questions. You ask, I answer. See you there. Have a great week.
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139 - ft. Priscilla McKinney: Social Selling
09/29/2020
139 - ft. Priscilla McKinney: Social Selling
I have a special treat for you today. So rather than listen to me talking, I invited a special guest to join us. Priscilla McKinney, founder of Little Bird Marketing and joining us from Galena, Kansas. Pam: So there's one thing before we get started, I want to have a chat with you about. I love your LinkedIn title. It says Annoying Truth Teller Powered by My Husband's Homemade Bread. So, you know, I don't really care about the truth teller part (laughs). You know, I really care about the homemade bread! So talk to us a little bit about your, I don't know, your husband's baking skills and what kind of bread does he share with you. Priscilla: Well, see, this is where we're already off to a great point about social selling, but we're going to go back to bread because the reality is, is that nobody who really knows me, doesn't know that my husband for the last 17 years has been a stay-at-home Dad, Homeschooled our kids, and basically does everything you could imagine for me (laughs). And so, you know, they say behind every woman is a great man and that's all I have to say. (I usually say behind every woman is another bunch of her great women friends!) But in this case you can’t know me without knowing that I really have an unfair competitive advantage, and that is that my husband helps me with so much. And then there's just treats, he's an amazing cook. And, uh, you know, and his bread is just, uh, just above par. And I grew up in Spain and lived in, around France and limited Germany. And let me just tell you, I think I'm a little bit of a snob and he makes the most amazing French baguette. So I'm very sorry and it doesn't travel well, otherwise I would be giving it away. Pam: Wow. Okay. One day I have to go to Kansas to visit you. Just to try his bread. Priscilla: You’d would be most welcome! Pam: Excellent. Speaking of telling all the marketers about the truth for today I want to talk about the topic you are incredibly passionate about: social selling. Yeah! So talk to us. What is your definition of social selling and why is it important? Priscilla: Well, I think there's some of the age old adage is like “people buy from people they know like and trust” and all these, like things were like. You know, just cliches that we've used over and over again. But sometimes when I talk about social selling, what I like to remind people is what it's not, and it is not actually taking some of the same old school slimy salesy, always-be-closing-approaches and just moving them onto social. Instead, Social selling might use the technology of social media, but it is first and foremost, you know, it's human and it's collaborative and it's connective. And at the very root of it, it is saying, “I am a person, first, and I'll connect with you.” Now, I'm not saying that I have to sit and we have to know each other personally and be best friends. We can get right down to business, but I want my humanity to be the first thing that comes out. And I want someone to know something a little bit about me and how I see the world. And the last thing I'll say about that is, you know, I am who I am, whether I'm selling to you fire hydrants, or I'm selling marketing plans. I can't help, but be Priscilla and see things a certain way. And I want to explain to you, if you're going to enter into business with me or a professional relationship where we're collaborating, or maybe I'm referring to you, or you're referring to me. Socially, I want you to understand where I'm coming from and have a grasp of being able to talk with me as a human first and foremost, Pam: Obviously before digital, you know, the sales people build the relationship with their prospects or with your potential customers first. So is something very similar to that, but we are doing that digitally? Is that how you see it? Priscilla: That is, but I tell you one of the stats that should make everybody shutter is that we know at this point that the average buyer is now 57% of the way through their buyer's journey before any sales person ever knows about them, before they come on the radar of a company, or a lead generating system before they hit a top of the funnel, anything. And so this kind of idea of like, there's this streamline, you know, even, even the notion of a funnel was funny. But, you know, because as we all know it zigzags all around and we use these constructs in order to try and understand the journey as if it's just this linear thing going on, but it's not. And social selling understands that people are not out there having a linear experience in selling, that they go zigzag around, they need to know people and things build on each other in a far more organic way. And so if you come into things, knowing that, then you actually can start building the foundations of social selling. Pam : With all that being said, typically, who is responsible for social selling within the company? Priscilla: That is the best question to be asking. And I think the reality is that people think it's one of two people: it's either the salesperson or it's the marketing person. Pam: No kidding! No kidding! Priscilla: And then we have the WWF smackdown about which one it is. (laughs) Pam: (laughs) I know! “It's your job.” “No, it's my job!” “No it isn’t your job!” “Oh, ok.” (laughs) Priscilla: And then there's the blame game. You know, sales says that marketing didn't give them good leads. And marketing says that they give salespeople good stuff and they don't close it. And then the thing just goes on and on. But I think the reality is that the job is far more complicated and far more open to a lot of other players than people perceive. Right? Pam: Yeah, I agree. Priscilla: So this idea of this duality of sales versus marketing to me is really kind of an old issue that needs to be put to bed because I think the job is everyone's and here's another stat that should scare people to death. And that is that we know that people are reading 12 to 14 pieces of content, at a minimum, before they make a decision. And I guess my question is, to anybody who's out there trying to sell, how many of the 12 to 14 pieces that they read belong to you and your brand? Pam: That's a good question. That's a very thought provoking question and we just need to be addressing the multiple different level. Right? So when the content is being served, can people find it? Right? And is the content in the right format. There's probably additional and thousands of questions that needs to be addressed before we can give an answer to that, but keep going. Priscilla: Yeah. So what, you know, the old model is that it's either sales or marketing. What social selling really promotes and challenges is that same notion. It's like, no, there is an overarching strategy for the brand and it involves sales, it involves marketing, it involves HR and that's in recruiting. It also involves HR in terms of employee advocacy. It also can employ customer care, Customer experience. There’s so many layers of social selling that needed to be happening. And so when we only put it towards sales and marketing, what we're saying is all we care about is revenue. Pam: We do care about revenue Priscilla, come on! Priscilla: But that's short view, short view of revenue because don't you want people on your team in terms of social selling really out there and pulling the messages about the brand and the culture of the brand across all of the channels. For example, talking about how great it is to work at this place so that the company can attract the best and brightest, which then in turn in the long run actually delivers revenue. Pam: Understood. So now you hit another cord and I think there may not be a clear distinction, say between, say brand advocacy, that's done by employees and also social selling. Do you see these two are the same thing as well? Priscilla: Well, you know, more people would call them something different. And I do think they are one of the buckets, but I think the skills and the tips and the tricks and the, and the mindset that needs to happen for both of them are the same. And we know that the technology is the same. And so for me, it's about saying people who are doing the social, selling, doing the marketing the HR recruiting the customer care, all of these people need to have the same skill and the same understanding about how social is a hub and every single aspect of the business comes around. Pam: Got it. So you are looking at in a more holistic view. And, uh, because everybody's on some sorts of social channels And if you are employees representing the company, you'll even just yourself, that how you present yourself does matter. Priscilla: Absolutely. Yeah. Pam: So with that being said--that how you present yourself does matter--what should people pay attention to when they do social selling? And what are some of the tips and tricks that you would like to share with everyone? Priscilla: Nobody likes to be sold to. Pam: True. Priscilla: We all know that we hate that feeling, right? We get there's this reason why our culture has this association with like slimy sales. But then we go, we come in and we get out of our car, come up to our office, sit down and all of a sudden, as marketers or salespeople or HR recruiting, now all of a sudden we get slimy. Wait a minute. Why don't we just write and behave the way we want to experience out in the world. And this is the proverbial crap, LinkedIn message you get when someone connects to you. And this is, you know, you and I are very heavily in the B2B space and so we do talk a lot about LinkedIn, you know, so much about account based marketing and how to actually get this done smarter. But this is where this age old dumb slimy message that is completely irrelevant to you didn't even consider you. And in the end, actually half of the time, they actually ask a favor of you when they reached out and it's so ineffective, but it comes from that original mindset of “I'm one person when I'm wanted, when I'm, you know, and then I'm a different person when I'm marketing or selling” and that needs to stop. Pam: Got it. So what is your advice specifically when people would like to engage or embark on the social selling? Priscilla: It's about putting the other person first and it's also about doing it in the right place. And so that kind of slimy salesy approach I just talked with you about, we all are very familiar with that over in LinkedIn mail. Get out of LinkedIn mail jail and get over into the comments and the juicy bits. And, you know, you have such a great depth of wisdom about account based marketing and how to actually use the social channels for real, real sales revenue--like KPI's like we're not joking around and just. Being friends with people. Pam: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I totally agree. Yeah. We have to hear the core, man. Priscilla: Yeah. Yeah. And you wrote the book on how to do that globally and there's, there's something very powerful about that, but you don't get that done by staying in LinkedIn mail jail. You have to get out and you do two things when you, when you do that. First of all, if you have a wishlist or you have, even existing clients or a group of friendly, you go out and you see who is actively talking about the things you want to talk about and you just like a cocktail party come on up and you, you get involved in the conversation. And you, let the stuff happen and there in a more organic space and you do two things: not only do you start a more organic conversation, that's not jarring like this other crap, but you have just completely removed everybody from the potential dumb conversations who's not active on that channel. They would only be in those conversations if they're on that channel every day or every other day, or they find it meaningful So you just muted out a crap ton of people who have a profile somewhere, who don't even ever, you know, take a look at it. And so the prospecting or running, creating the relationship through the, I think is a very, very important, but often missed point when people are social selling. Pam: That's actually a very good point. I missed that one completely (laughs). I comment on people's post, but I didn't think through. A lot of times it's very random. Maybe I should comment on the potential customers and especially the one I want to reach out. Priscilla: The first thing I do when there's someone that I want to really do business with is I go out to their page, I go to their activity, I look at their posts and I see what they're interested in and I strike up that conversation. Other people would be like,“Oh, that's a gimmick or that’s salesy.” No, not if you show up and you be yourself and you just, you're interested in what they're interested in. And we all do this in society. It's called etiquette. Pam: Yeah. I like that a lot. You hit the core. I liked that a lot. And, another question I would like to ask you specifically: are there, by default, social channels that people should use? I know that this is probably depending on your audience and depending on your personal preference, whatnot, but do you have any recommendation that there is a specific channel, or channels that people should use? Priscilla: Where are their eyeballs are, that's where you need to go. But I think we all know, you know, just the truth about business when it's B2B, is that number one, you need to be on LinkedIn. Number two, you need to be on Twitter. And the big difference between the two of those. That's very, very important to understand. Pam: I agree. Priscilla: You ready? (laughs) Linked In is a closed network and therefore it cannot be scraped by Google. Whereas Twitter is a public channel and it can be scraped by Google. And so when, if you want to be famous for something, if you want the recognition of an influencer in a particular field, then you better get out on a completely public network that can be scraped and looked at, regardless of whether they've actually connected to you. And so if you're really looking for that exposure, and building your influence, then you really cannot leave out Twitter. Pam: Okay. Got it. So it's really depends on your goals in terms of communication and also what you want to accomplish. Priscilla: Exactly. Pam: And also, you know, where your audiences are and then you can determine what are the right channel that you would like to engage. Priscilla: Yeah, exactly. Pam: So that’s a wrap for our podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, please don't forget to leave comments or like the podcast on your favorite channels. As you venture out everyone, please continue to stay safe and healthy. Talk to you next time. Take care. Bye bye.
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138 - SOLO: Strong Digital Marketing is About Processes and Automation
09/22/2020
138 - SOLO: Strong Digital Marketing is About Processes and Automation
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. I interviewed Neal Schaffer on my past week’s podcast. What do you think? Like I said, I am planning to juxtapose the episodes of me talking for 7 minutes at a time with guest interviews. Just want to try something new. If there are guests that you want to hear from, please send me a quick email at and add the questions you want to ask them. This way, I get a chance to meet new people and you get your questions answered. #winwin I am more than happy to do all the logistics to reach out. For today, I want to talk about a topic that is not getting much of the spotlight in the marketing landscape: processes and automation workflows. You are like: “Ugh, Pam, can you talk about something that is more sexy and fun? Like how to select creative that will pop? Or what are the tips and tricks to writing catchy headlines? How to run Facebook pay ads that will convert?” Well, if you Google those topics, you’ll find many, many outstanding blogs and videos out there that cover these topics. One thing I do want to share with you, though: you can read forever, but at the end of the day, you need to practice and implement. That’s the best way to learn. So if you have budget and don’t want to do the work, that’s OK. Once you’ve done your reading, internalize the takeaways well enough to provide clear guidance to your agencies and the contractors so that they can do a great job for you. If you don’t want to do it, you are still responsible to convey your marketing visions and ideas clearly. Creative, design, writing, and anything content related is what you see on the front-end. I get it. We, marketers, tend to focus on the front-end and leave the back-end to IT and operations. However, for digital marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience, you need to plan out how the back-end will integrate with the front-end. So you cannot separate: “well front end is my job and the back-end is someone else’s job.” For instance, when people click “contact us,” what is the next step that needs to happen? IT and operations cannot tell you that. That’s your job to figure it out. When people sign up for your app, what email notification should they receive the first hour, the 2nd day, and the 7th day. Again, IT and operations cannot tell you that. You need to figure that out. How should their data be captured? That has a lot to do with how you are going to get your analytics. Will that be part of CRM, marketing automation, or the customer data warehouse? You need to make a decision about how the data will flow. You need to make sure that all these systems can talk to each other. For that, you need to get involved on the back-end to understand how data flows and what steps are manual or automated. You need to make that call. I’m not saying you need to code, but you do need to design the customer experience. You need to answer such question as When to send the registrant email out? When to contact the customer when they sign up for the event? How to further engage and nurture them after the event? When you address these questions, you need to set up steps and process in your systems so that actions are taken when the customers act or engage. All these require some strategic thinking to ensure a smooth online experience. From on-site events or webinars, to post-event follow-up, timely email outreach, to sales engagement, you need to visualize the process and pave the journey for your customers. Then you can have someone either code it or build a workflow to connect various systems to ensure it happens the way you envision. None of this just happens magically. It requires you to plan, think through the permutations and work on the back-end and front-end integration. I am doing that for myself and my clients. It’s tedious: testing, retesting, constantly changing the workflows, and anticipating problems. And the systems they don’t just work themselves out. Once you start going live, trust me, you run into a new of set of user issues that you don’t expect. That’s the type of tedious, detailed work that no marketers want to talk about. I hate telling you this but those processes and workflows will make or break your digital marketing. You are like, “Pam, you are stressing me out? So, what can I do?” Well, it actually depends on your job. For some of you, you probably never have to deal with the back-end. Lucky YOU! I know some content marketers just need to write the content, upload content to WordPress and check on Google Analytics. That’s it. Great!! I also know some event marketing managers that only need to worry about everything on-site, but nothing pre- or post- events. They have other members who will take care of that for them. Well, you know what, with no physical events at this time, many of those event marketing managers are forced to change and they need to build something online for events to work! And that something is really the back-end--sourcing the different platforms, integrating the process with a different system. It’s a lot of work! So regardless of your current responsibilities, I strongly suggest that you make an effort to learn how marketing as a whole works in your company. Your marketing departments may run paid social, events, email campaigns, create blog posts and videos. Try to understand how everything works. Try to understand what tools are used and how they tie together (or fail to tie together.) I encourage the marketing managers I coach to draw workflows as a way of putting their understanding of the back-end to the test. The way I see it, if you can explain your understanding in a logical flowchart, it means that you understand how things work. The biggest benefit of understanding how things work is to help connect the different dots and give you the ability to think strategically. Workflows will help you see the good, the bad, and the ugly of your digital marketing. You know where to go to get the data and you also know where the gaps are. Yes, it’s tedious and boring, but make an effort to understand the backend. You won’t regret it. The understanding of the processes behind-the-scenes will help you identify what you can do to improve the front and back-end together. Again, thank you for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is one-way communication. I don’t necessarily know who you are, but your support means a great deal to me. Feel free to ask questions on my FB community: “Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.” And when you join, you can get a free Tall Starbucks on me. I added a gift card with a barcode. You can find that in the announcement page. Again, love to hear from you. If you venture out be safe and stay healthy. Take care. Bye-bye!
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137 - ft. Neal Schaffer: Should Influencer Marketing Be Part of Your Marketing Mix
09/15/2020
137 - ft. Neal Schaffer: Should Influencer Marketing Be Part of Your Marketing Mix
I interviewed Neal Schaffer who is a social media and influencer marketing expert. Neal recently published his fourth book, The Age of Influence. He is already thinking about his fifth book! #Amazing Here is the quick summary of the podcast: Neal shared the definition of influencer marketing. It's about social media users who have built a community around publishing content frequently about a specific topic. Over time, these users build a certain level of following. With many people having much to say, it also creates a democratization of information in recent years. He also touches on the differences between employee advocacy and influencer marketing. You can be an advocate of your company and an influencer at the same time. Starting at the CEO level down to employees, you can not only be your brand's advocate, but also have different levels of influences depending on your social media following. There are different spheres of influence. Neal also pointed out that influencer marketing is a long-term play. It's about building relationships. Many brands invite influencers to their customer events and provide sneak-peek of product reviews. Help influencers understand the company, the product, and the culture better. Sourcing the right mix of influences is also critical. Work with the team on the selection criteria. Understand your objective and KPIs. Make sure that there is a natural alignment between influencers' expertise and your products and services. Also, broaden your definition of influencers to customers, partners, and followers as well. Listen to the podcast and check out Neal's book, The Age of Influence. Find out the habit that he picked up that he would have never expected due to COVID 19!
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136 - SOLO: Business Benefits of Taking a Break
09/08/2020
136 - SOLO: Business Benefits of Taking a Break
Hello from Portland, Oregon! During the pandemic, many people turn to podcasting or video recording as a creative outlet. I, on the other hand, moved inward and started to focus on my mind and my emotions. I haven't completely shut down or gone off grid. I still work on my client projects. I continued to get on Zoom for business and the personal gatherings. I still create content, but only limited to my monthly webinars and the pre-committed speaking engagements. To manage my emotion and my stress, I made an intentional effort not to worry too much, even though the business has been down. But following that premise willing too much, I took very proactive look of the overall financial health of my business and created a plan for the worst case scenario, such as what if I didn't meet my revenue goal for second half 2020. What should I do? Right. Once I have a plan in place and I know what to do and what I can control, I stopped worrying. Now, if it happens, I have a plan. I know exactly what I need to do. Then subconsciously, I just decided to let go of that podcasting goal, that video recording goal, that my writing goal, just for a little while. Like I said, it was not planned, it just happened and I kind of went with that flow. Speaking of focusing in where I spent a lot of time thinking, thinking about my business, thinking about where I want to be in next several years, thinking about what type of content to create moving forward. And thinking about whether I need to modify my current value proposition--and if I do, how do I pivot, what do I need to change? And I also think about the work and life balance, and I've been spending way too many hours working in the past six years. So I kind of just let my mind wander here and there without much direction. Oh, by the way. I also think about what I want to eat every day (laughs). I'm not much of a cook, but I love to eat when I'm sad. I eat when I'm angry, I eat when I'm depressed, I eat when I'm happy I eat. When I'm with my friends, I eat. All right. And I love to try different restaurants. So when the restaurants were closed, doing COVID, man, that was hard for me. Thank God. My husband started baking and cooking. I don't know what happened to him and I'm not going to ask, but I'm so happy he started doing that. And I am his worst critic. Like if he creates something and I was like, “Oh my God, this is not good. Can you just go back to a kitchen and fix that? Otherwise don’t come back.” No, I'm kidding. I did say that occasionally, you know, in a very joking semi-serious type of way. But either way, I'm very grateful that he cooks and I'm just being a critic. It's fantastic. Oh, by the way, we love, we love “Great British Baking Show.” Have you seen that show? It's fantastic. We watched 10 seasons straight and you can say that I stopped creating content and then stopped consuming massive, I mean, massive amounts of content on Netflix and Amazon Prime—aka: binge watching shows. I guess that's kind of like the trends like everybody's doing. I certainly can check off binge watching shows on my 2020 list. But, you know, even though I've been thinking a lot and thinking is nothing without execution, right. Because I can think all the time, but if I don't on it, it's kind of like a fart or thin air. So here's one thing out of this whole, let-my-mind-flow-randomly process. I came up with one idea and this is related to a podcast. So I'm thinking I've been doing the seven minutes kind of podcasting format for about three years and you'll be hearing me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Thank you so much. Moving forward. I was still sharing my thoughts and my ideas, but I like to juxtapose that with guest interviews--the length will be around 15 minutes with three to five questions. You can hear other people's point of view and we can all learn together from them. What do you think? I want to try that and to get your feedback. All right. So you are going to hear several interviews in the next several weeks, so check it out and I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback. Another thinking ideas that I did is I started to reevaluate my own website and I look into my current value proposition is a clear enough is anything I need to be fine. And also I need to change due to the current environment. And there are a couple of things I made changes. And they are changed to accommodate the current situation at the same time optimize for SEO. For example, I offer strategic planning, account based marketing, content marketing, and the Martech integration and evaluation, so I create a separate page to talk about what I do for each of this topic. And that that will make it very clear. It's articulate, again, my offering in a way that people can understand at the same time optimize for search. Another thing I did is for my book page. So in the past I listed three books on one page. So that very long page. Now I broke that down into three separate pages for three different books. Again, you know, articulate my positioning a little better at the same time optimize for SEO. Another thing I did is the speaking page, which is obviously it was tailor for face-to-face conferences and trade shows and events. Now all that has stopped. And so I changed the heading and add it online and also virtual a virtual events as a part of my offering. Again, looking into the current environment and optimize my website accordingly. And you know, to be honest with you, many brands are changing that they are onsite rule to accommodate or comply with social distancing. And you should talk about what your stores are doing or your brains are doing on the specific situation like this. And make that very clear and does share that on your website, so you people know that you are doing everything to keep them safe. That's another form of a content marketing. So here are some of the changes I made and by thinking and let my mind wander around. So what about you? What have you been doing in the past 10 to 12 weeks? And you're working hard. Are you hardly working? or are you enjoying your time with your family or you just want to get away from them for a long period of time? I get it. Or you’re just spending way too much time, like me watching Netflix and Amazon Prime. Some of my friend actually went off grid. They literally just take a break away from computer and not really looking into a social media stuff. And I really admire that. So whatever you did, I hope you are healthy and safe. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is a one-way communication. I don't necessarily know who you are, but your support means a great deal to me. If you want to chat, reach out to me on any social media channel. Not Tik Tok top. Okay. I'm not on Tik Tok. You can also join me on Facebook community . When you join, you can get a free tall Starbucks on me. I place a gift card with a barcode on the side. You can find that in the Announcements page. Please use it. Right. Love to hear from you. If you venture out, be safe and stay healthy. Take care. Bye bye.
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135 - SOLO: An Example of How to Cultivate Strategic Thinking
06/25/2020
135 - SOLO: An Example of How to Cultivate Strategic Thinking
Hello, everyone. Back in October 2019, I recorded a podcast episode. Episode 107: How to Cultivate and Expand Your Strategic Thinking. What I want to do today is to share with you an example of what I did with a client to help her explore more ideas to expand her team’s charter and scope which is one way to help her think differently and drive strategic conversation with VP of her group. So let’s do a quick review in terms of what I shared with you in EP 107 on how to cultivate strategic thinking. There are a couple thing I mentioned--3 points, if you will. Think from the perspective of “why and what,” not “how.” Explain that to your management well before you go into details. Communicate in a way that senior managers can understand. So obviously senior managers care about costs and efficiencies. Or they care about success metrics. So whatever you discuss you need to tie with that so that they can understand how you make an impact to their metrics. Help senior management connect the dots. Especially in the digital world, all the back end, or technology are inter-related. For many traditional sales and marketing managers, they didn’t grow up with digital natively. It’s very hard for them to understand how the back end are connected and you need to explain it in a way that they can understand and help them connect the dots. Now, here is an example I worked on with my client. She is a director of content for a large SaaS-based service platform company. Even though she is a director of content, she doesn’t really focus on content marketing within the agency, she more focuses on providing content marketing training and workshop for customers. So it’s kind of like a post-sales, contract fulfillment type of things that a lot of their customers when they sign a contract with this specific company, part of the contract is for the company to provide content marketing trainings and workshops for these customers. So her team is basically trying to fulfill that contract commitment. Her manager constantly asks her on how to scale without increasing her team’s headcount. She is struggling to come up some ideas to drive the conversation with her management. After several conversations, here is what I suggested her to do: Option 1: (This is probably the pie in the sky) She can productize her workshop offering as a profit center. At this time she’s a cost center. And what if she can standardize some of her workshop offering and make that a paid program? So she can standardized a package and make it a certification program—she can certify facilitators and then it's a train-the-trainer approach. Because she has a proven methodology why don’t we turn that into some type of certification program, It could be a 3-day workshop to be certified trainer and then those trainers can actually train or provide the workshop for their own companies. So it’s a pay program. So I mentioned that her and she was like, “oh, that’s kind of interesting,” I told her she doesn’t have to take a big initiative initially. What she can do is take a small step: I told her that she doesn’t need to start big on this. Start with a discovery project. Define the types of workshops that can be customized or standardized. Then she can publish a recommendation to determine if it's feasible to create a certification program or identify the types of workshops that can be standardized. Because once you standardize, your team can do more workshops to actually support more accounts. Option 2: Continue to be a value-add part of contract agreements, but scale fast and furiously. What I am trying to say is look into workshops she’s already done. And I mentioned about standardized package. She can have her team act as a coach to work with these trainers. So the team doesn’t have to do a lot of workshops, but have the team work as a coach on the sideline and work with the trainer so the trainers can do the workshop on their own for their companies. Basically, this can help your team scale to support more accounts. It’s a slightly different business model than option 1. Option 3: Outsourcing. So her team is currently at full capacity and I recommended outsourcing some of the workshops to trained and experienced facilitators. And also use existing materials that she uses to train new hires to train these contracted facilitators or agency so she doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. She took my suggestions and made that part of the annual planning discussion. According to her, the chances of turning her team into a profit center is pretty slim, but she wants to mention to her management to continue to think about how she can morph and expand her offering and also her team’s capabilities. However, the outsourcing model is certainly a great option to expand her team’s to support more accounts. I work closely with multiple clients to help them on their marketing plans and identify potential areas that their groups can expand to get additional headcount and budget. If this is something where you need help, please reach out. For the time being be well and let’s connect again next week. Take care!
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134 - A Reminder That You Are Not Alone
06/18/2020
134 - A Reminder That You Are Not Alone
A big hello from Portland, Oregon. I want to talk about something totally different this week. I’ve been going through a lot of changes lately on both the business and the personal levels. Well, all of us are going through a lot of changes. Heck, our country is going through massive change to try to co-exist with COVID-19 safely, and even on how to reform our policing structure after recent protests. All of us are stressed in our own way. If you have a job and your company is doing well, your managers are asking you to take on more. If you have a job and your company is not doing well, your managers are asking you to do more with less. If you don’t have a job, you are working hard online and offline to find a job. If you are working for yourself like me, you are hustling even more to get additional businesses, because we just don’t know what else is going to happen next and how that will impact our cash flow. And I am only talking about the professional front that we all have to deal with, I haven’t even touched on the stuff that we have to deal with in our personal lives! Many of us have children and aging parents that we care for while working full-time at home. On top of it, everywhere we go, there are new rules and new processes that we need to follow. I went to see my dentist. You know what? it was not an easy walk-in anymore. I waited in my car until my appointment. Then, they took my temperature, I needed to wash my hands and clean my mouth with mouthwash for 60 seconds. My hygienist wore a full-on face shield, in addition to a N95 mask, to welcome me. I couldn’t even see Barbara’s smile. There is a new safety procedure for everything we do now. Everything that is familiar is eerily unfamiliar. When things are tough, most of us want to hold on to something familiar to help us cope. Ever since the beginning of March, there has been no familiar daily routine (I’m speaking for myself now) that I can hold on to except possibly the routine of getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night. Sounds sad, doesn’t it. Most of my listeners, I call you my B2B marketing peeps. You guys tend to be on the quiet side, incredibly professional and all about get-things-done. I’ve rarely heard any B2B marketers complain (except me! I complain A LOT!). Even when headcount and budgets were tight, you guys tend to tough it out and do what we can with what we have. I love B2B marketers. Now, I am coping. You are, too! We are all coping. When you are stressed or frustrated with the situation, always remember that you are not alone. Don’t get fooled by all the perfect FB or Instagram photos. Privately, they are also doing the best they can to cope mentally and physically. But there is one thing I am completely tired of. I am tired of virtual happy hours, virtual dinners, virtual workout, and non-stop virtual meetings. I am tired of the pizza commercials showing various family members eating pizza together on Zoom—and happy! You know they’re not. I actually prefer just eating my pizza and watching Netflix. Am I venting? This is episode 134, but it’s the first episode I’ve ever recorded in which I am not addressing a marketing topic. I hope you are OK with that. At this point, I am longing for the day when I can meet my friends; that we can casually sit next to me, we can hug each other freely, and talk trash without masks. I am sure that day will come. While we are impatiently waiting for that day to arrive, unleash your stress and frustration and let it out. You’ll feel better and I’ll feel better for you. Again, thank you for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is one-way communication. But I’d love to carry a conversation with you, online of course. You can do that by joining my FB community: “Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.” And when you join, you can get a free Tall Starbucks on me. I added a gift card with a barcode that you can use. Again, love to hear from you. Meanwhile, stay healthy and be safe. Take care.
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133 - What is Sales Enablement Planning?
06/11/2020
133 - What is Sales Enablement Planning?
I received an interesting question the other day: “Hey Pam, what is your approach of creating a sales enablement plan?” Great question. I actually have a workshop on how to create a scalable global content marketing plan. So there are some similarities between creating a marketing plan and a sales enablement plan. The bottom line is certain kind of element, or what I call “the skeleton” of the plans stays the same. So let’s talk about this a little but more. The first thing I want to get clear is the purpose and the audience of the plan. This is something you should always know. Who are you creating the plan for? And also what is the purpose of the plan? Any plan tends to be for internal communication and usage. We create a plan to get buy-in from management so that we can get budget and headcount and/or we create a plan to rally the internal and external teams so we can move toward the same direction to achieve the same goals. And most of us create the plan to let management know what we are going to do and to accomplish the overall company goals. So, with that in mind, your plan should be short and get-to-the-point. And here are some things I would include in my plan. Make sure your sales enablement plan ties in with the company’s sales objectives. Let’s assume sales enablement is part of the sales operations. You need to be sure that you are able to show the connection between your objectives and company business objective. The key is to show management what you do does has an impact on sales as a whole. Categorize your tasks into initiatives or strategies. We all have tasks that we do. I’ve come to realize that management doesn’t want to understand the laundry list of things we do on a daily basis. Is it possible to elevate them to a higher-level strategy? For example: the task you do is customer event management. But the key strategy is to scale ABM efforts to top 50 accounts. And the event management is actually one of the tactics underneath that. So Focus on communicating your strategies and initiatives with management and nest your tasks under that. So, don’t give them a list of the task that you have to do. That would just overwhelm them. They’ll literally shut off right there. “OK, that’s way too much information for me.” Provide high-level key deliverables timeline. Management wants to see the deliverables you get done. Please don’t show that you are doing a campaign from April to June. Show when they will see your first campaign result; is it on 4/30 or 6/30? So show the high-level key deliverable date, not just a bar to show “oh, I’m running a campaign from April to June.” Identify metrics for each initiative and strategies. For key strategies, what are the key results? What are the key success metrics? For example: to scale ABM to 50 accounts. Well that’s good. Maybe your key results are 35 customer events, two ABM-specific campaigns that generate 50 leads. So you need to be very specific in how you measure success. And you make sure that your metrics can be tied to the initiatives and the strategies. Communicate proposed budget and headcount. Depending on where you are in terms of your planning stage, if you are at the initial planning stage you probably will need to propose the head counts or the budgets needed to do your job. But if your plan is approved, I still recommend that you share your actual spend information with your management as a part of a planning update to show them not just the results and how much money you spent (are you over the budget or under the budget. It depends on which stages of planning you are in. That’s my suggestion to create a sales enablement plan. Tie your objectives to sales objectives. Craft your strategy and initiatives. Articulate your key measurements and provide timely report outs. So what does your sales enablement plan look like? I’d love to showcase your plan. I would love to share that on my podcast and or video. YouTube is the place to go and find my channel by typing “Pam Didner” and I’ll mention your name and give you credit. Be well. And let’s talk again next week.
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132 - Prepare for Future Disruptions with a Marketing Continuity Plan
06/04/2020
132 - Prepare for Future Disruptions with a Marketing Continuity Plan
Hello, welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. Last week, I said that I had one marketing takeaway from the pandemic. Well, I actually have two. Let’s talk about what I said last week. I shared that it’s important to update your marketing plan when the economy is opening up. This time around, it’s important to re-evaluate your customer’s behavior changes, understand what behavior changes are permanent, and how they affect customers’ buying decisions and the usage of your products and services. Use that insight to update your buyer personas. Another element which goes side-by-side with buyer personas is your messaging frameworks. Since the customers’ behaviors have changed, you need to review your messaging frameworks and determine if the value propositions, talking points, positioning need to be changed accordingly. In the previous podcast, my key marketing takeaway was that you need to refresh and update your buyer personas and messaging frameworks before revising your marketing plan. So here’s another takeaway that I want to address in this episode is the need of building a marketing continuity plan. We’ve heard of a Business Continuity Plan. So, what is a Business Continuity Plan? I like this definition from IBM’s website. “A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that outlines how a business will continue operating during an uncertain disruption in service.” In the IBM’s blog post, it goes on to explain: “It’s more comprehensive than a disaster recovery plan and contains contingencies for business processes, assets, human resources and business partners – every aspect of the business that might be affected.” That sounds complicated! If we have a Business Continuity Plan for our company, why shouldn’t we have a Marketing Continuity Plan? So, naturally following the definition above, I crafted a definition for a Marketing Continuity Plan. “A marketing continuity plan is a document that outlines how marketing will continue operating during a sudden disruption in service. The plan should address every aspect of marketing that might be affected. The plan should contain a checklist to evaluate creative, copy, and communications in owned, earned, paid, and social media channels. It should also include key decision-makers and representatives from each marketing function. And a frequent huddle will be activated for the duration of a crisis.” Do you like that definition? I like it very much! Of course, I created it! During the pandemic, many marketing teams started a daily marketing huddle to ensure close communications. Key players or representatives from management, social media, PR, email, paid media, product marketing, web, content, demand gen, or data analytics work together to address any urgent issues. The initial daily huddles tended to last for hours since many issues needed to be addressed at first. The team would discuss the current issues of the day, such as: Share what social media content is going out? Discuss currently running ads and proposed replacement ads Brainstorm creative outreach Modify talking points or messaging Review data analytics to see what worked or didn’t work Address “help needed” from team members at the tactical or execution level Communicate key initiatives and adjusted priorities And over time, the number of issues declined, and meeting times could be reduced to 15 or 30 minutes. Here is what you can do if you have a daily huddle. Take the time to observe what you did and document it. Answer the following questions What were the key topics addressed during the crisis? How did the team reach certain decisions? What data was needed to make these decisions? Who were the decision-makers? What help was needed at the tactical and execution level? What templates worked the best to communicate with upper management or to convey tactical information? How did we decide on budget allocation? You can turn it—your whole process during the pandemic--into the documented marketing playbook for crisis management, which is the marketing version of a Business Continuity Plan. Viola, now you have a documented process to help marketing move forward and faster next time. Well, let’s hope there is no next time. If you need help creating a Marketing Continuity Plan, please reach out. On several occasions, I’ve worked with clients to modify their existing marketing processes and help document actionable marketing continuity plans so that they could focus on important priorities such as creative, marketing planning and outbound executions. Again, if you have any questions, reach out to me via pamdidner.com As you venture out, please continue to stay safe and healthy. Talk to you next time, take care.
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131 - Webinar Series to Help You Think Strategically
05/28/2020
131 - Webinar Series to Help You Think Strategically
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I talked to many marketers in the past 6-8 weeks. All of us are looking forward to the re-opening of the economy. Yay! #can’twait Update the buyer personas and messaging frameworks In the previous episode, I talked about the need to update your marketing plan to align with the reopening. I called out that don’t revise your marketing plan for the sake of revising; you need to understand the behavior changes of your customers which leads to the need to update your buyer personas. B2B customers don’t usually change our behaviors that often so we don’t usually update our buyer personas. However, I think it’s important to evaluate your customers especially after the pandemic. Understand if there are any behavioral changes you have to take into account. And by the way, the behavioral changes may or may not have an impact on how they use your products. And if there’s a change in how they use your project, another factor you need to look into is your messaging framework. You need to determine if your value proposition and talking points need to change or not. So, evaluating your messaging framework and buyers personas are critical pre-requisites before updating your marketing plan. Another capability that’s important for marketers to possess is to be nimble and move quickly. You need to develop the ability to think strategically so that you can connect the dots swiftly and identify what needs to change when a crisis strikes. To help marketers think strategically, I created the “think strategically” series for my monthly webinars from May to August. The whole four months! In May, I did a webinar on “How to Change Your Marketing Plan Again: Continue to Plan for the Unknown.” I summarized the key points of the webinar in my blog post: . So check that out if you are interested. You can check it out on my website, pamdidner.com, and download the templates. In June: I’d like to talk about the 7 Elements You Should Include to Your Marketing Plan In July: I’ll touch on the topic of How to Create and Deliver Impressive C-suite Presentations In August: It’s all about How to Sharpen Your Strategic Thinking Skills I want to talk about the June webinar a little bit. The topic is about how to create a marketing plan. This is the topic, to be honest with you, that comes up most often during my mentoring sessions with marketing professionals. I thought I’d take a webinar to address it. If you already have a marketing plan template, GREAT! If you don't, well, it's the time to create one. I simply want to share some critical elements that should be included in the marketing plan, and I'll explain why these elements are vital. If you have an existing template, you can compare my recommendations with your current templates and determine if it's necessary to refine it. If you don't have one, you can check out my template as a starting point, then customize it based on your company's needs. To me, one way to judge if a marketer can think strategically is his/her ability to create a solid marketing plan. After this webinar, you'll be able to: - Identify the objectives and audience for your marketing plan - Determine the elements to include in your marketing plan You can register for any of the webinars by going to my website: pamdidner.com, click on webinars under the Resources tab. You can see the detailed descriptions of each webinar. I hope to see you there. Many marketers work hard to learn marketing disciplines such as SEO, content marketing, video production, email marketing and more which I call “hard skills.” However, it’s the soft skills such as how to communicate with C-suite and how to ask strategic questions that are hard to possess unless you have numerous opportunities to present in front of senior managers or have an experienced marketing coach to work with you. I’ll share many key tips at my webinars. Oh, by the way, I recently launched the FB community, B2B Marketing and More. One thing I want to do on the Facebook community is to have some virtual face time to work with a small group of marketers on soft skills or how to use my templates correctly. I am still working through the details, so stay tuned. If you are interested in joining, just go to Facebook and look for B2B Marketing and More. Again, if you have any questions, reach out anytime. Don’t forget to register the webinars! Stay healthy and be safe. Talk to you next week. Take care.
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130 - One Big Marketing Takeaway from COVID-19
05/21/2020
130 - One Big Marketing Takeaway from COVID-19
Hello, welcome to another pandemic episode of B2B Marketing and More. We are finally seeing the light at the end of tunnel as many states are reopening. Yay! So, are you out and about yet? If you are, have a great time and shop until you drop dead. It’s our official responsibility to stimulate the US economy. I am just having fun with you. But definitely shop, but follow the social distancing rules and stay safe. OK? So, from this whole drama, there is one giant, giant marketing takeaway out of this unfortunate event. It has to do how I help my clients approach marketing planning. Many of my clients asked me if they should update their marketing plans, Well, now the states are opening, the economy is probably going back to normal and they just went through a round of marketing plan headcount and budget adjustments during the pandemic. Now people will start spending again, plus, our company’s business objectives and goals have not changed. Can we keep the marketing plan as it is? Well, the answer is NO. Hear me out! For the longest time, I have always advised my clients that marketing plans needs to follow the business goals and objectives to the T. Marketing, ultimately, is about growing the company and helping sales. The business direction certainly guides marketing’s creative, outreach and its overall strategy; the whole nine yards. After strategies are set, marketing works on identifying buyer personas, creating customer journeys, content creation or what not. But with this pandemic, it made me ponder the validity of my approach. If I think about it, this pandemic has forced all of us to live our lives differently. Everything we’ve taken for granted, like giving our loved ones a hug, going to school, meeting friends for happy hour or going to a graduation ceremony, was completely taken away in a moment. It has had a huge impact on us mentally and psychologically. Well, I wouldn’t say that it scarred us but, for business professionals who have full-time jobs and need to home-school their children, this whole situation has traumatized them. Just kidding. I have huge respect for people who were doing both. Seriously, you deserve a medal. You are like: “I don’t want a medal, I just want my kids to get out of my house for 8 hours and go to school so that I can sleep!” I get it. I agree with you wholeheartedly. If you think about it, some behavior changes are permanent. For example, face-to-face customer meetings may be reduced to virtual calls. Less face-to-face to calls and on flight travels. And the physical demos may be moved to online demos. Our buyers may use different options to communicate with us and the features for our products may be different as well. Therefore, buyer personas need to be updated with our customers new preferences. Before updating your marketing plan, you need to refresh your buyer personas. And by the way, this is a great standing topic to discuss with your internal teams and agency partners. Everyone will have their point of view and perspective from reading many COVID-19 posts and some have probably talked to sales and customers and will have some great insights. I suggest my clients hold several virtual meetings over virtual happy hours. Talk about the buyer persona changes. Here are some of the questions you can ask. What are some of the new normal behaviors for them? Do these new normals work for us or against us? Most importantly, how do the “new normal” behaviors shape customers’ purchase journeys and their decision-making processes? If you refresh your buyer personas, you certainly need to re-evaluate your messaging frameworks. You may need to dial up different features of your products due to customers’ behavioral changes. For example, some product features are great for face-to-face communications but, with remote work, it’s better to emphasize other features that allow quick access on the cloud through mobile devices. So here’s is my big takeaway from the pandemic: The refreshed buyer personas and updated messaging frameworks will guide your marketing plan changes. Business goals and objectives are important, but your marketing plan needs to reflect the changes of your customers and the talking points. I know it has been stressful for all of us marketers. By talking to many of you, I know how challenging your situations are. Some struggle to get clear direction from management, some have lost their jobs. Some have no budget or resources to help them. I am in the same boat. If it’s hard on the client-side, it’s equally hard on the agency or consultant side. I created templates to help you sort out your new buyer personas and messaging frameworks. Send an email to hello@pamdidner.com I’ll send you the templates right away. In the meantime, I mentor individuals and provide training so teams can revise their marketing plans faster and quicker. If you need help, please reach out! If you venture out, stay healthy and be safe. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.
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129 - 5 Steps To Work With Sales On ABM
05/07/2020
129 - 5 Steps To Work With Sales On ABM
Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. This episode is about working with sales on account-based marketing. In the current situation, it’s even more important than ever to align with sales to demonstrate marketing’s value-add. Yes, it’s been more than a month of shelter-in-place for all of us. I didn’t know that staying-at-home could be so exhausting… I am not going to say that we are in this together. Let’s tough it out together. Enjoy the episode. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends. Good morning from Portland. I had a coffee with a friend yesterday and she asked me what I’ve been working on. I said that I’ve working with a client on the collaboration between sales and marketing, especially on the account-based marketing (ABM). She asked me how to get that started. Her marketing organization doesn’t work closely with sales and it makes sense that she posed the question. First of all, ABM is a lot of work. There are plenty of things that marketing is doing keep themselves busy, especially with digital marketing integration, marketing research, most importantly, demand generation. So here are the five steps that you can work with sales to get ABM started. Marketer needs to do is to make this as a priority as part of overall marketing plan. This works the best if it’s top down driven. Make sure that senior marketing managers are in conversation with VP of sales and they agree to put resource and headcount to support it. Basically this needs to be a priority between the two groups. Sales and Marketing agree on accounts that marketing will support. This can be existing accounts or new accounts. It’s important to agree who these accounts are. I may make this sound easy on the podcast. Trust me, salespeople spend a lot of time identify the top accounts. Frankly, there are AI-based tools out there to help companies identify key accounts to focus to maximize potential revenue. Lead Crunch is one company that uses AI to identify look-like accounts. So agreeing on accounts is also critical before you can move forward. Marketing needs to spend time to under these accounts. Marketers focus on personas, but sales focuses on accounts. This is something that Marketing needs to do their homework to understand account-specific intelligence such as: What kind of products are the companies buying from us? Who are the decision makers? Who are the influencers? What are some challenges they encounter? What are their pain points? Their pain points may not be the same as a buyer persona’s pain point. They may be very specific for them in terms of the technology they use. And what is our sales teams game plans to overcome that or drive the conversation with them. So all this is very much account specific. You need to study and understand that. You need to have a conversation with sales about that. Or if they have a platform they use to gather all the email exchanges or some of the information you should go there and check it out. So make an effort to understand the account. This was something I didn’t do very well, when I was supporting sales. Hindsight is 20/20! Recommend to Sales what you will do as part of ABM and success metrics: What are you going to do to support them? Are you running hyper-targeted campaigns for them? Are you customizing and creating specific content for the accounts? Or are you doing a customer event? Be clear on what you will do. Whatever you do, please create your success metrics. Be very clear how you want to measure it. I think it’s very important to set up expectation on your key metrics and have sales agree with that. Set up a process to implement your ABM effort. No matter what you do, you need a process. It takes time, effort, and money to set up a process to do them. There is no shortcut. If you are doing retargeting, you need to make sure that the back-end from CRM, analytics, content syndication, media buy, to landing pages are all integrated. If you are doing customer events and you need to scale that to 35 events, again you need a process. If you are working on customized collateral, you need a process to make sure that happens. It’s important for you to actually know what needs to be done. And again, everything in terms of ABM, it takes time just to get it started and set up the process to launch it. So be sure you allow the time to do that. And what does that tell you? You have to start your planning early! . Ok, I covered 5 steps that you need to do get started to work with sales with ABM. The reality is that it takes a lot of time, and a lot of time going back and forth on each of the steps and especially set things up and in the implementation stages. So make sure that you have the time and effort to do it right. A lot of time we are under deadlines and we tend to skip steps or not setting the expectation or try to launch anything in haste and do not have the metrics in place. So make sure that you take your time and have the metrics and process in place when you do your ABM. So, I hope I answered my friend’s question in terms of how to get ABM started with a Sales Team. What about you? How do you get yourself started on ABM with your sales team? If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. If you enjoy my podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
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128 - Tips to Build Your Recovery Marketing Strategy
04/23/2020
128 - Tips to Build Your Recovery Marketing Strategy
Ok, what have we not seen in the past six weeks? Well, we’ve seen the stock market collapse and bounce back slightly; we have seen virtual proms. Sorry class of 2020, I know this is a horrible time at this point, probably no graduation and no prom. Hang in there. You guys are fantastic. We have seen Zoom-style virtual happy hours. Even though we’re stay at home it hasn’t stopped us from drinking. Fantastic! And no, we have to line up to get into Costco or Trader Joe’s. I would never have seen that coming. And I’d not have guessed that the no.1 most sought-out item during the pandemic would be tp. (Really?! Toilet Paper?!). I guess it makes sense. It’s kind of like a safety blankie. It kind of makes us feel safe if we pile it up, we feel like we have a control on the environment. It’s a psychological thing. So, while working from home, are you continuing to make adjustments or starting to look ahead to the adjustments you need to make as marketers post COVID-19? Have you begun to wonder about what behaviors will quickly revert back after the restrictions are lifted and the types of behaviors that will become the new normal? Understanding our own behavior changes will help us comprehend why some behaviors can easily be adapted and why some just can’t be molded that easily. I always tell marketers to connect the dots--to connect the different dots that don’t seem to be related on the surface. The ability to understand your own behavior adaptation patterns can make you better relate your customers’ behavioral changes. Like I said, connecting the dots. Questions we should ask ourselves about our customers: What are some of the new normal behaviors for them? Does the new normal work for us or against us? How do we need to modify our positioning and messaging? What types of content should we create to reflect the new normal? How to communicate our findings with our sales teams? Most importantly, how do the “new normal” behaviors shape their purchase journeys and their decision-making processes? So it a way, we to all need to re-understand our customers again. It’s like a couple who has been married for 20 years. Well, now is the time to re-discover each other to rekindle that romance. Yes, rekindle the romance with our customers. With that understanding (again, it’s about connecting the dots), you need to: Re-plan your overall marketing strategy Re-write existing messaging frameworks Re-document your buyers’ personas Re-update your editorial planning and content production schedule Re-communicate changes to different internal stakeholders Re-adjust your marketing budget and channel mix Re-determine your own KPIs with management buy-in I created processes and templates for you to re-think all the elements above. If you are interested, come to my 11:00 am PDT FREE webinar on 5/14. I’ll share the processes and templates and show you how to use them so that you can revise your marketing plan accordingly or at least use the templates as a starting point. In addition to that, I a few updates. For people that signed up for “Ask Pam Anything” hours and couldn’t attend, I sent you a short email of my answers to your marketing questions. If you still have questions, please reach out. I can elaborate. I understand it’s been tough for marketers at this time. Budgets have been reduced or are on hold. There has been a lack of clear management direction or, conversely, constant management direction changes due to the uncertainty. If you have any questions or just need someone to talk to, please reach out ANYTIME. (I also work at night, BTW). I am more than happy to provide my thoughts and help you modify my templates for your use. That’s the least I can do during this time to help fellow B2B marketers. I started a FB community for B2B marketers for us to ask questions and support each other. If you want to join, please send me a quick email. If you and your team are doing very, very well to adapt to current circumstances, GREAT!! Please share your processes with me. Let me promote your stories and share your successes. We all need some good news and sharing is caring. If you haven’t seen the “Some Good News” episodes with John Krasinski you need to. I love John. If there is anything I can do to help out, please send your suggestions. I’m all ears. (Well, just the two really, but I am listening. I am!) It’s a tough time, but remember, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Ok, total cliche, but true. Stay healthy and be safe. We’ll talk to each other soon.
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127 - How Should I Do Marketing During a Crisis?
04/09/2020
127 - How Should I Do Marketing During a Crisis?
Hello, this is Pam. Welcome to another pandemic episode of B2B Marketing and More. IN this episode I am going to talk about a question I received after attending the Social Media Strategies Summit “Ask Anything” webinar. Here is the question from Lauren: I work for a non-profit organization. In the current situation, what’s the appropriate way to ask for donations? or is it not at all? Lauren, I love your question. Frankly, I can modify this question for salespeople: I need to reach out to prospects to build up my sales pipelines, is it appropriate to do cold prospecting or not at all? So the truth is, we are all asking ourselves the same questions and trying to figure out what is appropriate for our own target markets and audiences. We are all looking for answers and trying to figure out appropriate actions. We’re asking what is the right thing to do, even myself. So before answering Lauren’s question I shared this blog post with her. The name sof the blog post is 5 Media Principles Guiding Google’s Media Team in the Wake of the COVID-19 outbreak from Joshua Spanier. He made it very clear that there is no playbook for times like these, I 100% agree. So here is what he’s found is that crisis can provide clarity. Here are the 5 principles that his media team follows and I thought it applies to marketing and sales teams: Context, always: You need to ask yourself: “In what instances are you comfortable putting your brands alongside news content?” “Do people care about your products at this time?” If your products can help them, how can they help at this time? Can you put it in the right context? Context is everything. Constantly reassess: Things change on a daily basis. You need to stay on top of it. Most of us have some sort of editorial planning. For myself, we plan our editorial 1-2 weeks in advance. I have clients plan their content planning 6-8 months in advance. Given that things change on a regular basis, what we plan one week ago may not apply now. We can pre-schedule your communications, but be prepared to make changes the last minutes, because it may no longer be appropriate today. Creative consideration: Given that Joshua manages the global media team, creative does matters. For all of us, both creative and copywriting matter. What we say, how we say and what images or videos we use to illustrate that our points are more important than ever. The way we communicate need to be sympathetic, respectful, and supportive. Our creative and copywriting needs to reflect that. Many B2B marketers are so accustomed to buttoned up communications (me included), but now is the time to be up close and personal. Constant priority changes: B2B marketers are so used to planning (I’m talking about me!). We plan our product launches months in advance. We start planning 6-8 months before our big events. Our editorial is likely to be planned out 2-4 weeks in advance. Well, you know what? Planning still matters. But we need to be nimble enough that we need to re-align with ever changing priorities from management. It’s not that they want to make changes, but a situation requires them to do that. We just need to be cognizant of that. Contribution and be helpful: When you are online, you’ll notice a great many SaaS-based platforms are offering their platforms for free. Many paid courses and books are free as well. Some organizations are donating their time and money to help front-line workers or fund pandemic research. All these can be talking points that you can share as a part of marketing communications, but be careful how you phrase it. And another thing is pricing changes or product offering change impact messaging, sales talking points, even content and copy we show on our websites and social media channels. It means that we need to update our webpages, and refresh or update our content everywhere. It’s a lot of work and can be overwhelming. I get it. I told Lauren there are two principles that are critical for her to be aware of: put it in the right context and be helpful. Is there way she can think of reaching out to her donors in the right context? If she can’t think of anything on her own, can she brainstorm with her team or management? Get others to help her come up with creative ideas. Again, put it in the right context. In this trying time, what we say and how we say it matters. I told Lauren that she knows her donors well, she needs to trust her gut on how and what is the best way to reach out at this time. BTW, I also shared the following ‘excerpt with her. This is a response to a question on Reddit that’s similar to Lauren’s. This marketing manager is in the travel and hospitality industry which has been very heavily hit by the pandemic. What he or she said resonates with me. Here is the excerpt from Reddit user: LobsterOnTheLand “I'm in the tourism business in Central America. The outlook is pretty grim for the short term. Realistically, no one will be traveling until next fall at the soonest - and even then tourism will be WAY down. We've decided that marketing and promoting our trips aren't the best choice right now - it won't make us look good, and no one is thinking about traveling anyway. Instead, we're doing a few other things: - Reaching out to customers who have trips planned with us through the end of 2020 and updating them on the travel status in our country, and how their trip will be affected. It's important to keep people updated. - Reaching out to good (repeat) customers and just wishing them well in this difficult time. - Working on promotional content and website updates that we can use a few months from now when the time is right. - Mostly we are just slacking off though, because there isn't a whole hell of a lot to do, and profits will be almost nil this year.” Honestly, I don’t know how LobsterOnTheLand and his or her company is going to make it, but what he or she said resonates with me. If you are struggling, just be aware that everyone is struggling as well. We are trying to pivot and do something different. We’ll make mistakes, but we will adapt and learn along the way. Hang in there, my friends. Reach out if you have any questions. Stay healthy and be well. Take care.
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126 - 5 Rules of Personal Branding
04/02/2020
126 - 5 Rules of Personal Branding
Hello, this is Pam. I hope that everything is safe and sound and working from home has not driven you completely insane just yet. It’s certainly added a lot of pressure to those who not only have to work full-time but also have to homeschool their kids and deal with the various aspects of home confinement. I get it. We all do what we can. In the meantime, ttay healthy and be safe. Today I’m going to talk about something different. 52 Limited is a Portland-based marketing recruiting firm. They launched a virtual get-together that they call ‘10 minutes with 52.’ Three days a week they invite different experts to talk about various topics for 10 minutes at a time before you start your day. What a lovely idea. I was invited to talk about "Personal Branding." Based on my experience building a digital presence for my personal brand, here are the five key lessons I shared to help you build your personal brand. Personal branding on the Internet is not about a logo or the name of your company. It's really about positioning. When you think of your personal branding statement, don't think of who you are and what you do. Think about who you are to your clients and what you do to help them. That will help you write your positioning and tagline. In addition to having a headline to describe what you do for your clients, make sure you have a sub-headline. The purpose of the sub-headline is for Search Optimization. If you do content marketing, for example, just say content marketing. No need to dress that up to make it fancy, like referring to yourself as a digital marketing maven. What does that even mean? That doesn't mean that you can't differentiate yourself or your offerings. You still can. You do Content Marketing for small businesses. That’s a differentiator. You can provide Content marketing audits in 48 hours. That’s a differentiator. Your Content Marketing approach is unique because you use AI to run the audit. That’s a differentiator. You can still talk about your uniqueness without using fancy terms that may hinder SEO. For digital personal branding, you also need to take into account digital destinations. By that I mean social media channels. How would you describe yourself on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms? What would you say about yourself given the character limitations of these platforms? Another consideration is your marquee banners on these platforms. What images should you use to show who you are? I understand that's a personal preference. Again, make sure you use the marquee banners as the extensions of your headline and sub-headline. Also, the images you choose do matter. Do you want to use icons, photo stocks or your own photos? Everyone does differently. Make sure that it follows your brand guide, colors, and fonts. Really, there are many elements to consider for personal branding when building a full digital presence. It's exhausting. Seriously... Quickly, I'll use myself as an example to talk about these 5 elements. Here is how I describe what I do for my clients on my website. Increase revenue through sales and marketing alignment My subheadline on my website: Strategic Planning/Account-Based Marketing/Customer Journey and Sales Integration To be honest with you, I want to add content marketing, but it's getting too long, so I sprinkled the term content marketing into various pages and my blog to help SEO. So there are other ways you can do it if you can’t add certain services to your subheadline. Here is the statement I use for my Twitter: Accelerating marketing’s contribution to sales via strategic planning, workshops, & keynotes. Author of Global Content Marketing & Effective Sales Enablement. (So again I use a couple of keywords: content marketing, sales enablement). Here is the statement I use for my LinkedIn: Accelerating B2B marketers’ contribution to Sales: Content Marketing | Sales Enablement | ABM | Keynotes | Workshops| Consulting (So I use some of the keywords to describe what I do). Ok, a quick summary to wrap this up: When you think of your personal branding, have fun with logo design and the name of your company. Have a blast! After that, think about who you are from your clients’ perspectives and what you do to help them. Have a sub-headline for SEO optimization on your website. Be very clear about what your offer to optimize for search Make sure your statements on social media platforms are consistent with how you describe yourself on your website. Pay attention to your marquee banners on social media platforms. The images are also opportunities to communicate who you are and what you do. Personal branding is a lot of work in the digital era. There are many, many fronts to cover. I literally just described the beginning of a personal branding journey. Once you start on that journey, you'll have more questions. Reach out and we can chat. Oh, by the way, I am doing "Ask Pam Anything" Hours on 4/13 9-10 am PST, 4/14 4-5 pm PST, and 4/15 8-9 pm PST. Come and ask me anything about B2B Marketing, Career Development and other marketing topics. I'll do what I can to answer your questions and make it actionable. Come join me, simply go to pamdidner.com and click on the webinar page to register. I hope to see you there. Stay safe and healthy. We will talk again next week. Take care!
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125 - Who Owns Sales Enablement and B2B Marketing
03/26/2020
125 - Who Owns Sales Enablement and B2B Marketing
Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. I know that it’s going to be a stressful time for all of us. I do hope that you’ll find time to relax and get a sense of normality from listening to my episodes. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends. Hello everyone! Today is Sunday. Sunday is both lazy and busy afternoon. It’s a lazy morning and buzy afternoon kinda day. Sunday is the only day that I allow myself to sleep late and wake up whenever I want to wake up. It means that I don’t usually get up until like 10 am, so a very lazy morning of doing nothing. I love it! Then, I start working again on Sunday afternoon, like writing podcast or video scripts or recording podcast and video. Blah, blah blah! I was interviewing a marketing director of my clients a few days ago to help them build a collaboration process between B2B Marketing Group and Sales Enablement Team. During the interview, the Marketing Director made it very clear to me that B2B marketing should reside with the Corporate Marketing Team and should be part of the marketing function. You know what? I understand where she is coming from. Earlier this year, there was a talk that B2B marketing should be part of the sales team given that they are supporting business accounts and corporate sales. Plus, most of the marketing dollars such as media dollar and demand gen campaign budget supporting B2B marketing is coming from sales; therefore, the sales team feels that they should also own the team. Well, I can see both sides. Marketing wants to have the B2B Marketing Team as a part of their teams and the Sales Team feel that all the B2B Marketing dollars are coming from them so B2B Marketing should be part of corporate sales. Organizations often struggle which part of group should belong where. Sales enablement is a great example. I was doing my research for my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. I have heated discussion with several sales enablement managers where this group should reside. Some are adamant that this should be part of sales. Several feel that sales enablement has a function of demand gen, therefore, they should be part of marketing. In many tech companies, believe it or not, sales enablement is part of product team or business units, because subject matter experts are within these teams and many sales-centric content is created by the subject matter experts and also the content creators. Heck, one company, recently, marked the sales enablement team as part of HR, since the core of sales enablement they did is all about on-boarding and training. This team did a great job, they were allocated to HR to help other teams to do better jobs on employee training. Granted there is no right or wrong answer. Here is my stand on this. Where the B2B Marketing or Sales Enablement resides depends on the purpose of the team and the maturity of the company. If the company is a start-up and growing fast, everyone is nimble, it probably doesn’t matter where the team reside. The core is communication, everybody talks to each other all the time and things get done. If the company is growing, chances you are going through growing pains at different stages, your company will go through different re-orgs to test out where the group should reside. If the sales team is growing rapidly, it may make sense for sale and marketing all stay under sales during that stage. If the company reaches a plateau or mature stage, the sales team has a bigger sales force, the marketing team is growing, as well, it may make sense to break down to have B2B marketing as part of the marketing, and sales enablement as part of sales operations, sales training or on its own. It really depends on what you want sales enablement to do. B2B Marketing from my perspective should stay in corporate marketing and that has its benefits. The biggest benefit is that you can leverage the corporate marketing’s resource and use other marketing resources whenever necessary. Where does your B2B Marketing and Sales Enablement reside? Share that with me. If you enjoy my podcast and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
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124 - 3 Ways to Keep Your Marketing Moving in Times of Uncertainty
03/19/2020
124 - 3 Ways to Keep Your Marketing Moving in Times of Uncertainty
Hi, everyone! I'm doing something different for this episode in light of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic in our industry. Today, I'm sharing an excerpt from a webinar I did on March 18, focused on how to keep your marketing moving in times of uncertainty. I teamed up with Ryan Lewis, a good friend of mine at Bonfire Marketing. At the end of today's episode, I will have details on what else you can learn in the webinar and how to watch it. Before I get started, just want to let you know the sound quality may not be as sharp as what you're used to. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy the episode. Webinar excerpt: From my perspective, now is actually a perfect time to actually start engaging with sales. If you are working with your sales team closely, fantastic! They are your BFFs! Try to actually enhance that relationship, if you will. And they are three things I want to talk about and just to share with you in terms what are some of the best option to actually work with a sales team as a marketer. The first one is you need to think about modifying your product messaging and positioning. The second one is about revise your content based on the new positioning which is I just talked about, and to take into account the current new formats of a virtual communications. Obviously sales love to do face to face. Now it's an opportunity they can't. So they are forced to change and they using the new tools, and you need to understand how they are using that tools and to better help them in terms of the communication. Another one is give them some love and give the strategic account the air cover to complement the sales engagement. So with that being said, let's move on to the next slide. And the couple examples I want to share with you in terms of modifying the product messaging and positioning that has a lot to do with the business strategy changes. For example, I'm a platinum members are United, and I got this message. And if you actually have flown United, you know that if you want to make any reservation changes, they charge you whopping $200, right? Doesn't matter unless you pay three times of airfare otherwise you have to pay the reservation change feeds and you can see the email I got was actually way before March 3, they basically said, “Hey, I know customers are looking for more flexibility as they make their travel plans right now,” which is true, right? Everybody's canceling the traveling plans and the future reservation. They basically said “Guess what, if you book anything, anything at this time between March 3 and March 31st, you can change it for free for the next 12 months, it doesn't matter your location destination the date, you can make the changes with no change fee.” Same thing for Loom. Loom is actually a video platform. If you haven't used them you should look into it. I love using loom to make a quick video recording to share some of the feedback I have with my say social media manager or even I want to say a quick thank you to a potential prospect. I do a quick recording on Loom and I just send it out. It's wonderful and easy tool to use. And the full Loom, they actually have a premium version of it. They also have a paid version which is the Pro. On the free. I call it premium or a free version of it you can only record up to 25 videos. Now they actually change their free plan from 25 to unlimited, right and also cutting the price of lawn pro in half before it was $10. Now it's $5. And they change the existing free trial from 14 days to 30 days, on top of it. This is the most important part. They know that all the teachers and also K to 12, and education institution, universities are doing everything online. So they are really working hard to make sure that the tool is available for teachers and students. If you are a marketer for Loom, this is a business strategy change. On top of it, you have to Change your messaging, and your positioning of your product. Second thing that you have to change is the content, right? In the past, you were probably creating content horizontally that apply to all industry segments. Now with this specific direction change, you have to think through that some of the key content that you are going to create needs to be specifically tailored for teachers and students, and also K to 12, schools, universities and other education institutions. As a marketer for Loom you need to think through, “oh, now with this direction changes, I need to think through in terms of the segments I need to go after to align with the product messaging, positioning, and also the vertical that sales team will go after. You know, what does that mean to you? Well, obviously, for me, I'm a pro member. I'm actually going to get some of my money back and apply to next year. That's great. So this is actually a very good email in terms of talking about the changes, and how the marketers modify the product messaging and the positioning changes, and at the same time, increase the pipeline. Does that make sense? Now let's move on to the next one. And you probably said, “okay, Pam, that's great, but that's a B2C examples.” Understood. Now I'm going to share with you in terms of B2B example, Sirius XM, and a lot of you probably have it. I'm actually a member as well. Obviously, consumer is probably biggest portion and also revenue drivers. But they also have for business right here on the upper right hand corner, right? When you click on that, this is the page that I show in terms of they obviously sell this specific product through the authorized resellers. They are working very closely with resellers and channel partners to sell this to businesses which is the right model. I see that as the right model for Sirius SM. So with that being said, you can see that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 they have a six talking point or positioning to sell to businesses right before is probably monthly fee now is low monthly fee. Maybe in the past, they actually have a long-term contract that you have to sign. Now they have no long term contract. So there are some messages are changing, and you need to make sure that your content and your messages align with the new direction to actually help educate the resellers. So modifying existing or creating content is actually essential. So how does that impact you? I mean, you will like “oh, yeah, you know what this? I do this all the time.” I totally understand. But engaging with sales you need to start observing and understanding how sales use to currently current online conferencing tools, right and then create a sales entry contents to align with that, and your demos video, which is interactive content that needs to be easily shareable and easily incorporated into the company's online conferencing tool. Another thing is very, very important is while you are creating content, just don't create a content and pass that to a sales team. Is it possible that you can buy in the right context and map your content through the different sales stages. So with that being said, that's, that's one thing that you need to pay attention to. And the last one I want to talk about is use account based marketing to provide air cover. And now is the time that you need to stay very closely with a sales team, especially about their game plans. Maybe when they started their 2020, they have a very ambitious goal to actually go after new accounts. But now, with the current situation, they probably need to make a change adjustments between the existing versus new customer ratio, and you need to understand that because that will impact your demand generation goes, okay? Another thing is they the total sales revenue, annual revenue, they have to achieve maybe the same, but they probably make an adjustment between quarters in terms of what that revenue should be. Again, you need to understand that and then you have to modify your demand generation goal accordingly. Another thing in terms of a sales pipeline, they are looking into the existing sales pipeline very, very closely. Whatever is in the pipeline, you probably look into it have a lot of thoughts and they are modifying and to determine what is actually the right plans to move forward. And they are going to have a multiple or more frequent sales, huddles meetings and you need to attend that just to stay close, right? And another thing that you need to think about in terms of account based marketing is you will to find, I guess, a challenge or a difficult time in terms of how to rebalance your marketing outreach between the top of the funnel and also the bottom of the funnel accounts, communications. And another thing that you will run into is in terms of budget discussion, right. And I was in the corporate world for a long period of time. I totally understand in a time like this, the first things that got cut is trouble budget. The second thing got cut is a marketing budget, right? So you probably have to go through the 5% budget cut reduction scenario, 10% as well. And you need to look into it and see if you can maintain and salvage some of the marketing budget. Snd one of the best way to do that is align with a sales goal. Okay, so look into that and see if you can do what you can to make sure that you take care of your sales team and also maintain your marketing budget. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. To see the whole webinar including Ryan's portion, visit my YouTube channel. Ryan's talks about different conferencing, interactive technologies and marketing tactics that you can leverage to keep momentum going. Really helpful information. Simply look for the thumbnail for “Everything Was Canceled. Now What?” You can’t miss it. If you'd like to see the slides, please send me an email at hello@pamdidner.com. Before I sign off, I want to acknowledge it's a tough time for all of us. Honestly, it's even tougher for independent consultants like me. Most of the speaking engagements are canceled and the client engagements are put on hold, which is totally understandable. However, I take this opportunity to reflect, determine the next steps and to continue to do personalized outreach. And for some of you, I understand, I totally sympathize that working from home is very challenging, especially with young children. I hope that you do find time to relax. If I can provide assistance in any possible way, or you simply just want to have a chat like a therapy session, please reach out anytime. And in the meantime, stay healthy and be safe. Take care.
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123 - The Role of Data in Approaching AI Marketing
03/12/2020
123 - The Role of Data in Approaching AI Marketing
Hello, everyone. In the past several episodes, I’ve been discussing AI’s role in Marketing. As I’ve been talking about all the wonderful magic of AI, you might ask, “What’s the catch?” Well, there is a dark side. If you use machine learning as a way to implement AI, you need to make sure you have high-quality data first. Whenever I mention data, marketers are like “WHAT?” I was like “WHAAAAT? I know, right? Data is really the marketers’ nemesis. So the quality of data: you need to define in terms of the quality of your data and also your data sources. You need to know the quality of your data. And here’s an analogy from Wilson Peng, CTO of Appen (and I love the analogy!). He said, “If you train a computer vision system for autonomous vehicles with images of sidewalks mislabeled as streets, the results could be disastrous. In order to develop accurate algorithms or predictions, you will need high-quality training data.” And I 100% agree with that. Amazon famously scrapped its AI recruiting tool because it shows bias against women, given they based their datasets from resumes submitted to the company over a ten-year period. And guess who submitted the majority of resumes to Amazon? Mostly men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry. Basically, the way that they used the dataset to train the AI—or Artificial Intelligence—is biased, therefore the recommendations that come down from the AI recruiting screening is going to go against women. So they basically said, “that’s not gonna work” and I 100% agree with that. As a marketer we often have this love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with data. Most data tends to be scattered in different areas, sources or over different platforms. And please don’t ask me where the data source of my Google Analytics is! I don’t even know. To work with the data and understand the data sources, it’s very important to work with IT to pull data from various different places. It’s also important to work with vendors or data scientists who actually know how to build the model and have experience to prepare and measure the quality of datasets. Yes, AI is a lot of work. I never said it was easy, right?. So if you are responsible for AI initiatives, you need to work with IT and different stakeholders and vendors to create in-depth quality control process for data. Can you imagine marketing and quality control? That just doesn’t go together, such as creating multiple quality metrics, and actually having weekly data deep-dives, regular testing and auditing. There is no shortcut when it comes down to the quality control of your data. Here are some suggestions to mitigate bias from the Inside Big Data site: (yes, there is a site called Inside Big Data!) 1) In addition having the data, you also need to label the data; you’ll need skilled annotators to carefully label the information you plan to use with your algorithm.” You need to be sure they are labeled correctly. When internal team members label data, they will always add some bias because they have expectations about what their system should conclude. If you decide to use an internal team to label your data, make sure you also consult an outside source to help foster an objective annotations environment. So labeling is very, very important. 2) When you train your datasets, try to find the most comprehensive data and experiment with different datasets, metrics and segmentation to ensure you’ve covered the bases and also tested and see the outcomes of recommendations and compare them. 3) Check for implicit bias in the data as part of your quality-assurance process. Once the product is live, monitor performance using the data it generates to determine whether it’s delivering equitable opportunities and outcomes for all users. So the training data is critical for a successful AI initiative. Although the quality-assurance processes are tedious (I mean I went through it and I’m pretty sure I put you to sleep!), “Quality training data not only begets algorithms that work in the real world, it also helps mitigate some of the bias inherent in manual data annotation.” That is the role of data in AI marketing. If you enjoy the podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. Be well, and let’s talk again next week. See ya! Jeffrey Dastin, Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women, Reuters, Oct 8, 2018, Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019,
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122 - Three Use Cases of AI for Marketing
03/05/2020
122 - Three Use Cases of AI for Marketing
Hello everyone! So, I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence--which is available on Amazon. Simply type “Pam Didner” or the name of the book “The Modern AI Marketer”. Download to your Kindle and check it out. Love to hear your feedback! I mentioned in my past podcast that I wrote this book to help myself and others understand how AI fits into the field of Marketing. In the eBook, I mentioned six use cases. For today’s podcast, I want to talk about three or so that you can get a sense of it of how AI applies to Marketing. So one specific case I want to share with everybody is the chatbot. Whenever you go to the website you will see a little bot at the bottom of the right hand corner, waving it’s hand and wanting to talk to you. So a lot of times I will try the chatbot and ask specific questions and see if they can answer them. And a lot of time they are not giving me the answer I need and I end up talking to real people, which is fine. But there is one website which I go to all the time trying to find freelancers and it’s called Upwork. I don’t know if you use them, but if you are looking for freelancers check out that specific website. From time to time I need to change the milestones of my project or add additional money because my scope has changed. So I don’t know how to do some of that work and I will go to their support site and they have a little bot. And I ask multiple times in terms of different questions. Interestingly enough, that specific bot always gives me the answer I’m looking for. I am very impressed in terms of how Upwork works with the bot and build the workflow and also help the bot understand and learn from the different questions that people are asking. So that’s a very good example in terms of AI use in Marketing and Communication, especially on the website. Create a blog post or white paper And another thing I want to share with you is in terms of content creation. For example, many publishing companies they are using home grown AI reporters. uses automated technology, Cyborg, to generate 1/3 of its financial news, especially company earnings reports. The Washington Post used the home-grown AI content generation machines, Heliograf, to create content for coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympics Games and the 2016 Election. The media company has been using this AI-based content creator (aka robot reporter) to cover local-specific news which the publisher can’t afford to assign to full-time local reporters. So they are using the robot reporters to actually pull the content and write the content based on the keywords and also pull from trusted sources. This works well if you know the intended outcomes of your content. For most white papers, we know what we want to say, what information we want to emphasize, and what the call-to-action should be. Given that we know the predictive outcomes, it’s actually possibly and plausible to use AI to create a first draft of the white paper for you. If you write blog posts or long-form content, look into , the AI Content Intelligence and Strategy Platform that will transform how you research, plan, and craft your content. I don’t believe that MarketMuse can write the content for you, but its capabilities can certainly help you to optimize and refine your content. Support sales via account-based marketing Another use case I want to share with you is basically supporting sales using account-based marketing. Sales and marketing have traditionally played two separate roles within an organization. Marketing focuses on the top of the funnel and drives demand, while sales is responsible for the bottom of the funnel and closing deals. I am a firm believer that marketing’s primary role is to support sales, in addition to driving demand and building brand equity. There are many ways to support sales as a marketer. I talked about these extensively in my book, (if you are interested in purchasing the book, focus on chapters 4-7). As AI is further embedded into sales and marketing tech tools, it naturally forces alignment and bi-directional communication between these two groups. This has further elevated the need to integrate marketing automation and CRM tools. Many companies do that. One approach marketers can take to help sales is account-based marketing, which implements targeted campaigns and outreach to complement the sales account’s approach. The purpose of ABM--account-based marketing--is to address the needs of individual target accounts. What AI can do is further enhance the customization and the prediction. To do that, it requires a pool of intelligence (aka data) at both the account and individual customer levels to tailor your ABM efforts. One of the key desired outcomes for account-based marketing is to predict prospects’ intent or enhance propensity to buy. Predictive insights and intent data give you real-time intelligence on the accounts that are most likely to convert. This obviously streamlines account prioritization and fully optimizes your budget allocation. And there are several companies that can actually help you to do that. One of them is . It’s used by many enterprise customers, and positions itself as the end-to-end ABM solutions from identifying accounts between sales and marketing, personalizing content and ad retargeting, to tracking the prospects’ ABM results. The AI is also embedded into a DemandBase solution. This is one tool that is used widely my many enterprises. Another company is called . They have AI-powered platform that helps B2B marketers scale their account-based marketing programs across different channels. They connect and consolidate multiple internal and external data sources, and build audience segments using AI. So these are some of the companies and also use cases for account-based marketing. Extend reach via media-buy Obviously another use case example I want to share with you is a media buy. The media-buy landscape has changed dramatically with the Internet. Ad placement is no longer a direct communication between advertisers and publishers using email or phones. Now you can buy and sell your ads inventory using an algorithm. You are bidding on the different inventory. So it’s basically created and managed by machines or AI. It plays a critical role in the media buying process. There are many, many platforms that use the latest advancements in machine learning to optimize impressions in the real-time bidding process, like , , , etc. So, brands can use artificial intelligence to serve more relevant and targeted messages in the right places, at the right times, by providing data-driven insights So I’m sharing different use cases with you in terms of how AI is being used nowadays in the current marketing landscape. If you enjoy my podcast, feel free to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. That would be greatly appreciated. One new video every week. In the meantime, be well and let’s connect again next week. Take care. Bye bye! Jaclyn Peiser, the Rise of Robot Reporter, the New York Times, Feb. 5, 2019, Joe Keohane, What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism, February 16, 2017,
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121 - The Benefits of AI on Marketing
02/27/2020
121 - The Benefits of AI on Marketing
Hello everyone! Last week, I shared with you that I wrote a little eBook about AI that you can purchase on Amazon Kindle. Just in case you missed last week’s podcast, the name of the book is called The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing. The book was written for marketers to understand what AI is and how marketers can apply it in the work they do. Like I said last week, modern marketing is grounded on using technology to reach out to your audience digitally. You can’t scale, segment or personalize your marketing without technology. That’s why technology plays a critical role in marketing. In this eBook, I touched on many things, from definition of AI, a bit of history, benefits, and use cases to expectation that you need to set if you for implement AI. So for this podcast, I want to pique your interests on the marketing-specific benefits of AI. When people talk about AI benefits, they tend to mention AI benefits in very generic terms. For example, AI can: Enhance data analysis such as predictive analysis Offer recommendations and predictions Automate your repetitive tasks But what are the marketing-specific benefit using AI? Well there are three from my perspective. Here are the true benefits of using AI in terms of marketing 1) Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Customers Say, you have a large dataset on how customers engage your website. If you want to learn what types of content people usually read before they contact your sales team on the website, you can build a model by feeding your existing dataset and see the recommendation from AI. Of course, you can compare your findings with your gut or account-specific data to understand the differences and similarities between the AI’s recommendation and your recommendations. Use that information to refine your content editorials, in addition to keyword optimization. 2) Personalize engagements with your customers With digital obviousty everything we do is tracked—we are completely tracked—so you can use third party AI-based tools (there are a lot of software with machine learning or deep learning capabilities built into it), marketers can learn exactly what customers are doing in real-time. There are 3rd-Party tools which can analyze customers’ posts and online conversations to help marketers understand their sentiments, desires, needs or even pains. I mentioned Alyce in the past. Alyce is an AI-based gifting platform which can crawl your target audience’s social profile and come up with specific gift recommendations that you can send to get their attention. So a lot of stuff moving forward in order to scale, personalize and segment, you need AI to help you and AI is one technology. 3) Improve customer experience through journey mapping We do AB testing, use heatmaps or even focus group testing to gather information so that we can understand our customers better and improve their customer experience. What if we can build an AI model by working with your internal data team or work with a data analytic vendor to analyze customer journeys! This obviously will require you to integrate your outbound marketing campaigns to your website analytics. I understand Google Analytics and various third party tools are doing that. However, you can take the data further by merging with other datasets and also external data to understand, say, the time lapse from the first visit to the most recent visit on the website, the types of content or pages consumed, the product demo viewed online or sales email exchanges to see the customer journey by industries or by personas. Then, you can use the information to optimize the touch points, maybe use the data to predict or anticipate what the customers will do in the future. Here is the takeaway: I’m not here to tell you how to build your AI model or you need to do that. To really look into AI in terms of how AI can help you, the key is to know what questions you want to ask and then find a solution or build a model to answer your questions. Does that make sense? But I’m sure sure that you can use other approaches to get the answers as well So here’s a list of questions to think about building an AI model: Based on our account history and payment transaction data, what do the top 25 new accounts look like? What is the average transaction size? How does that compare with sales’ own top 25 account list? Are they similar or different, and why? With our existing lead scoring, what minimal score do prospects usually reach in order to get them to request a demo? With that score recommendation, what is the average success of closing a deal? What marketing channels drive the highest quality MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)? How much money can I allocate to that channel to see an improved rate of return? How many pieces of content do prospects consume before they contact us? What are they? How are these content pieces different based on different industries or personas? To me, the biggest benefits of AI for marketers lie in personalization and recommendations. We all know how to do mass communications. But for the next era of marketing, though, AI holds the key to providing insights and recommendations to do even more effective mass customization. If you enjoy my podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. Be well. Let’s talk again next week. Take care!
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120 - New Book Release: The Modern AI Marketer
02/20/2020
120 - New Book Release: The Modern AI Marketer
Good morning, everyone! I have super exciting news to share with you. I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence. Yeah! Here’s the thing: when I’ve spoken at conferences in the past, it’s been clear to me that marketers are intimidated by AI and don’t know what to make of it. AI piqued my interest when I was doing research for the Technology chapter of my 2nd book, . Ever since, my fascination has skyrocketed. To help marketers and sales teams better understand AI, I wrote a 9000-word Kindle ebook: The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing to Get Ahead. I am a strong believer that modern marketers need a firm grounding in relevant technologies so they can use it to their advantage. I am not saying that you need to write code or implement AI initiatives at this time. But as a starter, it’s nice to understand what it is and have some ideas on what it can do for you as a marketer. The book starts with simple definitions, history, and then I dive into the various marketing-specific benefits of using AI, from running hyper-targeted automated email campaigns to extending reach and improving the overall customer experience online and offline. It’s an easy read. I promise! And I make it fun. So go to Amazon, type my name, Pam Didner or the name of the book Modern AI Marketer. Download automatically to your Kindle. Oh, at the end of the eBook, I also provide a list of useful books and online resources. I am positive that you’ll get a good sense of AI, and discover how to apply it in your own way. Happy AI reading! If you enjoy my podcast, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. It’s all about B2B Marketing. So, be well and let’s connect again next week.
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119 - Questions You Can Ask to Understand Your Sales Team
02/13/2020
119 - Questions You Can Ask to Understand Your Sales Team
Good morning, everyone! I’ve been doing several webinars and podcast interviews in the past 5 weeks. I found one question particularly interesting. That was from Jeff, CEO of MarketMuse. He asked me: “What are some examples of questions I ask to understand my salespeople?” If you are working with your sales team and don’t have a good relationship with them just yet, here are some questions that you can ask to get to know them. It’s worked well for me and I want to share with you. For a starter, here is the top question I ask frequently, and it always gets them talking. How do you handle rejections to salvage the potential lost deal? OMG, it’s like giving them a free therapy session. They would talk about the different types of rejections they encounter and the frustration of almost getting the deal closed and losing it at the last minute. Interesting enough, they can always recount specific deals they’ve lost and what they did before and after that. It’s a question that gives them an opportunity to tell their personal stories. I simply just listen, which helps to get to know them. To follow that question, I usually ask them: For those accounts which they lost, should the contacts come back to the marketing database for further nurturing. Why or why not? Then, they start sharing their perspectives on the different types of rejected leads, which types make sense for nurturing and which one don’t. That’s valuable information for marketers to help determine what to do with rejected leads from the sales team. It helps you to work on customized campaign to reach out to these leads. Depending on how the conversation goes, I also ask what the biggest deal is they closed in the last 2 years and why they think they were able to close it. They love talking about their major victories. I let them show off their glorious moments. Who doesn’t like to share how awesome they are? Again, I just listen. Then, I ask them to dissect their recipes for success. That helps me understand what they did right to close the deal, such as their game plan, their conversations, their email exchanges etc. Again, it’s not an interview. It’s just a casual conversation over a cup of coffee between two colleagues. The next question is: What content do you find most useful? I usually have them walk through the typical sales stages from prospecting, qualifying, demo and proposal down to PO placement. Why do they usually do at each stage? What does email communications look like? What types of content are incorporated into their emails? Interestingly enough, most salespeople still love product-collateral and case studies or white papers. More and more are asking for video format content. My last question is always: How can marketing or I help you? What can I do to help? Of course, that opens the flood gates for a long wish list, but it doesn’t mean that you have do all of them. It gives you ideas of what they need and helps you prioritize what you can do to support them. So, those are my questions to understand my sales team over a cup of coffee: How do you handle rejections to salvage the potential lost deal? For those accounts which they lost, should the contacts come back to the marketing database for further nurturing. Why or why not? What the biggest deal they closed in the last year and why they think they were able to close it? What content do you find most useful at different sales stages? How can marketing help? What can I do to help? There! Those are types of questions I ask my sales peeps. So, what questions do you ask to understand your salespeople? I’d love to hear from you. If you are inspired by what you hear today, please leave a 5-star review and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
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118 - The Pros and Cons of In-House vs. Outsourced Marketing
01/30/2020
118 - The Pros and Cons of In-House vs. Outsourced Marketing
Hello from Portland. This week is one of those weeks when I have several pressing client deliverables. On top of that, I also need to create several podcast and video recordings. Creating content to build my personal brand and working on client projects are two full-time jobs. Ugh… What is the take-away of this: Don’t do what I do. It’s too much work. Speaking of creating content, here is a LinkedIn message from Queenie who lives in Hong Kong. She said: Hi Pam, I continually read your blogs and find them useful as I am in the B2B marketing field and specialize in the Asia Pacific market. Shall we connect so I can be informed about new articles. Of course, Queenie! I’d love to connect, I answered. In response, she added one quick question: When it comes to content marketing, I understand many in-house experts can contribute content but they might not write it in a customer-oriented way. For a tech startup company, what is your take on outsourcing the content writing vs getting a copywriter in-house? Actually, Queenie, every marketer struggles with that decision. Should I hire someone FT or should I outsource? Which marketing functions should I take in-house and which should be outsourced? The pros and cons of in-house vs. outsourced: For in-house resources: Advantages: You have total control of when and how things are done for your marketing materials and campaigns. There is more transparency on how things get done. The teams understand products and services better. Faster communications among team members. Much lower risk of confidentiality breach. Disadvantages: Takes longer time to turnaround than agencies Skills are more likely to be broad rather than specialized Less industry experience Reduces employee time left for other business initiatives For outsourcing: Advantages: Scale efforts quickly Access specific and specialized disciplines such as SEO, Facebook Paid Ad buy, Quick turnaround with new creative ideas You can focus on strategy and leave the tactical implementation to contractors or agencies Disadvantages: Lack of complete dedication to your business Lack of full understanding of your products and services Requires multiple rounds of reviews High turnover of account team support There is no perfect solution How do you decide when to use in-house vs. outsourcing? To me, this is a budget and headcount discussion. I always ask my clients: Do you have an approved headcount to hire someone full-time? Or do you just have budget for outsourcing? For a tech startup, chances are that you don't have headcount and a small budget. You likely need to outsource as much as you can. I told Queenie that even if you get a headcount, you should hire someone who can wear multiple hats and cover multiple marketing functions, from copywriting, e-mail marketing, to social media outreach. Many blog posts suggest that you should outsource repetitive tasks or tactical work. The challenge is how do you define tactical work in modern marketing? Is SEO tactical? I think it’s quite strategic, yet, many companies tend to outsource that. Is content creation tactical? Personally, I believe it’s very strategic, but again, many companies outsource content creation. Understand your existing talent pool and what they can do Evaluate your overall marketing plan and identify the gap between your talent pool and marketing plan. Then, use your headcount and budget to determine which marketing functions to insource vs. outsource. The key thing about outsourcing is to make sure that you spend time to train and brief your contractors and agencies. Don’t expect them to know your products and services. It’s your job to brief and train them well. They can excel if you nurture them and provide the tools and knowledge to do their jobs. Give them wings so that they can fly. I told Queenie: In-house or outsource, that’s no right or wrong answer. At the end of the day, it's what you are comfortable with, how you want to prioritize your resource and budget. I made it very clear to her, if she wants to hire contractors, make sure that she takes time to brief and train them. Queenie, it was great connecting with you on LinkedIn. I hope that we can meet when I visit HongKong next time. So, how do you determine when and how to insource or outsource your marketing efforts? If you are inspired by what you hear today, please leave a 5-star review and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. Be well. Let’s connect again next week.
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117 - Is a Career in Marketing Right for Me?
01/16/2020
117 - Is a Career in Marketing Right for Me?
Good Morning from Portland, Oregon. I have a confession to make. I travel a lot and most of my clients are not in Portland, Oregon. The truth is that I don’t know many local marketers. So, I attended a networking event the other day and I had the opportunity to talk to several local marketers. One of the young marketers I met, Ken, asked me an interesting question: How do I know if a marketing career is right for me? He received a marketing job offer after he graduated from college. The job is not exactly what he expected; therefore, he started questioning whether this is right career path for him. The question he poses is perfectly legit, especially if you don’t particularly enjoy what you are doing. Pay attention and be in tune with you likes and don’t like. I asked him if he knows what he wants to try next. He said that he is not sure. I also asked him if there are any specific parts of marketing that he enjoys. He said he loves creative and copywriting, but is really not much into data analysis. Yet, as part of his job, he needs to do SEO and social media analysis. I understand that completely. I don’t much enjoy data analysis myself, especially trying to pull analytics manually from multiple sources. Ugh. What a pain! Here is what I shared with him. Everything has 2 sides. While there may be parts of our job that we enjoy very much, there is usually some part of it that we hate with a passion. That’s just part of the life. I told him not to write off marketing yet. Pay attention and be in tune with he likes and doesn’t like. Observe what he is naturally good at and what areas he needs to improve. Find a way to learn or delegate to others I didn’t advise him to only focus on the part of job he likes and ignore the parts that he doesn’t like. For example, I’ve never like to do data analytics, but be able to analyze data is an important part of modern marketing. I can’t just ignore that or not do it. To solve that dissatisfaction, I could either find a way to do it myself or delegate to someone to do it. Rather than just letting someone else do it, I look at it as a learning opportunity. That doesn’t mean that I learned to code so that I can do data analysis. I am not a coder and I’ll never be a coder. That’s my limitation. If I need to learn to code to do data analysis, that will literally kill me. So, I find 3rd party tools to conduct data analysis. Learning how to use new tools and dissect data is a way to expand my marketing skills. That’s one way of dealing with part of the jobs I don’t like. Find a way to learn or delegate to others. Sometimes, you can find a solution to deal with something you don’t enjoy doing. Sometimes, you just can’t. For example, I have a friend who is an awesome event manager. With digital, she also needs to learn how to promote her events on social media. No matter how hard she tried, she just doesn’t get how to do social media effectively. She tried to learn, but she also reached her limitation. Finally, she began delegating to a contractor while she sticks to what she knows best, which is doing physical event production. Therefore, it’s important to find ways to work around or deal with the parts of the jobs that you don’t like to do. Sometimes, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Although Ken told me that he likes creative and copywriting, he is not crazy about SEO and social media. I told Ken to observe and pay attention to his daily tasks and write down what he does every day. Sometimes, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Maybe changing the processes or using different tools would substantially change how he feels about SEO and social media. You just never know. This idea really resonated with Ken. Take time to self-reflect and analyze why you like or don’t like about your job before you pull the trigger and change your career path. Ok, I hope this also gives you some ideas on how to do analysis of your own job, especially if you are thinking about your next big move. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and comment on Apple Podcasts. , if you prefer a video format. Type Pam Didner on YouTube, you’ll find me. Again, if you like the content, please subscribe. Be well, enjoy your job and talk to you next week.
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116 - How to Define a New Marketing and Sales Role
01/09/2020
116 - How to Define a New Marketing and Sales Role
Good Morning from Portland! It has been super chilly lately, and RAINY. It’s cold! My husband was like, does it matter to you? You are always inside working anyway. True! But…who doesn’t like a ray of sunshine shining through the window, right? Question: What if you could define your own sales enablement role? I received an email from Kate. In her email, she mentioned that she’s been an account manager for several companies. She started as a Sr. Account Manager with a new company a year ago. From her perspective in this role, she’s identified a large gap in marketing and sales collaboration; so her manager asked her to create a new role to address these gaps. She read my book and loved it. Thank you, Kate! She wanted to have a chat to discuss how to better define her new job. If you can define your own role, that’s GREAT news!! Kate. Congrats. It’s wonderful that your manager asked you to define your own role. It’s an endorsement that says you’ve been doing a fantastic job. And you earned enough of his/her trust so that you can write your own job description! Kudos to you, Kate!! Here is the approach I told Kate to take so that she can create a win-win job description not just for her, but also for her group. Create your own version of the job description first. Given that Kate’s been with the company for over a year as an account manager, she knows where she is having trouble getting support from Marketing and what she can do to guide marketing and other internal stakeholders to better address these gaps. I suggested that she do a quick 30 minutes exercise on her own. She needs to answer one question: In a perfect world, if she could wave a magic wand to get any support from Marketing that she needs, what would that look like? I told her to write non-stop for 15 minutes about anything that comes to mind. Then, spend the remaining 15 minutes reading the list out loud. Edit and refine the list to identify the areas that she will own, that marketing will own and others that they will need to work together on. Now, she has a rough description of the sales enablement job. Next, set that aside. Interview internal stakeholders to get their perspectives Step 2 is to interview stakeholders such as Marketing, Inside Sales, Outside Sales, and even Product Development. Ask them, if there were a sales enablement role within the company, what do they think that role should do? It’s better to talk to them rather than have an e-mail exchange. With Zoom, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams, it’s easy to do virtual conferencing. Put your headset on, turn on the camera and have a great chat with them. The reality is that they’ll give her a laundry list which will need to be pared down. Therefore, it’s important, at the end of the conversation to ask the internal stakeholders to prioritize and give her a top 3. Just 3. What are the top 3 things that they would like to see a Sales Enablement manager do. The benefit of talking to stakeholders is so that the job description is not created in a silo. Plus, they may identify some things that Kate didn’t even think about. Compare and review the job description with internal stakeholder’s feedback Now, Kate can compare her list with internal team’s priorities. This will help her write a 2nd draft of the job description. Out of this draft, she can also identify what she won’t do, to set expectations upfront and ensure that everyone is on the same page. One more tip: Focus on one big win and many small wins In addition to getting the job description right, I told Kate, for a new role like this, she needs to identify one big initiative and several quick wins from the start. Quick wins are low-hanging fruit that she can achieve to show success and build traction. A big initiative is likely to take several months or a year to complete and involve stakeholder collaboration. Most importantly, she can use the big initiative to request budget and headcount and start building her own team. If you ever had a chance to write your own job description, try this approach and see if it works for you. If you like this podcast, B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you like to watch videos, , simply type Pam Didner. You’ll find my channel. Please subscribe. Again, for any questions, please send them my way. Be well and talk to you next week.
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115 - How to Document Your Marketing Contribution
01/02/2020
115 - How to Document Your Marketing Contribution
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that you had a great holiday and are well-rested. I was on the road from 10/14 to 12/21. I am so happy to spend the holidays at home and just chill . . . and eat. As a marketer, if your company’s marketing plan for the new year is done, I’d strongly recommend you do one thing, tie your job contribution to your Company’s business goals and marketing objectives and do that in one page. This is especially important for a marketing specialist, an individual contributor or a first-line manager. Obviously, we know our roles and responsibilities. There are many things we do on a daily basis, such as answering email or attending meetings, that don’t really contribute to achieving our business goals and marketing objectives. When I mentor marketers or even work with my clients, I always encourage them to document what they do and tie that to the company’s business and marketing objectives. Here is a simple one-pager I want to share with them. On this one-pager, there are six components that you need to fill out. I am going to read them first. Business Goals Business Objectives Marketing Objectives Marketing Strategies Your Deliverables and Contributions KPIs Let’s talk about the first one: Business goals. What is your company’s revenue, growth % or market segment share goal? It’s important that you know that. This is especially important if you support your sales team. Business objectives: What does the company want to accomplish this year? Maybe the company wants to grow a new segment, tackle new countries, or launch new products. Write 1-2 statements. Marketing objectives: What does marketing do to support the business objectives? In general, marketing tends to build brand awareness, drive demand or enable sales, but it needs to align with business objectives, say, of going after new segments, tackling new countries or supporting product launches. Strategy is how. How do we drive demand? What tasks do we need to do to make that happen? The next one is your contribution. What do you do to contribute to the strategy? Can you list 3-5 deliverables that connect to strategy? The next is how do you measure your success? Be very specific. The number of content items created. Number of MQLs or big projects such as complete a website refresh. It’s important to have one pager like that. When you have a 1:1 meeting with your manager, you can use it as the basis for a discussion. This will help make sure you are both in sync and agree on your plans and that they support the objectives. If adjustments are necessary, you can make them collectively. To welcome the new year, I hope that you sit down and create a one-pager and let me know how it works for you. If you like this content, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts. I also have a . I publish one video a week. Each video is about 5-7 minutes long and all about B2B Marketing. If you prefer video, please subscribe. Reach out anytime at Pam (@) PamDidner dot com. Again, Happy New Year!! Talk to you again next week.
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114 - My Lessons and Reflections From 2019
12/12/2019
114 - My Lessons and Reflections From 2019
If you are a long-time listener, you know that my episodes tend to focus on marketing and business, not so much about me. I am going to be up close and personal today as I record the last episode of 2019, I decided to do a little self-reflection, a look back to my 2019. Frankly, this year didn’t start very well, business-wise. I didn’t tell many people, but my pipeline was bone dry the first 5 months. I had speaking engagements and small projects here and there, but nothing steady or substantial. I was so scared that I started considering going back to be a full-time corporate citizen. You know how you are hitting a wall and can’t break through and you don’t know what the next steps are. That’s how I felt earlier this year for several months. The key was that I had a good run for the first 4 years, and I didn’t do a good job to continue developing my sales pipeline. I got cocky and thought the business would just come. Well, it didn’t come in the first half of the year. So, I started investing in business development and re-evaluating my business model. I started prospecting. I talked about how I started that in my blog post: . I also evaluated my business model. Most of my projects are 2-10 month long engagements. The purchase cycle to get a project like that is long. Because I am in B2B, my purchase cycle for new clients can range from 3-18 months. That’s not a quick turnaround to increase revenue and billings, isn’t it? Projects like that are still the bulk of my revenue. However, I, now, offer 10-hour and 15-hour consultation and mentor packages. The cost for these packages is smaller and many B2B marketers can pretty much pay using corporate credit cards. It doesn’t involve a PO or the challenge of being an approved vendor. I’ve been testing this new model and, so far, it has been well-received by people who came to my sessions and workshops. I started getting inquiries from people who listen to my podcast as well. The people who reach out for this kind of help are newly promoted VPs of Marketing, Marketing Directors, marketers making a career transition from traditional to digital or young marketers who have the goal of becoming a director or a first-line manager. They want some help to cultivate their strategic thinking skills. I’ve been there and done that. That’s my forte and I know how to help people build that skill set. I talked about how to think strategically and how to cultivate strategic thinking in Episode 106 and Episode 107. At the same time, with the business model changes, I am also evaluating the content I offer. I re-aligned the content I create with my business models and created more templates. It’s amazing that the structure of your business models has ramifications on everything you do. This is also why my one-page marketing plan always starts with business goals and business objectives first before going into marketing objectives. Business models and objectives guide marketing strategy and planning. Period! On the speaking front, I continue to sharpen my craft. I try different ways to deliver my keynotes and sessions. I add humor whenever possible and I select fun images and gifs to add colors to my presentations. I try different openings and closings. I have always viewed myself as a coach and teacher, but here is my newfound discovery. I’ve come to realize that the audience wants to learn, but they also want to be entertained, especially going to session after session at a conference. They are tired of listening. So, I’ve been thinking about what I can do to entertain them, yet also deliver useful messages and key take-aways. The mindset of being an entertainer literally changes how I work and deliver my presentations now. I am not saying I need to be a stand-up comedian, but it helps to look at different ways to deliver dry materials like messaging frameworks or sales/marketing alignment. I keep asking myself: “How can I make it more fun?” In addition to blog posts and podcast episodes, I launched my YouTube channel in October. Adding video content has been on my bucket list for 3 years. You probably don’t know this, but I tended to freeze and get very nervous in front of a camera. Well, after 20 video episodes and countless re-takes and re-recording, I’ve finally overcome that. But I continue to hone my craft. To be honest, YouTube is not the most ideal channel for talking about B2B marketing. Seasoned B2B marketers usually don’t go to YouTube to find information. They tend to start with search. I am doing this for myself to further improve my presentation skills. Although, I suspect millennial B2B marketers will be going to YouTube for information and maybe that can be a growing potential audience. With business development, new business models, a different approach to delivering presentations, and the launch of my YouTube channel, needless to say, I’ve been very busy. Building a personal brand and working on client projects are 2 full-time jobs. I work until 11 or 12 often on weekdays and weekends. My husband, Mike, would read, do his music or whatever, while patiently waiting for me to be done for the night. I am so grateful to have a partner who allows me to be me and gives me space to do what I need to do. However, he does think I am crazy to work that hard. I know. I am crazy. Ok, the reflection is not all about work. I do yoga 2-3 times a week. I take on the challenge of learning 1-2 difficult poses every year. As of 2019, I can finally say that I can do a headstand (Salamba Shirshasana Sirsasana), handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana), and forearm stand (Pincha Mayurasana). For 2020, I want to focus on a couple of backward bend postures, especially the upward bow pose, Urdhva Dhanurasana, which is a backward bend while lifting up your spine using your arms and legs. And, one thing on my bucket list is to learn how to dance. I started taking dance lessons to learn how to waltz and tango. Yes, I am a tango dancing B2B marketer. These are two different dance styles. One is super elegant and fluid, the other one is about showing force and crispness for each move. Dancing and yoga help me manage the stress of working 2-full time jobs. I love it! Looking back on 2019, like everyone else, I’ve had good days and bad days. I’ve had more setbacks than successes, but that’s what life is all about, we learn from setbacks and failures. I’ve met some great people, I’ve also met some asses. I chose to focus on the best time and let the bad moments go. I am grateful that every morning I can look forward to a new day. I am grateful for all your support. With the holidays and family events and celebrations approaching, I hope that you’ll take a quiet moment with a cup or a glass of your favorite drink to reflect on your 2019. Cherish what you’ve accomplished and made a mental note of how far you’ve come. Let go of negativity and emotional pain. Get yourself ready for 2020. It’s going to be here in no time. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!! I’ll see you in 2020. Again, this is Pam from B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. Signing off for 2019.
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113 - How Lately Personalizes Customer Support
12/05/2019
113 - How Lately Personalizes Customer Support
If you listen to my podcast on a regular basis, you know that I am not affiliated with any tools or platforms. Occasionally, I mentioned certain tools and platforms for my listeners to check out if they are dealing with specific marketing or sales challenges. For social media, I’ve been using ‘Buffer’ for several years. However, a good friend, Lisa, introduced me a tool called ‘Lately’ to me. This tool has the functionality of Buffer, but at the same time, it uses AI to autogenerate social media posts for you. You can quickly pick your favorites or edit the posts, then schedule. You can choose how and when you want them to post, or have Lately’s AI schedule for you based on your audience engagement history. You can seamlessly stockpile your post with hash-tags and short-links. Lately will send them as scheduled to help drive traffic back to your website. In addition, they have built-in dashboards, the graphs are visually compelling and similar to what you see on Tableau or Power BI. As you are publishing your posts, you can see the traffic on different social media channels and correlate it to your website traffic. You can click each day to see the traffic on each social media channel and connect the results with your workflow. Once the business development manager, Chris Breault, did a quick demo to me and my team. We were enthusiastic and definitely interested in a free trial. By the time the free trial expired, we signed up to use the tool. You know this is pretty typical for SaaS-based tools. You get a demo, you try, you like and you buy. There is one thing Chris did which impressed the heck out of me. About one week after we purchase the tool, he sent me an email with a video. I thought this video would be a typical tips and tricks video. No, he created this video for me. He said that he went to my account to check if I am using the tool. He noticed that I’ve been scheduling a bunch of tweets using Lately. That means that I am using the tool. Then, he went on to talk about tips and tricks that may be of interest to me. He also said that if I have any questions, I can schedule another demo with him. I love this video. What a wonderful follow-up with a new customer. He not only checked on me, but also went into the system to make sure that I was using the tool. Obviously, some people may perceive this as an intrusion of privacy, since he didn’t get my permission to log into my account. I get that! However, I am running a business, everything I do is business-related. On top of that, all the posts will be public, anyway. In this case, I am OK with him checking on me and providing additional information on what I can do better. However, asking permission is certainly a good protocol to follow. I purchase many SaaS-based tools, I don’t usually hear from sellers after I complete the financial transaction. Some tools are used by millions of users and you can’t follow up with everyone. I understand. I just want to say that I liked receiving that personalized email with a video specifically created for me. The challenge is how to scale that. Do you have any suggestions on how to scale that when your user-base grows? Again, if you like the content, please subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts. If you prefer YouTube, . I publish one video a week. Thank you for tuning into to B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. Have an awesome day!!
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