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!

B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner

135 - An Example of How to Cultivate Strategic Thinking

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.

134 - A Reminder That You Are Not Alone

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.

133 - What is Sales Enablement Planning?

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.    

132 - Prepare for Future Disruptions with a Marketing Continuity Plan

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: Important Templates You Need to Update Your Marketing Plan. 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.

131 - Webinar Series to Help You Think Strategically

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.

Ep 130 - One Big Marketing Takeaway from COVID-19

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.  

129 - How to Start ABM with Your Sales Team

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.

128 - Tips to Build Your Recovery Marketing Strategy

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.              

127 - Is It Appropriate to Do Marketing During COVID-19?

Hello, everyone. A listener Ron sent me a question and asked me “Hey, my company doesn’t have a sales enablement group. Do we need one?”   That’s a good question, Ron. The need of sales enablement depends on your sales team and who is doing what to support sales. Chances that you already have sales enablement type of functions in your company, but it’s really not called sales enablement. Does that make sense? It’s probably part of Sales Operations, it’s part of Marketing, or it’s part of the Product Marketing team. They are jobs being done, it’s just not being called Sales Enablement.   For example: most of sales enablement is about training sales how to sell, and training them to know about products, or even onboard them when they start. Someone or a group of people are probably already doing that to support sales.  In some cases, marketers are working closely with sales to supply them messaging, sales collateral, sales deck or email templates to enable sales team. Maybe you have marketing people pretty much stay on top of that, and doing a certain function or portion of the 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 processes so that they can do their jobs. And that can also be part of sales enablement or sales operations job. Possibly somebody’s already working on sales tools and sales process sourcing and also implementation. I’d 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—kind of like a virtual team. Marketing is working on collateral, finance may be helping on sales forecast, HR is working on sales incentives. They are doing their jobs in supporting sales.   You need to identify the gaps that sales need help, 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 the team? And that’s pretty much a headcount and budget discussion with the management.   I hope I answer your question, Ron.   Do you have a sales enablement team in your company? What do they do? Share with me.   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.

127 - How Sales Enablement Helps B2B Companies

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!

126 - 5 Rules of Personal Branding

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.  

125 - Who Owns Sales Enablement and B2B Marketing

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.

124 - 3 Ways to Keep Your Marketing Moving in Times of Uncertainty

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.[1] 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:[2] (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.”[3] 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.”[4]   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!   [1] Jeffrey Dastin, Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women, Reuters, Oct 8, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G [2] Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, https://insidebigdata.com/2019/11/17/how-to-ensure-data-quality-for-ai/ [3] Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, https://insidebigdata.com/2019/11/17/how-to-ensure-data-quality-for-ai/   [4] Editorial Team, How to ensure data quality for AI, Inside BigData, Nov. 17, 2019, https://insidebigdata.com/2019/11/17/how-to-ensure-data-quality-for-ai/   

123 - The Role of Data in Approaching AI 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. Bloomberg uses automated technology, Cyborg, to generate 1/3 of its financial news, especially company earnings reports.[1]   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.[2] 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 MarketerMuse, 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, Effective Sales Enablement (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 DemandBase. 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 Lattice Engines. 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 Albert, MediaMath Omnichannel, IBM Bid Optimizer, 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! [1] Jaclyn Peiser, the Rise of Robot Reporter, the New York Times, Feb. 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html [2] Joe Keohane, What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism, February 16, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/     

122 - Three Use Cases of AI for Marketing

Do you want actionable marketing tips? In every episode Pam Didner will answer one specific marketing question that will help you in you business.

hubhopper

B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner

hubhopper