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A little bit about our own marketing...

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Mar 2 2009

I had the pleasure of dining with colleagues the other night, and at some point, conversation shifted from the day's training to the company's marketing efforts.  And although no one verbalized it, the underlying question was, do we practice what we preach?  After all, we are a marketing services firm that helps companies apply insight gleaned from customer data to make better, more informed marketing decisions.

The answer:  Yes and no.  As a business-to-business (B2B) services marketing organization, we are not nearly as sophisticated as some of our consumer counterparts.  Our sales cycle is long and our solutions tailored to meet the specific challenges our clients face.  In such a complex sales environment, it can take multiple "touches" (approximately 5-7) before we even engage a prospect in a conversation. 

In general, complexity hasn't been enough of a driver to force B2B marketers to speed up their marketing maturation.  Many still lag when it comes to customer strategy, analytics, marketing process improvements and the implementation of enabling technologies.  And many more haven't evolved their thinking regarding programs: they tend to stick to those tried-and-true demand generation tactics - direct mail, trade shows, events, inside sales, etc. - because, well, that's what they've have always done.         

But that's changing.  More and more B2B marketers (including myself!) are starting to employ some of the more sophisticated techniques B2C marketers have long had in their toolbox.  In a recent Forrester report, principal analyst Laura Ramos indicated that now more than ever, B2B marketers need to take more of a "left-brain" approach to marketing - deep customer understanding; centralized, well-managed marketing systems; and data-backed analytics - in order to move the needle.

It doesn't happen overnight.  Here at Quaero, we've been working on marketing improvements for the past nine months.  We've built a marketing database that sits on top of salesforce.com and begun some extensive data hygiene work.  Also, we are in the process of appending our marketing database with critical information that will help us better understand our "customer" to serve as the basis for a customer segmentation.

Crawl. Walk. Run. Despite our progress, we're still in the "crawl" phase of the project.  When push comes to shove, we still mail quite a bit to a broad audience because it's easy.  We still struggle to determine campaign ROI.  And, we need to do more to understand customer value.

It will come.  Quaero is on the right path towards better marketing effectiveness and I know many of my B2B marketing counterparts are thinking along the same lines.  Even in the last month, we've begun to dig into campaign performance and tighten our messages, offers and targets.  Once the hygiene work is complete and our segmentation built, we will deliver better, more targeted programs that create greater value for us and our clients. And we'll optimize continuously to improve performance.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on our evolution. Are you a B2B marketer?  What types of challenges do you face?  And more importantly, what are you doing to meet them?

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