Our new InfluencerCommunities subscription service

InfluencerCommunities.com, Influencer Communities, Influencer50, Nick Hayes, The Buyerside Journey.comWe’ve recently launched our new InfluencerCommunities subscription service. Here’s why. There’s a massive disconnect between the importance of an industry sector’s most important influencer communities, both online & offline, and the attention paid to them by vendors’ marketing depts.

According to InformationWeek, special interest communities featured in the top five most likely sources of vendor information for prospective purchasers (both at initial problem scoping and at vendor choice stages).

And while over three-quarters of B2B industry marketing heads rate their industry sector’s main forums & communities (both online and offline) as very important in influencing their prospects, less than one-third are confident their company has ongoing, proactive relationships with those top communities.

So companies really need to know which online & offline communities are the most influential in their sector. Which they should monitor, which to ignore and which maybe to join. Where are their industry’s most important conversations going on and who’s instigating them?

And it’s not just about which communities have the most members. Are their members those people moving & shaking the sector or are they just … followers? Which of their sector’s top influencers are members? And what should they do to engage with those people once they’ve identified the most important ones?

Our new Influencer Communities subscription service answers all of the above and more. We expect it to become one of our most popular services.

 

 

As mobile search overtakes desktop, is personality becoming irrelevant for the enterprise salesperson?

iphone-377887Enterprise salespeople have talked for many years about the critical points in their customer’s buying process. For most it incorporates some combination of the following: the initial realization that a problem exists, the scoping of the challenge, the search for an internal budget champion, the visualization of a solution, the long-listing of possible solutions, the early outreach to potential suppliers, their shortlisting, the internal proof-of-concept, the cost/benefit analysis, the final bake-off, the deal negotiation, and finally the sign-off.

When large sections of this process moved online a decade or more ago, many aspects changed. The timescales, the increasing number of long-listed suppliers, the lack of face-to-face time allowed for the salespeople, the fact that sales were only aware of the prospect’s interest far later in the process, etc. For ten years the majority of salespeople have struggled to adopt to this new way of working. And now the goalposts have moved again.

As online search has increasingly moved from desktop to mobile, so the buying process too has changed. Search results appear very differently on a mobile – the attention span is shorter, the search terms briefer, the convenience and immediacy more important. Online contextual text chat more relevant. Relevance and Immediacy have become watchwords. The right content, personalized, in real-time. The skills required of a salesperson are changing again.

I have a friend who’s worked as an enterprise salesperson for many years. She’s very hard-working, diligent, very engaging personality and always willing to travel. She says her skills are less valued than they once were – what’s the point of a great personality when your opportunities to display it are so reduced? When early-stage decisions have already been made on a mobile screen, only those shortlisted suppliers are now even getting to introduce themselves to the prospect. By then, impressions have already been cast – and that’s not ideal for any salesperson.

What vendors are now looking for are banks of prospect analysts, those who can watch a series of online queries and predict, then instantly supply, the information most likely to be of direct help to that enquiry. Sometimes its a real-world conversation, sometimes a relevant case study, sometimes a competitor comparison and at other times a business RoI argument. Offering the wrong option can kill the opportunity – with little hope of getting it back because you don’t know who’s doing the asking.

Mobile is certainly changing what triggers interest (and disinterest) among would-be buyers. And I think the salesperson will increasingly struggle to find a satisfying role.

Influencer50 launches new ‘exec benchmarking’ subscription service

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We just issued a new service allowing clients to benchmark the influence of their own execs against those of their top competitors – something we’ve been doing informally for a while now. Here’s the official announcement.

Influencer50 has launched a new subscription service by which companies can have their chosen executives benchmarked for influence against each other, or against execs from competing companies. Our new Executive Benchmarking service is based on our award-winning offline, online and social influencer methodology.

Influencer50’s approach to Influencer Identification differs from those of other ‘influencer’ companies in our focus on real-world prospect & customer influencers rather than the currently trendy ‘blogger influencers’.

Each executive is rated on seven fixed criteria – Market Reach, Frequency of Impact, Expertise, Persuasiveness, Thoroughness of (Customer) Involvement, Peer Group Citations and Online Connectedness. Each of these criteria is applied with their ‘customer influence’ potential in mind. Clients are also able to select one additional measurement criteria.

The objective is to analyze which individuals yield the most influence within the client’s marketplace, and better understand how this influence is both established and maintained. Clients are then provided with custom advice on how they can systematically improve on their influence. No criteria can be ‘gamed’ by over-eager executives or their support staff.

A single subscription spans eighteen months and allows for three separate influence reports allowing subscribers to monitor the changing trends in influence exerted by their execs. Pricing for an eighteen month subscription (one immediate reading, a second at nine months and a final report at eighteen months) is $9490 for up to five execs. or just $4990 for up to two execs. Each report includes a detailed analysis of why each executive rated as they did – and, importantly, how to improve their influence. (Pricing for higher number of execs, or for longer durations, is also available.)

“Time and time again our clients have been as interested in how their own execs fare for influence as they are in who their company’s external market influencers are. Whether for performance measurement, recruitment or marketing purposes, an executive’s personal influence has become a vital factor in how one organization can out-compete its rivals. It makes sense that we now introduce this as an affordable, stand-alone subscription service.” explains Nick Hayes, Principal at Influencer50 Inc.

Influencer50 is a leading influencer identification, engagement and measurement firm operating in the B2B and B2C marketplaces. With offices in San Francisco, London and Sydney we have conducted influencer programs in over 40 countries across four continents.

For more information go to influencer50.com/benchmarking

Anecdotal evidence of success is vital for continuing any Influencer Engagement program.

EngagementCover.peel3Point 3 of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs is that anecdotal evidence of success is vital for the continuance of any program – yet companies rarely have any way to record this.

Some clients like their engagement programs to be fluid – they believe in them because they know they make sense. Others prefer them tightly orchestrated and documented to the smallest detail. Some of ours have been detailed on Excel sheets with more formulas than I’d have believed possible. But one force has been proved, time and time again, to be more powerful than almost any other, aside from the cold cash of a direct resulting sale. Executives with personal anecdotes. A hundred actions, responses, metrics and the like are nothing compared to a client exec. with the power to approve budget saying “I was at a customer the other day and he was absolutely being influenced by (Influencer X)”.

It might not be scientific proof, or even driven by any kind of data, but one anecdote from the right executive and everyone down the chain falls into place. That’s why senior salespeople are so useful, and perhaps critical, to have on-board though the engagement process. They keep the budget in place during the inevitable dips in more tangible progress.

What’s particularly interesting is how few companies have any existing framework to collate such anecdotes. If the quote comes in as an email it can obviously sorted in a particular folder, or simply printed out, but beyond this, it just doesn’t happen. Yet every engagement program needs to harness these quotes, capturing them at the time and reminding senior management of them at key points down the line. Short-form video is by far the best format, way better than just audio and a hundred times better than an email – yet none of our clients have ever established this without us suggesting it. The quality of cellphone video is now more than good enough and iOS, Android and WindowsPhone can all transcribe to text from video. Collate the various video clips in an online database, even an iCloud Photo or Flickr album will do, and integrate them into your next program or performance review. You’ll be amazed how powerful they’ll prove.

The second of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs

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Point 2 (of 6). Many critical influencers don’t have any existing relationships with our clients. We’ve recently concluded one of our Influencer Perception Audits for a client of ours – one of the best known global software companies. One you would imagine knew everybody who mattered.

Having identified the top market influencers in a particular business sector we conducted a one-to-one audit on how each of those identified influencers currently viewed our client in that sector. One of the questions we asked was ‘ Do you have any existing working relationship with any of (our client’s) point executives, and if not, is this something you would like to have?’ It’s a typical starting point question we ask so we’ve come to know the likely trend in responses. The findings are made more interesting by the fact that in advance of the audit, we ask our client which influencers they already have a working relationship with.

As emphasized in our most recent audit, our client’s execs typically believe they have existing working relationships with perhaps 50-60% of the individual influencers. Sometimes it’s less, but rarely more. When we ask those identified influencers the same question, closer to 20% believe they have a working relationship with any of our client’s execs.

How much of this ‘over-belief’ by the client’s execs is just the bravado of human nature, how much is “I might have met him/her only once but I’m sure they’ll remember me”, and how much is the assumption that “it may not be me personally that knows him/her but I’m sure one of our team must know them”, is impossible to say. But our experience shows that it is never the case that the influencers believe they have a better relationship with the client than vice-versa. Clients always over-estimate the strength of their relationships. Sometimes by an astonishing degree.

It makes me wonder to what degree this also relates to the executives’ working relationships with their prospects & customers. How accurate is their gauging of the strength of those relationships? If there were a similar 30-40% gap between opinions then that could explain plenty of lost sales.

Aside from informal surveys such as ours I’m not sure how many vendors seek to qualitively measure the strength of their existing relationships. The acid test most used – “did you win the sale?” – is a winner-takes-all moment in time, with no opportunity for a second attempt. So the homework needs to be done in advance. Starting with the customer’s key influencers.

The first of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs

EngagementCover.peel1I was putting together a presentation on our Influencer Engagement Programs last week and thought it might be useful to outline some of the key learnings we have. There’s way more than six but I’ve chosen six and I’ll write about each in separate posts.

Point 1. Marketing depts. are still heavily, and rigidly, compartmentalized. And that’s a problem. The influencer model requires breaking that apart. As soon as we’ve identified the key customer influencers for a client, those influencers are then typically segmented into those the client routes to the PR agency, those to the social media team, those to the AR folks etc. Those that can’t be dispatched to these teams are mentally put into the ‘others’ category. Most companies have little existing mechanism to deal with these others. Through no fault of their own, they’re considered ‘awkward’ to accommodate. The cause is that their benefits are ‘awkward’ to measure.

Let’s go back one step. Marketing depts. are intrigued by who the individuals really influencing their customers are. There’s a genuine interest to find out. And an excitement with the ‘identification’ results – the feeling of a new dawn. But when they do find out, clients rarely have the internal structure & processes to act on this new knowledge. And then they can stumble.

Marketing depts. don’t have to break anything to commission us to identify their real customer influencers. They have to have interest, and a budget. But to act on our findings they often do have to break something internally. Because much as they’d like to create a new way of interacting with these new-found influencers, they’re restricted in how to deal with them by the existing fiefdoms within their organization. And they get into people-politics.

How do they choose to engage with the single consultant, who occasionally blogs, sporadically contributes an article to a trade mag., but who regularly consults to a number of large prospect opportunities? The PR team doesn’t want to lose that person from their long list of journalists, even though they’re never going to be a priority on that list. The client’s consultant relations team hasn’t the resource to proactively engage with small consultants either, preferring to spend their time with the much larger consultancy brands. And in terms of the influencer outreach program, how do you measure the value that influencer contributes when they act only as a background advisor to one or more prospect companies? Keeping them ‘onside’ with you costs time, patience, budget, and your influencer program needs to show a return on investment each quarter.

PR depts. and agencies think they have a hard enough time justifying their own existence – yet their traditional focus on journalists & the media means their eventual return can at least be measured in column inches, site stats, audience ratings, etc. AR teams can find they have a harder job because often only the analysts’ written reports are seen as tangible returns, when their actual role can be much broader. But how do you persuade your bosses of that? Yet compared to other categories of influencer, the returns from AR & PR activity are relatively simple to display on a PowerPoint chart. And that’s what seems to count. When each category of influencer may require a slightly different RoI metric to reflect the success of your outreach, it needs a particularly motivated, secure, senior and understanding client executive to support the ongoing engagement stage.

No surprise then that so many marketing depts. opt for the instant, though sugary, gratification of social media outreach. All those retweets, shares and weblogs look so much better on a PowerPoint graph. Whether they have any effect on sales is a very different argument.

Salespeople focus on knowing the buyer, but why not those influencing the buyer?

I’ve never known a vendor salesperson claim to know who his customer’s influencers are. Not in any detail at least. The majority I’ve spoken to – and it must now be in the high hundreds – might say “the finance boss”, “her line manager” or, even more vaguely, “usually those in the business unit”, but it’s never definite, precise or much thought about.

Salespeople do undoubtedly have a far greater understanding of the prospect themselves. They’ll likely know who are the eventual decision-makers, many of those who could potentially throw a spanner in the works and those who are likely just tire-kickers. By asking a few questions they’ll know soon enough whether the incoming enquiry has the support of the company’s bosses or not. And they’ll know with whom to start their initial cold-calling. Experience will have told them who they should be engaging with. But they still wont know who behind the scenes is influencing the eventual choice.

When I ask these salespeople why they don’t invest much effort into understanding the real influencers I’m told, “we just don’t get the time”, “buyers like to keep that quiet”, “it’s always changing” and “you never know until the decision’s made”. Salespeople clearly don’t expect much help from their marketing depts.

There has to be a better way. Using data not anecdotes. Now that’s the direction Influencer Marketing should be moving in.

B2B Magazine UK survey on how business purchase decisions are now made

B2B Marketing mag, BaseOne, Buyersphere Report 2015,, Influencer Marketing, Influencer50, The Buyerside Journey.comAn interesting survey was published earlier this week with recent data on how business purchase decisions are being made. These were all for UK B2B purchases exceeding £20k (approx.$32k). And the standout finding for me – reaffirmation that social media is not being used by buyers to guide their purchase decisions to anywhere near the degree vendors would have you believe. 50% of all purchasing decision-makers didn’t use social media at all to shape their buying decisions.

It gets worse for Twitter. Just 5% of the >200 respondents said they referred to Twitter for help in their decision-making process. This was the second-lowest score, just edging out the 4% who used Pinterest.

Top of the social platforms was not surprisingly LinkedIn (18%) and Google+ (16%). Online community sites came in at 10%.

So why are vendors (and their agencies) continuing to invest so much in their Twitter outreach? It’s certainly not based on a knowledge of their customers.

The survey is well worth reading. Hat-tip to the UK’s B2B Marketing and BaseOne. http://www.b2bmarketing.net/resources/buyersphere-report-2015

LinkedIn data shows ‘Influencer Marketing’ job roles are really social media job roles

thebuyersidejourney.comIn 2014 LinkedIn featured 514 recruitment posts for ‘Influencer Marketing’ or ‘Influencer Relations’ positions. That’s up from 289 the previous year. 206 of the 514 were from marketing agencies looking to fill roles within their agency, leaving 308 ‘in-house’ positions. We then looked at what criteria were most commonly cited as being requirements for the position. The three leading criteria, in order, were: Experience of social media outreach & engagement, Proven ability to apply metrics to activity, and Ability to integrate influencer outreach into broader marketing goals.

No wonder Influencer Marketing has gone so off-track. The LinkedIn data proves that those recruiting the positions are now seeing it as social media-based and those fulfilling the roles are themselves wishing to focus on social.

I’m wondering where the ‘understanding of the customer and what influences them’ comes in to play – if at all. I don’t see it in the ‘social media engagement’ because I’m pretty sure that’s all about the level of retweets / comments and shares. And I don’t see it in the ‘integrate outreach into broader marketing goals’ because that’s likely about the number of eyeballs reached and turning outreach into email addresses and Facebook profiles.

So as the incoming generation of influencer marketers bring with them their interest and focus on social media metrics, I think we’ll just have to look elsewhere for a greater understanding of the customer and their buying behavior.

Time for a step-change in what we’re doing.

 

What’s wrong with the current state of Influencer Marketing?

A starting point is that it needs to get back to having the prospective buyer at its center, not the vendor’s marketing dept., or worse still, the vendor’s PR agency. Five years ago it was of clear benefit to the salesforce, helping them better understand who was most influencing their sales targets. Marketing depts. took it on because they could see it at last being the glue ensuring sales & marketing alignment.

Then social media, which plays a very different role for marketers than it does for buyers, took hold. Marketers saw that through social media, influencers could simply become an additional database at which to aim their promotional messages. Which then led to a series of problems.

1. The term ‘influencers’ was given to any tweeter or blogger with even the smallest of networks

2. Systems like Klout emerged that allowed these tweeters to big themselves up – wasting a lot of people’s time in the process.

3. Marketers – desperate for metrics to show their bosses – could now show impressive graphs of outreach, retweets, likes and more.

4. New marketing tech firms emerged looking to sell the identities of these tweeters & bloggers to brands desperate for new outreach channels.

What this has created is a new marketplace for those acting as middlemen providing access for brands to ‘pay-for-play’ bloggers. Of course, the two sides are sold very different stories. The bloggers are told to endorse the paying brand as surreptitiously as they can, knowing that the more they can smuggle in brand references the more likely they are to earn repeat business. The brands are told that these bloggers & tweeters have been individually selected for their authenticity, sensitivity and audience. And that all their bloggers operate a full disclosure policy to their audience. When the brand notices that the blogger hasn’t disclosed their association they’re told this was a one-off mistake. And far from being individually selected, the middlemen are playing a numbers game. They aggressively advertise for increasing number of willing bloggers, just as low-end taxi companies promise endless numbers of would-be car drivers the best-paid job of their lives. For their part, the bloggers & tweeters game their own numbers – audience numbers, Klout scores, subject coverage, etc. in order to out-compete their rivals for any type of payment.

But these are very far away from being influencers. The problem is that it’s not in any of these circle’s interest to admit that. Brands want to be able to show they’re reaching real influencers, the bloggers & tweeters want to appear as attractive as possible to attract the money, and the middleman broker agencies (for which there’s absolutely no barrier to entry!) want to promise brands access to the largest possible database of would-be promoters. It’s an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ scenario. And it wont stop until the vendors’ salespeople remind their marketing dept. of what they expect from their influencer outreach. Legitimate sales prospects!