3 Steps To (Im)Prove the ROI of Your Reference Assets

Published: February 18, 2014

By Neil Hartley, VP Sales and Marketing, Boulder Logic

When used optimally throughout the sales cycle, reference assets can support the sales process and ultimately improve deal close rates.

Despite the benefits, about 80% of B2B material produced by marketing for sales goes unused — and this includes reference assets. This contradiction has resulted in marketing teams increasingly struggling to justify continued investment in reference assets such as case studies and video customer interviews.

By Neil Hartley, VP Sales and Marketing, Boulder Logic

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When used optimally throughout the sales cycle, reference assets can support the sales process and ultimately improve deal close rates.

Despite the benefits, about 80% of B2B material produced by marketing for sales goes unused — and this includes reference assets. This contradiction has resulted in marketing teams increasingly struggling to justify continued investment in reference assets such as case studies and video customer interviews.

Why is that? Based on our experience, here are four of the most important factors:

  1. The type of reference asset produced is not optimized for a particular stage of the sales cycle.
  2. Reference assets are not sufficiently personalized to match the buyer’s persona.
  3. Reference assets are typically held on the corporate web site, often with a poor search experience and no obvious marching orders as to who should go find them (sales or the prospect?)
  4. When an asset is used within a sales cycle, how is that usage tracked? Without tracking, how can marketing know which assets are most often used in closed-won opportunities?

There are then three relatively easy steps any B2B marketing organization can take to address these issues and consequently (im)prove the ROI of their reference assets:

  1. Ensure the reference assets are used by sales and consequently seen by your prospects.
  2. Provide a delivery mechanism that enables tracking; linkage to the sales opportunity in CRM and reporting.
  3. Better match assets to the buyer persona and serve Sales with different asset types at different stages of the sales cycle.

Ensuring that reference assets are used by sales requires, firstly, that sales people can find those assets from within their CRM environment and, secondly, that Sales can deliver those assets using a medium that adds value to both the sales person and the prospect.

At Boulder Logic, we solve this problem by integrating the reference database with the CRM and using advanced search algorithms that enable the sales person to easily find the best match reference asset for their prospect. We then enable delivery of relevant assets to the prospect using branded microsites. When a prospect engages with the microsite, the sales person receives an e-mail notification which is a great value-add for that sales person. The prospect has a single url containing varied content which makes it far easier for them to share across their own organization.

The same microsite technology also tracks which of the reference assets are viewed by the prospect. As the search for reference assets was instigated from the CRM opportunity record, the use of an asset can be automatically tagged to a specific opportunity and reports generated that will enable the ROI of reference assets to be measured.

This then addresses the second step to prove the ROI of reference assets. Of course there are many other ways to achieve the same goal but the key requirements are findability, delivery, tracking and reporting.

The third step is to better match content to the buyer persona. To explain how this works requires a quick lesson on how people make buying decisions.

People make emotional buying decisions and then use logic to justify them. This is not a matter of conjecture; it is a biological fact governed by the brain’s limbic system.

Traditionally, use of references has been at the end of the sales cycle, particularly for live reference requests, meaning they are not a true factor in the buying decision, merely a component of logical justification. The focus on large repositories of “heavy” reference assets on corporate websites also only addresses logical justification: “Look, we have hundreds of customer stories, but we don’t really expect you to read them.”

Even though the decision process is emotional, there are psychological triggers that can be brought into play to influence/persuade. There are six triggers that we all rely on as shortcuts to help us through the myriad choices we face in everyday life. These are covered in Robert Cialdini’s excellent book, Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion. The one that is relevant for this discussion is “consensus.”

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves — especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves. From a reference asset viewpoint this then suggests, as often as possible, matching the content to the buyer persona and attempting to trigger this shortcut as early as possible in the buyer’s journey.

Who is the prospect? What sector are they in (not just financial services, but insurance; not just insurance but commercial, etc.)? What role do they perform (specifically)? Country? What problem are they trying to solve?

Niching down on the buyer then necessitates a shift from relatively few assets to many pieces of micro-content that match the buyer persona and that can be served up either through marketing automation or via sales and their CRM.

Enabling sales to find reference assets, the delivery/tracking/reporting of those assets, and then a fundamental shift to micro-content that exactly match the buyer persona are, thus, the three steps to (im)prove the ROI of reference assets.

Neil Hartley is VP of Sales and Marketing for Boulder Logic, a provider of enterprise customer reference management software and services for complex sales and marketing environments. He can be reached at neil@boulderlogic.com.

 

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