B2B Marketing Book Review and Commentary, Part 1
Posted on 12.23 2009 by: Future Now
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I recently finished up a darn good book on B2B marketing called Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World. It was written by Steven Woods, who co-founded the ‘marketing automation platform’ vendor, Eloqua, in 1999.
I’m going to attempt to summarize, review, and add some commentary as it pertains to how we at FutureNow use this concept of ‘digital body language’ to increase the marketing effectiveness of lead generation sites.
First off, I would say that the title of this book really hooked me. I wasn’t quite sure what the author meant by ‘digital body language,’ but ‘deciphering customer intentions in an online world’ is exactly the challenge that us Persuasion Analysts love!
Next, since it’s a book review, I feel I should provide some critique. The publisher, New Year Publishing, should have done more quality control reading before pushing this book out the door. I realize that business books often have more editing errors than, say, non-fiction books, but there were too many in this book. Entire sections of text were repeated, the illustrations didn’t always match up with the text, etc. And, I felt that the numerous case studies in the book, while illustrative, didn’t have as much quantitative data as I would’ve liked.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s learn more about what Digital Body Language (DBL going forward) is about. The book is roughly broken into 4 sections:
- How the landscape of B2B, complex sales, and marketing has changed because of rapid developments in the Online world
- What Digital Body Language is, and how this new concept came to light
- The benefits you can get if you learn to observe and leverage DBL
- The future of sales and marketing as marketers start to adopt the DBL approaches
But before we get too deep, who should read this book?
- B2B Marketers who sense the shift that’s come because of the Web, but want to adapt and deal with it better
- Marketers moving from an offline background to a more online working environment
- Developers who want to better support their Marketing Teams
- Web Analysts who want to hone their analysis skills in regards to B2B marketing
- Sales Leaders who want better synergy between their sales teams and their Marketing counterparts
- Anyone interested in CRM as it pertains to Marketing and Sales
How the B2B Landscape has Changed
At its essence, the thesis is that the process for marketing and selling in the B2B environment has been changed by the Internet. It’s not even a “sales process” anymore; it’s all about the “buying process” and how you align to it. Hmm…reminds me of how I learned that concept from another good book written by FutureNow’s co-founders back in 2006. While it’s perhaps not the first time this thesis has been written about, I still like this description from page 118:
Marketers can no longer simply devote their efforts to blindly pushing a prospect through a seller-defined sales process. Buyers no longer tolerate that outmoded thinking. Instead, today’s marketers must provide appropriate ways to enable buyers to take self-directed actions consistent with their buying interests. The marketer no longer leads. He follows the buyer…
We sometimes forget, but the marketing world has changed drastically over the last 10 years…
- Media and technology have changed: Through increasing prevalence of search, email, blogs, video, and peer networking, the quality and accessibility of informational content has improved. It’s this improved information B2B buyers are using to educate themselves on possible solutions.
- B2B buyers have changed: They rely much less on salespeople, trade shows, and industry analysts. Their buying cycles are much longer, and buyers are much more savvy at using the Web to self-educate. Buyers now avoid Sales & Marketing in the early stages of their buying process. Research is done online, privately, and peer-to-peer.
- B2B Marketing has changed: Marketing assets have become more track-able, efforts are more accountable, business intelligence is better, and there’s much more content out there to help “nurture” leads. Marketers are much more responsible for intelligence and nurtured leads, as opposed to just ‘demand generation.’
- B2B Sales has changed: Sales organization must increasingly produce more with less, with less face-to-face interaction to learn from. Sales used to be about doing a sales presentation, gathering intelligence, and “reading the room” for non-verbal cues. Sales must now rely much more on Marketing’s delivery of motivated leads.
What is Digital Body Language?
The next chapters in the book delve into what DBL is and why it matters in the context of B2B marketing and complex sales cycles. DBL is a means of data collection and analysis that is intended to deliver on the promise of ‘nurture marketing.’ The book’s stated goals of nurture marketing are to stay on the prospect’s radar, present relevant content, keep the conversation going, and monitor DBL for any changes that indicate the prospect has moved to the next stage of their buying process.
The phrase is a play on the fact that in the “old days,” a salesperson would rely heavily on the body language of those he was selling to. The salesperson could read the room and figure out who held the purse strings, who was the internal champion, who had major objections, etc. Because the Web has taken so much of that away, companies must now rely on the digital version of that body language, made up of things like:
- What buying stage the prospect is in (FutureNow assigns Early, Middle, and Late, while the author breaks it down slightly differently)
- What solution/product the prospect has shown interest in
- How interested the prospect is (based on the recency, frequency, and depth of online interactions)
- Role (not necessarily Job Title, but the true role the prospect plays in the decision making committee)
- Information-gathering preferences (Do they ignore email, but visit the blog? Do they do lots of keyword searching? Do they watch your videos?)
Next week, we’ll continue by exploring what the implied benefits of Digital Body Language are to both Sales and Marketing teams, and talk about Wood’s vision for the future of marketing under this inevitable model. Stay tuned!
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