It’s sure great to talk to real people for perspective. We don’t do it nearly enough. Those of us in Silicon Valley spend too much time talking to each other and obsess endlessly about the buzz du jour – Twitter’s analytics;  Facebook’s privacy; the newest browser; Google’s new search algorithm and the games SEOs play. We talk about Social CRM, Social Selling, Customer 2.0. viral, Freemium, brand  and conversions.  But it’s not the real world.

My partner Pelin and I were invited to present a keynote recently for a Strategic Marketing Conference hosted by Cornell University at the beautiful and historic FDR Presidential Library, a few hours from NYC, in the Hudson Valley where the autumn colors where in their full glory. We presented our topic, and a recurring them about how marketing is dramatically changing to attendees from around the country – professors; business leaders, students and entrepreneurs.

We were honored to present our observations about the rise of Inbound Marketing, and some of our experience working with “cutting edge firms”, like Eightfold Logic, ViralHeat, and InsideView each pioneering these new concepts. We regularly speak at technical conferences, but we thought this might be a bit different as it had a general and mostly non technical audience. A few minutes into our presentation we asked a series of questions to find out more about the attendees, “How many of you use web analytics” – most hands went up.  That’s good we thought. “How many of you use links on your web site, and know how to link”?  This time almost no hands were raised and few knew how to link, and NO ONE knew the value search engines place on the right links!

How could that be? Surely they MUST understand the value of linking? Well, no, they didn’t. I’ve been creating marketing applications for 15 years and have to constantly  be reminded about the adoption myth. The one where I think everyone uses our products, and they don’t. While the rate of adoption will certainly be more rapid than it’s been in the past, the rest of the world is not living in our tech bubble. The real world is doing just fine and it’s good for me to get out and be reminded not drink too much of my own bath water. While a link is ubiquitous, its value is not understood by most. And that’s the lesson I relearned during my visit to Cornell. In future posts I’ll talk about how we can accelerate adoption. What role colleges and universities need to play, and what marketing skills will look like in the not too distant future.

Rand and I just gave a very well-attended webinar to the Cornell Entrepreneur Network titled, “The Birth of Customer 2.0 and the Death of Marketing as we know it”. One of the primary trends we discussed is the emergence of Inbound Marketing – and given the tremendous interest, I wanted to talk a bit more about it here on our blog.

It is clear to all of us that online marketing and social media have dramatically changed the marketing practice over the past decade. They have certainly made it a lot more measurable and accountable – much more of a science. They have also made it a lot more interactive and collaborative with the target customer.

Yet it is important to note that some of the marketing fundamentals haven’t changed. Marketing has always been and continues to be about knowing our audience so we can target them with relevant messages that will resonate. Of course the best way to resonate with our audience – really in any situation – is by listening to them before talking. So the fundamental approach to marketing hasn’t changed but how we do it, the tools we employ and how we define and measure success certainly has…

Traditional – or as it is coming to be known as “Outbound Marketing” – focuses on finding customers by building brand awareness and demand through PR, online and offline advertising as well as direct mail and email promotions. It is the company reaching out to the customer – presumably with a compelling message or offer – to entice them to buy their products and services.

Inbound Marketing is a new approach to marketing that optimizes getting found by customers. It is about attracting customers to the business…Whether through search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, social media, or relevant cross-linking, Inbound Marketing is focused on helping businesses improve website “findability” for qualified buyers. The bonus is Inbound Marketing also benefits the visitor with improved content relevancy and linked resources.

What’s important to note about outbound marketing is that it is “interrupt-driven”. What I mean by that is, just like that a TV or pop-up web ad, we interrupt whatever the customer (both B2B and B2C) may be doing with a “message from the sponsor”. Even email is interrupt driven.

So to put it simply, with Inbound Marketing, marketers “earn their way in” vs. “buy, beg or bug their way in”!
One of the biggest problems with outbound marketing – besides the interruption factor – is that it has to rise above the noise to be effective…and the amount of noise is growing exponentially. There are too many ads, too many email offers, too many websites, simply too much content out there – and of course that’s further complicated by less and less time and attention on the part of the buyer.

In an earlier post, I described Customer 2.0 as NOT wanting to be “sold to”…as being informed about products and services not from the vendor’s messaging but from peer to peer conversations. Hence interrupt driven marketing is NOT effective with Customer 2.0. They want to find the right products and services themselves. But given the increasing noise level I just described, rising above it and being “findable” isn’t easy.

The KEY to findability is relevance. It is back to those marketing fundamentals I described earlier, since relevance comes from a deeper understanding of customer behavior and sentiment…it comes from listening before shouting out our outbound marketing messages.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, Inbound Marketing comes with another bonus: unlike its program $$ heavy counterpart, it is people (that is time and effort) heavy. It is about generating the right content in the right places, building and fostering user communities for productive engagement to enable the right people – qualified prospects – to FIND us. Sounds interesting? Stay tuned for more discussion on innovative approaches and emerging best practices in a future post…

It sounds like one of those chicken or the egg questions…and given all the buzz about Sales 2.0 technologies and methodologies, you might be tempted to answer “Sales 2.0”.  But I think Sales 2.0 is really the sales organizations response to the “evolve or die” mandate they face, given the smarter and more informed buyer they have to sell to: Customer 2.0.   I do believe the customer has evolved faster than the sales guy…and I believe this is – at least in part – due to how B2B trends typically follow B2C.  Prospects who are looking to make B2B purchase decisions are also consumers, and have been making B2C decisions for a long time.  Access to online reviews, comparison shopping engines, Facebook or Twitter “conversations” on products and services they are evaluating has turned them into much wiser B2C buyers…So, why not transfer that same process, powered by “social intelligence”, to the B2B buying cycle? 

I started an earlier blog post with the observation “We market and sell in a brave new world where prospects are equipped with near x-ray vision into companies, products and people they are considering doing business with.”  This statement implies Customer 2.0 holds all the cards!  Hence, evening out the playing field requires sales to be just as knowledgeable about the buyer and bring real value to the sales process by demonstrating why their products and services can solve the customer’s unique business challenges.  Relevance emerges as the key to synchronizing the selling cycle with the buying cycle.  Armed with a 360° view of their prospect’s business that can only come from “listening to” them and engaging them through social media, sales people now have the opportunity to gain the deep insights necessary to get Customer 2.0’s attention – insights that will drive Customer 2.0 into deeper engagement with your company and delivering on the ultimate promise of Sales 2.0!