I am here at beautiful but frigid Cornell, at the invitation of Steven Gal of the Johnson Graduate School of Business, to guest lecture at his entrepreneurial marketing class.  The reason for the invite:  MBA students are starved for practical knowledge on how to leverage social media and online marketing for their entrepreneurial efforts.   When Dr. Gal announced my impending visit to his colleagues, other entrepreneurship professors jumped at the opportunity to engage me as well.  My jam-packed schedule for the three days on campus include several classroom lectures, a lecture at the Cornell Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute, meeting with the aspiring entrepreneurs of Cornell eLab, dinners with the entrepreneurship professors and few of their hand-picked students, as well as meeting with the Cornell Enterprise team.  Add to this the numerous ad-hoc meetings with individual student-entrepreneurs who want to pick my brain on their go-to-market models. You get the picture…Whew!

But there is good reason for this insane demand…and Dr. David BenDaniel said it best during dinner last night: Universities are falling behind in incorporating the latest social media and online marketing developments – and their massive implications to business strategy – into their curriculums.  (Incidentally Dr. BenDaniel was my entrepreneurship professor during my Johnson years…and helped me get connected with UCSD Connect which lead to my very first start-up experience – the man is an icon! ).   Cornell is actually doing much better than most in this area since it has such a well-organized curriculum around entrepreneurship at Johnson as well as a massive University-wide initiative.   But traditional marketing courses in most business schools still focus too much on “old-style” marketing strategies and are creating future Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)-marketing leaders.   This needs to change.   Clearly not all MBA students are entrepreneurial, and many will take on more traditional marketing roles within CPG companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Unilever or P&G.  But the reality is that the use of social media and online marketing is no longer limited to start-ups or tech companies in Silicon Valley.  One of the social media success examples I gave during my lectures is about Whole Foods.  Whole Foods has impressively embraced social media more than most, gathering over nearly 2 million followers on Twitter and half million fans on Facebook in the process. While it is easy to understand why a relatively young company or one started by a tech-savvy founder would so completely embrace social media communication tools, it is quite a bit more remarkable for an almost 30 year old established brick and mortar company with roughly 50,000 employees and over 270 stores worldwide to have done so.  And they are not alone.  More and more companies are following this model and embracing inbound marketing strategies to engage the new customer (Customer 2.0) in the emerging media channels.

Seems to me we have a great opportunity to add our new truths to the well-established curriculum.   If we don’t teach tomorrow’s business leaders about the opportunities and challenges presented by social media and online marketing, how can we expect them to lead their employees who are likely to be more social-media savvy then their managers? How can we expect them to steer their companies successfully without at least understanding the new go-to-market models powered by the social Web?  While there is undoubtedly a lot of hands-on learning the students will do when they step out into the “real world”, business schools must do their part in educating our future business leaders to not just survive but thrive in this brave new world.  My trip here indicates that the Johnson entrepreneurship professors certainly get this…and the conversation with Dr.  Vithala Rao this afternoon – who asked me to come back in the fall for more! - tells me Johnson marketing is on board as well…

I am delighted that my Alma Mater is once again taking the lead.  I’d say definitely worth the 18 hour round-trip 

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. Attention span crunch has become pandemic, and we now have the mandate of ensuring every customer engagement is targeted and relevant to synchronize buying and selling cycles – or risk being left behind to join the multitude of businesses that simply didn’t make the necessary transformations in time.

It wasn’t too long ago where the norm was for marketing and sales teams to shout insults and pass blame on for not reaching revenue goals: “The leads are worthless!”…”No, it’s the sales reps who just cannot close!!” Fast forward a decade and the rules have changed. Marketing is now measured and compensated more like sales reps on attainment of goals; and our friends in sales are having to think more marketing-like and segment and target prospects with the right messages at the right time to increase conversions. Welcome to the world of sales and marketing 2.0 or “Smarketing”!

The 2.0 approach requires the art of selling and marketing (a.k.a. creativity) to be augmented with a healthy dose of science (a.k.a. repeatability) to achieve the massive productivity gains required. While there are several factors that contribute to realizing these efficiencies, I believe there a few that are paramount to increasing accountability, reducing customer acquisition costs, and ultimately driving revenue.

Here are the four essential steps to grabbing the Sales and Marketing 2.0 brass ring:

• Align sales and marketing organizations around jointly-defined processes, definitions and success metrics. Establish a “system of record” – whether it is your CRM or your marketing automation system or both if they are synched – to ensure you are capturing all customer engagements in one place. And make sure to agree on the definition of sales stages to ensure your lead scoring process is consistent and gives you the necessary data to measure the effectiveness of each of your programs.
• Target the right audience with the right message at the right time. The days of one-to-many mass emails are gone. Launch targeted one-to-few campaigns by segmenting your prospect database. Watch for trigger events in the industries or geographies you are targeting to reach out to prospects with information that’s relevant to their current initiatives and urgent business challenges. Use behavioral targeting based on how your prospect is engaging with your website or your “free trial”.
• If lead scores indicate prospects are not quite sales-ready, nurture them! Educating prospects with whitepapers, tips and tricks emails or educational webinars are great ways to nudge them along the sales cycle (and effectively reduce your cost per lead!).
• And… don’t underestimate the power of continually testing and measuring the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. Is your website attracting and converting the right prospects? Which programs have the highest percentage of converting into sales-ready leads? How do changes in message or design translate into improvements in conversion rates? Remember, you cannot improve what you cannot measure!

Want to find out what we think on next gen demand generation strategies or dig deeper into how you can implement some of these recommendations? Then follow us on our new blog Smarketer. We hope you will join the conversation – and share your own experiences as well!