The ZiegenBock beer is going down smooth. Austin airport is a great place to wait for a flight. And, Ray’s Chuck Wagon at Asleep at the Wheel surely serves the finest briquette of beef in any airport. Dry and spicy. Country rock, courtesy of a SXSW (the locals say “South – By”) band helps me collect my thoughts about the day here.

This is the first time for me attending the show. And it will no doubt be the first of many. Austin is Portland meets Texas – hip, clean, smart and technology enabled with a little barbeque sauce. SXSW takes over town attracting (perhaps) hundreds of thousands to the festival.

 I spoke at session titled “Is too Much Math Killing Marketing” and debated the point with UK Ad Agency chief Mike Teasdale who took the position that it has. Mike’s a brilliant ad guy, fast, and with biting humor so I had to be careful not to get cut up in the knife fight on stage. In Bush country, I made my points – with rhetorical shock and awe (I had to work in a Bush-ism). Actually, we’re mostly in agreement but for the sake of a good show each of us labored (or laboured as Mike would say) to support a pure position – me arguing for left brain and Mike right.

 We didn’t really have any expectations – would this group come hear our thoughts at 9:30 in the morning on the last day of the show after four long nights of SXSW parties – the other reason people seem to go, or would we speak to a big empty room?  The answer came in loud in clear, that despite the time there was a morning thirst for an answer to the question, and we gave it our all in front of a full ballroom at the Hilton.

 So here’s my summary. One of Mike’s main points is that data becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. He made fun of some of Eric Petersons‘ work around measuring visitor engagement. Now, I know and love Eric (we worked together in several firms – Web Trends and WebSideStory),  however  the audience made up mostly of interactive agency types, seemed to agree with Mike that it’s too complex.  He quoted Ogilvy and Dave Trott, “it’s better to be interesting and wrong than dull and right”.

 And the battle lines were drawn –  Math, Reason, Data, Left brain; English, Instinct, Imagination, Right brain. Too much math stops us from taking giant leaps, “it takes imagination to take a leap into the future”, he said. There where hoots from the crowd supporting the position.

 I started the counter point with the question “What is the Sound of Creativity When No One Can Hear It”? And quickly counter punched that the world today has changed as the internet provides us the tools and the empirical data to optimize. I followed up with the observation that, “we’re all becoming Content Engineers”. I’ve seen this movement for some years – one part creative director and what part data analyst.  Here’s what I said back in 2005 to ZDnet about the topic. This new breed needs to monitor, measure then maximize. Check out our SXSW presentation here.

 But the bottom line to my math is this, creativity without conversion = zero. And hopefully on that point I had a KO! Regardless, the debate stirred the pot and seems to have triggered interesting tweets – #toomuchmath, and blog posts. I would be curious to hear your thoughts?

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!