Quietly over the past few years companies have been investing in a CAB program. They’ve carefully selected a dozen or so of their most strategic customers, engaged them in an ongoing dialog about their business plans, priorities, and trends shaping their customers’ businesses, and they’ve been listening. These companies are now poised to accelerate their sales pipeline in 2012 precisely because they’ve kept contact with the decision makers and invited them to influence the company roadmap. But it’s not too late for everyone else.

A CAB is unlike any other customer engagement program. CAB meetings are not sales meetings, but the outcome can dramatically impact a company’s roadmap and sales pipeline. The CAB meeting is not a glorified user group meeting, although it can promote education, engagement, and energy surrounding a company’s products and use cases.

CABs are strategic investments that cater to the long-term strategic relationship company executives have with their best customers. Companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 will tell you they are well worth the investment. And now is the perfect time to build your own plan.

Ready to get started?

Here are a few tips to set you on your way:

1) The CAB is a program, not an event. It represents a chapter in a continuing dialog. While the discussion at the CAB meeting will be center stage for a while, the most important discussions will take place offline and after the event. Keep that in mind as you plan your inaugural meeting. Follow-up is the key to a successful relationship with your customers.

2) It takes 12 weeks to plan. Avoid the temptation to throw a CAB together quickly. Your customers are busy people, just like you and your team.  You need a runway to get on their calendars, and a 12 weeks “heads up” is usually enough time. You’ll also benefit from having enough time to build, critique, and update your agenda as you work the CAB-prep process. Don’t allow company executives (or an outside facilitator) to parachute in at the last minute.

3) Do your research before you begin. Search for CAB best-practices online. I’ve put together a “CAB Resource Center” with links to a number of articles, case studies, and tips for success. Take advantage of these free resources.

2012 is the year of the CAB. Consider it as part of your integrated marketing campaign.

Good luck, and good marketing!

Confused about the difference between positioning statements and value propositions? You’re not alone. These terms are often used interchangeably, but they mean very different things.
Value propositions are broad in nature and are a direct output of a company’s business strategy. They reflect your brand promise along with all the primary benefits offered to multiple market segments and the price the customer pays for those benefits. Value propositions refer to the “big picture.” Product marketers are usually responsible for developing the value proposition.

Positioning statements, on the other hand, are a subset of the value proposition. Positioning statements are used in marketing communications programs and activities. The positioning statement includes the target audience (persona), product name, category, benefit, and competitive differentiation. Price is not a component of the positioning statement. Most importantly, positioning statements represent a plea for single-mindedness when it comes to executing specific marketing messages aimed at very specific audiences. While the value proposition reflects the wider range of primary benefits offered, the positioning statement points a laser beam at only the most relevant benefit and points of competitive differentiation that are meaningful to the persona. Positioning statements are usually developed by product marketers with input from corporate marketers.

A single value proposition may be comprised by multiple positioning statements. They are both tools used by marketing teams to focus their campaigns, programs, and activities. However, neither provide the exact wording that will be used in any customer messaging. For that, you need the message box.

*** Read part 1 on the dangers of being seduced by new marketing tools

*** Read part 2 on why market success requires having a focused positioning statement

*** Read part 3 on a tip for discovering your competitive differentiation

*** Read part 4 on mapping messages to the customer’s buying process

*** Read part 5 on tips for communicating your marketing plan internally

In response, Ragan.com posted a very insightful article, “Will the Netflix mea culpa work?”  As I read their article and reflected on my own personal experience, I realized that there is a deep lesson for all marketing leaders here — the lesson of what happens to a company when no one owns the marketing high ground.

First, let’s separate the business decisions from the marketing decisions. By all accounts, experts agree that streaming is the way of the future. To embrace that, Netflix is challenged by a whole series of difficult business decisions that includes everything from negotiating license agreements to capturing and creating content to providing top-notch customer service. But it is the marketing decisions that intrigue me because the only thing I can say for certain is that no one at Netflix appears to own their marketing high ground. If they did, Mr. Hasting’s impassioned email and video post would have been different.

The marketing high ground represents that special place where marketers know the market so well that they become acknowledged and valued within their company as the customers’ advocate.  I can only surmise that as Netflix has grown so quickly, somewhere along the line the path to the marketing high ground was abandoned, becoming trumped either by demands from investors or the complexity of running the business – challenges that are common to every business.

Failure to communicate

Failure to own the marketing high ground leads to decisions that customers don’t understand. For example, Netflix continues to defend its pricing decisions using language that appeals more to business investors than it does to consumers. And yet Netflix has not acknowledged the deeper issue that anger customers, namely that the streaming service currently lacks content value worthy of its pricing.

In Mr. Hasting’s email, he failed to address these issues and instead announced the launch of Qwikster, furthering customer dissatisfaction. If Netflix had known how customers where using the queues to juggle both their DVD and online viewing habits, perhaps the decision to separate the DVD and streaming queues into two different branded websites would have been different.

Why the Marketing High Ground matters

Control is an illusion. In the age of social media, customers have more power than ever before. This is even more important when we realize, perhaps much to our own dismay as marketers, that emotion drives purchase decisions (or decisions to cancel services), not logic. The only way to succeed in business and hold on to a market leadership position requires business leaders to empathize with their customers because whoever understands the customer best, wins. It’s as simple as that.

The most seasoned marketing leaders, from the CMO to product marketing, product management, and corporate marketing leaders, must be able to channel the sentiment of the customer and relay it to others inside the company when participating in business decisions and forming marketing campaigns and plans.  The best marketers make recommendations not based on personal opinion, but on an understanding of market trends, customer use cases, and customer feedback – three key elements that can change at any time. Standing upon the marketing high ground means being the customer’s advocate. Only then can company leaders make the best-informed decisions that will guide superior actions in everything they do.

• How well do we really understand our target markets? Do we have a clear and focused persona – or set of personas – or are we trying to be “all things to all people”?
• Do we have a common understanding of our positioning in the market against the nearest competitive alternatives? Is there a positioning statement everyone can rally behind? Or, are we making it up every time we launch an email?
• Do we have a story to engage prospects and customers in a meaningful dialog,using content that they care about? How well does our content map to the customer’s BUYING PROCESS?

I believe that marketers at every level (from the seasoned webmaster to the new social media recruit to the evangelizing product launch boss) should be able to ask these questions and participate in the finding of the answers. I wrote about several techniques and best practices in the book, The Marketing High Ground.

Leadership is not seniority. Leadership comes with the ability to ask these and other questions that help the organization rise to the next level of their performance. But it doesn’t mean the marketer has to know all the answers. Often, their value is in knowing the right questions to ask and asking them in a way that invites team members to tackle them together. This is the type of senior people I surrounded myself with when I led marketing operations and VP of marketing roles.

I dusted this excerpt from an old article of mine. Feel free to add traits that have made a difference for you.

1. They are experienced all-around marketing athletes with proven leadership abilities. Clearly, the best campaign managers understand how marketing works. They have deep marketing knowledge in at least one of the following areas: customers and target markets, marketing strategy creation, product knowledge, marketing expertise in a specific region, proven leadership in a marketing media type (such as field marketing or press relations). In addition, the best campaign managers bring marketing knowledge and political savvy to the role.
2. They know when and how to delegate. Campaign managers take their success not from their own actions, but from the accomplishments of the team. They look for opportunities to involve others in mapping the campaign strategy. And in so doing, they encourage and nurture the team’s passion and energy.
3. They are excellent in “managing upwards” and gaining and maintaining visibility for the team. Every business has its political nuances. The best campaign managers can spot these and keep the team out of trouble, while interfacing with management proactively and effectively. Team players look to campaign managers to resolve or escalate issues when required. Campaign managers are adept at managing the process so that the team players can do what they do best.
4. They are accountable, but they don’t micromanage. This is a tricky balance because campaign managers are responsible for delivering the campaign strategy and plan, but they can’t build it alone. Their ultimate success is achieved by being a resource and guide for the team and ensuring that their collective contributions are aligned appropriately. When campaign managers cross the line and micromanage the execution of the specific activities and offers, team members may take offense and sabotage the process. To avoid this trap, the best campaign managers add value, not by dictating action, but by setting clear objectives and timelines and working to remove obstacles. They leave the execution of the details to the functional experts.
5. They know how to manage their role as the campaign evolves. The best campaign managers always focus on the “big picture,” lead the charge, and then get out the way. When the go-to-market plan has been created and approved, the role of the campaign manager changes. Initially, the primary duties of the campaign manager are to unite a cross-functional team, guide strategic discussions with the team, and facilitate the development of the marketing plan. Once management approval for the plan has been granted, the campaign manager’s role shifts to focus on results and providing status updates and recommendations for campaign adjustments should market or business conditions change.

Empathy.  Specifically, empathy with the customer.  When marketing teams had strong empathy with the target customer and geared their lead generation and nurturing campaigns around the problems they cared about, their campaigns produced more, better quality leads.  When campaigns were centered solely around product features or pricing, they didn’t do so well.

A company that cannot fully empathize with its customers can never be market driven.  Here in Silicon Valley, our roots come from either sales-led or engineering-led dogma. But the problem here is that these approaches will always run out of steam eventually because market conditions can (and do!) change at any time. Don’t think this is true? Let me ask you this: as a citizen, have you ever felt that a company has communicated with you or treated you with a less-than-empathetic attitude? You don’t have to look far. I’m willing to bet that a couple of top brand name, Fortune 500 companies come to mind. But these are not bad companies. What happened? When a company becomes so big, or a small company grows so fast, empathy for prospects and customers gets trumped by the insatiable urge to maintain growth, raise shareholder value, and meet expanding quarterly revenue targets.  Empathy falls out of style.  That’s ironic, because it was largely empathy that attracted so many customers to them in the first place. Now, a lack of empathy will cost them customers.

We as marketers are in the best position to ensure that empathy for the customer and prospect is never lost.  To achieve this, we need to become the customer’s advocate, and for that we need to operate on the marketing high ground.

3 Tools Used by the Most Effective Marketing Teams

Effective marketing teams can be found within global enterprises as well as the newest start-ups. What they share in common is a deep-rooted belief that the customer, not their product, should be the center of their universe. To understand the customer and create a shared sense of empathy across their organization, these marketers take advantage of a set of simple tools and templates to accelerate the planning process while driving true sales-marketing alignment.

1)   Persona: They are able to paint a picture of a target buyer to better understand their needs, expectations, values, and the type of content they require at each stage of their buying process. The seeds of empathy are generated in the 20 minutes it takes a small cross-functional team to fill out the persona template.

2)   Positioning Statement: They realize that customers always have alternatives. (Sorry Mr. VP of Engineering, but yes there is always competition, even if the competition is the “status quo” or “doing nothing.”)  The secret is to map the product to a specific persona (or a set of related personas, rather than trying to target “everyone” at the same time). The positioning statement template challenges marketers to focus their value proposition on what the customers value most and against only the relevant competitive alternatives that may show up in the target audience’s field of vision.  The hardest challenge of the positioning statement exercise is that it demands sacrifice. We know instinctively that it is folly to try to be all things to all people, yet that is exactly what many companies try to do. When this happens, customers have no idea what our product stands for or why they should care.

3)   The Message Box: Guess what: it’s not about you. It’s about the customer. Messaging that is not rooted in the persona will only add noise in the marketplace. Clues regarding the right words to use can be found within the persona description and the positioning statement. From those tools we can use the message box template to hone our own story (i.e. elevator pitch) – a story that will engage prospects and invite them to respond with the three little words we are dying to hear, “Tell me more.”

When used together, these simple techniques and templates greatly improve a company’s ability to empathize with its customers. They set the framework for every marketing campaign, product launch, and go-to-market plan. Without it, you can only hope your marketing efforts will produce results. And hope is not a marketing strategy.

As it so happened, I’ve already had several opportunities to try out Davis’ recommended approach on a couple of sales calls of my own. I had been talking with a potential client for a while and hoping to close the deal that afternoon. However, I wondered if perhaps I was selling too quickly. I reflected prior to my call that the prospect had dropped some hints as to their first and secondary needs that I had neglected. So, instead of pushing for the close, I took a step back and used the call to review their needs and expectations. Good thing I did because their conditions had changed! Having taken a step back, I was able to re-evaluate the needs with the prospect and then finalize the proposal! It’s ironic but true: you have to slow down in order to sell faster!

For B2B marketers, this is a “must read” on how the sales model can work best for the complex sale. His book is in many ways a mirror to The Marketing High Ground. His new book goes a long way to helping marketers and sales teams alike to align their plans and engagement models around the customers’ buying process and the “message box” used to engage them in a relevant, meaningful conversation.

Marketing popcorn = marketing tactics that are planned and executed independently of each other and with no interaction or cross-functional coordination.  To the prospect, they appear random and unconnected.

Oh, here’s a press release.  Pop!

The next day, we’re at a tradeshow. Pop!

A direct mail drops that afternoon. Pop!

Let’s blog. Pop!

A big challenge for any marketer in a team is to coordinate our efforts. Traditionally, marketing organizations create silos. This isn’t necessarily intentional; it just happens. A case in point: early in my career I ran the PR team at HP’s Test & Measurement business. I sat next to the advertising manager. Unfortunately, we rarely knew what each other was working on. We were heads-down, pedal to the metal, focused on executing specific tactics that had been assigned to us. I received a personal kick to the kidneys when I was working on a prime editorial review for a new product that was soon to launch. We conducted the interviews and were promised a wonderful spread in a leading tech journal. When the day of the planned editorial arrived, there was no mention of our new product. I was horrified and on edge because I had promised great coverage for the product team. I called the magazine to find out why the article wasn’t in the issue.  They told me that since our ads for the new product started appearing the prior week, the announcement was no longer news. They were angry with me and felt that HP had cheated them and wasted their time. So, because the ad hit the week before the editorial, our marketing activities were out of order and unsynchronized. This hurt our company’s reputation with the magazine, and the ad manager and I received a stern talking-to from our boss. Ouch!

The lesson here: all marketers need to break out of silo’d behavior and silo’d thinking!

The only way to do this is to leave our personal egos at the door and embrace a unified planning process that encourages everyone to work toward a shared objective. This is where the best practices found in Marketing Campaign Development, and The Marketing High Ground come into play.

Sometimes we all need to be reminded that PR, advertising, demand gen, events, social media people are really all on the same team.  Let’s leave the popcorn to the movie theaters.