This week I caught up with marketing and CRM guru Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions to continue our thought leadership blog series. With more than 15 years in the industry, Ardath is a revered B2B marketing innovator and published author, inspired by connecting the marketing process and the people, with “contagious”content. Read on for expert advice on sales and marketing collaboration, lead nurturing and mastering the complex sale.

1) You spent over 15 years servicing some of the most demanding customers in the world – acting as a turnaround specialist in hospitality service businesses. Tell us how you got into B2B marketing and what you like most about it.

In 2000, my sister developed an innovative sales & marketing technology platform and asked me to come to Minnesota and run the company she’d founded. Taking that opportunity resulted in a fast-paced immersion into technology and B2B. One of my roles was training our customers to use the technology.

As a business executive, customer servant and writer, I saw a disconnect in the way companies were attempting to communicate that kept them from getting the results they thought the technology would provide. Their content focus was on them, not their customers—because that’s what they knew best. What I knew best was customers, how to speak with them and how to use words with purpose. By helping our customers improve content to get the outcomes they wanted from the technology, I found a role I am truly passionate about. It’s what I do every day through my firm, Marketing Interactions.

2) The disconnect between sales and marketing is a topic you have paid a lot of attention to, do you think the gap is slowly closing? What are three tools or approaches that marketers can employ to dramatically impact on streamlining sales efforts, while capitalizing on business results?

That first question is tough to answer. I see some progress in closing the gap, but not as much as I’d hoped. I think it’s the key to a well-managed end-to-end buying process and that the gap will continue to close.

If I can only pick 3 tools or approaches, they’d have to be:

1. Use a Buyer Synopsis:  A buyer synopsis is a combination of a persona plus a problem-to-solution scenario. In other words, how would this type of buyer go about solving a specific problem your products can help them with? What are the questions they’d ask at each stage and what answers can you provide that propels them forward in that buying process?

2. Nurture Prospects farther Across the Buying Process: It drives me crazy when a company tosses leads to sales after one interaction. Nurturing is like a trial run of what it will be like to work with your company. What companies need to realize is nurturing is a huge opportunity to impact perception. Showing you care more about them than pushing the sale before they’re ready makes an impression. It also maximizes sales outcomes because salespeople spend their time focused on the buyers who can actually buy in the short term.

3. Facilitate Sales Engagement: When marketers are nurturing farther across the buying process, they’re telling a longer story. Instead of creating a stall at the handoff, where buyers must adjust to how salespeople sell, marketers can empower the extension of the story and help sales step gracefully into the conversation.

Sales content is not marketing content. Where marketing content needs to deliver education about issues, challenges, industry trends and business value, sales content needs to illuminate just how your products deliver all that marketing promises. Your salespeople need to be able to competently articulate value in a very personalized manner that applies to the prospect they’re speaking with. Marketers have the resources to help them do this efficiently so they stay focused on selling, not trolling for information.

3) You’ve authored a new book titled E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, can you describe the elements of a complex B2B sale and how the selling process is unique?

The elements of a complex B2B sale include:
•    An elongated buying process with consideration points that must be addressed at each stage.
•    A need for education coupled with strategic ideas about achieving complex priority objectives.
•    Multiple purchase influencers to address—each of them with differing needs and expectations.

The B2B complex selling process is unique due to the depth of knowledge and versatility required to move a buyer to purchase. Buyers can now find enough information online to make an “educated” guess about whether or not your company’s products are a fit to solve the problem at hand.

By the time they agree to a sales conversation they know a lot, so their expectations from your salespeople are higher. Salespeople must be seen as the purveyors of value (ideas, proof points, validation for beliefs and assumptions) and be able to apply that value to each influencer’s perspective across the board.

This is why I push so strongly for marketing and sales to work more closely together. With their combined knowledge across the buying process, joining forces makes them a powerful team for creating consistent business outcomes. And it allows each side to focus on doing what they do best.

4) In your book you discuss “contagious content,” what does this mean, and how can marketers best utilize it?

Contagious content gains the attention of the prospects you know about and helps your ideas spread to others who haven’t yet raised their hands and identified themselves. It differentiates your company because it’s clearly focused on your prospects’ priorities and perspectives. Contagious content is designed to help your prospects visualize their own successful outcomes through achieving business goals with your company’s expertise. The whole point is to create progression across the buying process—to grow engagement through content that provides something valuable prospects want.

The best way to use contagious content is to have it become the pervasive norm for your company. Consistency in the story you’re telling is key. If you focus on prospects for one piece and your products the next, you’re confusing the message and the relationship signals.

5) The book also discusses social media marketing. How can B2B companies take their marketing stories social?

If your content is company focused, forget using social media. Nobody cares and it won’t spread. Develop contagious content and then expose it to communities that value those ideas. This means you have to listen before you leap. The benefit social media provides is additional distribution options that can expose lots of people to your stories in comparison to only distributing them via your website or house list.

Focus on developing conversations around the stories you’re sharing. People will help you spread them. Personal recommendations help build the credibility you need to have others who don’t know you check you out. Social media enables a self-selection process that can help your company gain exposure to and engage with highly interested influencers and buyers.

6) In the down economy what should marketers do immediately to improve their lead management most significantly, and then manage those leads most effectively?

Use marketing automation technology. Lead management is unwieldy without it. The change you’ll see in your ability to progressively manage leads will pay off in more sales accepted leads and qualified opportunities if your content is valuable (e.g. contagious).

Once you have marketing automation, improving segmentation and personalization becomes easier. Any improvements to those two areas will reap impressive rewards for marketing effectiveness, even during an economic downturn.

7) Why is lead scoring so important in the nurture marketing process?

Lead scoring is how you cut the wheat from the chaff in your lead database. By reviewing and refining your lead scoring process your prospect intelligence improves. You’ll uncover patterns about which online activities indicate true buying interest vs. tire kicking. That means the leads you pass to sales are more likely to buy. But, make sure you interface with sales about the scoring parameters. They have insights marketing doesn’t. Getting buy in helps facilitate acceptance and motivates salespeople to work the leads marketing sends them because they have a basis for lead quality.

Thanks Ardath!

For more from Ardath, check out her blog here