Ramon Baez is CIO and Vice President of Information Technology Services at Kimberly-Clark.

Ramon Baez is CIO and Vice President of Information Technology Services at Kimberly-Clark. Prior to joining Kimberly-Clark in this role in February 2007, Baez served as CIO at Thermo Fisher Scientific and before that at Honeywell.

Why do companies benefit from a close relationship between the CMO and CIO?

In the past, the media controlled how technology reached consumers in television or print ads. But if you look at the web 2.0 world, we can leverage technology to reach consumers directly. Things like Facebook or LinkedIn are great ways to interact with our consumers. But if you think about it, consumers today don’t want to be bombarded by spam from mass marketing organizations. They want to be able to pull content that’s relevant to them.

So the bottom line is that marketing needs the technology partner to deliver the solutions to reach consumers and enable customer integration analytics. There is true fit and connection between marketing and technology perspectives that can really drive value for a company.

What traditionally prevents marketing and IT from working closely together, and how do you overcome those barriers?

It’s a natural conflict in the traditional motivators behind marketing and IT. Marketing folks ask, “What is possible?” while IT folks say, “Wait a minute. What is practical?” Marketers are naturally more extroverted, while IT is more introverted. And financial constraints between the two organizations also contribute to the tension. IT has to consistently be concerned about affordability, because we don’t just support marketing. We support all the other functions across the company.

So circumventing this conflict requires a high-performance culture. Individuals must be able to comfortably jump across functional boundaries and have an understanding of perspectives, needs and motivators. At Kimberly-Clark, we created a Digital Center of Excellence where we get teams from marketing and IT working together with a common goal. We take the creative side from the marketing community but with an affinity towards digital marketing and technology, and we take IT folks that are really knowledgeable in IT but with an affinity for marketing, and we combine them in the center of excellence. That’s the secret sauce.

How does marketing and IT integration impact the customer experience?

We’re not going to implement new technology for technology’s sake if it doesn’t fit our brand strategy. It’s all about the brand strategy for us. That’s the beauty of having technology people working with the marketing people, because you start realizing that it’s not about the technology. It’s about really getting people to embrace our brands across the globe.

The way our CMO, myself a lot of our senior leaders think is that it’s not about our different individual functions. It’s about the whole organization. That helps us drive greater alignment and integration within Kimberly-Clark so we can have better results and a more realistic experience for our customers versus each brand pursuing technologies and consumers independently. It’s a powerful thing.

Where should other executives focus their time, energy and effort to create better alignment between marketing and IT?

Members of both the marketing and IT organizations must be comfortable with crossing functional boundaries and with the unique perspectives each area brings. Both sides must understand how working in concert with each other will drive success in digital marketing. We have to be comfortable that I’m not trying to do their job, and I have to know they’re not trying to do my job. It’s that fundamental, understanding that we have a common goal.

We also found that it’s very important to establish and demonstrate the value that IT can bring. We don’t want to be a solution looking for a problem. The business has to see and want the value that we bring in order for us to participate in the conversation…We literally have to get out of our chairs, get out of our offices and travel or have videoconferences with the other players around the planet, so they feel comfortable and trust IT that we’re working on bringing the next digital campaign to the consumer and customer.

The Principles of Highly Persuasive Messaging: Create Effective Messaging with Objective Evaluation Criteria

By Michael Cannon

In the world of business-to-business marketing, messaging is the words and visuals you use to persuade people to buy from you. Yet numerous research reports show most messaging is ineffective. For example, the IT Buyer Survey from International Data Group (December 2008), found that “58% of a vendor’s marketing content is not relevant to potential buyers and reduces the vendor’s chance of closing a sale by 45%”.

A main reason for ineffective messaging is the use of subjective criteria such as conciseness, clarity, relevance to the target audience and likeability, to evaluate messaging effectiveness. Since these subject evaluation criteria have a different meaning and relevance to different people, it’s very difficult to create effective messaging using these measures.

What is missing is an objective set of criteria or principles that is clearly defined, agreeable to the majority of people creating and using the messaging, and easy to use when evaluating messaging effectiveness, prior to formal market testing or launch.

This is the gap in the current marketing approach that “The Principles of Highly Persuasive Messaging” fills. This objective set of criteria serves as a checklist to evaluate the effectiveness of your messaging by asking, Does your messaging…

1. Focus on One Offering. Sales messaging is about selling a specific offering to a specific person. If you sell a number of products and services bundled together, think of this as one offering. If you have many products or services that you sell on a stand-alone basis, you must have sales messaging for each offering.

2. Target the Buyer by Audience Type and Buyer Role. There are numerous audience types to consider, including Customer, Channel Partner, Sales (Inside, Outside, Channel), Market Research Analyst and Financial Analyst/Investor. There are also buyer roles such as User, Technical, Economic, Line-of-Business Manager and Executive. You must target messaging to your buyer by audience and potentially by role so that the messaging resonates with each buyer or stakeholder’s interests and perspective.

The rule of thumb to use when deciding if you need to segment your audience messaging by buyer role is whether that buyer segment has similar business challenges, and whether the solution to those challenges are also similar. If the answer is “no” to either of the questions and this buyer segment is critical to your success, then you must have messaging for each buyer segment. Or, accept the messaging to that buyer segment will be less effective. It’s your choice.

3. Identify and Persuasively Answer the Audience’s Primary Buying Questions. The buying questions for each audience are fundamentally different. For example, Customers ask, “Why should I buy your solution rather than a competitive alternative?” Channel Partners ask, “Why should I distribute your product or service?” Sales ask, “Why should I spend time selling your product or service?” Consequently, you must identify and persuasively answer each audience’s specific questions. The great way to determine the effectiveness of your current messaging is by identifying your audience’s primary buying questions and then evaluating how persuasively your messaging (collateral, sales training, and sales tools) answers them. Is it really good enough to win an order?

4. Target Specific Market Segments or Sales Opportunities. Messaging that straddles all industries and/or markets is typically so high-level that it is not very effective in an actual sales conversation. You can increase your messaging effectiveness by honing it down to a specific set of prioritized customer segments in marketing terms (or sales opportunities in sales department terms).

A market segment is a cross-referencing group of people with similar business challenges and where the solution to those challenges is also similar. Segments can be vertical by industry, or horizontal across markets by job tasks, departments and even specific geographies.

5. Make the Right Comparison. A lot of messaging does not manifest this comparative principle. When you are developing business-creation sales messaging, it’s not about the value of your solution. It’s about the value of the difference between your solution and the customer’s current solution. The reference point for comparison is the customer’s current solution.

On the other hand, when you’re developing competitive sales messaging, it’s not about the value of your solution. It’s about the value of the difference between your solution and the competitors’ solutions. Here, the reference point for comparison changes to the competitors’ solutions.

Only the difference, or delta, has real value to the customer, and the bigger the delta, the more likely you are to create a business opportunity and get the business. If you can clearly communicate how your product can help prospective customers solve their problems or reach their objectives better than their current solution and/or better than the competition, then you should win the business.

6. Use Strong Comparative Language. In order to help the buyer see the difference between the old way and the new way, or the difference between your solution and the competitor’s solution, you must use comparative adjectives such as more, easier, faster, less, reduce, or increase in your messaging.

Numerous neurology studies (used as the basis for Neuromarketing) have proven that the old brain is the true decision maker, and that the best way to communicate to the old brain is with clear comparisons between opposites such as black and white, best and worst, fastest and slowest. That’s why great competitive sales messaging must include superlative adjectives such as easiest, fastest and greatest where appropriate, to create the highest level of comparison possible.

Another strategy to provide greater comparative contrast is to quantify the difference. For example, changing “reduces costs” to “reduces costs by 15%” and “unmatched performance” to “3x better performance” creates crisp contrast that is easily understood by the old brain.

7. Define Clear Capability Advantages. This derivative of the “Make the Right Comparison” principle is used mostly for competitive messaging. Most companies’ competitive messaging is a list of the company capabilities and product features. While these capabilities and features are fine for descriptive company or product messaging, they’re not effective as highly persuasive sales messaging.

This is because a capability or feature by itself has little real value to the customer. Only the difference between your capability and the competitor’s capability has value. The greater your capability advantage and the clearer you can communicate that advantage, the more likely company will win the deal.

The best way to communicate your capability advantage is to summarize the difference and then provide the capability comparison. For example, “3x Better Performance: 300 rev per second versus 100 rev per second”.

The more of these principles your messaging incorporates, the more effective it is. Moreover, since messaging is “the fuel” on which all your marketing and sales engines run, it will also have a big impact on the effectiveness of all your marketing and sales investments. Typical results from companies that implement great sales messaging include:

• An increase in sales leads and sales pipeline growth of 10% to 20%
• An increase in win rates of 15% to 30%
• An increase in market share of 5% to 10%
• A reduction in the amount of time marketing spends supporting sales by 40% to 50%

Better messaging means better results. It’s truly a silver bullet to help you increase market success and gain a more sustainable competitive advantage.