Digital Body Language [Hardcover]

I'm not sure if I like the term Digital Body Language, but Steve Woods' book I like very much. It clearly shows how the role of marketing in the complex sale has changed, and gives lots of detailed suggestions on how marketing teams can cope with this change, by using smart demand generation strategies.

This book is required reading for marketers who currently use a marketing automation system such as Eloqua (for a full list of vendors see my blog LeadSloth.com). Or for marketers who plan to use such a system. It provides useful guidelines to improve profiling, lead scoring, and lead nurturing. Also, it shows how to measure marketing ROI more objectively.

Steve Woods is CTO an co-founder of Eloqua, so the book is based on 9 years of practical demand generation experience. However, the book does not mention Eloqua, so you are spared any advertising and you get access to knowledge that is relevant regardless of the marketing software you use.

Digital Body Language is not an easy read, because it's chock-full of information that has never been put in a book before. Steve has added about two dozen case studies, which are brief but provide practical examples that make the book come more alive. All in all, I think this book will soon become a classic in the demand generation space.

Whether you are a salesperson or company, your prospects are changing. Finding and connecting with prospects is more difficult today than ever before. And once you do connect with a prospect, the chances are they know far more about the issues they want or need to address and the potential solutions to those issues than the prospects you've dealt with in the past.

It used to be salespeople were the dispensers of knowledge and solutions. Not too long ago most psopects needed salespeople to help them analyze their needs and to then propose viable solutions to those needs.

No longer.

Everyday more and more of our prospects are turning to the ever growing number of resources on the internet to research their problems and issues, their wants and needs. With the explosion of websites, artilce sites, blogs, forums, webinars, and other resources immediatley avaiable to anyone willing to take a few minutes to do a keyword search, salespeople are no longer the lynchpin of knowledge and solution.

Salespeople are increasingly engaging prospects at a later and later stage of the purchasing process--often so late in the process that their only task is to give a price since the prospect has already diagnosed the issue, researched the various solutions, determined the most appropriate solution for their situation, and now only need a potential product or service provider to quote a price.

This movement away from using salespeople early in their purchasing process creates a huge problem for companies and salespeople--how to recognize and capture a prospect early in their solution search.

Steven Woods in Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World (2009: New Year Publishing) argues that just as it used to be critical for a salesperson to be able to read a prospect's body language in order to be able to successfully move them to make a positive decision to purchase, it is now equally critical--and possible--to read a prospect's "digital" body language via their use and movements through the company's internet resources.

Digital Body Language is aimed at the marketing function of companies with relatively sophisticated marketing departments engaged in business-to-business complex sales. For Woods, the activities that allow one to read the body language of a company's electronic visitor is very much a pre-sales handoff activity. This, however, doesn't mean that smaller companies, salespeople, and individual professionals can't pick up some good ideas of how to understand where in the buying cycle the visitors to their website, blog, podcast, or other resource are.

Woods argues that by understanding and analyzing where the visitors to the company's website or blog come from, how long they stay, what they engage while they are there, and what they go afterwords can help the marketing department formulate a campaign to eventually move the prospect from investigator who is researching issues and options to being handed off to the sales department for final follow-up and consumating the purchase.

Each movement a prospect makes signals their individual involvement within the purchase, where in the process they are, what type of information the company can follow-up with that will interest them, and when to turn the lead over to sales.

Reading digital body language requires a set of data mined from both your electronic and non-electronic resources, as well as "a marketing team prepared to implement numerous processes that deliver the right communication at the right time to the right prospect." No easy task and one that Woods says requires "the entire organization to make siginficant changes to marketing." Traditional marketing concepts and functions still apply, Woods says, but now take a back seat to understanding and responding to prospect's online behavior.

Digital Body Language is a throught provoking look at how prospects are buying in today's market and how marketing--and ultimately sales--must respond. As more prospects move to self-education, analysis, and solution creation, a new understanding of the prospect must emerge. And since it seems that everyday brings an additional resource that allows prospects more control over their purchases, those companies who learn how to "read" their prospects and engage them with the information they are seeking in a manner they will respond to will be the companies who manage to maintain their margins and grow their business--even in a market where more and more "complex" products and services are moving into the realm of commodities to be bought at the lowest possible price.

Knowing whether Digital Body Language is a book for you depends on YOUR experience in this field. The book seems to get confused with who the reading audience is and I'll explain it by your experience level so you can make up your mind if it's right for you. Here's a rough breakdown by your experience:

If you have little sales/marketing experience and are someone looking to better understand how to break up your messages based on where customers are in the buying process, this is a good book to help you understand this. This book loosely defines sales funnel and segmentation from a short tail perspective of understanding how to deliver your content differently to your customers depending on what you know about them. Unfortunately, it does not dive too deeply into HOW TO exactly accomplish this. Your knowledge will need to be supplemented elsewhere but this will be a good introduction of how to think about content delivery.

If you are an experienced marketer who understands his customers well and know how to break up your messages based on where they are in the sales cycle, Steven Woods does not deliver strong thought leadership in this field nor does he propose tools outside your existing toolset to assist further. This book focused on overall strategy and really harps on switching from old sales processes to inbound marketing to a point where it becomes redundant, particularly if you've already purchased this book. This ought to be apparent when Chapter 3 is "What is Digital Body Language?". Anyone in marketing (as Steven Woods ought to know) that if you spent your first 1/3 of the book on problem definition, you probably have lost a good portion of your audience at this point since we're past the research phase and have already invested (aka purchased this book).

Steven Woods shows great understanding of the sales process and what a marketers goals are from years of experience. For someone new to the process, this will be useful and a good way to get you thinking outside of your goals as a department, and really think about corporation goals. It vaguely touches on the customers goals, though it is implied in many spots. This book has "GET STARTED NOW" sections which are the actual Call To Actions section of the book. I personally don't enjoy reading 15 pages to be summed up into one paragraph of here's how you can achieve this. These sections really need to be fleshed out to educate people new, or provide new insight to people who are more experienced.

A conversation can be great, but if it doesn't go anywhere, it's just that... a conversation. This book will leave experienced marketers who are hungry more as it seems like the book was just a good conversation and doesn't provide much in terms of tactical tools for your belt. If you're looking into the field and want more information of how to start thinking about this, it's a good book to snatch up as the first 1/3 focuses on definition.

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