Congratulations to client Manhattan Associates for winning an AMY at last night's American Marketing Association awards dinner. The win was for "Zero Dissapointment Retail," Manhattan's unique offering and clever campaign that helps retailers offer a seamless cross-channel (Web, mail, store, call center) shopping experience to their customers.

CMO Terrie O'Hanlon (pictured with her BOA and her AMY) was gracious in acknowledging the cross functional team (including The Content Factor) that contributed to the campaign's success. And in case you think marketing is all fluff, Manhattan has already identified a multi-million dollar incremental sale that was due to this campaign.

As many have said, the B2B "sales cycle" is becoming a "buying cycle" where the prospect has control over the relationship. Although the graphic of the sales funnel will be with us forever, the days are numbered when Marketing and Sales can claim to be the ones moving prospects through the funnel. In the social media world, prospects move when they want to move.

• If a prospect doesn't want to register for your white paper, he has options online; he will search the blogs and online trade pubs for product reviews.
  
• Rather than schedule an hour on her calendar to attend your live webinar, she will fast-forward through the on-demand version at her own convenience; or even better, read the attendees' comments in five minutes.
  
• And before the first sales meeting, the prospect has Googled all your executives, industry blogs, PR pieces, financial data, and the same for your competitors; that meeting is never your company's "first impression."

The traditional call to action is going out. "Call us today" is sounding hucksterish. And registration forms are hitting the wall in terms of effectiveness as prospects enter just enough information to get what they need.

It's time to shift our thinking from "call to action" with a "call to knowledge." (B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee calls this the "takeaway.") As stated by our friends at Response Mine:

Put the right content in the right places so that prospects can self-select. By responding to relevant, compelling content, prospects qualify themselves.

By answering the call to knowledge, prospects move themselves through the funnel.

Specifically, the call to knowledge helps the prospect think--and is therefore essential to a content strategy in which thought leadership is a goal. It's a tip or technique with a built-in "it depends on your situation" clause. The reader is then in control to take it or leave it, or adapt the information for her own use, and move on to the next bit of content. The next step might be a more technical white paper, a case study suited to their vertical, or a detailed online demo.

Do your white papers need a registration page? Do they need to say "Call us today" after the company's boilerplate? It depends on your situation. But marketers are building trust by allowing their prospects to move--and think--at their own pace, guided by calls to knowledge.

A year ago, I was a B2B marketing manager in a muddle. I had, at my fingertips, some powerful tools to share my company's message with the world. But I had nothing new to say.

My title as "Manager" gave me authority to drive content down a number of channels: an attractive web site, automated email campaigns, and webinars with full in-house tech support. It was my job to maintain quarterly plans using these channels within my budget.

What I lacked was the authority to devise a content marketing strategy. So I had the tools (hammer, saw), but no new raw materials (wood, nails). To borrow another metaphor, I was shooting blanks.

My job became a case study in marketing repurposing. I pushed out the same old client case studies in articles, white papers, web copy, and sales presentations. The edict "Do More With Less" applied to content, as well as to marketing spend.

The root of the problem? Content is gravely undervalued. (Validation: Kristina Halvorson's presentation, Content Strategy: The Future of Marketing, slides #37-40, "Lies We Tell Ourselves.") Content is expected to spring forth from the ether--or the marketing manager's weekends. But the company's best ideas are trapped in the minds of a few executive subject-matter experts. The effort required to move those ideas out to the market is not reflected in the marketing budget.

I suspect that many marketing managers, especially in B2B, are in the same muddle. What is the way out? After pondering this muddle from both inside and outside the corporation, I have these suggestions:

• Give your subject matter expert the opportunity to blog regularly, preferably with a regular guest post on a trade magazine's blog. B2B executives love the exposure. As bloggers, they learn quickly that blogs are hungry for compelling content. So they feel the pain and often get on board for the need for content. Even if you, as marketing manager, end up ghost-writing and editing the posts, the blog will be a vehicle to pull the latest thoughts and ideas out of the mind of your executive expert.
  
  
• Outside writers and editors can do wonders--but what if there's no budget for them? Squeeze an experienced content professional into one high-profile project, preferably one that gives them exposure to an executive.
  
  
• Reorganize the "marketing plan" into a "content strategy." Just using the words "content strategy" will help reset priorities. It's a document or spreadsheet listing your new content ideas, how they are being produced, which marketing channels they feed, with # leads ganerated and $ spent. The content strategy can be simple, even if it consists of relatively few line-items from the overall plan. Just having one is a start.