What is Marketing’s #1 Job? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #94
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008Marketing’s number one job should be lead generation with measurable impact to top-line revenue, right? I bet that’s what most CEOs and Sales Executives would say. So why do other departments still think of us as the ones who order the t-shirts and go to cool events? And these are the nice comments made, ask a few sales guys what they think of marketing and I’m sure you’ll get a variety of not so nice answers.
According to the CMO Council, 38% of CMOs say that aligning and integrating sales and marketing is a top priority this year. But, only 30% have a clear process or program to make this priority a reality. I think the real question here is - why is it only a priority for 38%?
For Marketing to have a clear impact on revenue, they must be aligned with Sales. I believe there are three important factors for healthy Marketing and Sales alignment:
- Marketing’s goals (and bonuses) are tied to the same goals as Sales – e.g. bookings and new customers acquired
- Clear definition of a lead and when leads should be passed to Sales
- A closed loop process that allows Sales teams to push leads not ready for Sales back to Marketing for ongoing nurture programs.
When Sales and Marketing share the same goals, they have to work together. Neither will be successful if they do not communicate openly and collaborate to reach their goals. The breakdown typically starts with the definition if a lead. With Sales constantly asking for more leads, it is no wonder that many Marketers are forced to get new contacts any way they can (website registrations, event attendees or just buying a list) and then just throw them over the wall to Sales. More is better, right? Not necessarily in this case. Instead, Marketers should warm all new contacts through an email, direct mail or webinar campaign to gauge their “sales readiness”. This enables Sales to focus on only the warm/hot leads while Marketing continues to educate those that aren’t ready to buy just yet. Through this process Marketing should also be able to weed out companies and contacts that are not a fit for the business allowing for more productivity and efficiency on your sales team.
The ideal scenario is to build a funnel together with Sales and define the stages of it and the specific hand-off point of a lead – a unified funnel is the ONLY approach to creating a win-win for the business.
After the User Group Conference, How to Stay in Touch? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #93
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008User group conferences are expensive and time consuming but are the best way to have your customers network with each other and for you to get real face time with them to update them on new products and features and gather input on where you should be headed next. I was speaking with a colleague about her user group conference. She has managed them in the past but wanted a better way to stay connected with customers after the conference. Her boss wanted her to create an online community because social media is so hot right now. However, an online community didn’t seem like a right fit because her customers wanted real answers from executives not just responses from whoever in client services happened to be monitoring the discussion boards that day.
I recommended that she continues to hold events throughout the year but to instead make them virtual. As part of the goody bags at the user group conference she could give everyone a web cam. Then, once a quarter, she could organize a live virtual conference on Skype (if Oprah can get housewives to use it, you can get executives to). Users may not be able to interact with each other as much, but an executive could be on hand to make announcements and answer questions. Now I am a firm believer in pushing your message through as many media as possible because everyone’s preferences are different. After the live web conference, she could turn the highlights into a webcast for those who couldn’t make it and send a newsletter with updates as well. That way people can digest the information in their own way.
The point here is that no matter what you do to stay in touch with your customers, do something. We learn in school the importance of keeping our current customers, “It is easier to keep a current customer than to gain a new one.” Somewhere along the way acquiring new business became the focus and we forgot that our current customers are our gold.
As a footnote, I have not executed a campaign such as this one. This was truly an idea I had in the moment when my colleague told me about her dilemma. I would love to hear from anyone out there who has done something similar!
Early Warning Guerrilla Marketing Idea - Marketing WTF?
Monday, April 28th, 2008Now this has some really exciting possibilities. And, a low, low price tag. Check out Flogos, floating ads and messages generated by re-purposed artificial snow machines. The machines can pop one Flogo out every 15 seconds, flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500.
Even better, it’s environmentally friendly as the material is derived from plants.
Marketing WTF? - Call Me Crazy - Twitter Will Save Your A#$%@
Friday, April 25th, 2008While I’ve been deep in debate about Twitter as an effective B2B marketing or community building tool, one Twitter user just used it to save his life. According to CNN:
“Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. The message only had one word. “Arrested.”
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held. “
Amazing.
Direct Mail on a Comeback? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #92
Thursday, April 24th, 2008As a long time B2B Marketer I know I typically have to “touch” a lead 5 to 6 times before they become a prospect in my sales funnel. With that in mind, I am using multiple tactics to get suspects to raise their hand. I have a feeling direct mail is on the comeback so we are about to give it a try again. Yes, it’s still expensive and postage rates are still going up but with email boxes being filled up with spam, suspects may be more likely to act if we can figure out how to stand out in the crowd.
As Marketers, when we start to build out a campaign we spend time on the WHAT we are going to deliver, the HOW we are going to deliver our message and the WHEN the program is going to go out but when it comes to the WHO, we haven’t had many options. Our choices were either an in-house database (how old and accurate is this data really?) or to rent data from a title-based list broker. And do we know who these people are or how these names were really acquired?
So as we get ready to build out a direct mail program I’m reminded of a tragic story one of our customers told us. They had a total budget of $100,000 for a direct mail campaign. This was going to be the program of the quarter and they were very anxious to get it out the door so the responders would start rolling in. Of their total budget, they spent $5,000 on the WHO they were trying to reach. The rest of the money went to creating an elaborate piece with “exactly the right messaging”, an attractive call to action and web components for tracking. They felt good about the program and believed the number of responses would justify the cost. They dropped the piece, then waited and waited and waited. Not only did they not get the overwhelming number of responses, they only got one. Now that’s one expensive lead if you ask me.
Obviously when creating a direct mail campaign we need to create a compelling piece with a strong call to action. But the WHO is where a lot of B2B Marketers go wrong. The most successful campaigns, direct mail or otherwise, are those that are targeted at the right people in the right companies. So how do you decide what the right WHO looks like? Here’s what I’m doing –
To find the right businesses, I go straight to my sales pipeline and recent customer wins. I’m looking for where we are winning and what kinds of companies are moving through the funnel the fastest. Then I build out an initial database of other companies that match this profile. Now that I’ve identified the right companies to go after, I’m just left with finding the right contacts for my message. Lucky me, we’re in the business of building custom role based contact databases for lead generation initiatives. So I use our own role-based contact discovery service to find the right decision makers within those target companies. By paying a little more attention to WHO I’m targeting, I feel confident my upcoming direct mail campaign is going to deliver.
Just in case you’re wondering, the person who was responsible for the $100K campaign lost their job. And the person that took their place now uses ReachForce to help keep their job.
TagClouding Your Leads - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #91
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008Written by guest blogger, Kyle Flaherty of www.engageinpr.com
Messaging is critical to how you communicate your benefits and your product to your audience. Your messaging follows you throughout your communication and no place is it more applicable than your main website. This is the spot where your prospects must make a fairly immediate decision whether to stick around and gather some more info (and hopefully make a purchase). When you find the proper messaging you will ultimately be able to provide customers, partners, media, analysts and even internal owners your core value proposition:
- Who are you?
- What do you stand for today?
- Tomorrow?
- How do you explain your main benefits?
Your first step to consistent and powerful messaging is to have your internal and external constituents answer the above questions. If done properly you’ll have a tremendous amount of data. In a recent scenario at my last gig, we were able to gather information from more than 1,500 survey responses from users, partners, executives and investors. Often you simply comb through all the data and make various hypothesis based on a thorough scrub of the data. It is great to have so much data, but with too much data comes the fear that we won’t be able to get to the core of what people actually thought of the company and its solution. Also, we would need hundreds of hours to sort through it all properly.
One thing we have noticed as we sifted through data were the patterns in the answers that were receiving. The ability to quickly view these patterns is critical to discovering how your audience views your company and your product, thus starting to form the messaging that will most resonate with prospects. The most simple and effective way for you to visualize the patterns of your data is to create a tag cloud. A tag cloud will help represent the words that appear the most; the larger the font the more that word appeared in the results. Very quickly you will see if your prospects will respond more to particular words and phrases. Fortunately there is the ability to automate tagclouds using tools such as TagCrowd, which allow you to input data and create a tag cloud; this could be a URL, a file or just paste in the text to be visualized. It then gives you options for how many tags to show, ignore common words (‘and’, ‘the’, etc), grouping of similar words (innovate, innovation, innovating) and whether you want to show the amount of times each word appears. You can then grab the HTML or take a screen grab and you have a great visual way to demonstrate data.
Reviewing these tag clouds is highly effective and can lead you to terrific conversations about your company and your final messaging…which of course is the goal. But the power of the tag cloud goes beyond simply helping to create the proper messaging. Use it to visualize what each of the pages of your site actually say about you, critical for SEO/SEM, but also to determine if you are actually saying what you mean to say. It can be surprising to find out that not only are the words you are using on your homepage not resonating directly with your prospects, but often we are using hypocritical verbiage. The same can be done for any marketing campaign you are gearing up to drive leads. Just remember you may not be saying what you think you’re saying.
Marketing WTF? - Twitter Me Crazy
Monday, April 21st, 2008Anyone who thinks Twitter is a waste of time, just doesn’t know how to use it properly. Take a look at how Mahalo is using the product to build a following of tens of thousands.
According to Mahalo CEO, Jason Calcanis
“People have told me I’m crazy for wanting to give one of my friends on Twitter a Macbook Air if I become the #1 user (i’m essentially tied for #2 behind Obama). Well, based on the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to Mahalo.com I don’t think so. It’s not huge traffic, but as you can see in March Twitter sent over 10,000 people to Mahalo and this month we’re on track to have–wait for it–20,000 folks visit Mahalo from Twitter. In the past six months ~45,000 people have visited Mahalo from Twitter. If the 20,000 number is sustainable 250,000 folks will visit Mahalo from Twitter over the next year. Most of these folks are coming from my personal account (I’m think half). 250,000 visitors at .01 each is $2,500 in value. At .05 each (what StumbleUpon charges) it would cost $12,500. MacBook Air = $1,700.”
Wow, and I’m really a huge StumbleUpon fan. Call me crazy but I agree with Calcanis, “Twitter is going to be huge. Folks have no idea how huge right now.”
Create More Demand by Focusing on a Smaller Target Market - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #90
Friday, April 18th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: This article discusses using Sales Win analysis to be able to create a profile of best customer accounts enabling you to identify matching companies that you are not currently marketing to. By narrowing the target market, lead generation programs can speak specifically to the buying audience, increasing response rates and ultimately ROI.
By laser targeting a narrow group of prospects, Marketers are able to deliver a message that resonates with their target audience and creates better leads for Sales. Spraying a large list of contacts with a generic message and praying that message will reach the right people has led to average response rates of less than 3%.
Instead of spraying and praying, consider building a database of targeted prospects based on where you are winning customers today. Identify these companies with customer wins analysis. Once you’ve identified this winning profile, start the search for other businesses that match that profile.
A good starting point is your in-house database of current customers and prospects. Find the companies that match your wining profile and start there.
Narrowing the focus allows Marketers to deliver a targeted message that has a better chance of resonating with your audience. Instead of cleansing an out-of-date, in-house database, review your sales pipeline and customer win data and to identify your top market segments and determine key qualifying characteristics. Look at the size of the open and closed deals, as well as the velocity of those deals as they move through the pipeline to answer the following questions:
- In which market segments am I closing the most deals?
- In which market segments are deals closing the fastest?
- What are the common characteristics of companies in those market segments?
- What other market segments share those common characteristics?
Relevancy is key here. The more relevant the data used to feed Marketing Programs or Automation systems (like Eloqua, Marketo, Loopfuse, Vtrenz, Aprimo, Market2Lead, Manticore, etc.) the better and more powerful the results will be.
With Sales wins analysis, you can also build a profile of your best customer accounts to develop qualifying criteria. Do you close more deals with Fortune 1000-size enterprises or are you moving more deals with Small and Medium-size businesses? Is the number of employees of an organization a critical success factor or is a global, distributed environment more important? Are there key trends you can identify in certain industries that are driving the need for your product?
Now that you’ve documented your top markets and qualifying criteria, you can use this information to discover other target accounts. While these companies have not yet purchased from you, they share many of the same characteristics of your best customers, and therefore will likely have a higher propensity to purchase your products or services.
Next, complete an enterprise buying profile to identify the roles of buyers involved in the buying process. Just as you identified the profile for targeting new companies, you need to have an understanding of the role and responsibilities of the buyer within those companies. You’ll want to understand their role both in the buying cycle and within the organization. It is vital to be aware of the responsibilities for each of your buyers and which organizational role typically corresponds with the role in the buying cycle. With this information, you will be able to refine your augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted Marketing Programs.
Creating your wins analysis can be done with a low-tech approach using a business analyst and a spreadsheet, but you may find that business analytics tools such as ReachForce Insight can save time and money and provide insight into pipeline changes in real-time. Once you see the results of wins analysis in action, you’ll want to monitor your pipeline closely to uncover new opportunities so it’s best to automate if possible.
Sales wins analysis is providing a new breed of B2B marketers with a more effective way to continue to build databases of accurate, consistent, and comprehensive role-based data used for multi-modal, segmented Marketing campaigns. By using sales wins analysis to understand best target markets and profiling their common characteristics, similar prospects can be identified in the same market segment, as well as additional market segments in which there are a higher propensity to sell more, faster.
Web Analytics for B2B Marketers - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #89
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008In today’s world of new media, search engine marketing is perceived as a necessary tactic in the B2B world. The challenge with online advertising is that we, as B2B marketers, take a B2C approach. We build PPC ads under the guise of “if we’re out there they will come”. The problem is that B2B buyers are different from B2C buyers. When you are shopping for new tennis shoes, you search in Google for “red nike running shoes”. Various sponsored and organic results appear, you click through and pull out your credit card.
B2B sales cycles are measured in months not minutes, so why are we trying to use the same tactics? B2B marketers instead need to do whatever they can to drive leads to their website, be that SEO, PPC, links from blogs, etc. but because their business is less transactional they must capture those visitors so that they can control the marketing messages and proactively target interested buyers throughout the buying cycle.
You may be thinking, “Well I capture web visitors through landing pages and forms.” The thing is that only 3% of web visitors fill out a form and according to MarketingSherpa, only 50% of those fill it out completely and accurately. The #1 name filled in on forms is Mickey Mouse (although cute, I don’t think he is the buyer you are looking for). Also, did you capture contact info for the right buying roles? How many college interns did you have filling out information?
You know there are unannounced visitors on your website, the challenge is to identify those visitors so that you can turn a passive visitor into an actionable lead. There are several web analytics tools out there that can help you on your way to identifying these unknown visitors. You should look for a tool that:
- Identifies the companies visiting your website
- Offers data services to find the right buying roles within those companies
- Analyzes those visiting companies to determine trends in the industries and sizes of visiting companies
- Allows you to set up business rules to score visitors based on pages visited and time on site
Also, be sure to ask for a free trial so you can test the power of the tool and see results before you have to buy.
Make it a Feature Not a Bug - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #88
Thursday, April 10th, 2008Have you ever gotten your dry cleaning back with a tag saying “We noticed a broken button on your shirt, so we replaced it for you free of charge.”? At first you may feel warm and fuzzy like your mom is taking care of the little things for you. But if you sit back and think about it, you would probably realize that the likelihood that you brought it to them broken is pretty slim, unless you are wrestling in your dress shirts.
Dry cleaners know that their machines will break buttons from time to time and rather than have you notice it and bring it back to be fixed, they check for broken buttons and replace them before you get it. What could have been a bug in their system is instead a feature. Do you have a bug you could turn into a feature?
