6 Habits of Highly Effective Salespeople - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #161
For a while now we have been focusing a bit more on the marketing side of our B2B Marketing and Sales Tips. Here are a few great sales tips from Brian McRae, Market Development Manager at ReachForce.
- Remember that you are selling to PEOPLE, not to rows of data on your daily call sheet. People require you to reach through the phone and deliver an articulate, powerful, and succinct message. Every person is different, so use the cues you hear over the phone to help you understand how best to communicate with your prospects. I live in Austin, Texas, however, my territory is the Northeast United States, including New York. I’ve found in my prospecting activities that these professionals prefer I be direct and exactly on point, because their time is not to be wasted. This is somewhat different from the laid back and casual environment I work in. But that nuance of personality provides me with the ability to understand how these professionals prefer to be communicated with via phone and e-mail. You can bet the house that my language on a call or an e-mail is powerful, bold, and succinct, because I must connect using my prospect’s culture rather than my own.
- People buy from people, not companies. Be likable and easy to work with. Develop a relationship with your prospects. Make each one feel like they are your number one customer.
- Develop a consistent process that you repeat every day. As a salesperson, it is your duty to be as disciplined and productive as possible. Develop a routine that you follow every single day to take full advantage of your working hours. Applying that disciplined approach over time is guaranteed to keep you productive, make you a better salesperson, and ultimately close more deals.
- Be crisp and impactful in all your communications. Think about how many sales or marketing related e-mails the average decision-maker receives on any given day. How many of these messages use the same tired clichés at best; and at worst are fraught with grammatical or spelling errors? The only way to rise above the fray on the phone and in email is to absolutely compel your prospect to learn more about your services. Create that need with clear, concise, and complete language – a language devoid of all filler-words and “ums”. Take the time to use the power of language to your advantage. That alone will place you head and shoulders above your competition.
- Don’t believe the myth that people hate being sold to. The truth is that people hate being sold to by BAD salespeople, and there are plenty of those to go around. But if you think back to your most positive buying experiences, whether it was for a car or a multi-million dollar enterprise software package, every one of those positive experiences was driven by solid and professional salespeople. Salespeople are the engines of commerce. Good salespeople explore, analyze, and create a mutually beneficial need between two parties. Good salespeople develop relationships with their prospects that lead to mutually beneficial deals.
- Have a long-term strategic view. The best and most successful sales professionals that I have worked with in my career all shared a single trait – they were with their respective companies for a long time, usually more than five years. They all understood that developing a territory was a long-horizon project, and that success would come only if they executed every day. You’ll also become an expert not only on your product, but on the entire competitive landscape.
October 22nd, 2008 | 1 Comment |
Economic Turmoil Creating the Perfect Storm for Trigger-based Sales and Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #160
Here’s another one of those bad news, good news posts about marketing in a bad economy. The bad news is about as cliché as it gets: it’s tougher than ever to get prospects’ attention and close deals today. The good news, however, is a bit of a surprise: clever B2B Marketers and Salespeople have a tremendous opportunity to beat the competition by capitalizing on trigger events that will undoubtedly be a side effect of our struggling economy.
Breaking it down: with all of the turmoil in the markets today, companies are going to be looking for new ways to become more efficient, save money and expand globally. Basically, we are about to see lots and lots of changes such as mergers and acquisitions, facilities consolidation, technology acquisitions, career moves, etc.—in other words–“trigger events.” This is where smart Marketers can fuel their Sales pipeline.
We all know great Marketing and Sales programs are about timing–being there when the prospect needs a product or service. But, how do you know when one of these events has happened or who to contact once the event is announced? How can you move beyond an ad-hoc program of reading about trigger events and chasing down the right buyer?
Enter the perfect storm: combine today’s economic turbulence with the growing popularity of social media tools, search functionality, and web analytics, and you have the perfect conditions for a powerful trigger-based marketing program.
Let me explain. There is now more information online than ever before. You have RSS feeds with immediate updates of corporate news such as mergers, funding, new hires, etc. You have professionals who go online (to Google and other forums) to search for purchasing data. You have automated intelligence tools such as CI Radar (which also includes a trigger-based Sales module) and other free search tools such as Google Alerts and Tweetscan. You can also combine all of these market intelligence tools into an automated feed of market intelligence to identify companies and buyers who are searching for products and services.
Most marketers also have an unbelievable wealth of information produced by web analytics tools such as Eloqua or Clicky. Yes, visits to your web-site can also be considered a trigger-event.
All of this market insight can be gathered and fed into a role-based contact gathering program to give your sales team fast access to actionable leads from companies in active purchasing mode. In many cases, through role-based qualifying, you can provide Sales with the actual buyers. For more information on that, check out ReachForce’s Funnelnomics.
With the right combination of automated either free or paid market intelligence tools, social media programs, conversation monitoring, and role-based data programs, you can weather today’s terrible economic conditions. Would like to hear more about how your company is fairing today.
October 20th, 2008 | No Comments » |
Tune In For Tips on Predictably Irrational Consumer Behavior - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #159
A few months ago I spoke at a Marketing Profs conference and had the good fortune to meet and listen to Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, discuss the paradoxical choices consumers often make.
Recently, Ariely spoke with the Marketing Subgroup of the Bootstrap Network on the topic of consumer behavior. Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences captured and posted a Podcast of the discussion. If you can suffer through the first few minutes of boring introductions, you’ll be treated to a very interesting discussion on the value of “free” and how it influences behavior.
Ariely claims that “free” is the Kryptonite that cripples our decision-making no matter how rational we think we are. He claims the “freemium” models that Web 2.0 sites use to lure audiences are not as effective as a discounted service. He argues that once free is introduced, that’s its perceived value.
Perhaps, but in the B2B world, there’s nothing like a free widget or product trial to capture visitors and contact information. It all depends on how you structure the offer. A wonderful example of this is HubSpot and their Website Grader tool. The allure of using the free Website Grader tool was enough to get me to give them my contact information. Once I used it to identify problems that needed solving, I was all too eager to buy the product to help me fix the problems. Oh, and there’s also the issue of how I found Website Grader…giving away a free tool is great link bait – the most powerful SEO tactic I know.
For more predictably irrational fun, check out the Predictably Irrational Blog.
October 16th, 2008 | 1 Comment |
Help your Business Get Found with SEO Using These 5 Tips - B2B Marketing and Sales Tips #158
Monday’s Marketing Profs “Get to the Point” newsletter featured Mike Volpe’s 5 tips for starting search engine optimization. Mike is the VP of Marketing at HubSpot and blogger for HubSpot’s Internet Marketing Blog. These are great SEO tips and we wanted to be sure to share them with the readers of The B2B Lead.
5 tips you should be sure to include in your SEO strategy:
- Pick good page titles. The words that appear at the top of the browser window are what a search engine looks at first as it evaluates that Web page. Use keywords and unique titles.
- Be smart about URLs. If you’re using a URL like yourcompany.blogspot.com, then you’re building SEO power for blogspot.com, not your own company.
- Start a blog. Blogs help in two ways. They provide new content (search engines prefer new over old). Plus, the more interesting blogs tend to generate lots of inbound links.
- Leverage your PR program. Use press releases and externally distributed articles to drum up more inbound links. To maximize effectiveness, link back to your Web site from keywords.
- Use social media to build links. Find out where your customers hang out online, and start participating there. Remember to add value. Don’t lead with a sales pitch.
October 15th, 2008 | 2 Comments |
A Salesperson’s Biggest Asset - Targeted Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #157
Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.
Before joining ReachForce I was a sales guy with no marketing department. Knowing how important and effective marketing strategy can be, I set out to try and do my own lead generation. I can remember investing days and days of work on this one project. As a sales guy, I had a particular interest in automated lead generation (that’s right, sales guys are typically lazy) and had been studying it for months. I finally grasped the concept of doing it right, I thought.
So, having never been blessed with the spiritual gifts of patience or discernment, I decided my next step was to find and buy a list of 1,200 names to send my message to. The plan was to do an email blast with an offer to download a new report.
The report looked great - guaranteed to attract plenty of hot prospects, turn them into customers, and make me look like the Dalai Lama. The email was perfectly crafted, engaging, and sure to catch the eye. I told my wife to get ready for the commissions to start pouring in.
So, with palms sweating and my reputation at my company completely mortgaged (side note - companies don’t like spending money on things they don’t understand), the time had come for launch. Three…two…one…CLICK.
Within 15 minutes my mailbox was full! The response was unbelievable…from “System Administrator, Address Unknown.” The list of 1200 contacts turned out to be about 60% accurate, at best.
I believe whole-heartedly that a company’s biggest asset are customers and happy ones are even better. I’ll even take that a step further, though. A sales and marketing person’s biggest asset is a database of FUTURE customers (prospects).
** WARNING – Here comes the ReachForce promotion. Your prospect database should be 100% accurate, up-to-date, properly targeted, and relevant to your business. Each name you have listed should be the right person inside the right company. You’re thinking “in a perfect world…”
If you’re not a ReachForce customer and you’re reading this, here’s a few interesting data points to consider:
- Industry listed (rented) deliver less than a 3% response rate
- Sales people can spend up to 1/3 of their time hunting down the right buyers in a prospect company
- According to Gartner, 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months.
- 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau
If you’re interested in cleaning up the data you already have, check out this post on Dirty Data. If you’re interested in hearing how ReachForce can help, please contact me.
Sales people out there – please jump in here, tell your marketing counterparts to help you out and make sure they are marketing to the right people in the right companies so you can spend your time selling, not hunting.
October 14th, 2008 | 1 Comment |
Trade Show Marketing for Startups - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #156
Just returned from Brussels where I represented BreakingPoint at the Broadband World Forum (BBWF). Our 6 meter by 3 meter booth was quite a difference from my typical experience in a 30′ X 40′ Platinum booth at the show entrance.
As a startup and a new entrant in the market, we didn’t have the large Marketing budget to invest in a huge exhibit and it wouldn’t have made a good investment anyway. We also didn’t have the history to score a great booth location. Finally, to make things even more challenging, we didn’t have the $80,000 exhibit that our competitors had to stand out at the event. So, we had to rely on a superior product and a little ingenuity to get the most from our investment in the event. Here are a few tips for your next trade show:
- Locate your exhibit right next to your hottest competitor. It’s a risky move, but if your product stands out and provides superior capabilities this strategy should help you attract a steady stream of qualified traffic. It also makes a bold statement about the confidence you have in your product.
- Locate your exhibit next to your largest partner. This will also help you attract qualified traffic without the risk. Even better, your partner may actually recommend attendees visit your booth.
- Make use of lots of plasma displays to tell your story without the need to invest in a costly booth or expensive graphics.
- Promote and deliver presentations in your booth. Live presentations from subject matter experts attract significant crowds and helps position your company as a thought leader.
- Produce a creative marketing campaign that stimulates word-of-mouth.
- Use Twitter to spread the word about your exhibit.
- Take your show on the road. At BBWF, I actually saw an exhibitor rolling a mobile demo stand around the show floor. Genius!
Just a few ideas to help your startup stand out at the next trade show. Wish we would have had the time and resources to leverage all of these ideas at BBWF. As it turned out, simply using idea #1, 5, and 6 were quite enough to drive very qualified traffic. Another interesting data point: our Twitter updates drove about as much traffic as our email blast. Neither of these techniques worked as well as parking right next door to our competitor, however. Big risk, big reward.
October 13th, 2008 | 5 Comments |
The Economy, Budgets and Mid-Funnel Opportunity - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #155
It’s the perfect storm – tough economic times … budget scrutiny … the Q4 numbers chase … budget planning for 2009. As Reachforce CEO Suaad Sait says, this Fall is a marketers ‘oh-crap’ moment when we start asking ourselves if there is enough fuel (or money to provide the fuel) in the lead generation engine to fulfill current year sales needs and fuel 2009 momentum.
Under old school marketing rules this storm would usually lead to 1 of 2 things … 1) slam on the breaks and try to hit NOP numbers by minimizing expense, or 2) a flurry of spray and pray direct marketing activities that seek elusive bluebirds against all odds. The big problem is that neither of these well worn paths does a very good job at motivating prospects who are in the middle of the funnel.
On this note, Josh Bernoff – Forrester’s Interactive Marketing expert – made a great point in his February 2, 2008 writing entitled “Strategies for Interactive Marketing in a Recession.” It’s more obvious to some than others, but most mid-funnel contacts are logically folks who are still in consideration mode or somehow on the fence about making a purchase. Mid-funnel contacts are not only abundant, they are literally bluebirds in waiting who just need to be earned.
Companies who opt to slam on the marketing brakes in an effort to save their way to success are essentially putting all of the pressure to motivate a purchase on their sales closers. This may work in certain instances, but it’s not very strategic, scalable or sustainable. Nor is motivating these people a matter of creating awareness with direct marketing. While consistent DM needs to be happening for sake of keeping the top of the funnel fed, it rarely has the sort of impact needed to push mid-funnel situations forward.
But social marketing applications like interactive webinars, e-communities, blogs and networking sites are an effective way to align B2B marketing’s work with the things that are most critical to driving mid-funnel situations to closure I.e. – establishing credibility, delivering proof points, deep-dive Q&A, earning “trusted partner” status and best of all – a structured, pragmatic way to capture, manage and execute against those issues/objections that most often create and add to mid-funnel traffic-jams.
In his easy to read, highly recommended article Bernoff points out three important social media attributes that help recession proof your marketing plan:
- Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.
- They’re cheap. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. But Facebook pages and blogs are two examples of social programs that you can start for next to nothing. Even more sophisticated programs like a full-blown customer community typically don’t cost more than $50,000 to $300,000 to get going.
- They motivate consumers in the middle of the funnel. Social applications like discussion forums are better than advertising at helping people in the consideration phase when they’re on the fence about purchasing. In a recession, improving consideration will be more cost-effective than blasting awareness messages at resistant consumers.
October 9th, 2008 | No Comments » |
Is a GoogleGrader on the Horizon? - Marketing WTF?
What’s your Google Rank? No, not your Google Page Rank, your personal Google Rank? That’s right, according to a story published by Business Week, Google has filed for a patent on technology for ranking the “influence” of people on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Much like Google’s approach to ranking web sites, the algorithm would calculate your influence rating based on how many “friends” you have, how influential your friends are, how frequently you blog, etc. The article speculates that this breakthrough could finally make ads on social networks relevant and profitable.
Not sure about that. Sounds a bit too much like TwitterGrader to me and you all now know how much I like that product. 
October 8th, 2008 | 1 Comment |
In This Economy, to Buy or Not to Buy That is the REAL Question - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #154
Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.
In this current economic crisis many businesses have a natural, knee-jerk tendency to “wait and see how everything plays out.” It seems that business spending is put on hold, which only exacerbates the overall problem.
We as marketers and sales people feel it the most. I’m sure we’ve all heard something like this in the past couple of weeks, “We’re going to ‘wait & see’ what this economy ‘does’ before we spend any kind of money on ‘that.’”
Yeah…and sometimes a deer in the headlights just “waits to see” what that car is going to do.
Here’s what I don’t understand – if what you sell can grow your customers’ bottom line, then why wouldn’t they buy it? If they can’t afford what you offer “right now,” then how are they going to afford the additional cost - “right now” - of NOT having it?
I do believe that in an economic crisis it may be wise to lighten up spending on certain things if we can’t afford them (i.e. lavish parties, luxurious vacations, designer nose-hair clippers, doggy massages). However, as sales guy at ReachForce, we have a unique opportunity to show our prospects how we can contribute to helping them through this mess.
If what you sell saves time, saves money, or adds to top line revenue or productivity in some way – AND YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE IT – then not only do you have an opportunity, you have a responsibility to tell as many prospects as possible about it.
If you’re still with me, you’re probably reading along, looking for your tip on how to get action from the ‘wait and see’ crowd out there today. Well, here’s what I’m doing…
- I’m direct about how what I sell drives revenue
- I show real customer case studies that include customer results
- I provide best practice information around how to act on ReachForce solutions
October 7th, 2008 | No Comments » |
Search Engine Marketing - ReachForce Book Club
In this chapter, David covers the basics of search engine marketing without getting into the technical details. He makes the great point that if you follow the New Rules, you will already be practicing search engine marketing. It really is all about the content. (Some of you may scoff that inbound links are most important, but I contend that great content is what draws inbound links.)
David covers a few tips on SEM but I want to highlight his tips on landing pages:
- Make the landing page copy short and the graphics simple.
- Create the page with your company’s look, feel, and tone.
- Write from the prospect’s point of view.
- A landing page is communications, not advertising.
- Provide a quote from a happy customer.
- Make the landing page a self-contained unit.
- Make the call to action clear and easy to respond to.
- Use multiple calls to action.
- Only ask for necessary information.
- Don’t forget to follow up!
Landing pages are critical to direct buyers to your content. Well optimized landing pages can rank highly in organic search and produce high conversion rates.
That pretty much wraps it all up. Now that we have completed The New Rules of Marketing and PR, the title of the final chapter sums it up nicely, “Make it Happen.” David, himself, admits that he has not put into practice every idea presented in this book. The point is to find what works best for you and your organization, put it into action and start reaping the benefits. Best of luck!
October 6th, 2008 | 2 Comments |
