In Chapter 5 we learned the New Rules of News Releases and how news releases should be written for your buyers. Building off of the New Rules, after you have written for your buyers, now you need to reach them. David gives tips on how to develop a news release strategy in order to reach buyers directly.

Here are some of his tips:

Write about pretty much anything that your organization is doing.

• Have a new take on an old problem?
• Serve a unique marketplace?
• Have interesting information to share?
• CEO speaking at a conference?
• Win an award?
• Add a product feature?
• Win a new customer?
• Publish a whitepaper?

Publish news releases through a distribution service.

• Business Wire
• Market Wire
• PrimeNewswire
• PR Newswire
• PRWeb

We have been using PRWeb for our latest news releases and have gotten descent response. What service have you had success using?

Use RSS feeds.

• Many distribution services provide this to make your news release available to other sites, blogs, journalists and individuals.

Simultaneously publish news releases on your web site.

Link wherever possible.

Focus on the keywords and phrases your buyers use.

• Think about your buyer personas.

Include social media tags.

• Like Technorati, DIGG and del.icio.us

Tell the media, your clients and your prospects.

• Repurpose content for all audiences.
• Example: Tweak content for use in company newsletter.

I’ll close with what David said about the importance of reaching your buyers.

“Implementing a news release strategy to reach buyers directly is like publishing an online news service – you are providing your buyers with information that they need in order to find your organization online and then learn more about you.”

“Great Web content is about your buyers, not about you.”  I think David really hits the nail on the head with that line.  The goal of your website is probably not to just be an online brochure but so many sites are just that.  Instead it should be a place for buyers to: find answers to their questions quickly and easily, interact with you and find out how your solution can solve their problems.  Anyone looking to update their company website should ask themselves the following questions:

• Who are my buyer personas? Have I created easy to find, targeted content for each?
• How can I deliver my content in multiple media to accommodate my buyers’ preferred media and learning styles?
• How can I segment my content to deliver targeted new content via RSS?
• Is my web navigation organized using my buyers’/customers’ language?
• Does my offline content match my online content?
• Have I created a path for each buyer persona on my Web site?
• Does my site’s personality match my company’s personality and do my buyers respond well to it?
• Can I add interactive content to my Web site?
• Do I offer content for buyers in every stage of the buying cycle?
• Do I provide content to my current customers?
• Is my content easily available to go viral?

These questions should help you to organize and create content when redesigning your site.  Please do keep in mind that there are definite SEO implications to be factored in to a full scale site re-design.

What else do you consider when doing a re-design?

Next week we will cover chapters 14-16 on How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly, The Online Media Room and The New Rules for Reaching the Media.

Thinking about how to make the biggest splash with your next mega-launch? Think again. Emerging companies are getting smarter about how they “launch” and opting for a slower community building process that takes place over the course of months. Turns out it is not only less expensive but it proves to be more valuable over the long term.

The process involves getting out months ahead of your product availability and building relationships with key influencers, contributing relevant valuable content to your market and attracting a loyal following with a blog or community. We did something like this at BreakingPoint, although it happened in a far more condensed time frame, and it has indeed been very valuable for reaching our hyper-niche market.

There’s been lots of controversy on the topic of launching at Tech Crunch 50 vs. DEMO lately. Robert Scoble triggered a firestorm of commentary when he posted a blog series about how “companies launching at DEMO suck”. (Why is it that blog posts that include the word “suck” always generate so much buzz?) This triggered Paul May of BuzzStream to blog about the economics of launching a startup at TechCrunch 50 or Demo. According to Paul:

“The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin.  Let’s look at an example.  My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago.  In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:

1. Devote 80 hours to prep time.  At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
2. Speaking coach – $5K
3. Travel – three nights for three people – $6K
4. PR rep – $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
5. Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. – $3K to $5K”

Wow, that’s a hefty price tag for a startup—bootstrapped or funded. Years ago when I launched a startup at Demo, it was well worth that investment. Why? Those were the early Internet Boom days when startups had to shell out $30,000 to $50,000 per month in retainers to PR agencies. We netted 17 pieces of very high profile coverage from our Demo participation in major trade publications and even The Washington Post. It was such a success that I actually considered going this year with BreakingPoint.

Today, however, most of those publications are no longer around—at least in print. Buyers get their information in different ways and focusing your efforts on laser targeted database marketing combined with a strong push for building a community using social media are the keys to success for startups. If you have a B2C play, those events may make sense for you. But for us, I had to pass.

So, back to the topic at hand: launching your company online. There’s absolutely no reason to wait until you have a product to launch to get started. Why not start engaging with your customers now? Reach out and conduct a little market research. Build tight relationships and a nice following for your blog. Funnel your money into building a detailed, role-based database of your target market. Hire an intern to discover the top thought leaders and start building tight relationships by interacting with them in social media circles.  Start generating a slew of inbound links so that you will rank at the top of the search engines when you introduce your product or service. The possibilities are endless.

B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right?  The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth.

We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe…

With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch.

Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth.

• # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs)
• # of inbound requests
• # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info.  (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page)
• # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages)
• # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs
• # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline
• # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing

Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it.

Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on.  It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs.

Do you measure anything not on this list?  If so, please share.

We’ve talked a lot about writing best practices here on The B2B Lead.  B2B Marketers out there, pay special attention to this chapter.  Gobbledygook words – that’s what David calls jargon-laden phrases.  Words like groundbreaking, industry-stand, and cutting edge are good examples of gobbledygook words.  David goes on to say that business-to-business technology marketers are the worst offenders.

Here are some interesting findings from a study David highlighted in this chapter.

388,000 press releases were analyzed over a 9 month period.
74,000 of them had gobbledygook words
9895 of them used the words next generation
over 5000 of them used words like flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use
between 2,000 and 5,000 used words like cutting edge, mission critical, market leading, industry standard, turnkey and groundbreaking

WOW!  And isn’t the goal of doing a news release to stand out in the crowd?  Well we’re not if we’re using these words.

Here’s a few more tips – another study highlighted in this chapter, this time a survey of general business and trade editors.  These are these people that we sent out announcements to.  Are you using these words?

• “Leading” (used as an adjective) – 94% of editors feel it is overused
• “We’re excited about…” – 76% of editors feel it is overused
• “Solutions” – 68% of editors feel it is overused
• “…a wide range of…” – 64% of editors feel it is overused
• “Unparalleled” – 62% of editors feel it is overused
• “Unsurpassed” – 53% of editors feel it is overused

David does a great job of summarizing the importance of writing for our buyers, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to steal a couple of lines for the book to close this as well.

“Your online and offline marketing content is meant to drive action, which requires a focus on buyer problems.  Your buyers want this in their own words, and then they want proof.  Every time you write, you have an opportunity to communicate and to convince.  At each stage of the sales process, well-written materials combined with effective marketing programs will lead your buyers to understand how your company can help them.”

If you’re worried about your use or overuse of gobbledygook words in your news releases, check out Hubspot’s Press Release Grader.  This free tool helps you make sure you are getting the most out of every news release you write.

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company Marketo.

I recently wrote about why sales and marketing can’t get along. Here are some practical tips to start bridging the gap!

1. Model the entire revenue cycle. As opposed to a standalone sales cycle, focus on an integrated revenue cycle that starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. This helps each team understand what the other is doing, and how their actions help facilitate revenue.

2. Develop a common vocabulary. Part of an integrated revenue cycle is common definitions for each stage. When marketing sits down with sales and says, “what is the definition of a good sales lead, and how can we help?” the dynamic between the two departments changes. With the definition of sales-ready in hand, marketing can begin rebuilding trust by delivering leads that meet that definition. This common language and metrics is essential for communication between the functions.

3. Look for operational disconnects. Too often, sales energy and promotions are focused in a different direction than marketing’s most recent campaigns. In some cases, they can even be in conflict! In one example, the sales team had an incentive to sell a product that marketing was planning to discontinue in the next month. Make sure that initiatives and promotions are aligned by developing plans jointly and meeting monthly or at least quarterly.

4. Create a closed-loop reporting process. Marketing needs to have a way to follow-up with sales to see how well leads are performing. This can be a field in the CRM system, a regular call, or even an automated survey. Just make sure it’s easy for the rep to respond. It can be as basic as sending the rep an email two weeks after receiving a lead with the subject “Was lead ABC good?” This way, they can simply reply “Yes” or “No”, which they can easily do on their Blackberry or in a hotel room. Closing the loop like this can help tune lead generation efforts, and is an important way to take qualified prospects that are not yet sales ready and recycle them back into marketing for lead nurturing.

5. Share accountability between the teams. Marketing is a very measurable process, but the results are head to measure; it’s easy to measure Sales outcomes but Sales activity is hard to measure. As a result, compensation and rewards tend to be very different, which creates further problems. So be sure to review how each team is compensated and rewarded to ensure alignment. (One typical disconnect: marketing focuses on the number of new deals while sales is focused on the amount and size of the total pipeline.) The better your ability to measure marketing ROI, the easier it is to bridge this gap.

6. Foster respect and trust. Perhaps most importantly, in particular, building alignment between marketing and sales organizations starts with a common set of values and shared beliefs. If the two functions don’t fundamentally believe the other has the same set of goals in mind, it will be much more difficult to drive alignment. This is rooted in good and regular communication, but it can be challenging to repair years of miscommunication all at once. Start by focusing on small wins (for example, look for a particular rep who closed a big deal because of a marketing lead) and promote the result aggressively. By having a “victory parade” for small wins, you will begin the process of better communication and trust.

I love that David is now giving us actionable things to think about for our own businesses.  So many times we read business books with a lot of commentary but no real action items or ideas on how to incorporate these things into our existing strategies.  In this chapter he lists 8 ideas on creating thoughtful content.  Here’s a few I really liked –

• Do not write about your company or products.  Thought leadership is not advertising.
• Based on your goals, decide whether your content should be free or behind a form.
• Write for your audience.  Use examples and stories.
• Choose a great title that grabs attention.
• To drive  viral marketing effects, alert appropriate reporters, bloggers, and analysts that content is available for download.

Are you already using some of these ideas or is there anything else to add to the list?

Next week we will be discussing chapters 12 and 13 on how to write for your buyers and how web content influences the buying process.

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company, Marketo

The gap between marketing and sales teams has been around since the two functions were created and is usually just accepted as an irreparable inconvenience in many businesses. Sales thinks only they are worried about the quarter; Marketing thinks they are the only ones who think strategically. Sales wonder why they have to generate all their own leads; Marketing complains that sales ignores or criticizes everything they generate. Sales thinks marketing is lightweight and easy; Marketing thinks salespeople will say anything to get a deal.

It is time for this fighting to stop. As the spread of the internet and social media transform the B2B buying process, aligning the warring departments has never been more critical to driving revenue and growth. And stopping the fighting begins by understanding the real and significant differences between the two functions.

There are a number of factors on which marketing and sales differ, including timeframes, goals, and ways of showing value. While marketers look months and even years down the road as they seek to develop a brand and grow broad interest in their company, sales is laser-focused on hitting their numbers for the here and now. Each viewpoint meets a distinct and valid business need, but these contrasting views lead to conflicting perceptions of what contributes to the overall success of the business. It also means that marketing and sales tend to attract different skill sets and risk profiles, which exacerbates the “us versus them” mentality and makes it harder to appreciate the other’s disciplines.

The dissonance is further intensified by the feeling among marketers that they are treated as second-class citizens while sales gets the glory (and the incentive-based compensation). The value of a new sales win is immediately quantifiable as new revenue, but marketing is often seen as a cost center because its impact on revenue isn’t made explicit. (Marketers often exacerbate this by focusing too much on measuring activity instead of outcomes; while it’s easy to measure sales outcomes but hard to measure sales activity, the opposite is true in marketing.)

What to do about it?

Put simply, these difference means that Sales is from Mars, and Marketing is from Venus. Therefore, they key to closing the gap between marketing and sales is not to slam the two groups into one function under one leader, as some pundits advise. And it’s not to force marketers to behave more like salespeople, with aggressive quotas and huge variable compensation. Instead, the answer is to recognize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the revenue process, and to find ways to get the best out of each function in a coordinated, efficient process.

In my next guest post, I’ll share my six keys to building a happy marriage between sales and marketing, so stay tuned!

As the summer ends and everyone comes back from vacation we’re quickly reminded that the end of the year is right around the corner.  As Marketers that means we really only have about 10 weeks left to drive meaningful activity (sales-ready leads) this year.

With only limited time left we naturally want to target our marketing efforts at low hanging fruit first.  Targeted lead generation requires reaching the right buyers in the right companies, right?  Before you kick off new programs, why not start with what you already know and have?
Consider these starting points:

Sales Pipeline data – Customer win data and in-funnel opportunities can be a goldmine at your fingertips.

• Understand where you’ve been, where you won and who else is out there that match that profile.
• Look at what prospects are moving through the funnel the fastest, find more like these.

Website Analytics – Visitors are stopping by, but do you know who they are?

• Are there visitor profiles or patterns of interest?  If so, do you have a plan to act on these?
• Web analytic tools can help you identify the company that is visiting, interesting.  Identifying the right decision making unit inside these visiting companies, even more interesting.

Once you’ve identified the companies with the highest likelihood to buy, don’t forget about your decision making unit buying personas (influencers, evaluators, recommenders, end users and budget owners).  What do your buyers look like?  What do they care about?  Why should they listen to you?

As you are getting ready to ramp your lead generation for the end of the year push don’t forget where you’ve been, who you’re attracting today and how you are going to use this information to get the best results possible.

“What are your organization’s goals?” For most B2B marketers the answer is increasing revenue. David says that leads and website visitors are the wrong things to focus on. I have to disagree. At ReachForce, we are all striving towards the same goals (proven by the fact that all of our bonuses are tied to revenue and bookings goals). But, each department sort of reverse engineers what they individually have to achieve in order to meet those goals. We measure everything, so I know exactly how many new leads need to be delivered to sales in order to for them to reach their bookings numbers. I cannot make a sale or generate revenue directly, so I have to focus on goals I can achieve.

I think a great question you have to ask is “what is the goal of my website.” I touched on this some in my last post, but it is even more relevant for this chapter. Is the goal of your website to:

• educate buyers about your products or services?
• get buyers to download a white paper, eBook, webcast, etc?
• get buyers to contact you?
• get buyers to request a demo?

Most executives will say that they want all of the above. In my opinion, you can’t have it all for every persona. Your website should lead buyers down a path. The better goal may be that you have a different goal for each persona. That way your website is reaching all of these goals but each persona is traveling down the best path for them. Now I would love to tell you to check out the ReachForce website as a great example, but I don’t think that it is. Check back in a few weeks though because we are making lots of changes in this direction.

David spends a lot of this chapter talking about personas. Our own Pam O’Neal has blogged about personas before. I find that the best way for me to think about my different buyer personas is defining the different members of the decision making unit. I already segment my database that way and have different offers for different roles, shouldn’t my website be the same?

Anyone had any success using personas to drive their web design?