I know you are all on pins and needles wanting to know our next eBook for the ReachForce Book Club.  We have chosen Brian Carroll’s Start With A Lead: Eight critical success factors for lead generation.  In this eBook, Carroll highlights ways to improve demand generation programs including aligning sales and marketing efforts to optimize the number of leads, avoiding lulls in the sales cycle, building, maintaining, & growing your database and multimodal lead nurturing (all things we like to talk about on The B2B Lead).  Be sure to join in the Book Club discussion on Thursday led by Amy Hawthorne.

More great sales tips from Brian McRae, Market Development Manager here at ReachForce.

Cold calling is a discipline that every successful salesperson must adopt to be successful.

Our key steps to successful prospecting:

• Script your voicemails, e-mails, and live connects.  Then practice, practice and keep practicing.  Be mindful that you have about 15 seconds to make that first impression.  Avoid clichés, apologies, “ums” and weasel words.  Instead use strong, powerful language to get the prospect’s attention.  You have to “reach through the phone” in order to generate interest in your message.
• Approach every dial with a little bit of courage and a little bit of confidence.  Remember that you are providing your prospect with an opportunity to derive real value from your product or service.  Be bold to capture their attention and intelligent enough to keep it.
• Develop a routine for dialing every day.  Nolan Ryan says “I wouldn’t ask anybody to do anything I wouldn’t be willing to do.”  So if you’re managing a team…
• Know your desired outcome prior to the call.  What specific goal do you want to achieve with this call?  Our team’s goal on a first cold call is simply arouse enough interest to set a meeting with the prospect to further discuss our value and solutions.
• Execute.  Every single day.  Remember that the difference between amateurs and professionals is that professionals do it, even when they don’t feel like it.

If you are looking for more…here are 10 other great tips!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how to use Trigger-based marketing techniques in a down economy by leveraging Web 2.0 tools. Some of these tools are also great for online reputation management, as well, you’ll just want to focus on a different set of search/scan criteria.

To get started, you’ll need to identify keywords that are important for tracking your industry, key trends or issues, the competition, your company and product brand names, as well as company spokespersons’ names. Once you’ve come up with a manageable list, configure the following tools to scan and collect that data.

1. Google Alerts, Google Blog Search, and Google Reader: We’ve written a lot about using Google Alerts here on The B2B Lead. What we haven’t written about is organizing all of the discoveries you’ve made using these tools in Google Reader. It’s a great way to collect a bunch of sources of insight about your keywords and feed them into a list of must-read links each day.
2. Tweetscan: This is one of the most important feeds in your Google Reader list as you can use it to monitor what people are saying about you or your competitor throughout the Twitter universe. It’s also another good way to find people with shared interests.
3. For my company, most of the conversations are taking place on tech forums and message boards. I just discovered Boardtracker.com which will enable me to keep an eye on popular forums and alert me by RSS feed if my company is mentioned. But, you have to know which forums to track.

Need more? Marketing Pilgrim published this great post with 20+ others.

In this inspiring and award-winning eBook, Dianna Huff lays out five strategies that all B2B Marketers should be employing and, as the title suggests, will help drive sales and ultimately revenue.  During these uncertain times, marketers need to prove their worth and tie their activities directly to increasing the bottom line.

DISCLAIMER: This blog post in no way replaces actually reading the eBook.  This is a great one, completely devoid of self-promotion and full of great tips.  Not to mention, it is a quick read.

I don’t want to dilute or regurgitate what Dianna wrote, but I do want to highlight some of the best tips.

“Strategy #2: Determine Your Campaign Objectives Before You Start Writing.”  I have always been a planner and someone who thinks a project through to the end before starting.  I often have to ask other members of my team, “Why are we doing this?  What is the ultimate goal?”  The course of action you take to update your collateral, re-do your website or create a new email campaign should be dramatically influenced by your goals.  Your boss may be pushing you to get it out the door as fast as possible but without planning and execution tied to specific objectives, results will suffer.  Check out pages 7 and 8 for questions to ask before you start.

“Strategy #5: Focus on Your Customer, Not on Your Company.”  Dianna is not the first and definitely not the last to say this.  However, it is amazing how few companies actually employ this strategy.  No one likes talking to someone who only talks about themselves, so why do companies think that their buyers want to read about the company’s latest award, product release features or “unmatched customer service?”  Every buyer wants to know, “What’s in it for me?,” so tell them.  Dianna gives great tips on what you should be telling your buyers on pages 16 and 17.

I am not giving away anymore, but I hope I have given you enough of a taste to entice you to read the entire eBook. And if you don’t trust me, Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now just won a platinum award from the MarCom Creative Awards

Dianna Huff is principal of DH Communications, Inc. and is the author of the B2B MarCom Writer Blog.

Did you know that our new President Barack Obama was named Marketer of the Year 2008? Last month, Advertising Age named Barack Obama “Marketer of the Year”. Congratulations, on both counts. It doesn’t matter if you voted Republican or Democrat this year; I think we can all agree Barack Obama took campaigning to a whole new level. As an independent first time voter, I was impressed as a Marketer by the campaign overall. The dimensions of marketing they put to use stretched my marketing brain. With the use of direct marketing, event marketing, online marketing and new media the Obama team understood the need to reach out to voters as individuals – demographics and targeting were central to the campaign.

Obama and his team understood their target demographic/markets and how to use a mix of multi touch, multi level and multimedia platforms to reach these people where they were already hanging out. By using video game ads, Twitter, an active online community, and a list of other marketing vehicles, the Obama marketing team understood the importance of motivating the younger demographics and using multiple mediums that worked for them.

B2B Marketers take note. Our new President has something to say about reaching the right audiences with the right kinds of messages through the right vehicles. Below is a list a few places you can find Barack Obama marketing. Are you there for your business and what lessons can we learn from the reach created by his campaign?

Email marketing

• event based – I would receive text messages and emails while Obama was at an event or debate
• 1:1 with key players – email messages from Barack, Michelle Obama and Joe Biden – For example, I got a message from Michelle Obama reminding me it was the last day to give money to the campaign.

Community – currently over 1 million members. Through the community supporters can:

• find information about local events or groups
• connect with other supporters
• share information or real-life stories
• donate to the campaign

PPC – 14% of Barack Obama’s online traffic in August 2008 came from paid search

New Media – Barack Obama is out there, are you?

Polls are showing more young voters have registered to vote than ever before. I have no doubt that Obama and his team’s approach to reach them drove this involvement.

Thank you President Obama. You are proof that targeted marketing does drive real results…oh, and I’m sure your messages and positions on the issues helped too.

My Granddad used to say, when times are tough hang on to those that love you. Is the same true for tough economic times and B2B relationship marketing?

Your market is fundamentally made up of three types of targets. Customers you have, those you’ve lost, and potential accounts who – so far – have decided to do business elsewhere.

This is the first of a serial discussion (please join in) about measuring and connecting some specific customer experience management dots for minimizing customer churn, growing key accounts and identifying new revenue opportunities with companies that share common profiles with those with whom you do well.

Over the decades I’ve devised and managed dozens of customer retention programs. As a deliberate marketing proponent I was an enthusiastic Net Promoter adopter because of its implied relationship with corporate growth and its sheer simplicity – something very appealing when trying to achieve internal buy-in for major (sometimes costly) customer experience initiatives.

But in times like these where the outcome of a company’s customer experience strategy can make or break quarterly revenue plans, a one dimensional measurement such as NPS may help to know how many loyal customers there are, but isn’t very good for knowing about problems or –more importantly– how to fix them.

So while I love the idea of NPS as a simple advocacy index (as well as the role it’s had on increasing the importance business owners now place on these types of marketing metrics) I’ve found it to be just one of the many dots that need connecting to drive revenue growth. The most common mistake in the B2B world today is confusing loyal customers with satisfied customers.

The difference between satisfied customers and loyal customers is distinctly a matter of emotion. And while metrics dealing with both are very different and have unique implications – they are interdependent as two halves – quantifiable (satisfied) – and subjective (loyal) of the complete customer relationship picture.

This means customer feedback must be secured, structured, analyzed and acted upon in both concrete and abstract formats. To this end I have developed an arsenal of best practices that can be used for the following:

1. Optimize the flow of information and feedback that captures both quantifiable and emotional responses to “customer experience” surveys.
2. Analytical methodology for connecting and measuring quantifiable and emotional feedback to determine a “CEI,” or Customer Experience Index for each customer on your list.
3. Templates and guides for using CEI scores to craft short, mid and long term account plans for retention, up-selling and cross-selling.
4. Templates and guides for using highest CEI scores to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting.
5. Templates and guides for using lowest CEI scores to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions

Over the next few weeks my blog posts will address these subjects one-by-one. Again, I’d really appreciate your feedback as we go.