B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

While Twitter is still trying to figure out a revenue generating model (which will include Pro Accounts) for their hugely popular free service, some people claim they are willing to pay for certain upgraded features.  Dan Frommer took a look at comments on his most recent blog post about Twitter and put together a list of what Twitter users say they would be willing to pay for.

Amazing what people will “say” they’ll pay for…

• Slightly longer messages: 160 characters instead of 140.
• Unlimited or prioritized access to API. (Twitter limits how many requests an account can make per hour.)
• Auto-deleting deadbeat followers who haven’t logged in within a month.
• More reliable service. (Can’t really charge on a per-user basis for this though, unless there’s a separate Twitter that’s more reliable, right?)
• Link-click analytics. (Free already if you use bit.ly, though some limitations.)
• Guaranteeing that their old tweets (all of them) are available forever, and easier to sift through.

Would you pay for twitter fearures?

I am always looking for new ways to find qualified leads for sales and will typically try anything once.  Each quarter we try to add something new to the mix.  For next quarter we looked at couple of virtual tradeshows.  We sponsored one last year and found it pretty interesting even though we didn’t get many real leads from it (lots of international visitors).  It was a good place to cut our teeth on something new.

In the last week or so, we were contacted to sponsor another virtual tradeshow being put on by a major industry publication that seems to be in transition with both their events and their publication, moving everything online.  I was intrigued and wanted more details.  I inquired further about this new event to find out what the cost would be and how many/what kind of attendees they expected.  I got back a very interesting reply.  Sponsorships ranged from $10K to $25K.  Little surprised here since this is typically the cost of live events.  I was still interested…then I found out how many people they were expecting.  I figured thousands, right?  Nope, they’re only expecting about 2500 people.  But how targeted are these people visiting?

With this economy travel budgets are definitely being cut but aren’t tradeshow budgets too?  Not sure about you, but it seems like a hefty pricetag for a very broad tradeshow.  I can think of a lot of things to spend $10K – $25K that will result in more targeted, qualified leads.  What about you?

Ah, to be counter-cyclic.  That holy grail of business performance that is coveted by all but achieved by few.   As our economy attempts to recover from the “off the top turnbuckle” piledriver inflicted upon it by our good friends on Wall Street, recent news in the Marketing Automation sector seems to indicate that things are going just fine, thank you, as evidenced by:

Marketo celebrating their One-Year Anniversary with their 160th customer win

Eloqua announcing their $33M year in 2008, up 58% YoY

Impressive on both accounts and hopefully this trend continues during the rebound.  Interestingly, new findings from the recently released Marketing Outlook study conducted by the CMO Council indicate that 50% of marketers are keeping flat or actually increasing their budgets, but as far as investment in Marketing Automation goes:

“…tactical capabilities and point solutions dominate. The top two target areas of investment for 2009 are email marketing (44.9 percent) and online surveys and research (33.2 percent). Only 10.1 percent are investing in master data, 12.8 percent in marketing operational systems, and 9.3 percent in marketing resource or process management solutions.”

This supports a trend that we see quite frequently, which is that although companies are buying Marketing Automation suites, they really end up using them as email marketing tools and only dabble in the other features.  Perhaps as times get better and budgets open up more, we will see a renewed/newfound exploration and usage of the multichannel capabilities that make these suites more powerful than your average load-and-go email blaster.

It seems like everyday I hear about a new social networking tool and read another article about how to increase my Twitter following or maximize my Facebook presence.  You can’t be everywhere but how in the world do you go about choosing the right networks to participate in? I have found there are 3 questions to ask myself when choosing where to spend my efforts online:

• What are these networks already talking about? - Most every social network has some sort of search tool. Plug in your keywords to see if your industry is already being talked about.  Sign up immediately and join the conversation if they are.  Don’t forget to include your Company name in the search.  Someone else may have already started the conversation about you.
• Where are your competitors? – If your competitors have a presence there, you should too. To find out where they are, go to their website or blog and look for links like “follow us on Twitter” or “join our LinkedIn Group”. You should also head to some of the post popular social networking sites and see if your competitors have created profiles/accounts/pages.  Be sure to check for activity in groups and discussion boards like in Facebook groups and in LinkedIn Answers.
• Where are your customers? – I think the best place to start is with your customers. Their activities should most closely mimic those of your prospects.  You can find out where they are by a quick survey to your customers.  Do you have a customer advisory board?  Use them to help you get started.  And there is always the hard way (not really all that hard but rather time consuming) which is to go out to different networks and search to see if your customers are already there.

Keep in mind that social networking is not right for every industry.  You definitely want to do your homework up front so you can be stategic in your social networking lead gneration.  If you feel like you are a little ahead of your time for your industry, I would start with something like LinkedIn.  It is the most professional of the networks out there and is kind of the gateway drug to other social networks.

Do you think you have mastered the basics of Twitter and want to take it to the next level?  I was amazed that there are 8 analytics tools out there just for Twitter.  Here is a great blog post from Social Media Today on 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams.  I am not sure that they all have great B2B applications, but interesting stuff to check out.

Do you keep track of what is being said about your company online?   If you don’t, you should.  I am certain that the folks at Mzinga were shocked by what Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Analyst, said about them in his post on Monday.  Thankfully they were monitoring and able to respond.  He chose one of the most public forums at his disposal to publicly bash the company.  He says, “Why this post? It’s my obligation to have my clients best interest in mind, and this is the fastest way for me to reach them, by using the tools where we’re already connected.”  I find that a little hard to believe.  My guess is that email is the fastest way to reach his clients, not a public blog post.

I have a real problem with anyone using a public forum to bash a company before actually speaking with someone at the company directly or at least reaching out to the company directly.  Why do we feel in this online world that we can post something to Twitter, LinkedIn, or our own blog about another company without ever having taken the time to find out if our accusation is true or to resolve conflict we may personally have.  Jeremiah obviously has connections to the folks at Mzinga. Why not pick up the phone and chat with them first to confirm or deny the rumors he has been hearing.  When they gave him the answer that they would be making a public announcement in a week (in response to his tweets, not his direct reaching out), why couldn’t he wait?  Or if he felt this was truly something his clients needed to know, why not inform them privately?  (Sorry if I have gone on a bit of a tangent, but I fell very strongly about this subject.)

Jeremiah did respond with an apology on his blog.  But like one commenter said, “After reading that “apology”, it wreaks of: ‘I have been asked by my employer to write something, but do not believe that I am in the wrong.’”  I have to agree.  Read the post and apology and decide for yourself.

Lessons learned:

• Track what others are saying about you online – Google alerts is not enough.  Make sure you are tracking what is being said on Twitter (set up an RSS feed of your company’s name on Twitter Search) and LinkedIn.
• Respond quickly and pleasantly to everyone, analyst/blogger/customer/prospect
  
• If you don’t have something nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all – I think we could all use reminding of this wonderful phrase our mothers used to say to us.

We launched our new search optimized website yesterday.  Thank you Leigh Anne for all your hard work!  After many months of research and lots of copywriting, we are all set and ready for the inbound leads to start pouring in.

As part of the new website launch we are also doing a PR blast.  Anyone that knows me well knows I’m not a PR person.  I get that it has its place but PR has always been very difficult to measure.  So instead of perfecting my PR skills, I’ve almost always outsourced this function.

But now, with social media and some pretty simple analytics we can see where we our visitors are coming from so we’ve built a PR program around the new launch.  To get over my dislike of writing news releases I’ve convinced myself that we’re doing these to support our SEO efforts as well as our overall awareness goals.

Here’s a few tips we used when drafting these announcements:

• Writing for our audience – we want to be sure that our audience understands our news and sees the value in what we are announcing, this is key to supporting out SEO efforts.  Important thing to remember here is the news comes first, SEO 2nd.  You have to make sure you don’t confuse or dilute your news by trying to overuse keywords or keyword phrases.

• Decide on your keywords before your start writing – this will help you make sure you are writing with these in mind.  Here, Leigh Anne keeps an updated list of our top keywords and keyword phrases on our white board, this way we’re looking at them every time we go to write something.  Trying to plug in your keywords afterwards will cause problems like I mentioned above.

• Links, links, links – be sure to link keywords in your press release back to pages on your website.  Best strategy includes already having optimized these pages with the same keywords.

• Optimize the important stuff – Be sure you are including your keywords in the most important places – your headline, your subhead, your boilerplate and your first paragraph.

• Press Release Grader – once again, a cool free tool from the folks at HubSpot.  Just copy and paste your press release in and it will grade the release based on language, content and SEO.  Don’t worry if you score a little low at first, it will give you tips for improvement.

• PRWeb – it’s what we use here – it’s worth it to upgrade (we use SEO visibility package).  You will be able to:
  • add links
  • add images
  • include in your own RSS feed
  • add Technorati tags
  • use SEO tools and statistics

We have seen some really great results since we started optimizing our releases.  From one release alone, we got over 100 new leads in a day.  It definitely makes the extra effort worth it.

This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke.  Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems.  She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient.  She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.

What do you arm your sales people with? A phone, a computer and a database of prospects (or worse, a phone book)?  How do you prepare them for what is to come, the rejection, or better still, the prospect who wants to buy?   How do we better equip our sales team and enable them to reach and exceed their goals? These are questions we recently decided to tackle at ReachForce…one of our answers came in the form of training.

Our typical training regime used to be comprised solely of a full-day quarterly kickoff.  During that time we would run through a few “sales” skills specific sessions, some background on our industry, and a piece on what we do and how we do it (for newbies).   Part team-building, part skills training, it was an exhausting day and by the end of it some of our more ADD inclined employees had mentally checked out.  Recently we decided to make some changes.  First, instead of only hosting training sessions on a once a quarter basis, each of our weekly sales meetings would be host to a mini-session led by a sales rep.  Second, our quarterly sales training meeting would be shortened to a little over half a day.

Some of the topics that have been assigned out (and presented) by our sales team are:

• Best Practices: Preparing for a first call – items to research/points to know prior to the call
• Overcoming Objections
• Winning Closing Techniques
• Managing Your Time Effectively
• Creating ‘Date Certain’ Decisions
• Call to action emails
• Bringing a proposal to life
• Upping the average sales price

Each of our reps was assigned a date and a topic.  There aren’t really parameters around what they prepare, some have used PowerPoint, some have just spoken and some have created handouts.  I can’t say that we’ve measured our results, but I can say that our reps have been able to put these things into practice as quickly as they are being taught.  One of the greatest things about this training is that it is led in a peer to peer setting.  We felt it very important to remove senior management from these meetings, thus alleviating the fear of looking stupid or asking questions.   Only our floor managers stay in the room with the sales reps, because our floor managers interact with our reps on a peer level, so they teach and learn alongside their fellow sales reps.

The topics listed above are just a few that we have come up with, our program certainly will continue to have fuel and the momentum of continuing education should have a great impact for us.  What kind of topics would your reps benefit from?

It’s a new year and here at ReachForce we are in the process of analyzing all of our programs to determine which ones drive the most sales conversions.  Very quickly we realized that people that respond to our programs seem to over and over again.  But what about those that never respond?  They are killing our response rates and conversions.

With every program we as Marketers run we are able to bucket people into “responders” and “non-responders”.  We typically do different things with these two groups.  Responders can either move into other programs that try and further qualify the lead for sales or they go directly to sales/inside sales for more follow up and further qualification.

Now – what do you do with the non-responders and inactive contacts in your database?  By leaving them in the current mix, you’re only hurting your program ROI and possible sales conversions.  Continuing to do the same thing over and over again with these non-responders is insanity, right?

So instead of writing these people off, change up the mix and try something new with them.

In our 2.0 world, there are so many new possibilities for reaching your prospects in a way they respond to.  Here’s a few ideas to consider:

• Webcasts – some people are visual learners and want to feel like they are interacting with live people.  Email them an on-demand webcast or invite them your next live webinar.

• Podcasts – some people like to listen vs. read [a whitepaper or eBook]

• Survey – we use explicit surveys here at ReachForce to gather lead qualifying information.  Now, yes we do incentivize people to take the survey but the results we get back are fabulous.  It helps our lead gen and sales team to prioritize their follow up and it helps us weed out no fits (also helping increase our next program ROI).

• Social networks – where else are your prospects hanging out?  Get out there with them and try and make contact.  Remember you can’t enter the social world with your used car salesman pitch, people will roll their eyes at you and never interact.

• Channels – are your prospects also customers of some of your partners, see if they can help with introductions or more insight into the prospect account.

• Offers and Incentives – be sure to change them up and test what works best.

And if all else fails, it might be time to clean up your data.  Make sure you have the right buying contacts in the right companies or it doesn’t even matter what you are sending or offering.

With every program we put together here at ReachForce, our #1 goal is to drive more hand raisers.  That means we have to create programs using multiple vehicles.  Is vehicles the right word here?  Maybe not, but you know what I mean.

So how are you reaching those stubborn prospects that give you no signal of interest?  Hopefully you’re not just giving up on them …