Earlier this week we featured a post on Eloqua – what it is, what it does and why B2B marketers should care.  Well there’s more.  Eloqua not only has built a platform that enables marketers to execute but as a team they are committed to providing best practices that ensure results.

If you are an Eloqua customer, chances are you’ve recently received your copy of Digital Body Language by Steve Woods, Eloqua’s CTO.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  Here’s a preview of chapter 4 – The Profile of the New Buyer.

As expected the smart marketers at Eloqua have turned a few chapters from the book into eBooks.  Great idea!  Be sure to download the Digital Body Language eBooks for yourself.

The Profile of the New Buyer, we talk about it a lot here on The B2B Lead.  This chapter starts with this list of 5 key questions about a potential buyer that any sales person wants to know before engaging:

• How ready to buy is this person?  You’re probably thinking…uh yeah, if I knew that I wouldn’t be working so hard on the messaging for my next program…
• What role does this person play compared to his colleagues?  Roles, I love it.  We often refer to this buying group as the decision making unit (DMU)
• How interested is this person?
• What type of message best resonates with this person?
• What information on this person would be useful to obtain?

All great questions and today getting the answers to these questions is now marketing’s job.  Here’s where Digital Body Language comes in.  The goal is to create programs that help provide consistent, predictive insight into buying intentions.  This means tracking all engagement activities and trends aka digital body language.

To get the answers to these questions we must understand the following –

• Buyer’s Stage – At what stage of the buying process is the buyer?
• Buyer’s Role – Who is the prospective buyer?
• Interest Level – How interested is this buyer
• Communication Preferences – How does this buyer find information?

Woods goes on to further break down and explain how to use a prospect’s digital body language to build out the information needed to further qualify the lead before it is sent to sales.  For more, you’re going to have to get the book or at least download the eBook of this chapter.  It’s worth the quick read.

One of the best things about the Digital Body Language book is that it not only forces you to expand your thinking on marketing’s new and improved role of creating a sales pipeline of qualified, interested buyers but it also provides some great ideas and how-to’s.  Here’s a couple from this chapter:

Web Sites and Meaningful URLs
Avoid storing multiple distinct information assets on one page or using incomprehensible strings as URLs.  Instead, achieve the highest level of insight into the prospect’s interests based solely on their path through you Web site.

Web Site Hot Spots
Make sure you can view this traffic by area, rather than by individual page.  Tagging these pages with “meta” meaning will show you when a visitor views five case study pages and seven product pages – rather than 12 unique pages

For more on Eloqua, go to www.eloqua.com.  To get your copy of Digital Body Language, go here.

LinkedIn seems to be the most commonly used social network amongst most B2B Marketers. Or at least the one where people seem to be seeing real results.  Today we’re able to participate in groups with those we have things in common with, answer questions, and look up contacts/prospects and see how many connections away we are. To date there has been no real way for Marketers to collect leads in a systematic way. Well, it looks like this is changing.

Yesterday, LinkedIn CEO sent out a tweet saying he just downloaded his first whitepaper from LinkedIn.

This new feature doesn’t seem to be available to everyone yet but here’s what we do know:

• There will be a form to collect info. from those that download
• Looks like costs will range from $40 – $100 per lead
• LinkedIn users will not have to pay for whitepapers
• Whitepaper ads will can be targeted by title and industry
• Content is still king here. People are only going to download interesting content that provides value.
• Whitepaper titles are going to be even more important. It’s what’s going to catch your target’s eye.
• When someone downloads a form, they are basically opting in for follow up communications.
• In addition to the targeted advertising, there will be a whitepaper directory for LinkedIn members to search for relevant content.

Here’s another example of how B2B Marketers are able to mix their social media with direct lead generation. Once this is rolled out, I think we’ll give it a try. How about you?

MarketingSherpa is a great resource for studies and stats.  Even if you are not a member you can sign-up to receive their weekly newsletter and chart of the week.  This week’s MarketingSherpa chart of the week really peaked my interest.

We’ve been working with the folks at MathMarketing (Hugh Macfarlane, author of The Leaky Funnel) lately and have been having a lot of discussions about the marketing and sales funnel, the lead flow into the funnel and the leads that leak out. The ones leaking out have me wondering…

With the introduction of marketing and salesforce automation systems, B2B lead generation teams are able to better measure and analyze activities that drive leads into the funnel and ultimately to customer wins but what about those that fall out?  Where do all of these leads go?  And who’s in charge of keeping them in the mix?

How Organizations Manage the Pipeline from Lead to Sale

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart.

The 2 at the bottom of this chart further confirm that there’s still work to be done here and I’m not the only one wondering about leaked leads.  We work so hard for these leads and just because they aren’t ready to buy right now they are getting kicked out. We’re missing opportunities and most of us probably don’t even know it.

What are you doing about leads that have leaked?  Do you have a way to get them back into a nurturing cycle?  And most importantly, is the sales team providing information on why the lead was kicked out or back?

What’s working for you?  Please do share.

One of my favorite social media news sites, Mashable, had a great post a couple of weeks ago worthy of sharing with our readers.   Sharlyn Lauby, the post author and president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) put together a list of 10 things to consider when creating a social media policy.

Leigh Anne and I try to stay pretty active out in the new social world and we often get asked if we have a social media policy here at ReachForce.  We don’t have one, but as we continue to grow our team we might consider it in the future.

Sharlyn says, “Whether you’re writing your social media policy from the get-go, or letting it develop organically in reaction to situations as they arise, here are 10 things you should definitely consider. These 10 tips will help you steer clear of pitfalls and allow you to focus on what’s important: engaging the customer.”

1. Introduce the purpose of social media for your organization- focus on the things that employees CAN DO rather than what they can’t do.  it’s all about leveraging the positive to get people to engage and bring value to your social media efforts.
2. Be responsible for what you write – Your team needs to take responsibility for what they write, and exercise good judgment and common sense. You’d think this is obvious, but better safe than sorry, right?
3. Be authentic – Include your name and, when appropriate, your company name and your title. People want to interact with other people in the social world, not business (aka sales people).  Here at ReachForce, when we’re participating in the social world, instead of including our ReachForce URL, we include a link back here, to the The B2B Lead.  We figure it’s more comfortable and gives our audience and followers a better snapshot of who we are personally.
4. Consider your audience -When you’re out and about remember that your readers could include current customers, potential customers, as well as current/past/future employees, your boss, your board members, and of course your mom. Consider that before you publish and make sure you aren’t alienating any of those groups.
5. Exercise good judgment – Refrain from comments that can be interpreted as slurs, demeaning, inflammatory, etc.  You’d think this was obvious too but remember if it ends up on the internet someone will find it.
6. Understand the concept of community – The essence of community is the idea that it exists so that you can support others and they, in turn, can support you. You need to learn how to balance personal and professional information, and the important role that transparency plays in building a community.
7. Respect copyrights and fair use – This should be a no-brainer, but just in case: always give people proper credit for their work, and make sure you have the right to use something with attribution before you publish.  i.e. These tips come from Sharlyn Lauby via Mashable.
8. Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info - Transparency doesn’t give employees free rein to share just anything. Common sense here please, it could cost you your job.
   
9. Bring value – share relevant activities or news with your community, fellow bloggers and other social media followers.  Do your customers really care what you had for lunch?  I doubt it.
   
10. Productivity matters – But, your social media usage won’t get you very far if you don’t execute on the core competencies of your business. Remember that in order for your social media endeavors to be successful, you need to find the right balance between social media and other work.

Looking for a sample policy?  IBM has published their social media guidelines publicly for anyone to read. It’s a great policy, though rather long.

Here at ReachForce we use a lot of best practice type content offers as part of our multi-touch outbound marketing programs.  I’ve heard my sales team say more than a couple of times that they don’t seem to get a lot of traction with people from the content downloads.  Even with prompt follow up, nothing.

After giving it some thought, I came to the conclusion that either people downloading content are in an education phase and aren’t ready to speak to a sales rep.  or that these people consume information in a way that does not involve interaction…yet.  Neither of these conclusions provided a solution though.

Then I ran across this blog post, Forgettable Follow-up on B2B Content Offers, from Ardath Albee at The Customer Collective.  This one is a MUST read for all sales and marketing teams.  Here are some of the highlights:

Here are some examples of how B2B follow-up becomes forgettable:

Example:
[Company] Hello, This is Sam from [Company]. I noticed you downloaded our paper on whiz bang issue 57 and I’m interested in helping learn more about how we can help solve your problem.
[Prospect] I’m just researching.
[Company] Well, do you have a project planned that we can discuss?
[Prospect] No, I’m just doing some research. [I knew I shouldn't have answered the phone.]
[Company] Okay, I’m going to send you some product information so you’ll have it on file for when you need it.
[Prospect] Thanks. You have a nice day. [click, buzz, delete]

Example:
Email follow-up message – Thank you for requesting the [Recognizable Name] white paper. As you may know, [Our Company] is a leader in [whiz bang whatever] and we sponsored the white paper. I’d look forward to learning what initiatives you’re working on to see if [Our Solution] is a fit. I’d like to schedule a fifteen minute call to discuss your goals in [whiz bang whatever]. Please let me know when is a convenient time to talk.

This is such a waste of time. Approaches like these do absolutely nothing to elevate your company’s trust level or credibility. Instead, you’re seen as self-serving and, ultimately, forgettable.

Now you need to give them a reason for continued involvement. Here are some ideas on how to improve the response to your follow-up:

• Have a business reason for the follow-up. Just touching base isn’t good enough.

• Have an additional offer ready that builds on their expressed interest. An exclusive report, an article not publicly available, an invitation to a webinar on a related topic, etc.

• Know exactly what they downloaded and be specific to help them make the connection. People are busy. They download a lot of things. Expecting them to remember yours when you call/email out of the blue is just silly. If your follow-up is in relation to content you sponsored, they likely downloaded it because of the source, not you. So have something compelling to say if you want their interest to transfer to you.

• Follow-up promptly.  Waiting a month means you’re likely forgotten and someone else now has their attention.

DO NOT:

• Ask them to educate you.

• Put them on the spot.

• Be ignorant of the interaction that prompted the follow-up.

• Push product information on them. Lead with “blah, blah, blah” about your company

• Use buzz words and jargon in the description of your company.

• Forget to use a value proposition for the communication that’s all about them, not you.  The key is to get the prospect to take another step with you because you’ve got something valuable to say or share that they need to know.

After reading Ardath’s post (which I again recommend reading the entire thing, there are more examples and tips) I immediately forwarded it to my sales team and I’m joining their weekly meeting today to make sure everyone “gets it”.

We write new content for many reasons but our #1 reason is to support lead generation programs that convert leads.  Hopefully this helps and we see more content download leads in our opportunity funnel.

Creating new content on a regular basis is tough and very time consuming.  Here at ReachForce with almost everything we create we create a plan on how we are going to make use of the content in as many places as possible.  Things like converting eBooks or whitepapers into blog posts and vice versa or using surveys for lead information gathering as well as trend mapping.

Well, nurture marketers and sales teams out there here’s a GREAT idea!  I got an email from an Account Executive at MarketBright (see his picture below) that simply invited me to visit the MarketBright blog.  Then he went on to list a few of the most popular posts.  I thought this was brilliant.  He wasn’t trying to sell me anything, well maybe he was in the last paragraph but it was subtle.  He was just letting me know they had a resource I may be interested in.  No customization was needed, just a simple introduction and a list of the resources.  Easy as pie.

Here’s what the email looked like –

Ok, I must admit I think the picture is a little cheesy.  But it did make me giggle so I guess it worked, it caught my attention.  But otherwise, his hook worked.  Now I’m sure with the MarketBright email tracking, Jon was able to tell what I was interested in and now he knows what to follow up with next.

If you have a blog, steal some content from there.  Big change your prospects missed it the first time it went out.  If you don’t have a blog, pull out highlights from eBooks, whitepapers, webcasts, basically anything else you have and put together an email that links back to each of these.

I’m stealing this idea and going to do something like this for our pipeline nurturing program.  No selling from me, just trying to be resourceful for our decision makers and help encourage further interaction.  Jon, your email worked.  You caught my attention and I acted.  Thank you for the great idea.

2009 is looking up and we’ve been very busy event planning, getting ready for a new webinar with Math Marketing (if you haven’t signed up, you can right here), and still working on our sales playbooks. Here’s where we’re at so far:

Current Issues Identified:

• The Sales team has too much information available to them and aren’t sure to how to use it

• Support materials not aligned with selling situations and buyer roles

• The sales process was not clearly defined causing missed opportunities

• New sales people need help with triggers that move prospects through the funnel

Next we assembled our playbook team and determined our mission to be:

Our sales playbook is going to ensure our sales team is armed and ready to have valuable conversations that help prospective buyers move through the sales funnel as fast and efficiently as possible.

Ok, now we are ready. We started with a list of questions and asked each sales person on the playbook team to think about some of their success stories and start by filling out the list of questions below.

Understanding the Buying Roles and their goals

• Who did you make initial contact with and how?
• Who else was involved in the buying decision?
• Who was the ultimate decision maker?
• What are they being measured on?
• What does success look like to them?

Understanding the pain

• What was their pain?
• What were they doing before connecting with ReachForce?
• What solutions were offered to solve their pain?

Understanding their environment

• What industry are they in?
• What do they sell? Average Selling Price?
• How long is their sales cycle?

Delivering Value

• What value proposition resonated with them? and Why?
• What were the buyer’s information needs at each stage of their problem-solving process?
• What tools and supporting materials were used and when?
• What would have been helpful during the sales process? Supporting materials needed? Presentation needed? Customer Case studies?
• What objections were overcome?
• Who else/What else were they considering?

And the ultimate question… Why did they choose ReachForce?

Next meeting is tomorrow. From here we plan to discuss key moves that converted the prospective buyers into customers and I’ll be busy trying to understand how to align our marketing support (what we have and what’s needed) with each trigger.

Stay tuned for next steps…

I’m still working on my sales enablement playbook plans and Suaad, our CEO and fellow B2B Lead blogger, just happened to forward me a very timely new eBook, The New Rules of Sales Enablement, by Jeff Ernst, VP of Marketing at Kadient.

Jeff opens the eBook with some very interesting stats.  Here’s just a few of them:
•    Over 40% of salespeople fail to hit quota
•    30% of reps turn over each year
•    65% of a sales rep time is spent NOT selling
•    90% of marketing deliverables are not used by sales

WOW!  This doesn’t look so good.  He goes on to say that “buyers actually think that salespeople slow down their buying process.”  I can see that and can see how the rules are changing on how we as marketers should be supporting our sales teams.

Now for the new rules –

Conversations, NOT Collateral – Our goal both in Marketing and Sales is to create conversations and not just to push a bunch of information at our prospects.  Ernst goes on to say that most of the time this collateral isn’t aligned with selling situations and is disconnected from daily reality.  I agree but haven’t been sure how to change this.
NEW RULE:  Sales enablement is about ensuring salespeople are able to have valuable conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process.
I couldn’t agree more.  We have a good deal of content here at ReachForce and we very often wonder what actually gets used.  My guess, not even half of it.  We’re working on realigning that now as part of our playbook strategies.

Experience BEATS Expertise – 90% of the “stuff” that the folks in corporate give them they ignore.
NEW RULE: The most effective selling content, messages, and strategies are discovered from experience with buyers.
This one seems easy, sales people like all of us really, want to know what works not what people say will work.

PROVEN Plays – Old rule says “if we implement a new sales methodology, every salesperson will become an “A” player.  Yeah right!  We all know that doesn’t work.  Even the best made plans don’t work for everyone.
NEW RULE:  Any salesperson can improve performance by following sales playbooks that are proven to work in winning deals.
Practical tactics that work in specific situations, that’s what they are looking for.

Value OUT, NOT Data IN – the new rule says it all here.
NEW RULE:  Adoption of sales enablement applications is driven by the value a salesperson gets out of it, not the data they key in.
I think we sometimes forget that the sales tools we put in place help with forecasting and activity metrics but don’t help the sales rep do their job better – driving more deals to close.  Interesting thought here but definitely makes sense.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on the great ideas presented in this eBook.  There’s no way I could cover everything you should know.  Download your own copy now.  It’s worth your time and effort to read this one.

Thanks to Jeff Ernst at Kadient for this great eBook.  As a long time marketer who is always up for trying something new to drive more deals to close, I’m excited about the game changing sales enablement playbook we are getting started on TODAY at 4pm!

This past week I was fortunate enough to join a couple hundred of the smartest marketers at the annual SiriusDecisions event in Scottsdale, AZ.  This is the second one I’ve been to and both times I come back feeling revived and optimistic of the new changes I plan to roll out based on what I learned.  For those of you who weren’t able to attend, no worries, in my next couple of posts I’ll share with you the highlights.

This year I went hoping for something to help our marketing team better align with and drive more productive sales activity.  I feel like we’re working harder than we ever have but maybe not as smart as we should be.

Here’s my first golden nugget from this year’s event– sales enablement strategies, sales playbooks to be more specific.  Do you have them?  If so, are they working for you?  I’m not talking about your sales portal with every piece of collateral, PR and case study you’ve ever written.  Instead, I’m talking about situation based scenarios that your sales team has run into before and won.  How did they do it? What supportive materials did they need?  Were there pieces missing?

Here’s 3 steps to help you  started on your Sales playbooks, compliments of Alden Cushman, Research Director at SiriusDecisions.  Remember, you’re not creating these alone.  Get product marketing, field marketing and sales involved.

1. Identify Situational Elements –things like Organization Size and Structure, Vertical/Sub-Vertical Industries, Geographic Characteristics, Individual Roles and Responsibilities
2. Collect and Position Content, Knowledge

• Products/Solutions – Features, advantages, benefits
• Pricing – Competitive info, volume discount
• Partners – Channel Positioning OEMs, VARs
• Market Forces – Complete market landscape and trends
• Objection Handling – Sticking points and best responses

3. Run a Controlled Pilot – here is Alden’s example

• Situational elements
  • CIO in a hierarchical insurance company, in education phase, with budget and need for an easy to use but sophisticated business intelligence offering
• Relevant available content and knowledge
  • Phase-based BI implementation case study (education, active buying and closing)
  • Archived Webcast of the return on and merits of BI solutions
  • Web-based demo of new SaaS-based BI solution
  • SaaS-based BI product features and function spec sheet

• Order of potentially appropriate sales plays
  • Email industry white paper
  • Three days later, send phase-based case study (tailored to CXO audience)
  • One day later, call to discover unique pain points, invite to upcoming Webcast
  • Email after Webcast and set up call for Web-based demo with SME
  • Set up face-to-face meeting, bring positioning and value literature
  • Ask for RFP, respond with detailed proposal

I plan on getting started on our sales playbook really soon.  I know this will be a big project that will take a lot of thought and a lot of support from our sales team and product marketing team but the end result will change our business.  As we get started on this journey, I welcome any ideas or feedback you may have.  Please share what you learned putting these together and don’t leave out the parts that didn’t work.

Your collateral mix – do you have everything you need?  Does your sales team think what you’ve created useful pieces that help drive the sales cycle?  How do you know or decide when to add something new to the mix?

Wikipedia defines marketing collateral as the collection of media used to support the sales of a product or service. These sales aids are intended to make the sales effort easier and more effective.

As Marketers we should be doing regular reviews of our sales support collateral.  Here at ReachForce our marketing team is responsible for not only driving new leads into the top of the sales funnel but also marketing to those who have made it into and are moving through the funnel.   Each quarter as we are building out our programs we spend a good deal of time making sure we have the supporting pieces (collateral) we need to get the results our sales team is counting on.  This means we have to really think through our buying cycles and what is needed to generate interest as well as keep people moving once we’ve determined they are a viable prospect.

Here’s some interesting stats from a BtoB article, Finding the Best Collateral Mix,  back in January.  It highlights content strategy services company Eccolo Media’s survey of 155 technology buyers, all of whom said they’d made or influenced a b-to-b technology decision in the last six months. Each was asked specifically about how they consume marketing collateral.

• White papers remain the most effective piece of marketing collateral, with 86% of respondents finding them moderately to highly influential in the purchasing decision.

Interesting – I’d love to know more about these whitepapers.  How long are they?  Are they grouping eBooks here? And what stage of the buying cycle are these being used?  I’m guessing in the “gathering information phase?”

• Product brochures and data sheets were the most frequently consumed collateral type, yet they were also most frequently ranked as the least influential.

I consider these must haves and I agree that most people probably don’t read them but people seem to ask for them so you have to have them.

• Somewhat surprisingly, the majority of respondents viewed digital content on the desktop rather than printing out the content.

Not really surprising to me.  We seem to be more conditioned and comfortable getting all information online.  Printing it doesn’t give it more credibility. And hey Al Gore, your message is getting out there….

• The majority of respondents (54%) used collateral for the first time in the presales cycle, before they’d spoken with a sales rep or had had any contact with the company.

Interesting, not surprising but interesting.  This means we have to make sure we have everything online.  This doesn’t mean you need new content just make sure what you have is out there.

So all of your marketing communication marketers out there – your sales team needs you.  Before you start your long list of things to write, ask your sales team if each piece on your list will help them win a new customer.  If not, scatch it and ask them what they need instead.