Notice:  If you are a professional Twitter user, you probably already know this tip so please take a minute to share your favorite Twitter tip with The B2B Lead followers.

Now for those just getting started on Twitter, here’s a simple tip on retweeting.

When you are just getting started on Twitter, building your following and having quality tweets are two of the biggest challenges.  A great way to solve both is retweeting.  See a great tweet?  See something interesting worthy of sharing?  Think that your followers would be interested in it, retweet it!

Proper Twitter etiquette dictates that you begin your tweet with RT followed by the original tweeters handle.  Example: RT @ReachForce: Building a Sales Enablement Playbook Part 1 – http://tinyurl.com/qotz4f.

When you retweet someone else, they are likely to start following you and there is a good chance they will retweet you in the future.  When you are retweeted, your message is now seen by a new audience also creating a situation where you could gain more followers and build your personal brand.

Looking for a specific topic to tweet about?  Try searching for it on Twitter first.  If it is a hot topic, you might see a few people with similar tweets.  Be selective about who you retweet when building your lead generation Twitter brand.  Think thought leaders in your industry, prospective customers, customers and partners.  This will help with general awareness as well as help demostrate your participation and thoughts on the topic.

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.

June is a big month. School is coming to an end, it’s the beginning of summer and vacation season is in full swing. For many businesses, June marks the end of the first half of the year and a slow couple of upcoming months.

With all of the summer distractions lead generation teams must have a plan to stand out in the crowd and be able to demonstrate value clearly and quickly. To help you jumpstart your thinking about your marketing and sales aligned programs and initiatives we’ve got 2 upcoming events you won’t want to miss.

June 4th, 3pm EDT – Join ReachForce and MathMarketing for a webinar to learn 3 strategies to better align Marketing and Sales teams to create a funnel that delivers.

We’ll also share a few surprising do’s and don’ts that debunk the classic understanding of the roles of Sales and Marketing. Things like: DON’T measure salespeople on proposals closed. Surprised? We were too.

Join us on June 4th at 3pm EDT to find out why successful companies DON’T use this as a metric and have increased growth as a result. Register Now

Then we’ll be in San Mateo on June 23rd -24th with Hugh Macfarlane, author of The Leaky Funnel, for a 2-day Funnel Academy. This 2-day in-person event will explore the following topics:

• Selecting a strategy based on the way your markets buy
• Aligning and allocating resources for multiple markets
• The buyer’s journey – understanding how buy and creating your strategy around your buyers
• How to build a model funnel and resolve disconnects
• How to plan campaigns that move buyers

Click here to learn more and to register.

For many businesses, the upcoming summer months can feel like they drag on forever. This summer use this time to set up for bigger success in 2009.

According to SiriusDecisions, “The Company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.”  Whether you love it or hate it, we all have a marketing database filled with web leads, customers and trade show lists.

If kept up to date, this database is invaluable to the success of our marketing campaigns.  If it is used as a general repository of contacts and never cleaned up, your email bouncebacks/mail returns will be through the roof and your response rates will be abysmal.  According to MarketingSherpa, 2.1% of contact data goes bad every month. This means each year almost 25% of your contact data gets dirty.  Do you know which 25%?

Based on these stats, ReachForce has created a dirty data calculator to show you just how much of your data is dirty.  See how dirty your data is now.

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…

Lose Control of Your Marketing is the latest eBook from David Meerman Scott.  It is mostly composed of excerpts from his new book World Wide Rave.  Readers of The B2B Lead already know I am a huge fan of Mr. Scott, especially his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.  However, the ideas presented in this eBook were a little hard for me to accept whole-heartedly.  As the name suggests, he encourages marketers to take down any barriers to their content and lose control to allow their ideas/content to spread.  As a bit of a control freak and one who lives by the mantra that everything marketing does must be measured, I had a bit of an internal struggle while reading this eBook.

According to David, You need to think in terms of spreading ideas, not generating leads. A World Wide Rave gets the word out to thousands or even millions of potential customers. But only if you make your information easy to find and consume.

One of the most difficult ideas for me to accept is the idea that sales leads are the wrong goal.  Isn’t my number one goal as a marketer to provide qualified leads to Sales?  David’s most compelling argument is that he has seen content downloads multiply by as much as a factor of 50 when a registration form was taken off.  I don’t know that I could ever take down every form on my website, but it is worth a shot on an eBook or two, just as a test.

The last part of the eBook focuses on how organizations should create a social media policy for its employees.  At ReachForce we are very open to allowing all employees to participate in social media, but if you are trying to create your own social media guidelines, David gives some great tips.

Helpful hint: if you are strapped for time you can probably skip pages 16-21.  And if you really don’t have time to read this eBook at all, let me leave you with David’s main point: The biggest requirement is that you change your behavior, so let me remind you of the most important strategies for successful marketing in a world of social media:

• Stop obsessing over the old measurements of sales leads and marketing ROI.
• Make your valuable online content free and registration-less.
• Give away lots of good information (videos, photos, data, graphs, audio, blogs, e-books, and the like) to enthusiastic or curious people interested in your products and services.
• Encourage an organizational culture of sharing.

Remember 1999?  The tech bubble had yet to burst, times were good and our biggest worry was Y2K.  Back then marketers had a positive attitude and spent time tailoring messages to their audience around how the benefits of their product would help the prospect.

We all know that times have been tough this year, we don’t need to be reminded in every email, direct mail, blog post and webinar invitation we get.  If I want to be reminded, I just look at my stock portfolio . This is a plea to all marketers out there, STOP talking about the recession.  Don’t remind your audience that their budgets have been cut or that they are now a man down.

If your prospects have had budget cuts and layoffs, there is no need to remind them of the current economic state; they live with the reminder every day.  Instead, now is the time to focus on the positives.

Here are some reasons why you should NOT highlight the recession in your next marketing message:

• Stand out from the crowd.  If you are sending out the same  ways to recession-proof your X, as everyone else, your message will be lost.  I automatically delete any email or webinar invite I get that has the word recession or economy in it.
• You are subtly reminding your prospects that their budgets are shrinking and that they should be spending less.  FYI- your goal is to sell them something meaning you want them to spend more.
• Now is the time to really highlight how you are going to save your prospects time and money.  Make them feel like your product is the one thing that cannot be cut from the budget.
• Perception is reality.  As long as the media and we as marketers continue to propagate the idea that we are in a recession, then we will be in one.  We can all do our part to be more positive.

My point is that we all know we are in a recession and although things are beginning to look up, we don’t need every marketing message to remind us of our budget cuts and staff losses.

Part of my job here at ReachForce is helping our customers with a quick analysis of their marketing database and then helping them update and repair the company and contact information needed for their lead generation programs.  Here’s a list of 10 things I see in almost every marketing and sales database I’ve looked at:

1. Names are mis-mashed up with erroneous information.  Examples:

John “No Longer There” Smith
Jenny (female) Jones
Byron (buy-ron) Doe (Dough)

2. Web-to-Lead forms have left you with a lot of trash.  Examples:

First Name    Last Name    Email                         Company
Test              Test              test@test.com           None
None of        Your              absc@asklfjsl.com    Business

3. Your Customers are still listed as your prospects.
4. You have multiple copies of any one person.
5. Employees of your company are listed as prospects.
6. You have records created with companies someone wants to target but no contacts, instead of holding a valid contact your CRM is being used as a place holder.  OR, you have holey records, pieces and parts of a contact but no whole contact.

Examples:
First Name    Last Name      Email                           Company
Find Name    In Hoovers      na@na.com                 Microsoft
IT                  Dept Mgr        na@na.com                 Exxon
Amy              H.                   ???@reachforce.com    ReachForce
L.                  Wallace           ???@Reachforce.com   ReachForce

7. Phone numbers are missing digits and/or area codes.
8. Bad or Blank email addresses.
9. Invalid or incomplete mailing addresses – maybe you don’t do direct mail, but chances are you need this for something…
10. You have no way to segment your data.  Do you have information on these companies in a standardized format, for instance all tech companies have some kind of tag, or all operations contacts have a specific designation? If not, how are you segmenting your data? Wouldn’t it be easier if everything had the same system of tagging applied to it?

Is is not the most exciting or the most glamorous part of campaign planning but getting your database in order will have a huge affect on the success your marketing programs.

Ready, Set, Go! It’s a short year, 8 months to go and 12 months of results to deliver.

Planning since last Fall has been a challenge, chances are you’ve been holding off (or have ratcheted down) on your spending hoping the bad news would stop and you would be able to get to work as normal. Well it looks like that time has come. The economy seems to be coming back and now you’ve got to make up for lost time. Here’s a few ideas to jumpstart your lead generation initiatives:

• Check out those web logs or unknown visitor reports, this is a great opportunity for you to start reaching out to companies who have already been checking you out. Once you’ve identified the companies, make sure you have the right targeted leads to market to. This is key to your program success.
• Think and be positive/upbeat — get new content (that’s not talking about the recession). Make sure it’s everywhere – your social networks, your website, as a possible link in your email signatures, offered on your blog, your email programs and don’t forget to share it with your customers, this could be used in the introduction you need help with.
• Dust off your old whitepapers, add some images and turn them into a new eBook. Use this refreshed content for your nurture marketing and email programs.
• Put together a news release schedule, remember to include your keywords. Press drives website visitors. Make sure you have your Google Alerts set up so you know when someone picks up your news and don’t forget to check those weblogs and unknown visitor reports so you can market back to those checking you out.
• Don’t forget your customers, they are your greatest asset. Talk to them. Ask them what they need from you. Ask them how you can better deliver your product or service and don’t forget to ask them for a referral or two. There’s no time better than the present to kick off a customer referral program.

The point is to get the most out of what you already have, be everywhere your prospects and customers are, and stay positive.