Newsletters have come a long way. They have evolved from printed pieces that were once mailed to e-Newsletters of many different flavors.  Some use newsletters to communicate with their customer base, some use them to grow their in-house database and some use them as a promotion vehicle for upcoming events, content or announcements.  If you’re considering putting together a newsletter, here’s a few tips to keep in mind as you putting together your program plans and goals.

• Repurpose content you already have – Here at ReachForce we send out a monthly newsletter of the best B2B Lead tips from the last month.  We live in a busy world and we realize that people can’t stop by everyday and some people just prefer to have the content delivered to their inbox so we give them highlights once a month.  It seems to work, our newsletter list grows by 10% every month.

• Event invitations and news announcements – Let them know what are you up to – whether it be a webinar you’re hosting or a live event your sponsoring and exhibiting at.  Newsletters are a great way to get the word out about where you’ll be.

• News – make sure everyone knows when you’ve released a new version of your product.  Remember to highlight benefits not product features.  Also be sure to include a call to action to drive interest for cross selling and upselling opportunities as well as new customer interest.

• Customer case studies – pick 1 and highlight your results. Be sure to include a link to the full case study on your website.

• Want to know what your prospects or customers are thinking?  Ask them in a quick poll or survey.  People like giving their opinion and this says you’re interested in it.  You can post the result in the next newsletter.

• Social networks or a blog?  Are you out there?  Do they know where to find you?  Here’s a great place to spread the word.

• Don’t make it all about you.  The majority of the content should be useful and compelling to the reader and not a company promo.  Otherwise, you risk an increase in unsubscribes.

• Don’t forget the newsletter sign up on your website, put it in as many places as it makes sense.  Remember this is helping grow your inhouse list for lead generation.

Bottom line is whatever you decide to do with your newsletter, the goal is to keep communicating!

Dear Sales,

Now that we’re on the same page about the data, let’s talk specifics on how to make this happen.

• You know that we work hard to segment the data before it goes into campaigns, so first, get to know how we segment things.  Talk to us, find out why we do things the way we do and who gets batched together.   Seeing the world the way we do will help you better understand why certain types of contacts are getting certain messages and will help you better reach out to and tailor your messages to those contacts. We are open to your ideas too.  You know your prospects better than we do.  Help us to help you.
• Get to know the companies in your database, ask for help from Sales Operations or export a report of your prospects.  Spend time learning about each company on your list, what do they do, who do they sell to, what events do they attend, make yourself an expert on them so that when you talk to them they feel like you really do know them and their pain points.   Make notes in the record so that you don’t lose track of this valuable information.
• Do you use mail merge fields in your emails or letters?  If so, then really spend some time cleaning up the names of prospects and their companies.  Make sure people aren’t listed like this: “John NO LONGER THERE Smith” or “Jane SHE IS A REAL JERK Doe” – there is a notes section in your CRM, use it!
• If you’re using salesforce.com, set up views that capture activity, for instance, if your marketing automation tool integrates and marks activity on prospect records, set up a view where you can see that kind of activity.  Keep tabs on what people are doing so that you can reach out to those active prospects.

These are just ideas, but the idea is that if you are truly in the ‘weeds’ of the data, you’ll get a good handle on what you own, who you’re calling and hopefully begin seeing some great results!

Love,

Marketing

Here at ReachForce, we talk a lot about role-based leads, but I have never heard of a role-based website.  I came across a great post by Heather Foeh on Eloqua’s Marketing Insights blog, Segmentation on Your Website.  In the post, Heather shares a well segmented website, rallydev.com.  They give a great user-guided experience letting you choose your role which then delivers you relevant content to fit your needs.

On our new website we also use segmentation.  Instead of segmenting by role, we segment by function.  We sell mainly to marketers, so we ask our visitors if they are looking to do direct marketing, event marketing or online marketing.  We then deliver up a total solution as well as whitepapers and eBooks to help with continued education.

This same logic can and should be applied to other marketing vehicles like email.  We segment our database by role and revenue range and send relevant content that matches the needs of each group.

By now you know that there is more than one person involved in a B2B buying decision.  The DMU (decision making unit) typically consists of the end user, key influencers, management, a financial buyer and others that have their hands in the decision to buy or not to buy.

It’s pretty easy to find the management decision makers with just a little research, but what about the others?  Here’s a few tips to help you identify and build out lead generation programs for those other than the Cs and VPs.

1. Where have you been winning?  This is always a good place to start.  Hopefully your sales team helped you out a little here and included notes about everyone they talked to in the buying process.  If so, are you able to define their roles?  If not, don’t despair, you’re not alone and this is not the end of the road for you.
2. Profile your best customers – talk to your best customer implementation team, talk to the sales person that sold the deal and if possible interview a few customers to better understand who all was involved in the decision to buy.
3. Once you have your roles defined, do you have these people in your leads database?  Remember you are matching roles, not just titles.  If so, tag them with a role identity.  If you’re missing roles, call ReachForce, we can help you fill in the gaps.  (Sorry for the shameless promotion…sometimes it just happens…)
4. You’re finally ready to start marketing to these people.  You are now able to build out very targeted programs focusing on key influencer and end user issues.  Here’s an example –
   
5. Nurture – not all buyers are ready to buy at the same time so be sure you are nurturing all of your prospects as well as those involved in a sales cycle.  Here’s a few ideas for offers for your nurturing programs  -

• Email analyst reports supporting the pain and possible solutions
• Email customer case studies
• Invite to webcasts
• Be sure to share any new content you roll out (whitepapers, eBooks, etc.)

For best results, I recommend you engage with your sales team before launching your newly segmented programs and ensure they are onboard to provide guidance and feedback throughout the process.  To execute a healthy, ROI generating program it’s important to map out each step of the building process taking into consideration budget, timing and appropriate follow up.  Here’s a template if you need help.

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.

As Sales and Marketing become better aligned, so do our tracking systems and metrics.  For a while, we at ReachForce have struggled with the question of how best to track our campaigns, we wanted to know (for instance), how many emails it took to get someone to respond, what email was it that seemed to be the trigger?  And the bigger piece to this puzzle, since we all know the Sales team doesn’t have the bandwidth to really track this information, how can we automate it?

Lucky for us, salesforce.com has a few cool features that we have found useful in tracking this type of things, the first is their Campaign Management tab.

Within the Campaign Management tab you can create a campaign, drop in the list of people who will be part of the campaign and as opportunities arise from that campaign, you can see exactly who they are.   Along with the ability to watch as opportunities join the funnel as a result of your campaign, you can keep tabs on the cost of your campaign, its possible ROI and its actual ROI.  Campaign Management gives you a full window into your programs.   For a full run-down on the Campaign Management feature as well as new Marketing related features in salesforce.com, you should check out their Marketing Blog.

Outside of the Campaign Management feature, we use individualized Dashboards to track activity on specific events/campaigns. For instance, after Dreamforce (salesforce.com’s user group conference and our one big trade show) this past year, we tagged leads that we gathered as having attended Dreamforce, exhibited at Dreamforce, or having had a conversation with someone at our booth.  To do this, we utilized a custom field we already had on our Lead and Contact records called “Marketing” – we populated all of the leads connected to Dreamforce with the right information (either a tag called “Dreamforce 08 Exhibitor”, “Dreamforce 08 Attendee” or “Dreamforce 08 Scan”).  One quick caveat is that not only did all of our leads go through a rigorous scrubbing process (to determine whether the companies were a fit for us), but in instances where we knew we needed a different person (i.e. we hadn’t had enough conversation to verify that these persons played a role in the Decision-Making Unit or buying process) we submitted the company to a role-based contact discovery project so that we could gather the right person.

Once all of those people were tagged, we were able to track them through the pipeline based on knowing they attended/exhibited at or were scanned at Dreamforce.  We built out a full dashboard tracking this information, it helps Marketing see the value in our investment at the event and helps Sales see the value of the data collected at the event and track to make sure that all of those leads get the proper follow-up.

On the Sales side we set up a view for all of our reps that showed their individual Dreamforce related leads.  This made follow up clean and easy because our Sales people knew exactly who attended Dreamforce and whether they showed up at our booth (we imported certain information to indicate whether leads had been at the booth and who they had spoken with).

Salesforce.com continues to roll-out new features that better enable Marketers to track the progress of their campaigns once from lead to customer.  As we test and use them, we will be certain to share our findings!  Have you found an easy way to track things once they hit the pipeline? What tricks do you have for tracking your campaigns?

In today’s increasingly global market, almost every B2B Marketer is facing the prospect of moving into foreign territories.  While geographic expansion promises the opportunity to unlock a whole new world of buyers, it also involves a new world of surprises and challenges.

Have you considered:

• What types of companies will be the best fit for your product?
• How buyers in these new markets make purchases?
• How buying roles and decision making units differ from one market to the next?
• What kinds of offers your new world responds best to?
• What are the unique decision drivers for buyers in a particular country?

Here are 6 steps to taking a more deliberate approach to targeting new buyers in new countries:

Step 1. Buyer Profiling

• Phone screen customers and possible prospects to identify pain points and purchase criteria
• Develop a profile of top buyers

Step 2. Prospect Profile Matching

• Apply buyer profile to prospects (companies) in new geography to identify those with highest propensity to buy
• Phone screen sample base of new prospects to map the Decision Making Unit and understand roles of decision-makers

Step 3. Prospect Discovery

• Map profile to existing database to produce an initial dataset
• Identify gaps to complete custom role-based database of Decision Making Unit contacts
• Phone screen to verify accuracy

Step 4. Marketing Database Segmentation

• Segment by vertical market and role and tag data
• Upload data into CRM or Marketing Automation system to prepare for targeted marketing campaigns

Step 5. Marketing Campaign Execution

• Execute vertical segment-focused campaigns targeted at each member of the Decision Making Unit
• Harvest responders, further qualify
• Funnel sales ready leads to Sales team

Step 6. Lead Nurturing

• Support Sales cycle by periodically reaching out to prospects; provide information/offers to stay top of mind
  • Email white papers or analyst report
  • Email to announce customer wins
  • Invite to Webinar
  • Incent customers to participate in a demonstration

Want a visual or a handout you can print?  We have put together a best practice template to use when considering expanding into new countries.  Check out our Expanding into a New Geography Tearsheet.

Want more free B2B Marketing Tearsheets, Whitepapers and eBooks?  Check out the ReachForce B2B Marketing Resources page.

We all know, not every customer is alike.  Customers buy for many different reasons.  Some buy to solve an immediate need, some buy a cure a specific pain point, and others know they need it but not sure how to get the most value out of your solutions.  As a marketer tasked with staying engaged with current customers, where do you start?

Start by segmenting your customers into groups that share common characteristics.  Talk to you sales team, spend some time with your customer implementation team, stay in touch your customer support team.   All of these people will help provide you more insight on how to reach out and target your communications with your customer base.   Try and figure out who has the best relationship with each customer and make sure you get regular updates when possible.

Here’s a few ideas on how your might segment your customer base for more effective, targeted marketing.

• Who are your end users?  What is their role in the organization?

• What pain points are your customers trying to address?

• Do you have multiple products?  Do your customers use one or a combination of several?

• Do you have different editions of your software or platform?  Each level will have different needs with your enterprise users having more complex problems and a higher level of sophistication.

• Do you have some customers that need more education to achieve success?

• Do you have some that are stretching the capabilities of your solution?  You might need a more sophisticated message for these people.

• Are their multiple people in the customer organization using your solution?  These people probably care about different things, you might consider doing more customized outreach here.

• Geographies/Firmographics – are their verticals or industries that are clustered together that use your product in a similar way?

• You probably have some customers who have gone dark on you too, your message and offers to these people are definitely going to be different.

Don’t forget your cross sell and upsell opportunities.  You’ll want to be sure you are considering these things when crafting your messages.

Once you have segmented your customers, stay top of mind through monthly or bi-monthly communication.  Here at ReachForce, we send a monthly newsletter and one targeted email or direct mail to each of our customers every month.

Business is growing – awesome, especially in this economy.  Need to expand into a new sales territory – well crap, where am I going to get those new leads?  Buyers don’t just line up in evenly distributed rows by territory no matter how much we would like them to. And we all know keeping a consistent and geographically distributed flow of qualified leads—or even better qualified buyers-in your pipeline is a constant struggle.  Are you feeling the pains of ramping a new sales territory?

Venturing out into a new sales territory comes with challenges like:

• Longer lead time to develop accounts
• Lack of qualified leads in the new region
• Inefficiencies in the Sales organization

To keep your Marketing and Sales pipeline working at peak efficiency you must be able to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to ALL of the Sales representatives on the team regardless of their territory or tenure.  Here are 5 steps to expanding or growing a new sales territory:

Step 1. Customer Profiling and Sales Wins Analysis

• Identify your top performing vertical market segments by analyzing your current customer wins or use CRM analytics
• Profile your best customers to establish qualifying criteria and identify roles of Champions, Key Players, and Decision-makers
• Identify prospective buyers in vertical segments that meet your criteria and that are located in the new territory

Step 2. Prospect Discovery and Validation

• Map list of prospective companies and required roles
• Identify gaps and augment data with a custom role-based contact data
• Phone screen to check for accuracy

Step 3. Marketing Database Segmentation

• Segment by vertical market and role and tag data
• Upload data into CRM or Marketing Automation system to prepare for targeted marketing campaigns

Step 4. Marketing Campaign Execution

• Execute vertical segment-focused campaigns targeted at each member of the Decision Making Unit
  For Champions/End Users – use White Papers
  • Send direct mail w/white paper offer
  • Email w/ white paper offer
  • Follow-up with email demo offer
  • Nurture with ongoing communications

  For Decision-makers/Executives – use Webcasts

  • Email invitation to executive Webcast
  • Follow-up with emailed executive brief
  • Send door-opener direct mail
  • Follow-up with Sales call
  • Nurture with ongoing communications
• Harvest responders, further qualify
• Funnel sales ready leads to Sales team

Step 5. Lead Nurturing

• Support Sales cycle by periodically reaching out to prospects; provide information/offers to stay top of mind Email white papers or analyst reports
• Email to announce customer wins
• Invite to webinar

Want a visual or a handout you can print?  We have put together a best practice template to use when building out territory specific initiatives.  Check out our Expanding or Growing a New Territory Tear Sheet.

Want more free B2B Marketing Tearsheets, Whitepapers and eBooks?  Check out the ReachForce B2B Marketing Resources page.

LinkedIn Answers can be a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader and connect with colleagues and prospects.  I try to create RSS feeds for almost everything I monitor online; it is more likely I will get to it that way.  The other day I realized I can get an RSS feed of LinkedIn Answers.  Unfortunately, it is not very customizable.  You can only get a feed of an entire topic, not just based on a certain keyword like search.twitter.com.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to LinkedIn.com
2. Click on Answers (it’s at the top)
3. In the right sidebar, under Browse, click on the topic that relates to your industry
4. In the right sidebar look for the orange RSS logo, click the link to add new questions on this topic to your feed reader

*Note you can also subscribe to sub topics.  Keep in mind that many questions are asked each day so the more specific you can be the better.

What is the benefit of being active on LinkedIn Answers?  I know someone who was asked to speak at an industry conference based solely on answering a question on LinkedIn.  We currently have two deals in the pipe that originated on LinkedIn Answers.  I know my sales reps don’t always have the time to keep up with LinkedIn Answers so whenever someone asks a question looking for a solution like ours I pass it along to the appropriate sales rep to follow-up.

I still recommend going in at least once a week to search your company and products’ names since those are conversations you defintely want to be aware of.  Still unsure of what to do?  Check out How to Use LinkedIn Answers in Marketing.

We are starting a new series here on the B2B Lead to bring B2B marketers new and/or remarkable products/companies/ideas that could make your life easier or are just plain cool.

Our first entrant in a series of many to come on this theme is BatchBook CRM by BatchBlue Software.  Now I’m fully aware that there are more CRM systems out there than you can shake a stick at.  What sets BatchBook apart from the rest is this simple assessment (IMHO): if you were to start a company to provide a current, modern CRM system today, BatchBook is what it would look like.  It sports an extremely easy-to-use interface and provides all the features and functionality that the primary end-users of CRM systems (sales reps) actually use.  But what makes it cool is the unique social networking and tagging elements that, whereas all the other CRM vendors are scurrying to retrofit their systems with it, has been built in.   Tracking relationships between social network contacts and keeping tabs on the social chatterings thereof are just some of the interesting capabilities on this front.  Their tagging capability, SuperTags, enables users to capture and search on ad-hoc information, such as “talked to this guy at EventForce”.

It is probably best suited for companies fitting the “S” in “SMB” (which most of their customers are), but the pricing model is attractive and I think we will be seeing some interesting things from this company in the future.