Kathryn Roy, marketing consultant and friend of The B2B Lead, has a great eBook, Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures, that we want to share with all of our readers.  We will post excerpts that cover the diseases one by one but feel free to download the entire eBook here.

There are seven problems I find so rampant in B2B companies that I suspect they are infectious – passed along as marketing people switch companies or work with contagious agencies. In each blog post I will cover a diseases, its symptoms, probable causes, and suggested treatment.

Commonly found in companies staffed with passionate sales and marketing professionals, Sleep Apendea is a disease whereby every conceivable reason customers should buy is stuffed into collateral, Web sites, and presentations. Coincides with the belief that prospects are patient enough to troll through your materials until they stumble across items relevant to them.

Mark Twain once wrote a friend: “I wanted to write you a short note, but I didn’t have the time.” There’s a corollary for marketing: the briefer the marketing piece, the more agonizing the process.

It’s hard to sift through the possible things you could say and choose the few that will have the greatest effect.

Studies show that, if anything, prospects are more impatient now than ever before. Eye-tracking studies of Web pages show that prospects laser in on headlines, tables, charts, and bullets, often ignoring much of the body.

There are phases in the buying process when prospects might take time to read information in depth – e.g., educating themselves about a new topic. However, for most phases, especially early phases of the buying process, expect an impatient prospect and choose carefully the few points you want them to retain – points that stress your differentiation.

Sleep Apendea is especially a problem with marketing staff who don’t have deep experience with the target audience. They can be creative in suggesting motivations for prospects to become interested. Not all of these suggestions will resonate with actual prospects, however.

SYMPTOMS

30- to 60-slide presentations forced on all prospects in first visit.

A high number of densely packed Web pages relative to number of products.

Multi-chapter collateral pieces.

SUSPECTED CAUSES

Not distinguishing between different buyer roles and stages of the buying process.

Passion for your product or service that is untamed by pity for the reader.

Inexperience with target audience.

TREATMENT

Identify and eliminate redundant messages with different wording.

Test messages to confirm relevance.

Map key messages to buyer role, buying-process stage, and market segment. Determine where to deliver which messages.

About the Author
Kathryn Roy is a marketing and strategy consultant with over 20 years of experience helping some of the most successful and fastest growing B2B companies including IBM, Avid, CA, Lotus, AT&T and dozens of other technology companies.  She has helped companies:

• hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
• boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
• evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

I have heard mixed reviews on using personalization in email marketing.  And if you have dirty data with things like LEIGH ANNE or Leigh Anne (don’t call til Q1) in the first name field of your CRM, using personalization can be pretty scary and it might be time for some data cleansing.  MarketingSherpa is a proponent of personalization as they use it in their own emails.  But shame on them for an email my co-worker, Lauren, received.  Check this out:

Dear ,

There aren’t too many positives to come out of the recession.

However, new MarketingSherpa research reveals one overwhelming positive: more than ever, companies are relying upon email marketing to engage prospects and generate high ROI…

Leading with the recession (which I believe is grossly overused) aside, “Dear” is not a greeting that can stand alone.  If you are going to use personalization with a holey database, you have to be careful.  Use a greeting like “Hi”.  It can be followed with a name or just a comma and not look weird or let prospects know that you don’t really know who they are. After all, the point of personalization is to make a prospect feel as though it is one-to-one communication.

Inbound Marketing seems to be all the hype these days.  B2B marketers are getting their feet wet with new social media tactics, online marketing is bigger than it’s ever been and word-of-mouth strategies are being built into most marketing plans today.  But what are you doing with all of this inbound activity on your web site and leads from registrations?

Are you adding them to your next email program?  Are you including them in your newsletter list?  Are you inviting them to your next webinar or live event?  Is your sales or tele-sales team following up with them via phone or email?  Chances are pretty high you’re using these inbound leads to fuel your outbound marketing programs.

What about all those web site visits?  Do you know what companies are visiting your web site?   What pages are they on? How long are they there?  Should you develop a Outbound Marketing program to reach and target the right person in those companies?

With the explosion of marketing automation, B2B Marketers now have the tools they need to better segment, target and reach these inbound leads with tailored messaging via Outbound Marketing.  But it’s not as simple as just loading these inbound leads up and hitting the send button.  To get the results you’re looking for you have to be more deliberate about your outreach.

We all know that in any typical B2B sale there is more than one person involved in a buying decision.  An inbound lead is a good sign someone is interested but chances are high they are collecting information for a team to evaluate.

Instead of waiting on the entire decision making unit to announce themselves, identify the roles you know to typically be involved in the decision and kick up your Outbound Marketing with messages tailored to each of their pain points.  This can only help your marketing results and conversions and getting everyone to the table at the same time also speeds up typical sales cycles.

While Inbound Marketing may be all the rage, you need a targeted Outbound Marketing program to reach all of the decision makers.  So as you are getting ready for 2010, make sure you have set up your Inbound Marketing to fuel your Outbound Marketing programs.

Kathryn Roy, marketing consultant and friend of The B2B Lead, has a great eBook, Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures, that we want to share with all of our readers.  We will post excerpts that cover the diseases one by one but feel free to download the entire eBook here.

There are seven problems I find so rampant in B2B companies that I suspect they are infectious – passed along as marketing people switch companies or work with contagious agencies. In each blog post I will cover a diseases, its symptoms, probable causes, and suggested treatment.

Checklistosis is a disease of marketing departments whereby marketing professionals are so focused on execution, they skip the planning stage – and pay the price.

All too often, a glimpse into a B2B marketing department shows a hive of activity focused on meeting deadlines for updating collateral, producing an event, or sending out the next email campaign. In these environments, it is not unusual to find marketers completing projects without having done the analysis that can determine which activities are valuable and which activities not on their list would make a larger contribution.

In some cases, it’s due to a natural tendency to replicate the process and activities from a prior company. Clearly, there is a set of deliverables, like Web sites, that are common to most companies.

However, the relative priority of activities and how they are executed should be based on the dynamics of the target market segment, including the competitive environment.

“Juicing the Orange”, a book by the advertising team that came up with United Airlines’ wildly successful advertising campaign, has a free 15-page workbook (pdf ) with 127 questions to help marketing professionals deeply understand a company’s market and challenge. This analysis is its prerequisite to prescribing messages and mediums for delivery. (Not all 127 questions will necessarily pertain to your situation.)

SYMPTOMS

Inability of marketing professionals to quickly and confidently answer questions such as these:

• What is the biggest impediment to sales growth today?
• What are the different market segments you are pursuing and how do they weigh the relative importance of different product/service capabilities?
• How does your offering compare with competitive alternatives on the key product/service characteristics listed above?
• Can you describe the buying process and buyer roles and specific concerns by role for your top segment?
• What is the target segment’s current perception of your company and your competition?

SUSPECTED CAUSES

Measuring output instead of results.

Mismatch between marketing resources and expected deliverables.

TREATMENT

Carve out time and resources to do a thorough analysis. If staff is not experienced, bring in outside help for the initial round.

Build new marketing plan based on the analysis.

About the Author
Kathryn Roy is a marketing and strategy consultant with over 20 years of experience helping some of the most successful and fastest growing B2B companies including IBM, Avid, CA, Lotus, AT&T and dozens of other technology companies.  She has helped companies:

• hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
• boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
• evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

If you read our post about metrics Marketing should care about and you use Salesforce here are some easy to follow instructions for putting lead source tracking into place.

Lead Source (the field with the big red arrow next to it), is a standard field in Salesforce, so it’s easy enough to locate and use, the important thing is to put your own custom sources into the pick-list and to use them.

1. To add custom values to the pick-list, you’ll need administrative privileges.
2. Click on ‘Setup,’ then under ‘App Setup’ you’ll want to click on Leads.
3. Next select ‘Fields’ and you’ll get a listing of all of the fields in your CRM.  Click next to ‘Lead Source’ on the ‘Edit’ link.
   
4. Once you are in the edit interface, you’ll be able to add items to the pick-list by selecting ‘New.’
   
5. From there you’ll be given an easy, step-by-step way to insert a new value into the list.

As you can see, we have a variety of different lead sources, you’ll want to make sure your list matches the places that you gather leads from.   Now when you import leads you can select to attribute them to one of these values, thus helping you better track where things come from.

Now you’ll be able to run  reports on these fields, luckily, lead source is a standard field on the Contact record in Salesforce as well and it’s mapped so that the lead source transfers over to the Contact record when you convert Leads.

Kathryn Roy, marketing consultant and friend of The B2B Lead, has a great eBook, Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing — And Their Cures, that we want to share with all of our readers.  We will post excerpts that cover the diseases one by one but feel free to download the entire eBook here.

There are seven problems I find so rampant in B2B companies that I suspect they are infectious – passed along as marketing people switch companies or work with contagious agencies. In each blog post I will cover a diseases, its symptoms, probable causes, and suggested treatment.

Glitzitis refers to companies that produce gorgeous ads and collateral pieces that fall flat because they aren’t based on solid analysis.

When we conduct focus groups for clients to test messages with their target buyers, we always test their competitors’ key messages or positioning as well. I used to assume that companies spending millions of dollars on advertising and expensive collateral vet the relevance of their proposed messaging with their target audience. It was a shock to see how off the mark many of these messages are.

Mark Twain said it best: “It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Sales trainers use a research study conducted years ago by Xerox to remind salespeople that their effectiveness declines after roughly 18 months. The reason is that as salespeople become more confident of their assessment of the prospects’ needs they spend much less time questioning and listening to their prospects.

The corollary for marketing professionals is this: The effectiveness of marketing professionals declines as their confidence increases if they don’t take the time to properly test their gut instincts.

A “trust but verify” attitude can also protect Marketing from Sales. In big-ticket item companies, salespeople can over-influence messaging. Their instincts are just as fallible as those of experienced marketers. A discipline of testing before investing will help prevent wasting marketing funds on the wrong messages.

SYMPTOMS

No exterior symptoms. Occurs with unexpected frequency in B2B companies with fabulous looking Web sites and collateral.

SUSPECTED CAUSE

Relying on the following sources for messaging without verification of relevance to larger target audience:

• A close customer contact
• An analyst
• Salespeople
• Company executives

TREATMENT

The only reliable means of correction is to test candidate key messages anonymously with the target audience or devise tests using interactive marketing techniques.

About the Author
Kathryn Roy is a marketing and strategy consultant with over 20 years of experience helping some of the most successful and fastest growing B2B companies including IBM, Avid, CA, Lotus, AT&T and dozens of other technology companies.  She has helped companies:

• hone strategy, positioning, and messaging via primary research
• boost sales productivity through sales enablement training and tools
• evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

As B2B Marketers we spend a lot of time, effort and resources on creating lead generation programs that drive prospect conversions.  But what happens next?

As we become more sophisticated marketers with more promising tools, we are now not only filling the top of the sales funnel but we are also helping move prospects through the sales funnel; one buying stage at a time.

We know it takes multiple interactions to turn a lead into a prospect and usually these interactions involve both Sales and Marketing.  This means both teams need to be armed and ready for the next follow up.

Here’s a checklist to go through to make sure you are set up for success before launching that next program.

• Do your sales and marketing teams know what to follow up with in response to different types of inquiries? If someone reaches out to you about Product A, your follow up should include more information about Product A that opens the door for a discussion.

• Are you emailing pdfs with your follow up emails? Remember attachments can get hung up in spam filters.  Consider putting your docs out on the web and link to them.  This also enables you to track who’s visiting this page.

• Are you prepared to capture all inquiries in a database or CRM for ongoing nurturing and qualification efforts? It’s key that this information is stored in a place that both sales and marketing can access.  Marketing needs to know when and what kinds of nurturing campaigns to push these people through and sales needs to know what marketing programs prospects are interacting with.

• Have you agreed with sales on what a qualified lead looks like? This is 101, right?

• Do you have a process in place for distributing qualified leads to sales contacts as they are identified? Getting in touch in a timely manner is key.  Make sure everyone is clear how leads are being routed.

• Do you have a program in place to nurture or cultivate your not-yet-qualified leads? One and done doesn’t work in B2B so you need a plan for staying in touch.  Different mediums with different offers is key here.  Not everyone responds to the same things.

• Do you know how often to contact prospects with nurture messages? The jury is still out here, monitor your nurture marketing unsubscribe rates and adjust as needed.  Also be sure sales has a way to opt people out of further communications.

• Do you know what offers to use to get them to further identify their needs and situation so you can determine if they are ready to buy today? Nurturing programs help build awareness, make sure you have the right kinds of offers in place to build on your prospect profile.

• Do you have a program in place to measure and track the results of your various sales-lead generation, cultivation and sales follow-up programs? You need this.  How else do you know what’s working and what isn’t?

• And, in my opinion, the most important question – Do you know what new customers originated in marketing and what programs helped drive them to the finish line?

Being able to show real ROI from your marketing efforts is key.  It drives so many “what’s next”  decisions.

This was and actual email I received last week:

Hello,

Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.

Given COMPANY X success with multiple SaaS providers, I wanted to ensure that you were aware of our company and service offerings. We have been winning many key deals from a highly competitive landscape and COMPANY X is able to leverage key pricing advantages from Vmware licenses on a rental basis, a true cloud utility computing model with rapid provisioning of servers, support for Windows 2008, IBM platform standard for managed servers, citrix administration and support services which are handled by some of the best engineers with the most experience in the industry and still coming out with much better pricing than is provided by your other hosting partners.

COMPANY X is a consolidation of multiple, US-based, high-density data centers by Managed Data Holdings (MDH). With facilities in Chicago, Denver and Irvine, CA along with the ongoing acquisition activities for others nationally, COMPANY X is focused on providing both standard colocation services (cabinets, cages and power) as well as managed services comprised of IBM Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage in a virtualized, outsourced infrastructure. COMPANY X is a SAS 70, Type II certified facilities company.

Our data centers are 24/7/365 managed facilities with on-site NOCs, security and network staff available to support your needs on demand. Our customer portal enables our customers to remotely manage their collocated infrastructure, network bandwidth utilization, hosted server & storage infrastructure plus enables Compute-on-Demand and Storage-on-Demand flexibility for our hosted customers. Our Managed Services products range from managed IBM iDataPlex or Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage, security services (firewall, etc.), managed VPN, monitoring of your network infrastructures down to Load balancing, Network management and Infrastructure services (including “hands & eyes”). We have seen significant interest from major companies who have found that turning the infrastructure over to COMPANY X with the Virtual instances of VMware and the dynamic storage provisioning (on the fly) has significantly reduced their OpX as well as scope of responsibility for systems and software updates.

Please let me know if you have any projects with which I may assist you.

Thank you and best regards,

JOE

JOE SALESPERSON

Senior Sales Account Manager

Why is this is a ‘what not to do’ – a few really obvious reasons:

1. “Hello,” is that really my name?  No, don’t think so – if you’ve got the prospect’s name, you know you’ve got it spelled right, use it….don’t just write ‘Hello’ and ignore a person’s name.
2. My personal favorite – “Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.” What does this say about your knowledge of the prospect when your opening sentence assumes you are not sending your email to the right person??
3. How long is this email?  Yes this is a real email, it was sent to a group of folks here at ReachForce (yes really personal, isn’t it?), it’s so long though who is going to read it?

This email cracked me up, how many people really respond to something like this?  It’s amazing it didn’t get captured in my junk email.  Take some time when you are crafting an email to a prospect.  If it’s follow up to a call, make note of the call.  If it’s a cold email and you’ve never had contact with the prospect before, really put some thought into what is going to stand out to the reader.  Or better yet, don’t send cold emails!

If you are anything like us, your resources page on your website is overflowing with whitepapers, eBooks, tearsheets and more.  How do you organize all that great content so your prospects can find what is relevant to them?

The most common way I have seen is to organize it by format:

• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Podcasts
• Webcasts
• Videos
• Case Studies

This is a good way to go about it if you know your buyers want to go looking specifically for a certain format.  Like you know that those early in the buying cycle want to read whitepapers and that the final decision maker only wants to read case studies.

However, I have found that although my buyers may tend towards one type of format or another, it is the topic of the content that they really care about.  So instead of grouping, for example, all eBooks together, we have 6 different categories our buyers are interested in (obviously this is relevant to our buyers being marketers).  This is how our B2B Marketing Resources page is organized:

• Direct Marketing
• Database Clean-up
• Online Marketing
• Event Marketing
• Marketing and Sales Alignment
• General Marketing

In each category, there could be eBooks, a webcast and tearsheets.  We have found that our buyers care first about the topic of the content and then will choose from the formats available.  Ultimately you need to find the best way to make your content easy to find so that your buyers can consume it.

David Meerman Scott is sort of the Godfather of eBooks.  Case and point, his eBook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free has been downloaded more than 600,000 times.  David had a great post on his blog, Web Ink Now, back in June called So you want to write an ebook? 30 tips for success

Here are some of the best tips David had to offer (be sure to read his entire article before you write your next eBook):

• You should write to solve a problem that people have.
• The ebook should be authored by a person. Don’t make it by your company. You need the personal connection with readers. An ebook by “Premium Landscape Company” will not do as well as an ebook by “Mary Smith, chief landscape architect at Premium Landscape Company.”
• Have a definite point of view.
• Do not sell your products or services in the body of the ebook.
• At the end, in the biography section, have a place where people can learn more and can contact you if they want to work with you.
• You will need a great title that intrigues people.
• Use a subtitle to say what the ebook is about.
• Add a Creative Commons license to encourage people to share.
• Tell people about the ebook, especially those in a position to talk it up.
• Invest in a great design
• Focus on the cover – the first thing people see
• You should have a permanent place to point people. It could be on your blog or site or you could even make a micro site with a unique URL

Here are some of my tips based on the success we have seen with our own eBooks:

• You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  Our most successful eBooks are a collection of blog posts by topic.
• Take out the formality.  Add some personality.
• People love valuable content so put it out there where your customers are – could include: LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, monthly newsletter, advertising, etc.

Whether or not to have a form in front of your eBook  is highly debatable.  David would tell you to let your content go free and he has some very interesting stats to back this up.  I have yet to convince the higher ups to do this, so we will continue to require registration for our eBooks.  If you are going to put a form in front, try to limit the number of questions.  Also, I have seen some forms where you can choose if you want follow-up from a sales rep or not which could increase downloads.