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.

There is a lot of buzz abut Twitter out there.  If you are just getting started it can be a bit overwhelming.  I came across another great post on Mashable, HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter by Dan Schwabel.  This post goes through six steps you should take to build your brand (personal or company) on Twitter.

1. Claim your Twitter handle – stop what you are doing and claim it now.  Even if you aren’t ready to take the next 5 steps you will want your handle there waiting for you.
2. Decide how you want to brand yourself – Dan offers some good tips including creating a custom background
3. Become known as an expert or resource – make sure you are optimizing your tweets with keywords as most people don’t read every tweet but instead look for keywords.
4. Establish a Twitter marketing plan – this is all about making sure your Twitter handle is everywhere and anywhere like in your email signature, on your blog, on your business cards, etc.
5. Utilize third-party applications – there are lots out there but many serve the same function and many will not be useful to you.  Dan outlines the best ones for building your brand.
6. Form a Twitter “Mastermind Group” – this is not right for everyone and I think is more for personal branding than company brands.

If you are just getting started, the point is to do just that, get started.  Everyone should do number 1, you don’t want to have to try to buy it later.  Then, go at your own pace to complete the rest of the steps.

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…

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.

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.

A few weeks back the Eloqua Artisan blog spotlighted posting up links within your CRM system to connect your CRM and LinkedIn, it’s a very helpful post that walks through how to better enable your Sales team with seamless integration between your CRM and LinkedIn.  Prior to reading this post I had done some similar linking within our salesforce.com instance and were inspired to share.
A few of the items we’ve linked into our Lead records:

• Hoovers Profile
• Map It!
• Google It!

So now for the how-to:

1. I (as our salesforce.com admin) opened up the set-up page, under “App Setup” and from the “Customize” menu selected “Leads” and then “Buttons and Links.”
2. Select “New” button, once the New Button or Link interface opens up, you’ll want to put information in all of the boxes that have a red line alongside them (those are mandatory).  Using our “Hoovers Profile” button as an example, you’ll want to fill in the Label and Name with the appropriate information.
3. Under Behavior you’ll want to make an appropriate selection, I have it set up to display in a new window and since this is replicating a search string, the Content Source is URL.
4. In the larger box with formulas and fields, I dropped in the following:  http://search.hoovers.com/cgi-bin/hol_search?which=company&query_string={!Lead.Company}
5. After you’ve entered your formula/search string, select ‘Save.’
6. Now you’ve got a button, you need to add it to your Lead Record.  Select the “Page Layout” menu under “App Set Up,” “Customize,”, “Leads,” “Page Layouts.”  Decide which of your page layouts you’d like to edit and choose ‘Edit.’
7. Once the interface for editing the lead layout appears, you’ll want to select ‘Custom Links’ (noted in blue below) in the gray box and find the link you created (it’s name will appear).   From there you can drag it and drop it within the links portion of the Lead record.
8. Hit “Save” and you’re done.

Here are the strings I use for the buttons we’ve added:

• For a Google Search:
  http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS275&q={!Lead.Company}
• For a Map:
  http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?cn={!Lead.Country}&csz={!Lead.City}+{!Lead.State}+{!Lead.PostalCode}+&addr={!Lead.Street}
• For a Hoovers Company Profile:
  http://search.hoovers.com/cgi-bin/hol_search?which=company&query_string={!Lead.Company}

This has been a great help to our sales reps to give them a little more info about their prospects and has been a huge time saver.

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.