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!

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.

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.

Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close.  Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out.  Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.

According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.   Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.   Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?

This makes me wonder.  Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.

Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:

• Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is.  Marketing leads are different than sales leads.  Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.

• Ask the sales team what is working for them.  Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies?  Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.

• What programs deliver the best leads?  And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers.  Does this align with what sales says?

• Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine.  Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.

• For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing.  Budgets and project timelines change all the time.  Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).

At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team.  We know one can’t be successful without the other.

B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

It’s a new year and here at ReachForce we are in the process of analyzing all of our programs to determine which ones drive the most sales conversions.  Very quickly we realized that people that respond to our programs seem to over and over again.  But what about those that never respond?  They are killing our response rates and conversions.

With every program we as Marketers run we are able to bucket people into “responders” and “non-responders”.  We typically do different things with these two groups.  Responders can either move into other programs that try and further qualify the lead for sales or they go directly to sales/inside sales for more follow up and further qualification.

Now – what do you do with the non-responders and inactive contacts in your database?  By leaving them in the current mix, you’re only hurting your program ROI and possible sales conversions.  Continuing to do the same thing over and over again with these non-responders is insanity, right?

So instead of writing these people off, change up the mix and try something new with them.

In our 2.0 world, there are so many new possibilities for reaching your prospects in a way they respond to.  Here’s a few ideas to consider:

• Webcasts – some people are visual learners and want to feel like they are interacting with live people.  Email them an on-demand webcast or invite them your next live webinar.

• Podcasts – some people like to listen vs. read [a whitepaper or eBook]

• Survey – we use explicit surveys here at ReachForce to gather lead qualifying information.  Now, yes we do incentivize people to take the survey but the results we get back are fabulous.  It helps our lead gen and sales team to prioritize their follow up and it helps us weed out no fits (also helping increase our next program ROI).

• Social networks – where else are your prospects hanging out?  Get out there with them and try and make contact.  Remember you can’t enter the social world with your used car salesman pitch, people will roll their eyes at you and never interact.

• Channels – are your prospects also customers of some of your partners, see if they can help with introductions or more insight into the prospect account.

• Offers and Incentives – be sure to change them up and test what works best.

And if all else fails, it might be time to clean up your data.  Make sure you have the right buying contacts in the right companies or it doesn’t even matter what you are sending or offering.

With every program we put together here at ReachForce, our #1 goal is to drive more hand raisers.  That means we have to create programs using multiple vehicles.  Is vehicles the right word here?  Maybe not, but you know what I mean.

So how are you reaching those stubborn prospects that give you no signal of interest?  Hopefully you’re not just giving up on them …

By now, we are all tired of hearing how the world is coming to an end.  The financial markets are down, companies are struggling and people are losing their jobs every time we turn around – times are hard and we’re all suffering.  But quite frankly, we’re tired of talking about it.  So instead, this month we’re focused on all around best practices that we should all be applying in any economy.

Optimizing your marketing mix for success – are you doing it?  If so, how’s it working for you?

As marketers, we have a lot of options for reaching our audience.  We use some for overall awareness and others for one-to-one contact with our customers, prospects, media contacts, etc.  And in most cases, we are building programs using a variety of tactics to get our desired outcomes.  Here at ReachForce, we categorize tactics into two buckets – air wars and ground attacks.

Air wars are things like PR, social media, and SEO.  All necessary but can be difficult to measure real ROI.  Ground attacks are direct one-to-one initiatives, things like email programs, webinars, and targeted live events.  You have to have both to get the results you really want.

We’re going to be exploring the following questions over the next few weeks on The B2B Lead, be sure to check back in.

• So how do you decide what combination of activities is driving the most value for your business and your audience?
• Are you just spinning the wheel of luck and hoping it lands on new customers?
• How are you measuring your programs for success?
• When do you decide a tactic isn’t working and you need to cut it out of the mix?
• How often are you adding new tools and tactics that help you drive ROI from your efforts?
• Is there a specific combination of activities that work with specific audiences?

When times are tough we are forced to make use of what we already have.  After many events, lead forms, list exchanges and sales rolodex’s you have probably built a nice size database of prospects.  Before you get ready to launch your next program to your in-house database consider these things:

1. Marketing Sherpa has said that 2.1% of data goes bad every month. (This stat is about 2 years old, with so many people losing their jobs over the last couple of months I bet this number has gone up, but for this, we are going to use the 2.1) This means each year almost 25% of your contact data gets dirty.  Do you know which 25%?

   Contact records stay fresh about as long as a gallon of milk. Well maybe a little bit longer but you get the idea. Here’s some other interesting stats (also about 2 years old) According to Gartner, more than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. In the same time, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  Again, I bet these numbers are up too.

2. Are you marketing to the entire DMU (decision making unit)?  Do you have your entire DMU in your database?

   B2B purchases are typically made by a group of people.  Each one with different concerns and specifications.  To accelerate sales cycles it pays to start the connections before your prospect moves into the sales funnel.  DMUs can include – end users, business managers, finance specialist, technology specialists, senior management, key influencers, procurement specialists, etc.

   Marketing Sherpa also says…For purchases of $25K or more -
   100 – 500 employees    6.8 people in the DMU making buying decisions
   501-1000 employees    13.5 people in the DMU making buying decisions
   0ver 1000 employees    21 people in DMU making buying decisions

3. If you are trying to upsell or cross sell to your existing customer database, do you have the right buyers and their contact information?

   If you are selling a platform or have solutions that affect multiple groups within a company, there’s a chance you don’t have the right buyers for your new product or solution.  Here’s an example:  You sell a CRM platform and have recently added accounting and marketing modules.  Marketing to the sales leader that bought the CRM piece probably isn’t your target audience for the new modules and won’t get you very far.  Their needs are already met. And while they may be involved in the additional purchases they probably are not the ultimate buying decision maker for your upsell or cross sell.

4. Do you have all of the relevant contact information needed to executive your marketing programs?

   Example – You are planning a breakfast city tour and want to invite people in each region via email and also with a direct mail piece.  Do you have everyone’s correct physical address for the actual events and the direct mail?  Do you also have correct email addresses for the series of emails you plan to send reminding people about the event?  Missing just once piece can hinder your results.

5. Have you considered international privacy and SPAM laws?

   While we’re all very familiar with our US CAN-SPAM laws, have you researched the other countries you are marketing to?  Each countries laws are different, like for example Germany requires a double opt-in for email marketing.

Am I missing anything here?  Remember the grass isn’t always greener with the unknowns.  Work what you have, at some point you thought these people were worthy of holding on to.

This is the fifth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 4 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title and Predictable vs. Spray and Pray.

Deliberate Marketing doesn’t involve capturing any and all leads, then tossing them over the fence to sales. Deliberate Marketing is about engaging with prospects, understanding their needs and scoring them based on their interests and behavior to determine their stage in the buying cycle. It’s about nurturing them with targeted communications and offers until they are ready to engage with sales.

A prospect that downloads a whitepaper probably needs to be further nurtured by marketing before being passed on to sales, whereas a prospect that requests a 30-day trial can be immediately handed off to sales.  This is different for each business; be sure to have an agreement with sales on when leads should be handed over.

With a Deliberate Marketing approach, B2B Marketers can ensure their leads receive the proper follow-up and that buyers are not discarded simply because they are not ready to make a purchase immediately.  Feedback loops between marketing and sales are necessary so that any leads that are passed to sales too early can be sent back to marketing for continued nurturing.

This is the fourth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 3 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads and Role vs. Title.

Deliberate Marketing techniques make it possible for Marketers and Sales teams to predict the results of their efforts because they know their direct marketing programs are focused on the right buyers in the right type of company. Deliberate Marketers do not spray a rented list of contacts with a generic message hoping the right buyers will respond. Instead, they deliver a highly relevant message to a targeted audience.

Based on preparation and research, they know they are using the right messages and the right medium to deliver that message based on the buyer profile (or persona). They also know that they are delivering this message to buyers in companies with a similar combination of characteristics as their best customers so their propensity to purchase is higher.

With this approach, Marketers can rely on repeatable lead generation efforts to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to Sales.