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…

I’m still working on my sales enablement playbook plans and Suaad, our CEO and fellow B2B Lead blogger, just happened to forward me a very timely new eBook, The New Rules of Sales Enablement, by Jeff Ernst, VP of Marketing at Kadient.

Jeff opens the eBook with some very interesting stats.  Here’s just a few of them:
•    Over 40% of salespeople fail to hit quota
•    30% of reps turn over each year
•    65% of a sales rep time is spent NOT selling
•    90% of marketing deliverables are not used by sales

WOW!  This doesn’t look so good.  He goes on to say that “buyers actually think that salespeople slow down their buying process.”  I can see that and can see how the rules are changing on how we as marketers should be supporting our sales teams.

Now for the new rules –

Conversations, NOT Collateral – Our goal both in Marketing and Sales is to create conversations and not just to push a bunch of information at our prospects.  Ernst goes on to say that most of the time this collateral isn’t aligned with selling situations and is disconnected from daily reality.  I agree but haven’t been sure how to change this.
NEW RULE:  Sales enablement is about ensuring salespeople are able to have valuable conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process.
I couldn’t agree more.  We have a good deal of content here at ReachForce and we very often wonder what actually gets used.  My guess, not even half of it.  We’re working on realigning that now as part of our playbook strategies.

Experience BEATS Expertise – 90% of the “stuff” that the folks in corporate give them they ignore.
NEW RULE: The most effective selling content, messages, and strategies are discovered from experience with buyers.
This one seems easy, sales people like all of us really, want to know what works not what people say will work.

PROVEN Plays – Old rule says “if we implement a new sales methodology, every salesperson will become an “A” player.  Yeah right!  We all know that doesn’t work.  Even the best made plans don’t work for everyone.
NEW RULE:  Any salesperson can improve performance by following sales playbooks that are proven to work in winning deals.
Practical tactics that work in specific situations, that’s what they are looking for.

Value OUT, NOT Data IN – the new rule says it all here.
NEW RULE:  Adoption of sales enablement applications is driven by the value a salesperson gets out of it, not the data they key in.
I think we sometimes forget that the sales tools we put in place help with forecasting and activity metrics but don’t help the sales rep do their job better – driving more deals to close.  Interesting thought here but definitely makes sense.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on the great ideas presented in this eBook.  There’s no way I could cover everything you should know.  Download your own copy now.  It’s worth your time and effort to read this one.

Thanks to Jeff Ernst at Kadient for this great eBook.  As a long time marketer who is always up for trying something new to drive more deals to close, I’m excited about the game changing sales enablement playbook we are getting started on TODAY at 4pm!

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.

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

Dear Sales,

We’ve had a long and storied relationship.   When we work well together, we’re pretty amazing, when we fight, it’s ugly but overall we make a great team. I feel like we’ve worked through our differences well and that we see eye to eye more often than not, but we really need to talk about one thing…the one thing that bonds us for life but keeps pulling us apart…our data.

I know, I know, it’s no one’s fault.  But that’s the problem.  I supply the data, I nurture the data and then I send it to you so you can make it flourish.  What happens to the data once I send it to you though?  Some of it gets the proper care, it blossoms into an opportunity and then low and behold we win!  Some of it isn’t really ready and gets nurtured some more, some wither and die on the vine, and some of it, well, it sits and it gets lost in the oblivion of it’s home, our CRM system.

So Sales, here is my proposition to you, let’s work together to cultivate our leads, I will continue to feed you nurtured sales ready leads that suit your need and I ask that in return, you help me keep everything straight.  We must communicate, it’s required for our relationship to work.  Get to know the data (your leads), really learn about your companies and our targets and then, tell me what’s not working (and better yet, what is!).

How do you do this you ask, well we’ll work together and make it happen!

Love,

Marketing

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?

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.

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.