Twitter for Lead Generation - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip # 208
Friday, February 27th, 2009We’ve been talking a lot about Twitter around here lately. It seems it’s become our newest shiny object. People are loving it, they’re dedicated to it so there’s got to be a way to leverage this very active audience, right? Right.
As we were out and about reading about the new world that is Twitter, I came across this blog post from Joint Venture Marketing Strategist, Christian Fea - 6 Effective Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool.
Here’s the list of his 6 tips and a few of my thoughts. Be sure to read his full post, it’s worth your time.
- Target your market to follow the right people.
We’re all about targeting here at ReachForce so I couldn’t agree more on this one being #1. If you are going to use Twitter as a lead gen tool, it only makes sense to find the right audience. - Offer actionable advice
Again, couldn’t agree more. Please save us the details of your Chinese food lunch or that you are on the bus ride home. Give us something useful, and please don’t waste my time. Just my 2 cents… - Use your 140 character wisely
And don’t forget about tinyurls. You can customize these too. - Your offer and call to action
Christian recommends that you push people back to your own blog whenever you can. This gives you an opportunity to interact with more than 140 characters. - Frequency of your tweets
We REALLY struggle with this one. It’s tough staying relevant and being as frequent as we should be. We’re trying to share the responsibility here, we have a team of 3 that are each responsible for tweeting once a day. This way our audience gets different personalities and not just one person is carrying the entire load. - Tracking your results
Google Analytics will tell you if people are jumping from Twitter to you. It’s free, why wouldn’t you use it?
All great and easy to implement tips, Thanks again Christian!
Are you using Twitter as a lead gen tool? We’re giving it a shot, in fact, follow us @reachforce. We’ll be sure to let you know when we land our first customer who found us on Twitter.
Blog Bling by Blidgets – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #207
Thursday, February 26th, 2009Try saying that five times really fast! If you’re like us and are running a blog, you’re always trying to find new ways to get the word out to drive more traffic your way. One interesting method that we are partaking in is to create widgets for your blog. These widgets are little web-based trinkets that make your blog content available for people to access through popular “start pages”, such as Google IG, Pageflakes, and my personal favorite, Netvibes.
It’s really easy to create one and there are a number of services out there that will walk you through the process, but probably the easiest one I’ve found is the Widgetbox Blidget service. There is no coding required and all you have to do is provide it with the URL to your blog and then optionally configure some standard theme elements and off you go with your very own blidget within 5 minutes.
Widgetbox also hosts a gallery where you can publish your blidgets and it automatically draws in any meta keywords you have setup in your blog and will use them as the default keywords for people searching through the Widgetbox gallery to find your blidget with.
Check out our blidget to see what the finished product looks like. There are also over 60 other B2B-related widgets and blidgets already published out on the Widgetbox gallery, so no guinea pigs here!
With any luck, your blog could end up on The 25 Most Valuable Blogs list next year!
What B2B Marketers Want to Know - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #205
Thursday, February 19th, 2009For our 200th Tip here on The B2B Lead we decided to do a survey to see what you want to talk about these days. Our goal was to see what our readers are challenged with in these trying times and get an idea of what’s working right now in the B2B marketing world. Thanks to everyone who has participated in the survey. If you haven’t taken the survey, you should, we’re sending the results to everyone who takes it and you want to know what your peers are doing, right?
The last question on the survey asks what you [the survey taker] what you would like to ask our audience. With over 100 responses, we’re already noticing some really interesting trends. The 2 most asked about subjects from the last question aren’t big surprises though - social media and marketing program metrics.
Since we’re stacking up a good number of questions people are searching for answers to, I thought we’d go ahead and start talking about these. Below are a few of the questions from our survey, please jump in and share your thoughts.
Social Media –
- Are social networking sites really that helpful for B2B?
- What are the metrics and things corporate marketing can do with social media?
- If your company doesn’t support the use of social media (to promote the business) how have you overcome those objections?
- Do you get returns on podcasting? What is the breakdown for your marketing plan among the social media tools for Blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Podcasting, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg & Plaxo?
Marketing Metrics –
- How are they calculating revenue attribution back to campaigns?
- What trends are you seeing in email response rates? I’m seeing a big problem with increasingly aggressive spam filters and policies trapping marketing emails.
- What metrics do you track to measure overall success of your program?
- How are your google ppc campaigns going?
And the question I’m most interested in…
What has been working for you in the first few weeks of this year?
P.S. Here’s the tiny URL, http://tinyurl.com/B2BMarketingSurvey, please forward to any other B2B Marketers out there. After all, the more responses we get, the better the results.
Social Bookmarks - Is more really better? Marketing and Sales Tip #203
Monday, February 16th, 2009Is it better to have a lot of social bookmark icons on your blog, or ones that are relevant to your space? I have heard (and seen) different opinions on this. What do you think?
I personally think you only need to have ones on your blog that are relevant to your audience. So how do you going about finding these?
I don’t know if there is an easy way, or if it depends on what you are looking for, but I used sites like Social Poster to look up social bookmarks. Then, I went through them individually and searched “marketing” to see if there was anything. That’s how I made the decision of what is on this blog as of now.
Any ideas or know where to find other applications like this to help B2B Marketers?
Customer Experience Index Scoring - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #202
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009Now with the 9th and final installment discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback. (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6) (#7) (#8)
CEI is a metrics-based way to drive revenue growth from customers you have, those you’ve lost and one’s you’ve yet to win. In drops 1-8 we’ve given CEI use cases for:
- An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
- Applying metrics for better account-by-account management planning
- Building lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.
- Using metrics for Reference Account Management and sorting a top 10 list of best customer references, and why.
Last week’s rant aside, I heard some heartwarming feedback during my phone rounds last week on Reference Account Management. Sorting a top-10 list using the aforementioned steps is great way to have a constantly regenerated, rules based index of advocates who are not only loyal for reasons intangible, but are also qualified “satisfactioneers” from a statistical lens measuring service fundamentals such as quality function, value, basic expectations, length and frequency of engagement. And as you are able, you can even create sub lists for different verticals, channels, etc. for more precise matching of current prospects with current customers who can and want to help you win deals.
Taking this one step further, what if you took all of the companies on your top-20 RAM list and created a rules based profile that paints the picture of what a perfect opportunity looks like for your sales team? No guessing! If you find and start prospecting companies who match up with your most loyal and satisfied customers you’re not only communicating where your message is most likely to resonate, you’re also creating mindshare and giving your company a strategic messaging and positioning edge segment by segment (directly relating to where you have the most traction). Look at this as a snapshot of your winning market segments and the activities that contributed to these wins, thus arming Marketing and Sales teams with the road map to further success.
Is this a shameless plug for ReachForce’s Insight SaaS? Yes it is. But it’s still a golden opportunity to ask and answer the following:
- Are you marketing to the right companies and what rules do you use to make this determination?
- Are there trends in your sales funnel that you are not capitalizing on?
- What kinds of leads move through the sales funnel the fastest and generate the most revenue?
- Can you look into their sales funnel and identify current trends. By analyzing opportunities in the sales funnel in real time, marketers are able to adjust programs on-the-fly to help keep deals moving to close.
These are all questions marketers ask themselves as they are developing lead generation programs. And by combining CEI metrics with applications such as ReachForce Insight, marketing and sales teams can finally agree on winning target markets and focus lead generation efforts at other companies that match the same profile.
Quick B2B Marketing Survey - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #200
Thursday, February 5th, 2009It’s a big day for us here on The B2B Lead. Today we’re bringing you our 200th B2B Marketing and Sales Tip…well, kind of. Instead of a tip per se we’d like you to participate in a survey about how your life as a B2B Marketer has changed in this new economy.
This will help us bring you relevant tips and tricks as well as provide you some insight on what your peers are doing. Also, if you participate, we’ll send you a copy of the survey results. You want to make sure you are keeping up, right? Take this 8 question survey and pass it on to your fellow marketers. There’s value in it for all of us.
Here’s a tiny url to make it easier to pass along: http://tinyurl.com/B2BMarketingSurvey
Thanks for playing along.
Is Your Demand Generation Optimized for Success? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #199
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009By 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?
Customer Experience Index Scoring - Part 8 - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #195
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009On with the 8th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback. (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6) (#7)
In case you’re just dropping in … as B2B marketers we know that our businesses are fundamentally made up of three types of customers. The ones we have, those we’ve lost, and potential accounts doing business elsewhere. CEI is a metrics-based planning tool for driving revenue growth from all three of these targets and over the past few weeks we’ve been working our way down the following outline:
- CEI Initiative Planning
- Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
- Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
- Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
- Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
- (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting
As of last week we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for:
- An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
- Applying metrics for better account-by-account management planning
- Building lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.
- Using metrics for Reference Account Management and sorting a top 10 list of best customer references, and why.
A Rant About Reference Account Management – cont’d
In my view, good Reference Account Management is perhaps one of the most overlooked things about B2B sales and marketing today. It’s seems to have been subverted by what the 1990s called “relationship selling” or “relationship marketing.” (By the way I am so tempted to try out a new acronym “RAM,” but I won’t).
After last week’s post I devoted some time on Google checking on as many high quality Sales, Marketing and Account Management job postings as I could stand. I had hoped to call some folks up to talk about how different companies are using CEI-type metrics and try to get some understanding of who is responsible for them. After a while I logged off in dismay. I’d read more than forty job descriptions and only one mentioned anything at all about the act of –or responsibility for (call it what you may)– maintaining an index of Sales-ready reference accounts.
As a sales person this finding (unscientific, yet time consuming) makes me feel needy. As an account manager it makes me think nobody is looking. As a marketer I just feel dirty. Even after the much needed influence of Fred Reichheld’s “Ultimate Question” (note to self: call Howie about game show idea) and Net Promoter Scores ― it pains me greatly to think this means that if we asked 1000 companies who their top-10 sales ready customer references are (and why) possibly only 20 could produce the information. Wow.
Because of this I’m sort of ranting this week.
If the discipline of stock managing Sales-ready references is being ignored at your company – especially in an economy where heroic customer experience is required – fix it, or buckle your seat-belt please. I say this because I believe a proper tool for this type of microanalysis and segmentation is the real brass ring for customer experience professionals.
To explain, let me bust out some John Lennon and ask you to imagine what you can do once you’ve managed your CEI metrics into a real-time data driven Reference Account Management list:
- Match prospects you are selling to with just the right customer references during the sales cycle
- Align customers with other customers for:
- Account assignment groupings
- Sales plans and quotas
- Geo-analysis
- Vertical-analysis
- Predictive analysis
- Campaign planning, newsletters, webinars, user conferences, PR etc.
- Align product roadmaps with prioritized customer needs
- Anticipate customer needs
- Use rules-based market profile of your most satisfied and loyal customers to frame market-to-market searches for new prospects
My point is this is that all of the above mentioned stuff sounds great if not essential ― and I think the last 7 posts I’ve done on this subject show that this is not so much about rocket science as it is about ownership and effort. Every company that is serious about growth (sometimes survival) needs to have a CEI-type initiative in place as a part of the organizational DNA. To that, I now add that these metrics are a tool to be used for holding the right people accountable for the right things. Knowing why customers become genuinely loyal to a supplier has everything to do with taking actionable intelligence from the bottomless well of information that is “the customer experience” and plying it back into the strategies and tactics that make your company tick.
Sales organizations that rely too much on relationship selling may not be as inclined as others to take a metrics driven approach. In fact, some studies say that in sectors such as manufacturing just more than half are less likely to consistently use comprehensive customer experience metrics as a part of their prospecting strategy. I think that could be a reason why American manufacturing is getting its collective butt kicked.
Stay tuned for more next week.
Making Sales Metrics Public - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip # 194
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009This 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.
Metrics, metrics, metrics…don’t know about you, but our sales team hates the word! Some of them claim it’s the big brother feeling, some of them just hate having to keep track of one more thing, but for management, metrics are the lifeblood of our organization.
Here at ReachForce we have an inside sales model so we sell just about every deal over the phone. We used to be content just tracking meetings set, proposals sent out and deals closed. We felt like keeping up with these few metrics was enough. We were at ease knowing most of what was going on, but when our sales team struggled we had zero visibility into why.
As we have grown as an organization we have learned that we can’t be lax on metrics, regardless of what someone “typically delivers”. When we would notice a hiccup in our sales results, our initial knee-jerk reaction was to change how we approached things, re-visit our value proposition and the way we are communicating it to potential prospects, talk about what triggers, etc. All great things to discuss and reinforce but it didn’t lead to the big change we wanted to see. We went back to the drawing board. We started looking at things a little differently and we noticed some trends among the metric conversion rates and numbers for our top performers, trends we had no line of sight into before.
Here’s what we did:
Displayed activity and metrics for the entire company to see. It now was very obvious when someone is struggling. Everyone’s information is updated every day – metrics reporting is now mandatory. Does our sales team like this? Probably not but my thought is, if they are delivering then what does it really matter? And, let’s face it, like most start ups sales is the lifeline for our business.
Since instituting mandatory metrics tracking and “the board” we have seen some pretty great results. Having an instant, always available picture of sales activity makes tracking things through the funnel and forecasting much clearer for us. Just imagine, if you know how many connects a sales rep has to make to set a meeting and how many meetings it takes to get a proposal, partner that with your proposal to close rate and bingo, you’ve got a good idea of how much activity will be needed to drive a close. The cool thing about this is that for us, the reverse engineering of activity translates pretty well into results.
On the other side of the house, instituting mandatory metrics has made sales more transparent to marketing. Our marketing team now has a much better idea of what our sales team needs to hit our company goals. Additionally, our marketing team uses the same numbers to gauge:
- what marketing messages are the most effective
- what messages aren’t driving hand raisers
- what kinds of programs are needed to drive the leads sales needs
- how many or how big programs need to be so our sales team can spend time talking to warm prospects, not cold leads
Simply put, metrics may be a hassle for some but they are a necessity for both Marketing and Sales to keep a pulse on their ultimate challenge - driving more business faster and more efficiently.
What key metrics are you tracking? Are they giving you the information you need to make the right decisions for your business?
I’d also love to know if anyone else is tracking daily or weekly metrics in a public place. It seems to be working here. In fact, it has really upped the competition among our sales team.
The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing: ROI vs. Response - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #193
Monday, January 26th, 2009This is the final post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 5 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title, Predictable vs. Spray and Pray and Nurture vs. Capture
A survey of B2B Marketing organizations by SiriusDecisions determined that the marketing departments of high performing companies significantly influenced or contributed at least 30% of the opportunities in the pipeline.
With Deliberate Marketing, virtually any marketing organization can achieve similar or even better results. Not to toot my own horn, but here at ReachForce, Marketing contributes over 80% of new customers.
Deliberate Marketing focuses B2B Marketers on business objectives like adding opportunities to the pipeline, increasing revenues, acquiring new customers, and maximizing the return on marketing programs.
No longer is marketing worried about meeting or exceeding a 2% response rate. Deliberate Marketers value lead quality over lead quantity and they are motivated to move qualified buyers through the pipeline as efficiently and quickly as possible.
If you want to learn more about Deliberate Marketing and how to increase qualified buyers in the sales funnel, check out our new eBook, Funnelnomics I: Deliberate Marketing.
