LinkedIn Answers can be a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader and connect with colleagues and prospects.  I try to create RSS feeds for almost everything I monitor online; it is more likely I will get to it that way.  The other day I realized I can get an RSS feed of LinkedIn Answers.  Unfortunately, it is not very customizable.  You can only get a feed of an entire topic, not just based on a certain keyword like search.twitter.com.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to LinkedIn.com
2. Click on Answers (it’s at the top)
3. In the right sidebar, under Browse, click on the topic that relates to your industry
4. In the right sidebar look for the orange RSS logo, click the link to add new questions on this topic to your feed reader

*Note you can also subscribe to sub topics.  Keep in mind that many questions are asked each day so the more specific you can be the better.

What is the benefit of being active on LinkedIn Answers?  I know someone who was asked to speak at an industry conference based solely on answering a question on LinkedIn.  We currently have two deals in the pipe that originated on LinkedIn Answers.  I know my sales reps don’t always have the time to keep up with LinkedIn Answers so whenever someone asks a question looking for a solution like ours I pass it along to the appropriate sales rep to follow-up.

I still recommend going in at least once a week to search your company and products’ names since those are conversations you defintely want to be aware of.  Still unsure of what to do?  Check out How to Use LinkedIn Answers in Marketing.

Are you really writing for your buyers?  Do you know how many gobbledygook words/phrases you used in your last press release, your “About Us” page, your newsletter or your collateral?  Ok, first things first, what is gobbledygook?  Gobbledygook is a word used by David Meerman Scott to describe the over used marketing words that lack substantial meaning.  These words typically do nothing to actually add value to the content.  Does it really mean anything to your buyers that your product is a scalable, world-class solution?  To learn more, check out the Gobbledygook Manifesto.

Here are the top 25 gobbledygook phrases used in press releases sent in North America 2008:

Are some of these words looking a little all too familiar, in a bad way?  Gobbledygook Grader is here to the rescue!  Gobbledygook Grader is brought to you from the fine folks at HubSpot, creators of other great graders: Website Grader, Press Release Grader, Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader.  Gobbledygook Grader lets you enter any content and grades that content based on number of gobbledygook words, links, readability, etc.  It is also identifies all gobbledygook words in the content.  I recommend copying and pasting every page of your website into this to see how you rate.  Don’t worry if you have a few words here and there that are gobbledygook.  Sometimes those words are necessary.  Just ask yourself, is this really telling my buyer something about my company/product that would make them want to buy?  Market-leading, flexible, robust solution probably does not mean much to a prospect nor is it particularly compelling.

Thank you to HubSpot and David Meerman Scott for this very useful tool to keep our writing in check.

We are starting a new series here on the B2B Lead to bring B2B marketers new and/or remarkable products/companies/ideas that could make your life easier or are just plain cool.

Our first entrant in a series of many to come on this theme is BatchBook CRM by BatchBlue Software.  Now I’m fully aware that there are more CRM systems out there than you can shake a stick at.  What sets BatchBook apart from the rest is this simple assessment (IMHO): if you were to start a company to provide a current, modern CRM system today, BatchBook is what it would look like.  It sports an extremely easy-to-use interface and provides all the features and functionality that the primary end-users of CRM systems (sales reps) actually use.  But what makes it cool is the unique social networking and tagging elements that, whereas all the other CRM vendors are scurrying to retrofit their systems with it, has been built in.   Tracking relationships between social network contacts and keeping tabs on the social chatterings thereof are just some of the interesting capabilities on this front.  Their tagging capability, SuperTags, enables users to capture and search on ad-hoc information, such as “talked to this guy at EventForce”.

It is probably best suited for companies fitting the “S” in “SMB” (which most of their customers are), but the pricing model is attractive and I think we will be seeing some interesting things from this company in the future.

I got a new newsletter in my inbox this week, Sales & Marketing Watch.  Not sure they found me but they caught my attention.  The simple newsletter included a list of recent articles from Fast Company, Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and a few others.  All articles very relevant to what I do every day, so I took a few minutes to checkout some of the articles.

One in particular caught my attention – The Top 10 Dumb Sales Questions During a Bad Economy from www.managesmarter.com.  The article’s author, Steve Giglio, lists 10 questions in every sales person’s normal process of understanding and moving a deal to close.  Here’s a list of the questions, check out the full article to see WHY you shouldn’t be asking these today.

1. How’s Business?
2. What are your goals for this year?
3. Who is your competition?
4. How is your company going to stand out?
5. How has your company been successful in the past?
6. Who is your customer?
7. Is there anyone else I should see?
8. Should I leave this information with you?
9. What is your budget?
10. Who should I follow up with?

And don’t forget to share this one with your sales team.

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.

While Twitter is still trying to figure out a revenue generating model (which will include Pro Accounts) for their hugely popular free service, some people claim they are willing to pay for certain upgraded features.  Dan Frommer took a look at comments on his most recent blog post about Twitter and put together a list of what Twitter users say they would be willing to pay for.

Amazing what people will “say” they’ll pay for…

• Slightly longer messages: 160 characters instead of 140.
• Unlimited or prioritized access to API. (Twitter limits how many requests an account can make per hour.)
• Auto-deleting deadbeat followers who haven’t logged in within a month.
• More reliable service. (Can’t really charge on a per-user basis for this though, unless there’s a separate Twitter that’s more reliable, right?)
• Link-click analytics. (Free already if you use bit.ly, though some limitations.)
• Guaranteeing that their old tweets (all of them) are available forever, and easier to sift through.

Would you pay for twitter fearures?

I am always looking for new ways to find qualified leads for sales and will typically try anything once.  Each quarter we try to add something new to the mix.  For next quarter we looked at couple of virtual tradeshows.  We sponsored one last year and found it pretty interesting even though we didn’t get many real leads from it (lots of international visitors).  It was a good place to cut our teeth on something new.

In the last week or so, we were contacted to sponsor another virtual tradeshow being put on by a major industry publication that seems to be in transition with both their events and their publication, moving everything online.  I was intrigued and wanted more details.  I inquired further about this new event to find out what the cost would be and how many/what kind of attendees they expected.  I got back a very interesting reply.  Sponsorships ranged from $10K to $25K.  Little surprised here since this is typically the cost of live events.  I was still interested…then I found out how many people they were expecting.  I figured thousands, right?  Nope, they’re only expecting about 2500 people.  But how targeted are these people visiting?

With this economy travel budgets are definitely being cut but aren’t tradeshow budgets too?  Not sure about you, but it seems like a hefty pricetag for a very broad tradeshow.  I can think of a lot of things to spend $10K – $25K that will result in more targeted, qualified leads.  What about you?

Ah, to be counter-cyclic.  That holy grail of business performance that is coveted by all but achieved by few.   As our economy attempts to recover from the “off the top turnbuckle” piledriver inflicted upon it by our good friends on Wall Street, recent news in the Marketing Automation sector seems to indicate that things are going just fine, thank you, as evidenced by:

Marketo celebrating their One-Year Anniversary with their 160th customer win

Eloqua announcing their $33M year in 2008, up 58% YoY

Impressive on both accounts and hopefully this trend continues during the rebound.  Interestingly, new findings from the recently released Marketing Outlook study conducted by the CMO Council indicate that 50% of marketers are keeping flat or actually increasing their budgets, but as far as investment in Marketing Automation goes:

“…tactical capabilities and point solutions dominate. The top two target areas of investment for 2009 are email marketing (44.9 percent) and online surveys and research (33.2 percent). Only 10.1 percent are investing in master data, 12.8 percent in marketing operational systems, and 9.3 percent in marketing resource or process management solutions.”

This supports a trend that we see quite frequently, which is that although companies are buying Marketing Automation suites, they really end up using them as email marketing tools and only dabble in the other features.  Perhaps as times get better and budgets open up more, we will see a renewed/newfound exploration and usage of the multichannel capabilities that make these suites more powerful than your average load-and-go email blaster.

It seems like everyday I hear about a new social networking tool and read another article about how to increase my Twitter following or maximize my Facebook presence.  You can’t be everywhere but how in the world do you go about choosing the right networks to participate in? I have found there are 3 questions to ask myself when choosing where to spend my efforts online:

• What are these networks already talking about? - Most every social network has some sort of search tool. Plug in your keywords to see if your industry is already being talked about.  Sign up immediately and join the conversation if they are.  Don’t forget to include your Company name in the search.  Someone else may have already started the conversation about you.
• Where are your competitors? – If your competitors have a presence there, you should too. To find out where they are, go to their website or blog and look for links like “follow us on Twitter” or “join our LinkedIn Group”. You should also head to some of the post popular social networking sites and see if your competitors have created profiles/accounts/pages.  Be sure to check for activity in groups and discussion boards like in Facebook groups and in LinkedIn Answers.
• Where are your customers? – I think the best place to start is with your customers. Their activities should most closely mimic those of your prospects.  You can find out where they are by a quick survey to your customers.  Do you have a customer advisory board?  Use them to help you get started.  And there is always the hard way (not really all that hard but rather time consuming) which is to go out to different networks and search to see if your customers are already there.

Keep in mind that social networking is not right for every industry.  You definitely want to do your homework up front so you can be stategic in your social networking lead gneration.  If you feel like you are a little ahead of your time for your industry, I would start with something like LinkedIn.  It is the most professional of the networks out there and is kind of the gateway drug to other social networks.