Tips for Follow-up on B2B Content Offers - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #244
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Here 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.
Time for Summer School – Learn How to Move Leads Through the Funnel Faster
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009June 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.
How Dirty is Your Marketing Data? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #243
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009According 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.
Repurposing Lead Generation Content You Already Have – Sales, This is a TIP for you too! - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #242
Monday, June 1st, 2009Creating 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.
Building Your Brand on Twitter - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #241
Thursday, May 28th, 2009There 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.
- 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.
- Decide how you want to brand yourself - Dan offers some good tips including creating a custom background
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Sales Playbook Part 1 - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #240
Wednesday, May 27th, 20092009 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…
Creating a Personal Background on Twitter - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #239
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009Being a somewhat typical marketer, I pay attention to the look and feel of everything we do. I believe that a cohesive look for our brand is essential because we run so many integrated marketing programs. I came across a great post on Mashable, HOW TO: Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds by Ben Par. The post goes into why you would want a custom background and examples of some great ones but to me the best part is a list of tools to help you create your own:
- MyTweetSpace: MyTweetSpace is one of the simplest ways to create a Twitter background with minimal effort. It allows users to create badges, add graphics, play with text, and more to create elegant backgrounds and left-hand text columns. You can even log in with Twitter and MyTweetSpace will automatically update your background.
- TwitterBacks: This website provides a set of templates perfect for creating your ideal Twitter background. The templates come in PSD (Photoshop) form. In fact, my Twitter account utilizes a TwitterBack template as the basis for my design. Can you guess which one?
- TweetStyle: TweetStyle offers free background templates, custom Twitter backgrounds, and a few useful blog posts on the subject of the backdrop.
- Free Twitter Designer: This handle little app provides an easy-to-use image editor to help you create a professional-looking theme.
- TwitBacks: This is another tool for creating backgrounds. This one specializes in left-hand column-based backgrounds.
- TwitterGallery: TwitterGallery is a directory of themes based on color and category. You can even click the “install” button under any theme, log into Twitter, and poof!…your background is ready.
- Peekr: If you stumble across a great Twitter background and want to take a quick look at it in its pure form, the Peekr bookmarklet is the way to go. Click on the bookmarklet once to show only the background, and press it again to bring everything back to normal.
One tip I would add is to be sure to change your design colors to match your new background. When you are in your Twitter account, click on settings and then change design colors. You can change your background, text, links, sidebar and sidebar border to match your new background.
We have already done this for the ReachForce twitter page but I can’t wait to get started on my own personal background.
Free Webinar: Bridging the Marketing and Sales Gap - 3 Strategies for Creating a Funnel that Delivers
Friday, May 22nd, 2009June 4th, 3pm EST Register now
We all know the classic adage “Marketing is from Venus, Sales is from Mars”
If your company is like most, Marketing and Sales plan separately, act separately and report separately – invariably pulling your business in opposite directions…
- Marketing is busy building the brand, providing Sales with collateral and marketing materials, managing events, and trying to generate truckloads of leads – all the while wondering why Sales doesn’t appreciate all they do.
- Sales is unearthing opportunities, building relationships and closing deals – but struggling with too many leads or too few, stop-start lead flows and too many dead ends. And complaining that Marketing just doesn’t get it.
Attend this 45-minute webinar to learn 3 strategies to better align Marketing and Sales teams to create a funnel that delivers and find out how to…
- grow faster than your industry counterparts
- close more proposals
- churn fewer customers every year
It’s not about aligning Sales and Marketing to each other - instead you must align both to the same goals and objectives. They have to act as one team. Only a singular plan with shared objectives, strategy, tactics and measures will produce real results.
During the webinar, we will share findings from a benchmark study of 1400 professionals in 84 countries, conducted by MathMarketing and MarketingProfs, which revealed 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 and MathMarketing to find out why successful companies DON’T use this as a metric and have increased growth as a result.
The New Rules of Sales Enablement – ReachForce Book Club
Thursday, May 21st, 2009I’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!
Game Changing Alert: Sales Enablement Playbooks - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #238
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009This 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.
- Identify Situational Elements –things like Organization Size and Structure, Vertical/Sub-Vertical Industries, Geographic Characteristics, Individual Roles and Responsibilities
- 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
- 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.
