Meet a New B2B Lead Blogger - Jason Morio
Thursday, February 12th, 2009Jason Morio, VP of Products at ReachForce
I’m the resident technologist and product “strategery” guy. After serving an almost decade-long sentence on the chain gang of enterprise software, I have emerged reborn, abask in the glow of SaaS and web x.0. My current musings include gazing into the crystal ball of “U.S. Economy – The Restart” and how B2B marketing is going to react and adapt to it. You can expect postings from me covering (well, pondering, mainly) B2B marketing applications of social media and that fountain of eternal vitality that seems to write its own material these days: venture capital. All postings served with a sprig of controversy, a twinge of east coast humor and an occasional dash of psychedelia.
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.
Keyword Research Tools - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #201
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009A website redesign/overhaul can be a daunting task but, for some, a necessary one. One of the first steps, from an SEO perspective, is to define your target list of keywords to use when optimizing your site for search. I have heard recommendations of having anywhere from 300 to 500 keyword on your list. Keep in mind you will optimize each page of your site for only 2-5 keywords.
Here is a list of the top keyword research tools you may want to use:
Keyword Discovery - According to their web site, Keyword Discovery has a database that tracks over 36 billion searches from 200 search engines worldwide over the last 12 months, including seasonal trends over this time period. This tool is useful in building keyword lists, overall campaign planning and competitive research.
Price: Standard - $69.95 monthly/$599.40 annually; Enterprise - $495 monthly/$4455 annually. They offer a free trial with limited functionality.
Wordtracker - Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential. Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers - Dogpile and Metacrawler.
Price: $59 monthly/ $329 annually. They offer a 7-day free trial.
Wordze - With a database of about 552 million keywords and 68 million unique search terms, Wordze is a great tool for building keyword lists. But it is also valuable as a tool to assist in creating SEO strategies, as it provides analysis on competing sites on specific search terms.
Price: $38.98 monthly, $7.95 1-day trial
Google AdWords Keyword Tool - If you are running (or plan on running) a Google Adwords campaign, then this tool is critical to your sucess. One can only guess the size of the database (all of Google?) and how frequently it is updated, but it is excellent at showing you what a site looks like according to the Google spiders. While a free tool, it does not lack in features.
Price: Free
KeywordSpy - KeywordSpy offers analytics to study competitors’ tactics as well as monitor their online search campaigns. According to their website, their database includes over one billion keywords. Best used for competitive research.
Price: monthly subscription from $89.95 - $139.95. They offer a free trial with limited functionality.
SEMRush - SEMRush uses 25 million of the most popular and expensive keywords to collect Google search results. SEMRush can show you keywords for any domain ranked high enough to be in top 20 search results results or that purchases AdWords. It helps you to keep track of your competitors, uncover your competitors’ organic and AdWords’ keywords, find their landing pages, discover your own long-tail keywords, and check Google rankings of any site.
Price: monthly subscriptions from $19.95 - $499.95. Free version available with limited functionality and only 10 queries per day.
SEO Book’s Keyword Tool - This keyword tool is powered by Wordtracker’s API. You can explore more keywords by subscribing to their powerful keyword research tools. Offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords. Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing. Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.
Price: Free
SpyFu - The SpyFu database can point to which sites and advertisers rank highly for any given keyword phrase. They can also indicate advertising trends, including Top 500 Advertisers, Top 500 Organically Ranked Domains, Top 500 Most Clicked Terms, Top 1000 Most Expensive Keywords. Best for competitive research.
Price: $38.50 monthly. Free registration for basic features.
Google Insights for Search - Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best, determine seasonality, create brand associations, and determine a new market. Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It then shows you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms. Keep in mind it was created for advertisers.
Price: Free, need to have a Google account
HubSpot Inbound Marketing System’s Keyword Grader - This is what I use. You import your list of keywords (or type them in one by one) and it shows you how many monthly searches that term gets, how difficult it is to rank for that term, your website’s current rank and the cost per click. Once you have had your tracking scripts on your website it will also show you how many visits you are getting from each keyword. There is also a competitors view to see how you compare on each term vs. each competitor. HubSpot actually does A LOT more than this so I didn’t originally include them in the list but since it is what I use I thought I should add them on.
Price: $250 monthly subscription (mostly for business owners) or $500 monthly subscription for closed loop marketing analytics and salesforce.com integration
Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more website redesign tips.
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?
Do You Know How Your Sales Team Really Feels? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #198
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009Not too long ago a couple of us here attended Eloqua’s Marketing Effectiveness Summit. One of the most interesting things we came back with was their Marketing and Sales Relationship Map.
Check out this post on one of Eloqua’s new blogs, Marketing Insights. It includes a sample relationship map that “can help you identify gaps in perception and prioritize areas for improvement [between sales and marketing], without pointing fingers.” The idea is to have sales and marketing separately rank performance in specific demand generation criteria. Both teams ultimate goal is to drive revenue and this map helps define key metrics and align goals so everyone wins.
I like to think Marketing and Sales here at ReachForce are all one team but I must admit I was a little scared to turn the map over to our Sales team to see how they really felt.
Have you ever done anything like this with your Marketing and/or Sales team? If so, please share.
How to Find Industry Blogs - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #197
Monday, February 2nd, 2009I know you have probably read somewhere that even if you aren’t blogging yourself you should at least be out there to see what other people in your space are talking about. The best way to do this is by reading industry related blogs. To ensure you are keeping up on a regular basis, set up your Google Reader. All of this sounds great but where do you find the right blogs to read for your business?
Here’s what helped me:
- Alltop – or “all the top” sites on the web. ReachForce’s space is B2B Marketing and I looked here for “all the top marketing news.” It has all the top Marketing blogs (even including this one!) based on results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us.
- Just Google your space…like “B2B Marketing Blogs.” First on the page was Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs by Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog. And keep moving down the page for more. Other bloggers also compile lists of top blogs in their space. For example, Web Market Central has a list of Marketing-Related Blogs.
- When looking at other blogs, be sure to check out their blogroll. It is a good way to see what blogs someone else follows and recommends.
So…now start looking for blogs in your industry and get into the conversation!
5 Things to Consider When Marketing to your In-House Database - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #196
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
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:
- 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.
- 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 - 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
