There 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.

1. 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.
2. Decide how you want to brand yourself – Dan offers some good tips including creating a custom background
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

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…

Being 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.

June 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.

Register Now

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!

This 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.

1. Identify Situational Elements –things like Organization Size and Structure, Vertical/Sub-Vertical Industries, Geographic Characteristics, Individual Roles and Responsibilities
2. 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

3. 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.

Lose Control of Your Marketing is the latest eBook from David Meerman Scott.  It is mostly composed of excerpts from his new book World Wide Rave.  Readers of The B2B Lead already know I am a huge fan of Mr. Scott, especially his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.  However, the ideas presented in this eBook were a little hard for me to accept whole-heartedly.  As the name suggests, he encourages marketers to take down any barriers to their content and lose control to allow their ideas/content to spread.  As a bit of a control freak and one who lives by the mantra that everything marketing does must be measured, I had a bit of an internal struggle while reading this eBook.

According to David, You need to think in terms of spreading ideas, not generating leads. A World Wide Rave gets the word out to thousands or even millions of potential customers. But only if you make your information easy to find and consume.

One of the most difficult ideas for me to accept is the idea that sales leads are the wrong goal.  Isn’t my number one goal as a marketer to provide qualified leads to Sales?  David’s most compelling argument is that he has seen content downloads multiply by as much as a factor of 50 when a registration form was taken off.  I don’t know that I could ever take down every form on my website, but it is worth a shot on an eBook or two, just as a test.

The last part of the eBook focuses on how organizations should create a social media policy for its employees.  At ReachForce we are very open to allowing all employees to participate in social media, but if you are trying to create your own social media guidelines, David gives some great tips.

Helpful hint: if you are strapped for time you can probably skip pages 16-21.  And if you really don’t have time to read this eBook at all, let me leave you with David’s main point: The biggest requirement is that you change your behavior, so let me remind you of the most important strategies for successful marketing in a world of social media:

• Stop obsessing over the old measurements of sales leads and marketing ROI.
• Make your valuable online content free and registration-less.
• Give away lots of good information (videos, photos, data, graphs, audio, blogs, e-books, and the like) to enthusiastic or curious people interested in your products and services.
• Encourage an organizational culture of sharing.

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.

Remember 1999?  The tech bubble had yet to burst, times were good and our biggest worry was Y2K.  Back then marketers had a positive attitude and spent time tailoring messages to their audience around how the benefits of their product would help the prospect.

We all know that times have been tough this year, we don’t need to be reminded in every email, direct mail, blog post and webinar invitation we get.  If I want to be reminded, I just look at my stock portfolio . This is a plea to all marketers out there, STOP talking about the recession.  Don’t remind your audience that their budgets have been cut or that they are now a man down.

If your prospects have had budget cuts and layoffs, there is no need to remind them of the current economic state; they live with the reminder every day.  Instead, now is the time to focus on the positives.

Here are some reasons why you should NOT highlight the recession in your next marketing message:

• Stand out from the crowd.  If you are sending out the same  ways to recession-proof your X, as everyone else, your message will be lost.  I automatically delete any email or webinar invite I get that has the word recession or economy in it.
• You are subtly reminding your prospects that their budgets are shrinking and that they should be spending less.  FYI- your goal is to sell them something meaning you want them to spend more.
• Now is the time to really highlight how you are going to save your prospects time and money.  Make them feel like your product is the one thing that cannot be cut from the budget.
• Perception is reality.  As long as the media and we as marketers continue to propagate the idea that we are in a recession, then we will be in one.  We can all do our part to be more positive.

My point is that we all know we are in a recession and although things are beginning to look up, we don’t need every marketing message to remind us of our budget cuts and staff losses.

Part of my job here at ReachForce is helping our customers with a quick analysis of their marketing database and then helping them update and repair the company and contact information needed for their lead generation programs.  Here’s a list of 10 things I see in almost every marketing and sales database I’ve looked at:

1. Names are mis-mashed up with erroneous information.  Examples:

John “No Longer There” Smith
Jenny (female) Jones
Byron (buy-ron) Doe (Dough)

2. Web-to-Lead forms have left you with a lot of trash.  Examples:

First Name    Last Name    Email                         Company
Test              Test              test@test.com           None
None of        Your              absc@asklfjsl.com    Business

3. Your Customers are still listed as your prospects.
4. You have multiple copies of any one person.
5. Employees of your company are listed as prospects.
6. You have records created with companies someone wants to target but no contacts, instead of holding a valid contact your CRM is being used as a place holder.  OR, you have holey records, pieces and parts of a contact but no whole contact.

Examples:
First Name    Last Name      Email                           Company
Find Name    In Hoovers      na@na.com                 Microsoft
IT                  Dept Mgr        na@na.com                 Exxon
Amy              H.                   ???@reachforce.com    ReachForce
L.                  Wallace           ???@Reachforce.com   ReachForce

7. Phone numbers are missing digits and/or area codes.
8. Bad or Blank email addresses.
9. Invalid or incomplete mailing addresses – maybe you don’t do direct mail, but chances are you need this for something…
10. You have no way to segment your data.  Do you have information on these companies in a standardized format, for instance all tech companies have some kind of tag, or all operations contacts have a specific designation? If not, how are you segmenting your data? Wouldn’t it be easier if everything had the same system of tagging applied to it?

Is is not the most exciting or the most glamorous part of campaign planning but getting your database in order will have a huge affect on the success your marketing programs.