Your collateral mix – do you have everything you need?  Does your sales team think what you’ve created useful pieces that help drive the sales cycle?  How do you know or decide when to add something new to the mix?

Wikipedia defines marketing collateral as the collection of media used to support the sales of a product or service. These sales aids are intended to make the sales effort easier and more effective.

As Marketers we should be doing regular reviews of our sales support collateral.  Here at ReachForce our marketing team is responsible for not only driving new leads into the top of the sales funnel but also marketing to those who have made it into and are moving through the funnel.   Each quarter as we are building out our programs we spend a good deal of time making sure we have the supporting pieces (collateral) we need to get the results our sales team is counting on.  This means we have to really think through our buying cycles and what is needed to generate interest as well as keep people moving once we’ve determined they are a viable prospect.

Here’s some interesting stats from a BtoB article, Finding the Best Collateral Mix,  back in January.  It highlights content strategy services company Eccolo Media’s survey of 155 technology buyers, all of whom said they’d made or influenced a b-to-b technology decision in the last six months. Each was asked specifically about how they consume marketing collateral.

• White papers remain the most effective piece of marketing collateral, with 86% of respondents finding them moderately to highly influential in the purchasing decision.

Interesting – I’d love to know more about these whitepapers.  How long are they?  Are they grouping eBooks here? And what stage of the buying cycle are these being used?  I’m guessing in the “gathering information phase?”

• Product brochures and data sheets were the most frequently consumed collateral type, yet they were also most frequently ranked as the least influential.

I consider these must haves and I agree that most people probably don’t read them but people seem to ask for them so you have to have them.

• Somewhat surprisingly, the majority of respondents viewed digital content on the desktop rather than printing out the content.

Not really surprising to me.  We seem to be more conditioned and comfortable getting all information online.  Printing it doesn’t give it more credibility. And hey Al Gore, your message is getting out there….

• The majority of respondents (54%) used collateral for the first time in the presales cycle, before they’d spoken with a sales rep or had had any contact with the company.

Interesting, not surprising but interesting.  This means we have to make sure we have everything online.  This doesn’t mean you need new content just make sure what you have is out there.

So all of your marketing communication marketers out there – your sales team needs you.  Before you start your long list of things to write, ask your sales team if each piece on your list will help them win a new customer.  If not, scatch it and ask them what they need instead.

Ever wonder what your prospects or customers are talking about on Twitter?  Or are you looking for a way to build your Twitter following with people that have similar interests?  Well, here’s a few places to get out there and ask some questions.

First, a shout out – Thanks again to Mashable for finding and compiling these kinds of lists, 5 Ways to Get Your Questions Answered on Twitter by Stan Schroeder.  Its great information and we want to be sure our B2B Lead readers know this stuff is out there.

• IKnowTweet.com - This simple site searches Twitter for phrases such as “does anyone know?” and “why does?” and collects them all at one place.

• ToAnswer – By far the most elegant of the sites listed here, ToAnswer lets you ask questions on Twitter by simply prefixing them with @toask. The answers are displayed in a nice Twitter-like interface, and questions are asked through a lightbox-style window that opens with your Twitter account. Looks like this site is down right now but they’ve put up a funny video until they get more server space.
  

• TwttrStrm – TwttrStrm is an interesting and slightly more complex service that combines Twitter with Squidoo and its “lens” approach to answering questions. Basically, you ask a question on Twitter, but instead of merely getting short answers, Squidoo will create a brand new Lens with a bunch of information on the topic you’ve asked about.

• Twtpoll - There are many ways to ask a question; a poll is one of them, and twtpoll lets you create polls on Twitter. You ask a poll question, add some answer options (you can choose if it’s a one answer or multiple answers type of poll) and you’re done. You can share the poll via Twitter, email or Facebook.

• twitQA - twitQA is a very new site that lets you ask questions in different categories such as sports, travel, health, business & finance, cars and the like. Instead of using hashtags, twitQA recognizes questions and fetches them directly from the Twitter feed, which makes populating the question database easier.

You’ll definitely want to check out Stan’s thoughts on each of these.  Once you try them out, come back and let us know what you think.

P.S.  B2B Lead readers – if you don’t have Mashable in your Google Reader, add it today.

Ready, Set, Go! It’s a short year, 8 months to go and 12 months of results to deliver.

Planning since last Fall has been a challenge, chances are you’ve been holding off (or have ratcheted down) on your spending hoping the bad news would stop and you would be able to get to work as normal. Well it looks like that time has come. The economy seems to be coming back and now you’ve got to make up for lost time. Here’s a few ideas to jumpstart your lead generation initiatives:

• Check out those web logs or unknown visitor reports, this is a great opportunity for you to start reaching out to companies who have already been checking you out. Once you’ve identified the companies, make sure you have the right targeted leads to market to. This is key to your program success.
• Think and be positive/upbeat — get new content (that’s not talking about the recession). Make sure it’s everywhere – your social networks, your website, as a possible link in your email signatures, offered on your blog, your email programs and don’t forget to share it with your customers, this could be used in the introduction you need help with.
• Dust off your old whitepapers, add some images and turn them into a new eBook. Use this refreshed content for your nurture marketing and email programs.
• Put together a news release schedule, remember to include your keywords. Press drives website visitors. Make sure you have your Google Alerts set up so you know when someone picks up your news and don’t forget to check those weblogs and unknown visitor reports so you can market back to those checking you out.
• Don’t forget your customers, they are your greatest asset. Talk to them. Ask them what they need from you. Ask them how you can better deliver your product or service and don’t forget to ask them for a referral or two. There’s no time better than the present to kick off a customer referral program.

The point is to get the most out of what you already have, be everywhere your prospects and customers are, and stay positive.

Dear Sales,

Now that we’re on the same page about the data, let’s talk specifics on how to make this happen.

• You know that we work hard to segment the data before it goes into campaigns, so first, get to know how we segment things.  Talk to us, find out why we do things the way we do and who gets batched together.   Seeing the world the way we do will help you better understand why certain types of contacts are getting certain messages and will help you better reach out to and tailor your messages to those contacts. We are open to your ideas too.  You know your prospects better than we do.  Help us to help you.
• Get to know the companies in your database, ask for help from Sales Operations or export a report of your prospects.  Spend time learning about each company on your list, what do they do, who do they sell to, what events do they attend, make yourself an expert on them so that when you talk to them they feel like you really do know them and their pain points.   Make notes in the record so that you don’t lose track of this valuable information.
• Do you use mail merge fields in your emails or letters?  If so, then really spend some time cleaning up the names of prospects and their companies.  Make sure people aren’t listed like this: “John NO LONGER THERE Smith” or “Jane SHE IS A REAL JERK Doe” – there is a notes section in your CRM, use it!
• If you’re using salesforce.com, set up views that capture activity, for instance, if your marketing automation tool integrates and marks activity on prospect records, set up a view where you can see that kind of activity.  Keep tabs on what people are doing so that you can reach out to those active prospects.

These are just ideas, but the idea is that if you are truly in the ‘weeds’ of the data, you’ll get a good handle on what you own, who you’re calling and hopefully begin seeing some great results!

Love,

Marketing

Dear Sales,

We’ve had a long and storied relationship.   When we work well together, we’re pretty amazing, when we fight, it’s ugly but overall we make a great team. I feel like we’ve worked through our differences well and that we see eye to eye more often than not, but we really need to talk about one thing…the one thing that bonds us for life but keeps pulling us apart…our data.

I know, I know, it’s no one’s fault.  But that’s the problem.  I supply the data, I nurture the data and then I send it to you so you can make it flourish.  What happens to the data once I send it to you though?  Some of it gets the proper care, it blossoms into an opportunity and then low and behold we win!  Some of it isn’t really ready and gets nurtured some more, some wither and die on the vine, and some of it, well, it sits and it gets lost in the oblivion of it’s home, our CRM system.

So Sales, here is my proposition to you, let’s work together to cultivate our leads, I will continue to feed you nurtured sales ready leads that suit your need and I ask that in return, you help me keep everything straight.  We must communicate, it’s required for our relationship to work.  Get to know the data (your leads), really learn about your companies and our targets and then, tell me what’s not working (and better yet, what is!).

How do you do this you ask, well we’ll work together and make it happen!

Love,

Marketing

Here at ReachForce, we talk a lot about role-based leads, but I have never heard of a role-based website.  I came across a great post by Heather Foeh on Eloqua’s Marketing Insights blog, Segmentation on Your Website.  In the post, Heather shares a well segmented website, rallydev.com.  They give a great user-guided experience letting you choose your role which then delivers you relevant content to fit your needs.

On our new website we also use segmentation.  Instead of segmenting by role, we segment by function.  We sell mainly to marketers, so we ask our visitors if they are looking to do direct marketing, event marketing or online marketing.  We then deliver up a total solution as well as whitepapers and eBooks to help with continued education.

This same logic can and should be applied to other marketing vehicles like email.  We segment our database by role and revenue range and send relevant content that matches the needs of each group.

After a couple of days out of the office I’m finally catching up on my Google Reader.  Mashable, one of my favorite sites, always comes through with great social media tips.  Twitter is definitely getting its fair share of airtime these days so for the Twitter obsessed, here’s a couple of options for searching Twitter to find what you need or want.

6 options for searching Twitter –

• TwitterSearch – this one seems to be the most common as it is hosted by Twitter. Results show the sender’s avatar, a link to the original tweet, and a link to Twitter.com to reply…

• Twazzup – this is Twitter Search on steroids. For any given query string, you can see results down the left column that are updated in real-time.

• Tweetzi – Perhaps the best element it has that neither of the above applications do, is the ability for real-time playing and pausing. See the blue “Play” button? If you click it, you can watch your trending topic gather steam; and you can hit Pause whenever you want.

• Tweefind - If you want a basic search utility, Tweefind is it.

• Twitterseach/Zeitbase – looking for something really simple, this is it!

• Flaptor – the key difference here is an RSS link, one click and you can get an RSS link of your results.

Of course you can find screen shots and more details of each of these on Mashable.  Thank you Mashable for the keeping us up-to-date and in the know on our ever changing world of social media!

Are you using any of these to help with your lead generation efforts?  If so, please share.

I was catching up on some reading and came across a new article in BtoB from Rich Karpinski, B-to-b followers flock to Twitter.  It is a great article especially if you are new to Twitter or wanting to know more about how businesses are using Twitter to connect with prospects and customers.

Since we are all about tips on The B2B Lead, here is some practical advice from the article for marketers getting started on Twitter:

• In your Twitter bio, clearly spell out what business you are in, who is posting to the account and even what you hope to get out of it. That creates transparency and the underpinnings of trust.
• Find people to follow. They’ll likely follow you back, broadening and enriching your conversation.
• To start, sit back and watch conversations unfold. As your comfort level grows, be proactive by participating in and starting conversations related to your business.
• Be generous: Offer more than you get back and always try to be responsive to peers and customers.

Finding the right people to follow can be challenging.  Karpinski offers this advice:
Locating other b-to-b marketers and companies that “tweet” has become easier, too. Ad network Federated Media late last month launched (with Microsoft Corp. as sponsor) ExecTweets.com, an aggregation of executives using Twitter, and the Social Brand Index offers an index of Twitter accounts organized by category. One also can find lists of b-to-b marketing-focused Twitter users with a Google search.

I was happy to see one of the smartest B2B marketers I know, Jon Miller from Marketo, quoted in the article:
“B-to-b buyers are still people, and in the end, they buy from people and not companies,” said Jon Miller (@jonmiller2), VP-marketing at b-to-b software vendor Marketo (@marketo), who uses Twitter personally and as part of his company’s marketing strategy. “If you can build a relationship with a prospective buyer using Twitter before they are actively looking, you built your brand more effectively than you could with much more expensive options. The trick is to know who to follow and who to focus on for that relationship-building.”

But Miller doesn’t think Twitter is the be-all and end-all. “Tweets don’t yet show up in Google search results, and links can’t influence your SEO rankings,” he said, adding, “I think other tools like blogs still work better as the content publishing mechanism, versus [using Twitter more as] a content promotion tool.”

How are you engaging with customers and prospects on Twitter?  Want to connect with us on Twitter?  Check us out at:

@ReachForce
@suaadsait
@ahawthorne
@lawallace

This 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.

As Sales and Marketing become better aligned, so do our tracking systems and metrics.  For a while, we at ReachForce have struggled with the question of how best to track our campaigns, we wanted to know (for instance), how many emails it took to get someone to respond, what email was it that seemed to be the trigger?  And the bigger piece to this puzzle, since we all know the Sales team doesn’t have the bandwidth to really track this information, how can we automate it?

Lucky for us, salesforce.com has a few cool features that we have found useful in tracking this type of things, the first is their Campaign Management tab.

Within the Campaign Management tab you can create a campaign, drop in the list of people who will be part of the campaign and as opportunities arise from that campaign, you can see exactly who they are.   Along with the ability to watch as opportunities join the funnel as a result of your campaign, you can keep tabs on the cost of your campaign, its possible ROI and its actual ROI.  Campaign Management gives you a full window into your programs.   For a full run-down on the Campaign Management feature as well as new Marketing related features in salesforce.com, you should check out their Marketing Blog.

Outside of the Campaign Management feature, we use individualized Dashboards to track activity on specific events/campaigns. For instance, after Dreamforce (salesforce.com’s user group conference and our one big trade show) this past year, we tagged leads that we gathered as having attended Dreamforce, exhibited at Dreamforce, or having had a conversation with someone at our booth.  To do this, we utilized a custom field we already had on our Lead and Contact records called “Marketing” – we populated all of the leads connected to Dreamforce with the right information (either a tag called “Dreamforce 08 Exhibitor”, “Dreamforce 08 Attendee” or “Dreamforce 08 Scan”).  One quick caveat is that not only did all of our leads go through a rigorous scrubbing process (to determine whether the companies were a fit for us), but in instances where we knew we needed a different person (i.e. we hadn’t had enough conversation to verify that these persons played a role in the Decision-Making Unit or buying process) we submitted the company to a role-based contact discovery project so that we could gather the right person.

Once all of those people were tagged, we were able to track them through the pipeline based on knowing they attended/exhibited at or were scanned at Dreamforce.  We built out a full dashboard tracking this information, it helps Marketing see the value in our investment at the event and helps Sales see the value of the data collected at the event and track to make sure that all of those leads get the proper follow-up.

On the Sales side we set up a view for all of our reps that showed their individual Dreamforce related leads.  This made follow up clean and easy because our Sales people knew exactly who attended Dreamforce and whether they showed up at our booth (we imported certain information to indicate whether leads had been at the booth and who they had spoken with).

Salesforce.com continues to roll-out new features that better enable Marketers to track the progress of their campaigns once from lead to customer.  As we test and use them, we will be certain to share our findings!  Have you found an easy way to track things once they hit the pipeline? What tricks do you have for tracking your campaigns?

In today’s increasingly global market, almost every B2B Marketer is facing the prospect of moving into foreign territories.  While geographic expansion promises the opportunity to unlock a whole new world of buyers, it also involves a new world of surprises and challenges.

Have you considered:

• What types of companies will be the best fit for your product?
• How buyers in these new markets make purchases?
• How buying roles and decision making units differ from one market to the next?
• What kinds of offers your new world responds best to?
• What are the unique decision drivers for buyers in a particular country?

Here are 6 steps to taking a more deliberate approach to targeting new buyers in new countries:

Step 1. Buyer Profiling

• Phone screen customers and possible prospects to identify pain points and purchase criteria
• Develop a profile of top buyers

Step 2. Prospect Profile Matching

• Apply buyer profile to prospects (companies) in new geography to identify those with highest propensity to buy
• Phone screen sample base of new prospects to map the Decision Making Unit and understand roles of decision-makers

Step 3. Prospect Discovery

• Map profile to existing database to produce an initial dataset
• Identify gaps to complete custom role-based database of Decision Making Unit contacts
• Phone screen to verify accuracy

Step 4. Marketing Database Segmentation

• Segment by vertical market and role and tag data
• Upload data into CRM or Marketing Automation system to prepare for targeted marketing campaigns

Step 5. Marketing Campaign Execution

• Execute vertical segment-focused campaigns targeted at each member of the Decision Making Unit
• Harvest responders, further qualify
• Funnel sales ready leads to Sales team

Step 6. Lead Nurturing

• Support Sales cycle by periodically reaching out to prospects; provide information/offers to stay top of mind
  • Email white papers or analyst report
  • Email to announce customer wins
  • Invite to Webinar
  • Incent customers to participate in a demonstration

Want a visual or a handout you can print?  We have put together a best practice template to use when considering expanding into new countries.  Check out our Expanding into a New Geography Tearsheet.

Want more free B2B Marketing Tearsheets, Whitepapers and eBooks?  Check out the ReachForce B2B Marketing Resources page.