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.
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.
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…
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.
Adding Custom Links to Hoovers, Google and Maps in Salesforce - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #238
Friday, May 15th, 2009A 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:
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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}
- After you’ve entered your formula/search string, select ‘Save.’
- 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.’
- 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.
- 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.
Sales - Here is How to “Work” Your Data, Love Marketing
Monday, May 4th, 2009Dear 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
B2B Lead Gen Low Down - Batchblue CRM
Thursday, April 9th, 2009We are starting a new series here on the B2B Lead to bring B2B marketers new and/or remarkable products/companies/ideas that could make your life easier or are just plain cool.
Our first entrant in a series of many to come on this theme is BatchBook CRM by BatchBlue Software. Now I’m fully aware that there are more CRM systems out there than you can shake a stick at. What sets BatchBook apart from the rest is this simple assessment (IMHO): if you were to start a company to provide a current, modern CRM system today, BatchBook is what it would look like. It sports an extremely easy-to-use interface and provides all the features and functionality that the primary end-users of CRM systems (sales reps) actually use. But what makes it cool is the unique social networking and tagging elements that, whereas all the other CRM vendors are scurrying to retrofit their systems with it, has been built in. Tracking relationships between social network contacts and keeping tabs on the social chatterings thereof are just some of the interesting capabilities on this front. Their tagging capability, SuperTags, enables users to capture and search on ad-hoc information, such as “talked to this guy at EventForce”.
It is probably best suited for companies fitting the “S” in “SMB” (which most of their customers are), but the pricing model is attractive and I think we will be seeing some interesting things from this company in the future.
Top 10 Dumb Sales Questions - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #221
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009I got a new newsletter in my inbox this week, Sales & Marketing Watch. Not sure they found me but they caught my attention. The simple newsletter included a list of recent articles from Fast Company, Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and a few others. All articles very relevant to what I do every day, so I took a few minutes to checkout some of the articles.
One in particular caught my attention - The Top 10 Dumb Sales Questions During a Bad Economy from www.managesmarter.com. The article’s author, Steve Giglio, lists 10 questions in every sales person’s normal process of understanding and moving a deal to close. Here’s a list of the questions, check out the full article to see WHY you shouldn’t be asking these today.
- How’s Business?
- What are your goals for this year?
- Who is your competition?
- How is your company going to stand out?
- How has your company been successful in the past?
- Who is your customer?
- Is there anyone else I should see?
- Should I leave this information with you?
- What is your budget?
- Who should I follow up with?
And don’t forget to share this one with your sales team.
Aligning Sales & Marketing Objectives – It’s NOT just March Madness - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #220
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close. Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out. Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.
According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams. Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons. Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.
There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?
This makes me wonder. Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.
Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:
- Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is. Marketing leads are different than sales leads. Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.
- Ask the sales team what is working for them. Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies? Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.
- What programs deliver the best leads? And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers. Does this align with what sales says?
- Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine. Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.
- For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing. Budgets and project timelines change all the time. Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).
At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team. We know one can’t be successful without the other.
