The B2B Lead » Sales Tips

What NOT to do when sending a one-to-one email – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #267

Lauren Kincke — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:59:30 +0000

This was and actual email I received last week:

Hello,

Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.

Given COMPANY X success with multiple SaaS providers, I wanted to ensure that you were aware of our company and service offerings. We have been winning many key deals from a highly competitive landscape and COMPANY X is able to leverage key pricing advantages from Vmware licenses on a rental basis, a true cloud utility computing model with rapid provisioning of servers, support for Windows 2008, IBM platform standard for managed servers, citrix administration and support services which are handled by some of the best engineers with the most experience in the industry and still coming out with much better pricing than is provided by your other hosting partners.

COMPANY X is a consolidation of multiple, US-based, high-density data centers by Managed Data Holdings (MDH). With facilities in Chicago, Denver and Irvine, CA along with the ongoing acquisition activities for others nationally, COMPANY X is focused on providing both standard colocation services (cabinets, cages and power) as well as managed services comprised of IBM Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage in a virtualized, outsourced infrastructure. COMPANY X is a SAS 70, Type II certified facilities company.

Our data centers are 24/7/365 managed facilities with on-site NOCs, security and network staff available to support your needs on demand. Our customer portal enables our customers to remotely manage their collocated infrastructure, network bandwidth utilization, hosted server & storage infrastructure plus enables Compute-on-Demand and Storage-on-Demand flexibility for our hosted customers. Our Managed Services products range from managed IBM iDataPlex or Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage, security services (firewall, etc.), managed VPN, monitoring of your network infrastructures down to Load balancing, Network management and Infrastructure services (including “hands & eyes”). We have seen significant interest from major companies who have found that turning the infrastructure over to COMPANY X with the Virtual instances of VMware and the dynamic storage provisioning (on the fly) has significantly reduced their OpX as well as scope of responsibility for systems and software updates.

Please let me know if you have any projects with which I may assist you.

Thank you and best regards,

JOE

JOE SALESPERSON

Senior Sales Account Manager

Why is this is a ‘what not to do’ – a few really obvious reasons:

“Hello,” is that really my name? No, don’t think so – if you’ve got the prospect’s name, you know you’ve got it spelled right, use it….don’t just write ‘Hello’ and ignore a person’s name.
My personal favorite – “Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.” What does this say about your knowledge of the prospect when your opening sentence assumes you are not sending your email to the right person??
How long is this email? Yes this is a real email, it was sent to a group of folks here at ReachForce (yes really personal, isn’t it?), it’s so long though who is going to read it?

This email cracked me up, how many people really respond to something like this? It’s amazing it didn’t get captured in my junk email. Take some time when you are crafting an email to a prospect. If it’s follow up to a call, make note of the call. If it’s a cold email and you’ve never had contact with the prospect before, really put some thought into what is going to stand out to the reader. Or better yet, don’t send cold emails!

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B2B Lead Gen Low Down: Gist

Lauren Kincke — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:09:46 +0000

As we run across cool companies that are trying to add value to today’s B2B sales and marketing teams we want to be sure and share them with our B2B Lead readers. Here’s another great idea…

Have you heard of Gist? If not, you should check it out. It might just be the tool your sales and telesales teams have been waiting on!

Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people (prospects) and companies.

Gist enables your sales team to build their ‘network’ from lists of contacts across a variety of sources from LinkedIn, salesforce.com, Outlook, Gmail (or any email service that supports IMAP), Facebook, Twitter to any CSV file. Then, it sets up a Dashboard view of all the “news” going on within your network. Once this is all set up your sales team can prioritize their contacts and outreach (or Gist can do it) based on companies/prospects/people you want to watch.

Something new is going up on the web every second of the day. Can you imagine the efficiencies with just one dashboard of all of these relevant updates?

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Lead – what does this word mean to you?

Suaad Sait — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:48:30 +0000

Lead – a simple word, very powerful impact to YOUR business.

Does it mean the same thing to both your Sales and Marketing teams? As it turns out, the crux of most sales and marketing quarrels (read: logjams) are tied to this one unique issue – how do you define a lead?

Does it mean the same thing to your management team?

My suggestion is that it may be time for a brown bag lunch to find out what your company thinks and getting on the same page on that simple definition.

Here’s a list of things commonly tagged as leads and typically end up in your marketing database and/or CRM:

tradeshow scans
contact form downloads
contact list buys
sales rolodex contacts
customer referrals
cold calling contact discovery
partner programs
target company CEO
webinar registrations
partner’s customers
inbound call
event attendee lists
advertising responders
competitor’s customers
target company with no contact attached
contact with no company attached
contact with personal email address
whitepaper/eBook form downloads

Are some of these better than others? Are some of these prospects? Are they all? It depends.

Depends on what you have defined as a lead and as a prospect? Does one come before the other? Are they the same thing? It depends. Depends on how you have defined your marketing and sales funnel (pipeline) and what it takes to convert from one stage of the pipe to the next.

The key to every solid B2B lead generation engine is the agreed upon definition of a lead, a prospect and a suspect.

If you’re reading this and you’re unsure if your sales team would define a lead the same way you would, STOP what you are doing right now. Set up time for your marketing and sales team to get together and define each stage of the buying process and what a lead (or prospect or suspect) looks like at each stage along the way to becoming a customer. Remember, this will more than likely cut down on the quantity of leads but the quality will make up for the difference.

Once these definitions have been defined for your company, decide as a team how contacts are going to be touched in each stage and by whom.

Interested in how others define leads and prospects? Check these out…

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Tips for Follow-up on B2B Content Offers – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #244

Amy Hawthorne — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:21:29 +0000

Here 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.

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Repurposing Lead Generation Content You Already Have – Sales, This is a TIP for you too! – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #242

Amy Hawthorne — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:21:56 +0000

Creating 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.

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Sales Playbook Part 1 – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #240

Amy Hawthorne — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:12:21 +0000

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…

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The New Rules of Sales Enablement – ReachForce Book Club

Amy Hawthorne — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:28:54 +0000

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!

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Game Changing Alert: Sales Enablement Playbooks – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #238

Amy Hawthorne — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:54:50 +0000

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.

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.

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Adding Custom Links to Hoovers, Google and Maps in Salesforce – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #238

Lauren Kincke — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:50:24 +0000

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:

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.

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Sales – Here is How to “Work” Your Data, Love Marketing

Lauren Kincke — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:32:27 +0000

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

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