Because “platforms” just don’t cut it anymore…

Quake in slack-jawed awe at the bombastic extremism that is….

Superplatform On-Demand

From the press release…
The term “Marketing SuperPlatform” was created by Upshot Institute and has gained fast industry acceptance. The term is applied to solutions offering multiple core marketing technologies, accessed as a single application suite.

Wow.  So where do we go from here?  How can anyone possibly top that?  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned for the next level of one-uppedness, which can only spring forth titles such as:

• Colossal Solutions Hyperplexus
• Marketing Methods of Gaussian Proportions
• Orwellian-Scale Mass Marketing

(any resemblance to companies or products, both real or hallucinated, is purely coincidental)

Want to make sure you aren’t filling your news releases with Gobbledygook?  Be sure to use Gobbledygook Grader.

Business is growing – awesome, especially in this economy.  Need to expand into a new sales territory – well crap, where am I going to get those new leads?  Buyers don’t just line up in evenly distributed rows by territory no matter how much we would like them to. And we all know keeping a consistent and geographically distributed flow of qualified leads—or even better qualified buyers-in your pipeline is a constant struggle.  Are you feeling the pains of ramping a new sales territory?

Venturing out into a new sales territory comes with challenges like:

• Longer lead time to develop accounts
• Lack of qualified leads in the new region
• Inefficiencies in the Sales organization

To keep your Marketing and Sales pipeline working at peak efficiency you must be able to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to ALL of the Sales representatives on the team regardless of their territory or tenure.  Here are 5 steps to expanding or growing a new sales territory:

Step 1. Customer Profiling and Sales Wins Analysis

• Identify your top performing vertical market segments by analyzing your current customer wins or use CRM analytics
• Profile your best customers to establish qualifying criteria and identify roles of Champions, Key Players, and Decision-makers
• Identify prospective buyers in vertical segments that meet your criteria and that are located in the new territory

Step 2. Prospect Discovery and Validation

• Map list of prospective companies and required roles
• Identify gaps and augment data with a custom role-based contact data
• Phone screen to check for accuracy

Step 3. 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 4. Marketing Campaign Execution

• Execute vertical segment-focused campaigns targeted at each member of the Decision Making Unit
  For Champions/End Users – use White Papers
  • Send direct mail w/white paper offer
  • Email w/ white paper offer
  • Follow-up with email demo offer
  • Nurture with ongoing communications

  For Decision-makers/Executives – use Webcasts

  • Email invitation to executive Webcast
  • Follow-up with emailed executive brief
  • Send door-opener direct mail
  • Follow-up with Sales call
  • Nurture with ongoing communications
• Harvest responders, further qualify
• Funnel sales ready leads to Sales team

Step 5. Lead Nurturing

• Support Sales cycle by periodically reaching out to prospects; provide information/offers to stay top of mind Email white papers or analyst reports
• Email to announce customer wins
• Invite to webinar

Want a visual or a handout you can print?  We have put together a best practice template to use when building out territory specific initiatives.  Check out our Expanding or Growing a New Territory Tear Sheet.

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

LinkedIn Answers can be a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader and connect with colleagues and prospects.  I try to create RSS feeds for almost everything I monitor online; it is more likely I will get to it that way.  The other day I realized I can get an RSS feed of LinkedIn Answers.  Unfortunately, it is not very customizable.  You can only get a feed of an entire topic, not just based on a certain keyword like search.twitter.com.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to LinkedIn.com
2. Click on Answers (it’s at the top)
3. In the right sidebar, under Browse, click on the topic that relates to your industry
4. In the right sidebar look for the orange RSS logo, click the link to add new questions on this topic to your feed reader

*Note you can also subscribe to sub topics.  Keep in mind that many questions are asked each day so the more specific you can be the better.

What is the benefit of being active on LinkedIn Answers?  I know someone who was asked to speak at an industry conference based solely on answering a question on LinkedIn.  We currently have two deals in the pipe that originated on LinkedIn Answers.  I know my sales reps don’t always have the time to keep up with LinkedIn Answers so whenever someone asks a question looking for a solution like ours I pass it along to the appropriate sales rep to follow-up.

I still recommend going in at least once a week to search your company and products’ names since those are conversations you defintely want to be aware of.  Still unsure of what to do?  Check out How to Use LinkedIn Answers in Marketing.

Are you really writing for your buyers?  Do you know how many gobbledygook words/phrases you used in your last press release, your “About Us” page, your newsletter or your collateral?  Ok, first things first, what is gobbledygook?  Gobbledygook is a word used by David Meerman Scott to describe the over used marketing words that lack substantial meaning.  These words typically do nothing to actually add value to the content.  Does it really mean anything to your buyers that your product is a scalable, world-class solution?  To learn more, check out the Gobbledygook Manifesto.

Here are the top 25 gobbledygook phrases used in press releases sent in North America 2008:

Are some of these words looking a little all too familiar, in a bad way?  Gobbledygook Grader is here to the rescue!  Gobbledygook Grader is brought to you from the fine folks at HubSpot, creators of other great graders: Website Grader, Press Release Grader, Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader.  Gobbledygook Grader lets you enter any content and grades that content based on number of gobbledygook words, links, readability, etc.  It is also identifies all gobbledygook words in the content.  I recommend copying and pasting every page of your website into this to see how you rate.  Don’t worry if you have a few words here and there that are gobbledygook.  Sometimes those words are necessary.  Just ask yourself, is this really telling my buyer something about my company/product that would make them want to buy?  Market-leading, flexible, robust solution probably does not mean much to a prospect nor is it particularly compelling.

Thank you to HubSpot and David Meerman Scott for this very useful tool to keep our writing in check.

We 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.

I 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.

1. How’s Business?
2. What are your goals for this year?
3. Who is your competition?
4. How is your company going to stand out?
5. How has your company been successful in the past?
6. Who is your customer?
7. Is there anyone else I should see?
8. Should I leave this information with you?
9. What is your budget?
10. Who should I follow up with?

And don’t forget to share this one with your sales team.

Yesterday 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.

B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

While Twitter is still trying to figure out a revenue generating model (which will include Pro Accounts) for their hugely popular free service, some people claim they are willing to pay for certain upgraded features.  Dan Frommer took a look at comments on his most recent blog post about Twitter and put together a list of what Twitter users say they would be willing to pay for.

Amazing what people will “say” they’ll pay for…

• Slightly longer messages: 160 characters instead of 140.
• Unlimited or prioritized access to API. (Twitter limits how many requests an account can make per hour.)
• Auto-deleting deadbeat followers who haven’t logged in within a month.
• More reliable service. (Can’t really charge on a per-user basis for this though, unless there’s a separate Twitter that’s more reliable, right?)
• Link-click analytics. (Free already if you use bit.ly, though some limitations.)
• Guaranteeing that their old tweets (all of them) are available forever, and easier to sift through.

Would you pay for twitter fearures?

I am always looking for new ways to find qualified leads for sales and will typically try anything once.  Each quarter we try to add something new to the mix.  For next quarter we looked at couple of virtual tradeshows.  We sponsored one last year and found it pretty interesting even though we didn’t get many real leads from it (lots of international visitors).  It was a good place to cut our teeth on something new.

In the last week or so, we were contacted to sponsor another virtual tradeshow being put on by a major industry publication that seems to be in transition with both their events and their publication, moving everything online.  I was intrigued and wanted more details.  I inquired further about this new event to find out what the cost would be and how many/what kind of attendees they expected.  I got back a very interesting reply.  Sponsorships ranged from $10K to $25K.  Little surprised here since this is typically the cost of live events.  I was still interested…then I found out how many people they were expecting.  I figured thousands, right?  Nope, they’re only expecting about 2500 people.  But how targeted are these people visiting?

With this economy travel budgets are definitely being cut but aren’t tradeshow budgets too?  Not sure about you, but it seems like a hefty pricetag for a very broad tradeshow.  I can think of a lot of things to spend $10K – $25K that will result in more targeted, qualified leads.  What about you?