A B2B company CEO asked me an interesting question last week: how long will it take to transform my marketing and get it on the right track? Naturally, the answer to this question is heavily dependent on where a company is on its marketing lifecycle. Everyone wants to do this instantly. A company that is well established, with a solid website and existing lead generation programs, may only require 4-6 weeks to tweak and optimize.

How do you know if you just need a little tune-up or a full marketing transformation? Here are some signs that you need major surgery:

• Your sales are flat or barely growing – stagnant sales are a sign that your message and marketing are stale. You need to fix this.
• You are a startup company – you need to get your marketing and sales operation launched on a firm foundation. This will pay off tremendously downstream.
• You are positioning your company for sale or merger – getting your marketing in order can be the difference between receiving an average or a premium price for your company.
• You are faced with tougher and larger competition – we know how to beat the big guys and the big budgets.
• You want to be a leader in your industry instead of just another player – if this is your goal, the best time to start is right now.

So what can you achieved during the 105 day transformation period? Here’s a list of five deliverables that will turbo-charge your end-to-end marketing and sales process.

1. A powerful and compelling brand promise and associated messaging. You and your prospects will then understand exactly how your company is unique and better.
2. A new or revamped website. This will allow you to attract and convert prospects. You can often achieve boosts in your website traffic (and conversions) of 150 to 500 percent.
3. Fresh marketing content. Content attracts visitors and visitors become customers. The greater amount of relevant content you have, the higher number of prospects you will attract.
4. An effective lead generation program. In the 105 day time period, you can create and execute a plan that improves your results in terms of inbound inquiries, qualified leads, sales opportunities and revenue.
5. A head start on your pull marketing and social media efforts. Pull marketing (including social media) is very effective at generating awareness and cost-effective leads.

However, if you are just starting out, with no marketing message, website or lead plan, it will take considerably longer. That being said, if your marketing strategy needs major surgery (e.g. you are a fish in troubled waters), then the correct answer is that you need 105 days to complete a major marketing turnaround. Of course 105 days is an average, but it could be much longer if:

1. You are totally resistant to change – even if those changes are good ones.
2. You have no budget and have to do everything on a shoestring.
3. There are lots of cooks in your kitchen and they all want to make the decisions.
4. You can’t find the right people to help you achieve your objectives.

If you make a commitment to spending the next 105 days on your marketing turnaround program, you will reap many benefits. Of course you can keep doing what you are doing. The results of these two approaches will be vastly different.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Pull Marketing

In his April 17, 2012 blog post at tellallmarketing.com, Ray Schultz addressed the issue of How Brands Are Failing Small Businesses. Schultz makes a number of important points in the post but one of the most interesting is the high cost of the disconnect that exists between how business owners learn and how marketers attempt to reach them.

According to a major survey by Inc. magazine and Cargo, a B2B agency, here are the channels that business owners deem important in learning about products and services:

• Search engines  - 85%
• Business blogs / websites  - 85%
• Business magazines  - 83%
• Trade shows / events  - 77%
• Newspapers  - 48%
• Radio news / business channels  - 47%
• Television  - 38%
• Billboards  - 15%

There is no doubt that most (not all) business owners use computers in to run their operations. There are exceptions but most are at least somewhat technology literate. Note from the list above that the two top categories business owners use for information gathering about purchases are search engines and websites/blogs. In other words, prospects want to learn about you online, so why do some companies make it so difficult for them to do so? And even though your customers may be in industries that are slow technology adaptors, why not appeal to the segment that is further in the adoption curve? Chances are, your competitors are not doing this.

We are almost five months into the year 2012. This might be a good time to evaluate where you are putting your marketing time and money. If you are marketing to consumers – the push marketing media at the bottom of the list (newspapers, radio, TV and billboards) – may be a good use of your resources. However, if your target is business owners, I suggest you focus your efforts on promoting your message in the media that are most likely to be seen by your potential customers. I suggest you do this by taking three important pull marketing steps:

1. Create an informative and engaging website that tells potential customers exactly what you do and why you are different and/or better than the alternatives. I provided additional ideas on engaging your prosects in an earlier post on, staying in touch with prospects.
2. Do everything you can (especially organic search optimization) to make your company/website easy to find online. (Why you need a strong web presence)
3. Have the right mechanisms in place to convert website visitors into engaged prospects. In fact, lead generation should be a key component of your website strategy.

If you are currently relying on push marketing to generate leads and awareness, by all means keep doing what works. But if you are finding your results slipping, it may be that your target audience wants to learn about you and buy in their way, on their timetable. And that’s why – whether you are selling to the Fortune 500 or the local small business, you should add online pull marketing techniques to your repertoire.

Let’s start today’s post by acknowledging one important fact. It is usually much, much (did I say “much”) easier to up-sell an existing customer than it is to find a new customer. Yet, our marketing efforts are often focused on selling the whole enchilada to the customer on their first experience with us. This is often counterproductive, and why you may need to adopt the “land and expand” marketing strategy.

This is where the “D-Day” analogy comes in. In World War II the objective of the Allied powers to re-take the European continent was not to capture it all at once, but rather to land in a small area, establish a beachhead and expand from that point. Your beachhead is a group of customers in a particular market that can be leveraged and expanded.

The land and expand strategy in marketing is based on the premise that it is easier to get a minor commitment first and then work your way towards a major commitment, instead of starting with a major commitment. A good analogy is that of dating. You don’t ask someone to marry you on the first date. You go for the smaller commitment (e.g. a dance) and then work your way from there. So how do we practice the land and expand strategy when it comes to marketing? Here are a few ideas:

1. Free trial – this offer works well provided you have a good plan for converting the free trial participants to paid purchasers.
2. Freemium – in this type of offer, you give a basic level of the product away at no charge. QuickBooks used this strategy to attract tens of thousands of customers, many of whom converted to the full paid version. Dropbox also uses this model – the freemium version is limited in storage capacity and many users upgrade to the paid version. Google Apps is free for 10 users or less but upgrade charges apply after this point.
3. Discount the initial offer – publishers use this model extensively. An annual subscription with a retail value of $199 is discounted to $99 for the first year, with a built-in automatic renewal.
4. Advertiser supported – many websites offer free information/services but require visitors to be subjected to constant advertisements. The visitor can bypass the promotions by paying a subscription fee. Pandora is a good example of this model.
5. Create a recurring revenue stream – the best example of the recurring revenue model are desktop printers, where the printer sale is considered a loss leader, and the customer pays a fortune in ink and other supplies over time.
6. Vertical penetration strategy – many industries are insular and they tend to buy only from those who have done business with their peers. To be successful in this type of industry, you need to seed the market and leverage these initial customers into the broader market. One of the tactics to do this is to trade a very low price for a customer case study.

These are just six of the many possible strategies. Remember that it may cost you more to get a new customer with the land and expand strategy than that customer is worth, at least in the short-term. To make it work, you must be able to convert a large percentage of the initial low-dollar customers into long-term high-dollar customers. Here is a B2B sales example of how the numbers work from one of our clients – a Software as a Service (SaaS) company:

This is obviously a strong performance and the key metric is the 11 percent conversion rate. In this case, when tested against the direct sale offer (no free trial), the land and expand program produced much better results.

What’s your version of D-Day Marketing?

As B2B marketing outsource providers, we get to hear some interesting statements about marketing. Some of these statements indicate a philosophy that can be detrimental to achieving your marketing and sales objectives. If you hear any of your internal personnel saying any of the following, consider it a red flag and address the issue right away.

1. Why should we spend any more time working on the website? That’s what our sales team is for. This is a very scary statement that shows a lack of understanding about current trends in B2B marketing and how prospects look for potential products and solutions. For example, according to Hubspot.com, in the B2B arena, 80 percent or more of the product research is done by the potential buyer before they interact with you. They are at your website reading your marketing material and they are judging you by what they see and read there. If your website stinks, they go away. It is that simple.
2. Our marketing department stinks so we’ll hire more B2B sales reps. B2B companies have been implementing the “hire more sales reps” strategy for years and most of the time, this doesn’t work. Throwing more bodies at a flawed process just multiplies the problem. The better approach is to implement a marketing machine that generates inquiries at a relatively low cost, convert a healthy percentage of these to qualified leads, and then focus your sales teams on closing, not prospecting. Yes this really works.
3. Why should we waste time on pull marketing and social media? That stuff doesn’t work. I have heard this many times and it always makes me laugh. Why? Because some of our best clients come to us through our pull marketing or social media initiatives. And our clients have themselves used pull marketing to generate quality sales leads and revenue. It takes patience and persistence but if you practice pull marketing correctly, you will get results.
4. Since we are selling a commodity product, we have to compete on price. Once you go down this path, it seldom gets better. Creating a compelling and differentiated brand for your products and/or services is hard work but it is essential to revenue and profitability. Here is a blog post on this subject of Brand Promise from CustomerThink.
5. We can’t compete because our product is weak or lacks features. This type of internal product bashing can lead to no good. As a marketer, you need to find what makes your offering superior, and when you cast doubts on your own product, it just gives everyone an excuse for failure. If you can’t be enthusiastic about what you are doing, do yourself and your company a favor and find a new position.
6. The sales team can’t sell its way out of a paper bag. This type of thinking is just as dangerous as denigrating the product. I’ve written a lot about how to bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Here are a few resources to help with this challenging problem.
   • Bridging the Gap in B2B Marketing and Sales
   • Bridge the Gap Between Sales and Marketing (Webinar)
   • Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Marketing (White Paper)

   It behooves both departments to work cooperatively and there is nothing to be gained by this type of infighting.

If you hear any of these types of statements from your marketing team, or have the urge to make them yourself, please take corrective action. The marketing game is tough and you need the right mindset to beat the competition.

One of General George Patton’s guiding principles was, “When in doubt, attack.” This sentiment was also expressed by many other famous military commanders. Their point was that although conditions are not always right and the outcome can be uncertain, you are usually better off going on the offensive and generate leads instead of sitting back and waiting for perfect conditions. This is equally true with your B2B marketing efforts.

So why do we hesitate instead of acting? Here are five common reasons:

1. Fear. We are afraid that what we do will not work properly. There is certainly cause to be concerned if you spend precious company resources without achieving decent results. But on the other hand, if you venture nothing, you gain nothing. And every time you market, you learn something that will improve your effective marketing results in the future. The more you practice building awareness and generating leads the better you get at these important skills.
2. Lack of knowledge. In this case, you may want to be an aggressive marketer, but don’t know the right steps to take. Fortunately, there are tons of online and printed resources available to guide you, as well as competent marketing professionals standing by to help. Here are a few recent posts to help you get started.
   • Where to Find B2B Sales Leads
   • Where to Find B2B Leads
   • Social Media Marketing
3. Lack of time. We all face our share of daily distractions. Most of the time, these competing priorities are caused by good intentions: customers to service, products to create, and financials to manage. But as important as these tasks are, you also need to generate leads and maintain an active marketing and sales funnel, because this is the lifeblood of your business.
4. Limited resources. Lack of budget is a familiar problem for marketers. After all, if you have no budget, or a limited budget, you can’t conduct marketing campaigns. Right? Wrong. There are some marketing tools that you can launch on a shoestring budget. One of the best is social media. For ideas in this area, read my recent blog post, Social Media – Can It Be Used to Generate Leads and Revenue?
5. Complacency. If you want to predict an organization’s future, take a look at what they have been doing in the past. Companies that market aggressively now are likely to do so in the future and those that sit on their hands are likely to continue to do so. Some companies work hard to generate leads and others place less emphasis on this. In other words, inertia can work for you or against you. And the best way to break the do-nothing marketing cycle is to do something, and do it now.

Your job as a marketer is to make people aware of the benefits of what you do and then motivate them to take action. But the relevant point is that you can’t get prospects to take action until you first take some action yourself. So go build some awareness, generate leads and support your company’s revenue goals.

Technorati Tags: B2B Marketing, Generate Leads, Lead Generation, Marketing

Some companies are good at generating B2B sales leads, others are good at qualifying and closing those leads, but the top performing companies, are those that leverage B2B lead management techniques and can do both.  Here are six strategies you can implement to create your own unstoppable marketing and sales machine:

1. Follow up every inbound inquiry within 48 hours – preferably 24 hours.  Leads have a short shelf and the person who was enthusiastic about your offer yesterday, may not remember who you are tomorrow.  This is such an important topic that I wrote a blog post about it titled: Sales Lead Management: Are You a Victim of FTFU (Failure to Follow-Up)?
2. Capture every lead in a single system (CRM or marketing database), along with all relevant marketing and sales data. I’ve talked to companies who have three or more opt-in inquiry databases, making it very difficult to implement drip marketing programs.
3. Set strict criteria for scoring leads.  To make a lead management system work you need to use consistent and reliable metrics at every step of the process. In other words, the definition of what constitutes an A or B lead should not change based on who qualified the lead.
4. If possible, make the qualification portion of B2B lead management a marketing task, not a sales task.  Sales people are good at taking leads from qualification to closure, not at initial lead scoring.  I know this is a generalization, and there are exceptions, but you will usually get more efficiency when you let marketing take the lead in managing leads.
5. Set-up a service level agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales.  This should not just be an informal “what are you going to do for me?” conversation, but rather a well thought out written plan covering exactly what the marketing department is going to deliver to sales in terms of inquiries and qualified leads.  Sales should reciprocate by setting goals for turning qualified leads into opportunities, and opportunities into sales.  It’s a beautiful thing when both departments accomplish their individual objectives and contribute to corporate success.
6. Don’t forget that lead nurturing is as valuable as lead generation.   My Fusion Marketing Partners clients, as well as my two decades of experience in high tech marketing, have proven that you can get just as many sales from the segment of leads that aren’t ready to buy now, as from those who are  immediately qualified.

Speaking of lead nurturing, David Meerman Scott wrote a very interesting blog post titled B2B Sales Leads are Too Important for Sales People at www.webinknow.com.   I really liked this sentence in his post: “How about warming up potential customers by giving them gifts of valuable content well before the salesperson bugs them by trying to sell something?”  Sounds like a good plan to me.

Technorati Tags: B2B Leads, B2B Sales, Lead Management, Sales Leads

Timing is an extremely important element in B2B marketing and sales.  The degree of prospect receptivity can range from zero percent (there is no chance I will buy your product) to 100 percent (where do I sign?).  Most prospects are somewhere in between these extremes.  The trick is to sell the ones who are ready to be sold, nurture those who are in-between, and keep in touch with those who have no interest now but may in the future.

This is where the pull marketing model can be so effective.  It can be a good vehicle to keep your company top of mind, so that when the prospect has a need for your product or service, you are high on their consideration list. One of our Fusion Marketing Partners’ clients refers to this as “being invited to the dance.”  The prospect chooses the time for the dance but you get to be a dance partner – a pretty good tradeoff.

Pull marketing allows prospects to be in control over the timing of the sale.  They are anyway, so why fight this?  Contrast this with push marketing, where you are always trying to get prospects to buy in your timeframe (usually right now!).

You don’t have to give up on all your push marketing efforts right now.  Perhaps you are filling your lead coffers with push marketing and can’t afford to lose these lead sources.  But you can supplement your push marketing efforts with pull marketing, particularly when it comes to nurturing your existing contact base.

Here are five ways you can keep in touch with B2B prospects until the time is right to engage with them in the sales process:

1. Connect with prospects through social media.  Every connection you can make though LinkedIn, Twitter or your blog, gives you many future opportunities to educate your prospects and bring them into your sphere of influence.  Here’s a link to a recent post on how to use social media to generate and nurture B2B sales leads.
2. Publish relevant content.  Make your website and blog a magnet for those who want to learn more about your area of expertise.  This will establish your credibility and make you a “branded expert.”  Reinforce this at every opportunity.
3. Optimize your website for organic search.  When a potential prospect types a search term related to your business into Google or another search engine, you want to make sure you are near the top on the search results.  There are many specific techniques to accomplish this, but the most important is to have plenty of fresh and relevant content.  This not only gives you the best chance to be noticed but also to drive a conversion.
4. Be aggressive with public relations.  PR is a low-cost way of getting your message out.  In addition to the use of targeted press releases, submit articles to relevant industry publications and participate in media interviews.
5. Send “non-salesy” information.   To be considered a trusted authority you need to make sure that you are considered by prospects as a valuable resource, not a persistent salesperson. In other words, your primary objective should be perceived as helping your prospects, not selling them something.   A good ratio of informational vs. sales pitch is 3 to 1.  Five to 1 is even better.

By practicing these online relationship-building skills, you will build a following of loyal contacts. Over time, many of these contacts will turn into prospects, and a subset of these will become customers. It takes patience and it takes persistence, but you will be rewarded with a very cost-effective and impactful B2B marketing and revenue machine.

Technorati Tags: B2B Marketing, Pull Marketing, Social Media

Sometimes it is not enough to simply make incremental progress on the small things.  There are times when you need a marketing or sales accelerator – something that takes you to an entire new level.  Here are six ideas to get you started.

1. Find a new target audience.  One of the best ways to reinvigorate a flagging B2B marketing program is to find an entirely new audience for you existing products or services.  This can be a related vertical market or an entirely new industry or departmental market.   For example, one of our Fusion Marketing Partners clients built a solid business by selling technical courses directly to students.  The company was able to vastly expand its market by offering multiple copies of its courseware to corporate managers.   Very few changes to the product were required to tap this rich new source of revenue.
2. Change your delivery model.   You see this all the time. In the computer software arena, software delivered as a service (SaaS) has challenged legacy installed software.  Instant streaming media (e.g. Netflix) has largely replaced brick and mortar media outlets (e.g. Blockbuster).  Getting in front of these new delivery models can be quite profitable.  Delaying can have a huge negative impact.  Witness Kodak, who was forced to declare bankruptcy because of the death of processed film, and Encyclopedia Britannica, who just announced that it would no longer offer its printed encyclopedia.
3. Differentiate yourself.   Do a web search on your six toughest competitors and write down their tagline and value propositions.  If what you are saying on your website is the same as any of these competitors, it’s time to do a branding exercise and come up with your unique value proposition.
4. Follow up all sales leads, quickly and appropriately.  It’s sad but a majority of B2B companies do a poor job at sales lead qualification. They follow-up slowly (if at all) and in a manner that doesn’t produce the desired results.  This change alone can lead to a big revenue payoff.
5. Create a lot more content.  It’s no coincidence that websites with a lot of visitors also have a great deal of content.  For most B2B industries, the expression “Content is King” is spot-on.   Content is critical for two reasons.  First, to satisfy the information needs of your website visitors and convert them to leads or sales.  Second, to attract visitors through organic search.  Your content should serve both purposes.
6. Be consistent.  How many hours have you wasted sitting around the conference table talking about how you need to come up with a new message to beat the competition?  While you may indeed need a new message if you aren’t differentiated from your competition, it is just as likely that what you need is to relentlessly and consistently share your existing message.  In other words – stop with the “new message of the month” marketing.
7. Start the transition to pull marketing.  If you have been generating B2B leads with push marketing methods, and have seen a drop off in lead quantity, or an increase in lead costs, it might be time to jump on the pull marketing bandwagon.  There are a number of ways to do this including social media, content marketing and public relations.  But you do need to get started.

Each of these strategies has the capacity to boost your B2B marketing and sales performance by 10 percent, and possibly a lot more.

Technorati Tags: B2B Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Pull Marketing

Get a bunch of B2B marketing professionals together and ask them: What are your most important criteria for benchmarking performance and how do you define marketing success? You’ll probably get some blank stares and muddled answers. “Well, we find that in this world of Web 2.0, commitment to advertising synergy…” blah blah blah. But the fact is that good marketing is both an art and a science.

Unless you can explain concisely how your department measures and reports on work output, you will not be recognized as a good marketer, let alone be viewed as indispensible in a tough economic climate. Start the thinking-through process by asking yourself these six questions.  Note that some of these are soft/qualitative measurements while others are hard/quantitative measurements – both are important.

1. Do you have a well-defined value proposition that is communicated in all your marketing messages and promotions? Can your entire team express this message in a concise and compelling elevator pitch?
2.  Are you targeting the right individuals at the right companies? Do you know who these people are and have you captured them in a system (CRM or database) that allows for ongoing targeted communications?
3. Is your brand/image being accepted by the marketplace? Are you seen by your prospects and customers in a way that is consistent with the way you see yourself?
4. Does every part of your end-to-end marketing and sales model work? Are you both effective and efficient at every phase of the process or are there gaps that keep you from achieving your goals?
5. Do you have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the sales department that specifies the quantity and quality of leads you will be delivering? Is this a sufficient quantity for the company to achieve its revenue objectives?  If you need more information on how to determine lead requirements, read our article How Many Sales Leads Do You Need?
6.  How many of the leads that you deliver to sales are truly qualified – do they meet the agreed-to criteria and have the potential of actually buying something from you?

B2B marketing is tough but it is even tougher if you don’t know how to evaluate your marketing success. Each of the above questions forces you to reflect on a different part of the value you’re providing to your organization. I’m not saying that these specifically should be your marketing success benchmark questions – but I am saying that you need to determine and release your own performance indicators. Remember that you can’t improve what you can’t measure, so start measuring and keep improving.

Technorati Tags: Marketing measurement, Marketing Success

When it comes to marketing strategy, it’s always useful to work from a proven formula. This doesn’t mean you have to follow the formula exactly as written, but it does give you a good starting path.  The following Formula for B2B Marketing Success illustrates why a prospect may not respond to a particular marketing promotion, no matter how well targeted or creative and it also explains why you must apply the principles of consistency and persistence.

F x I x P.I.Q. = R

Frequency

The “F” in the formula stands for Frequency, and refers to how often we share our message with customers and prospects. Frequency refers to all contacts; whether online, social media, print, email, telephone, or, in-person. Frequency is the portion of the formula most neglected by marketers. Since it takes an average of 7-8 contacts from initial awareness until the sale is closed, you must keep communicating until the prospect either buys or asks you to stop the contacts. The idea is not to annoy your prospects, but rather to practice friendly persistence.

Impact

The “I” in the formula stands for Impact, which is the part of the marketing campaign that has the greatest influence on the results achieved on a particular promotion. Without impact, marketing and advertising programs are lifeless, dull, and worst of all, they don’t generate response. High impact is achieved with penetrating copy and graphics, strong offers, clever sound and video and professional selling techniques. Most important, impact is generated through a consistent and compelling message.

Prospect Interest Quotient

Part three of the formula is the variable over which the marketer has the least amount of control. “P.I.Q.” stands for Prospect Interest Quotient, which is that position your prospects finds themselves in at the exact moment they reads your email, sees your social media outreach, receives your telephone call or logs into your website.  P.I.Q. is a complex blend of several different elements, some measurable and some not, including: physical presence; work load; point on the buying cycle; current attitude toward your product or service; financial situation; and mood (receptivity).

No matter how strong your marketing strategy is, or how creative your promotion, if you contact a prospect shortly after they purchase a competing product, your offer will fall on deaf ears.  P.I.Q. can work for you as well as against you. Communicating to a prospect at a time when they are optimistic about the future always increases your chance of getting the order. Likewise, it is tougher to drive business when the economy is bad.  However, applying the rules of this formula will always contribute to your marketing success, regardless of the economic climate.

Results

The final part of the formula, “R”, stands for Results. Results in any marketing campaign are dependent on the first three elements of the formula.  And the most neglected part of the formula is frequency.  While you have control over the creative impact your efforts convey, unless you communicate often enough, you won’t catch a large enough quantity of prospects in the right Prospect Interest Quotient (P.I.Q.), to achieve strong success. Likewise, it is important to make yourself visible through your online presence to prospects who are seeking what you offer.  This is always a good marketing strategy.

By the way, here is Albert Einstein’s formula for success: “If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y plus Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.”   Well said.

Technorati Tags: Marketing Formula, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Success