Image provided by: Naypong

Last week, I wrote a blog post explaining and sharing six examples of commonly used types of B2B brand awareness survey questions.

This week, I will share five business benefits of tracking brand awareness and why you should consider them when determining whether or not to start a brand awareness research initiative.

1.) Brand awareness research enables your company to quantify the aggregate impact of its awareness marketing initiatives. Often times, marketing awareness program impact is gauged in terms of the total number of companies or individuals touched by the program(s), but these are not realistic metrics for evaluating these programs.

The goals of these types of programs are to build brand awareness within a targeted group of potential customers and eventually convert this awareness into sales down the road. Therefore, measuring the number of individuals or companies that a campaign touches is not a fair measure of the reach of a campaign because many of the individuals or companies touched could be irrelevant.

That’s why you need to limit the reach measurement to just the companies who qualify as potential customers. An effective medium for measuring this impact is a periodic brand awareness survey that collects vertical identifier information, allowing you to track the impact of marketing awareness campaigns across — and within — verticals over time. However, since these types of studies rely on benchmark comparisons, their potential usages must be thought out in advance to ensure that the data will be usable for future analyses.

2.) Brand awareness research trends serve as a great indicator of brand health. Companies can utilize the changes in non-customer brand perception as a gauge of the brand’s reputation amongst new customers. This information can be combined with data from customer experience tracking studies to acquire a good overall picture of brand perception amongst customers and non-customers.

By monitoring these trends over time, a company can easily identify potential problems developing with its brand reputation and also determine whether it is investing enough in its brand awareness and brand building programs to meet the goals it set out for with these initiatives.

3.) Brand awareness research also exposes the gaps in a marketing campaign’s reach and allows a team to strategically plan to make-up for holes in coverage in subsequent awareness marketing campaigns. This is important because it ensures that your marketing budget is being spent in areas with highest return to expenditure ratios.

However, to be used in this manner, it is critical to track several important respondent qualifier data points like company size, industry demographics, geographic location, and respondent persona information (i.e. title, experience). Tracking this information allows a company to slice and dice the results of the study into many different angles and gives it the best glimpse of the market. The information learned can be insightful in determining:

• What mix of marketing channels to utilize for prospect education
• Which ad campaigns to continue or retire
• How to realign brand building investments by geography, vertical or other important demographics

4.) Similarly, knowing which customer segments are most likely already aware of your brand and/or products due to the concentration of awareness in a certain customer segment also helps determine the most efficient deployment of sales resources to leverage target buyer awareness. This will drive sales conversion ratios for your company, as the sales team will be focusing on the sales opportunities that are already there for the taking and not wasting too many resources on trying to sell to unaware customers that have not yet reached the consideration phase of the buying process.

5.) Brand awareness and perception research provide useful competitive intelligence on key competitors in the marketplace that can be used to identify areas where you company is more or less branded than its competitors. This can be valuable information in determining how much a company should invest in brand building to keep pace with competitors. It also helps identify where messaging seems to be reaching customers better than key competitor marketing awareness campaigns.

Brand awareness research provides great information and insight that allows you to gauge the success of your company’s awareness marketing initiatives and plan out its sales and marketing strategies.

The quality and depth of the insight that a brand awareness study provides is highly dependent upon the quality of the research design. So it is important to invest the time and money in designing an effective research instrument to collect this data. I highly recommend reading my earlier blog post in this series on the eight research and design factors to consider when planning out a brand awareness research project.

However, brand awareness research is expensive and is not for every company. Company’s should measure the costs and benefits before investing in a brand awareness research initiative. Additionally, they should also evaluate the alternative methods of monitoring brand awareness. Some of the most common methods will be covered in next week’s post.

Devon McDonald: Hey Aaron, how long have you been with Zmags now?

Aaron Kerzner: It’ll be two years at the end month!

DM: Wow, congrats on your upcoming anniversary! (OpenView helped recruit and on-board Aaron as Zmags’ first inbound lead qualification specialist in 2010.)

DM: Aaron, would you mind telling the audience what your role was when you initially joined Zmags?

AK: Sure, my role was pure lead qualification — and I was dealing strictly with inbound leads. I was brought on board because Zmags had such a large influx of inbound leads, it was becoming really time consuming for the sales team to talk to unqualified leads. My role was to have the initial conversation with the prospect and determine if it made sense to pass it along to a sales rep. It was typically a really basic conversation. I was making about 60 dials a day, which would translate to passing along two qualified leads each day.

DM: What did you enjoy about your starter role as a lead qualifier?

AK: I thought that it was a great learning role. When I first started at Zmags, I was really green. I am so grateful that Zmags was willing to take a chance on someone pretty much right out of college. I really like the fact that I got to work so closely with the sales team. They were always willing to let me shadow their calls and helped me along the way. They would listen to the conversations that I had with prospects and give me suggestions on how to improve them. It was a pretty cool experience. Ultimately, the sales guys knew that the better I became at my job and the more they helped get me there, the better off they would be with quality leads coming their way.

DM: What was the biggest challenge you faced as Lead Qualifier?

AK: Initially, the biggest challenge was trying to develop my own style. When I was first put in the role I was given pretty much all of the materials I could ever need. They included voicemail scripts, email templates, conversational guides — you name it. However, those materials can really only take you so far. You need to have your own style to be successful. After having some initial success, I got more comfortable on the phone and I was able to develop that style. That made all the difference. The number of qualified leads I passed along to the team increased tremendously.

DM: You’re now in a closing role as an account executive and, from what I hear, you are kicking butt. Is prospecting and qualifying leads still a part of your role?

AK: Yes, definitely. Prospecting is still half of my job now — a solid 50 percent. Honestly, I’d say it is still the most important aspect of my role here.  At the end of the day, you can be a great presenter, negotiation, and closer, but if you don’t make the prospecting calls you aren’t going to have a pipeline to work with and you are not going to be able to hit your goals.

DM: What are 5 tips that you would give to those either starting in a lead qualification role or currently trying to improve their output as a lead qualifier?

AK: Sure, here they are:

1. The higher the better. I honestly go right to the top when prospecting, the C-level. Once I finally figured out that was the best way to go and I started getting responses from people at that level, it gave me confidence that snowballed. That confidence allowed me to go to places with my prospecting efforts that I had originally been too scared to dive into. It allowed me to bring in my own style and personality.

2. Be human. This was something that Jens Karstoft, the co-founder and VP of Strategic Innovation at Zmags, taught me very early on. Prospects want to deal with humans, not robots. Have some personality. Be real. On that note, your email can’t look like it was a template generated by your marketing department. The person you are reaching out to will definitely pick up on that and immediately delete it.

3. Brevity is always king.  Less is always more when you are prospecting. It’s really easy to write an email with 200 words that includes numbers and bullets. But the best emails are sharp and never more than two or three sentences. Ideally, you are looking at 90 words max with a simple, razor-sharp value proposition. Don’t use lots of bullets or numbered items. Don’t use words like robust, exciting, etc. — that’s just fluff. Get to your point. If you are really struggling with brevity in emails or your call intro (you can’t explain something in a couple of sentences), make sure it’s something you work on.

4. Be willing to test. You need to constantly think about what is and isn’t working.  To be successful, you need to make adjustments until you’ve nailed it.

5. Be willing to learn. Take the time to learn and master processes. Read books on best practices. I personally recommend Jill Konrath’s Selling to Big Companies, particularly for email tactics. You need to truly learn about the industry that you are calling into and know what will separate you from every other sales person or lead qualifier. That means actually understanding your prospect’s business, not pretending to know. If you have a deeper knowledge, it will definitely be obvious in your conversations.

DM: Thanks for taking the time so share some tips with the next class of Lead Qualifiers, Aaron! Congrats on your promotions and successes!

Image provided by: vichie81

In his column, Mike talked about how important it is to have a vision that is clear to everyone in the company. It’s critical that your employees understand what is expected of them and how you want them to behave internally (with coworkers and management) and and externally (with your prospects, customers, and partners). At OpenView, we call those things “Values,” which go along with a company’s Mission and Vision (for more on that, click here).

Mike also wrote about one of his core strategies, which I happen to be a big fan of and have used successfully throughout my career. I referred to that strategy in a previous blog post, which I wrote after reading Mike’s thoughts on it. It was titled “UPOD: The Quickest Way to Boost Customer Satisfaction,” and you can read more about it here.

But the crux of Mike’s article (something that every founder and CEO who wants to be successful needs to understand and become comfortable with) was in the title: “Fire These Employees to Grow Your Business”

One of the things that I remind the CEOs of OpenView’s portfolio companies most often is that their people are the only strategic asset they have. When you employ the wrong ones, they can kill your company and your dreams. So, if you want to build a great company, then you should check out Mike’s article. The lesson he teaches is one that CEOs are never too old — or too young — to learn.

All the best!

G

Earlier today I stumbled upon the following pin from C.C. Chapman, founder of Digital Dads and co-author of Content Rules:

Image provided by: Pinterest

C.C. brings up an important point that is clearly often overlooked: NEVER blindly pitch your product or service without doing some critical research.  Or be aware that you will get blasted with an “Idiots Who Pitch Me” meme. Diana could have really simply prevented this from happening if she took literally 60 seconds to figure out who C.C. is (like the fact that he is not a new mom).

In order to stay in the clear, here are some key tips to follow when reaching out to the press or your key influencers:

• Connect on the main social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ in order to gain some insight into the personality of your influencer.  Social media is a great channel for learning about the human.
• Subscribe to your target’s blog or RSS feeds so that you can easily stay up to date on what your influencer is thinking and writing about.
• Read their content.  Once you’re subscribed, there are no excuses.  Take at least 15-20 minutes a day to review your influencers’ blogs so that you can intelligently talk with them about their work.
• Stay away from canned emails when you begin your outreach.  No matter how much you try to personalize them, they will likely still come across as canned.  And you may make a mistake or forget to customize all of the necessary fields in the email.
• Always proofread before pressing send to ensure you are using the right name and there are no embarrassing misspellings or grammatical errors

If you need more tips on getting your influencers to tune in and pay attention to you, please read my blog featuring 22 tips on pitching from the receiving end – bloggers and reporters!

Sound off, have you ever received a phony pitch?  Or if you accidentally sent one, how were you able to recover?

The first order of business is of course to create the job description.  Discuss the role internally and with the key stakeholders.  The best person to create the job description is not necessarily Human Resources!  You’ll want to involve the direct manager of this person, who is generally also the hiring manager, and those who have held this role themselves.  Be sure to take the time to ask yourself and others: “Why are we making this hire?”

You’ll also want to understand the compensation range that aligns with your own organization.  It’s ideal to use external compensation analysis tools (we use Payscale at OpenView) to understand market rates, but it’s also important to conduct ongoing data points as you begin your search.  As you interview, what are you seeing in the marketplace?   What did candidates earn in previous positions?  You’ll want to get everyone on the same page.  Who will approve this offer?  Make sure that they are aware of this data and you get their approval for the range you hope to offer before you begin discussing it with potential hires.

Define your target list.  Who are your competitors?  What are the complimentary solutions?  If you are reaching a stage in the growth of your organization where you would like to reach new market segments, it could be an opportune time to begin hiring employees who have diverse backgrounds in the segments you are seeking to expand into. Of course, I’ve also written a blog in the past which argued that you shouldn’t necessarily focus on recruiting from your competitors.  So, you should also consider researching and recruiting from “like” industries.

You’ll need to consider your geographic constraints (or on an optimistic note, your opportunities!).  Are you able to relocate someone for this position?  If so, what type of package could you offer?  If relocation is not possible, consider the potential of having this person in a remote location.  At the expansion stage, you can’t afford to make the mistake of a wrong hire.  Weigh the pros and cons of hiring the best talent in a location outside of your company headquarters.

Finally, review your recruiting resources.  Where will you post this position?  Are there posting sites that are specific to your industry or the role?  For example, if you are looking for a software developer, you’ll want to look at Dice, StackOverflow, and User Groups.  Beyond the job posting, you’ll want to engage in an active search and headhunt candidates.  Will you use LinkedIn (most likely!)?  Who in your network may have some leads?  Review your target list once more and consider what resources will allow you to truly reach these candidates.

Of course, once you’re here, you’re ready to start searching and screening candidates.  Create a set list of interview questions, develop a scorecard, and determine your interview team.

Do you have a process in place within your own organization for setting a recruitment strategy?  What has been the greatest challenge to getting started?