Reading emails before action

When an email lands in your inbox do you really read the email content or:
- Do you just reply with your standard reply email ?
- Do you forward it without really reading to your supervisor as prescribed by the workflow ?
- Do you try to up-sell in the first reply ?

It is imperative that you read the email and answer appropriately to his request for information or solve his problem or issues. That is the first goal of your reply as you need to satisfy his first demand.

The impression of the potential customer

If the potential customer gets:
- A standard reply then he will feel unimportant
- Forwarded to a supervisor then why was he wasting time communicating with the first person
- A solution but also an up-sell then he will feel the focus is too much on up-selling as the expected revenue is not enough
- A reply several days later then he might have taken his decision already
- A not then he is left in the cold and needs to hope other vendors bring a solution

The cheapest leads

You should grab this kind of opportunity as these are the cheapest leads you can get: apparently without any effort from your side or your company they present a potential sale for you for free. You or your company save upfront the cost of the lead generation.
All you need to do is:
- To read the inquiry email
- Investigate into the company: what does the company do
- Investigate into the person who addresses to you (using LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Viadeo or even Facebook)
- Reply solely to his question as an expert as you still need to build trust.

Read the emails of potential customers and answer them appropriately within 24 business hours.

Do you really read the emails of potential customers?

In some cases you should say “NO” to your customer and not proceed in selling to him. This “NO” is hard to do but it is better in the long run.

Saying “NO” to your channel-partner, system integrator-partner can be appropriate too when they:
1. Impose their requirements on projects for their benefit
2. Increase complexity of projects (like adding on third parties)
3. Change the requirements (rule of the game)
4. Mange you instead of you managing the partner
5. Change due dates (earlier) without having discussed
6. Change your price quotations by increasing the deliverable(s) without notifying previously
7. Call after business for urgent decision hours so you miss feedback of your staff and employees
8. Put you under pressure to decide fast upon new issues as quote needs to be in
9. Complain about everything including your products or competing products
10. Want special discount for each and every prospect
11. Discuss every item on your invoices
12. Pay always overdue
13. Want free inventory
14. Asks commission on top of received discounts
15. Ignore RMA (Return Material Authorization) procedures
16. Refuse to accept and handle faulty goods from customers
17. Call you and several employees about the same issue or problem
18. Use your information to sell the solution of your competitor
19. Pick up leads beyond their geography defined in the Partner Agreement
21. Get drunk at your yearly partner event – never sober
22. Occupy your booth on the trade show without any effort
23. Play games (sound/noise) during conference calls with potential projects
24. Receive MDF (Marketing Develop Fund) or Co-op Marketing but never spend it effectively or wisely
25. Blame you for any kind of mishap in projects

In many of these cases you might be better off without the partner as he creates:
- Overhead
- Not recoverable additional costs
- Confusion amongst your staff and employees and prospects and customers
- Loss of time and efforts
Instead of bringing in money this type of partners will cost you money.

You should evaluate:
- The amount of sales the partner brings
- The amount of additional costs he generates over one year
- How many potential customers he drove away by his actions.

Did you ever said “NO” to your partner ?

Limited reach

If you are eager to find prospects or projects then it is likely you won’t find them.
Maybe you are to pushy by being too much focused on getting a lead or even a sales cycle started. People feel this and this probably turns them away from you.
Promoting too heavily your product or services by grabbing every opportunity to mention your solutions will not helping to achieve your goal of leads and prospects. People will perceive you as a salesman eager to score or in the need to score.
The number of contacts you can make is limited. Hence the number of your pushy sales pitches is limited too as your reach is limited.

Email marketing tried to solve this problem of limited reach by blasting out marketing and sales messages to a massive number of people. The effectiveness of email marketing in B2B is probably decreasing significantly because of the pushiness.

Mouth to mouth expands reach

On the other hand when you listen to people and advise them with your real business expertise you will create a different attitude. The perception will be different.
The chance that the person you are helping will become a lead or prospect is still minimal, but the reward is in their network.
If you really help them with your advice, it is very likely they will mention it to their peers in face-to-face conversations and during social happenings as people crave for interest. Thanks to you they have something interesting to tell.
Or on a next occasion in a social environment the same people you have advised previously can introduce you to new people with similar business issues.

Giving advice and sharing your expertise will significantly expand your reach.

Business guru

Thus instead of being a salesman on a commission, you should be a business guru with expertise to share and giving advice freely. Make sure they remember you and get their contact details. The contact details should be used forming inform about the success or fail of your advice and not for starting sales pitch. Again listen instead of speaking.Even if your expertise wasn’t successful they appreciate it as you are concerned about them.

Are you a salesman or a guru ?

Hoarding expertise and information is history

All the information and expertise of a salesman that allowed getting an appointment is now available on the Internet. This can be provided by your competitors or by peers on social media (forums, LinkedIn, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc).

If you keep your expertise and information to yourself then your potential customers will find it on the Internet from another source. Thus bypassing you completely. This could make your company and its’ products obsolete as people won’t find you on the Internet.
Not getting found increases missing sales deals. Hence hoarding information and expertise is history.

Share your expertise, knowledge and information

Instead you should share your expertise, knowledge and information in order to keep up with competitors and make sure you are being considered for all the possible shortlists. It is not solely your products, the feature and functions of your products, the quality of products and after service and the brand name that will get you on the short list as your company and products might get overlooked or simply net found during the research phase of the purchase cycle.

Not gating for content

In most cases influencers and decision takers will not contact you before they have made up their short list. In order to get on the short list it is better to provide information and expertise without gating for this content as this is part of the sales cycle. Asking for contact details is a hurdle in your sales process and won’t help sales.

Instead of waiting and hoping getting invited to present all of your knowledge, expertise and information during a sales meeting, you need to publish this as it will:
- Bring traffic of interested parties
- Build your authority in the business
- Get you on the short list
Only when on the short list you will be contacted for information about your solution and price negotiations. This kills the concept of opportunities moving through the funnel as it has become ultra short.

Are you still hoarding your expertise ?

Leads in funnel – Sales deals

Marketing needs to prove their marketing spending’s by showing as many leads as possible.
Although Marketing will qualify the leads before entering them into the funnel they have the tendency to let more leads qualify.

On the other hand the more under-qualified leads the Salesman gets the more time he waists by qualifying each of the leads in his sales funnel. Hence the lesser time he can spend on the really well qualified leads. This creates the perception with salesmen that the marketing leads are of lesser value. In the worst case the salesmen will even ignore the leads from marketing as they prefer to work on their leads.

Rewarding

Marketing is rewarded for the number of qualified leads it generates into the funnel.
Salesmen are rewarded by the number of sales deals they have closed.

During sales meetings and revisions by the sales manager the salesmen are evaluated not only by the number and value of deals they close but also on the success rate of their funnel. Moreover their pipeline is used to get a forecast of sales which is all important business and management information.

Hence salesmen should be in control of leads entering their funnel which is not always possible with the current Marketing Automation tools. These Marketing Automation tools and CRM system often start from a marketing campaign and feed the potential leads directly into the funnel.

Commissions for Marketing and Sales

Instead of marketing being rewarded for the number of leads entering the funnel, they should be rewarded just like salesmen for deals closed. In this way they would take the time to qualify leads better as every lead requires time and effort from a salesman. The more effective the salesman can work the better for both.
Marketing and salesmen should both be rewarded on a sales commission for deals closed.

This split commission would bound the collaboration between Marketing and Sales as they both will have the same goal.

How is the distribution of leads organized in your company ?

Content marketing

As people are fed up with interruption marketing (ads, emails) it seems that content marketing is the way to go as people prefer to search online for solutions and products.
Content marketing will drive your inbound marketing for the complex sale in B2B.

Having just a few text documents, presentations or video’s might be sufficient for starting the process of generating interest, however you need to cover the entire purchase cycle and address to all of the people involved in the purchase decision. Your content needs to support the purchase process just like a salesman would do.

Purchase process and buyer persona

Hence you will need to identify:
- The different steps in the purchase process
- The different people that get involved
You need to identify the buyer persona’s. The different steps in the purchase process need to be supported by appropriate content for each of the people involved. Even if in one step different people get involved then different content needs to be created as a user-employee has different takes and views than a manager and again different than a CxO or VP:
- Functions will interest users
- Features will interest managers
- Benefits will interest CxOs

Content inventory

For each of the process step and for each of the people involved you will need to create a piece of content in your content inventory.
In order to do so make a spreadsheet having on the left the steps in the purchase process and the top the buyers persona. Then indicate who is involved in each step. Then define the content that is required for each cell in your spreadsheet that you indicated. Then start creating texts, presentations or video’s.
This will make sure you have no gaps in your content marketing.

What’s the status of your content marketing ?

Being liked versus trusted

The customer might like you as a salesman or sales rep. but that doesn’t mean they trust you.
People might buy from you because they like you, but that will be limited to smaller amounts of money as they need to trust the salesman for larger purchases.

Getting sympathy or being liked might be a first step in the right direction which might lead to being trusted.
On the other hand being trusted doesn’t mean you are being liked. The customer can trust someone without liking him.
Being trusted will help getting larger sales deals closed.

A trust relationship will last longer and is much stronger than being liked. Just being nice to people doesn’t mean these people will trust you for their decisions and money.

Trusted adviser

The goal of anyone in B2B sales should be to become a trusted adviser as this opens the number of opportunities with this customer. The main role of the salesman is to take away or to minimize the risks, the apparent risks or the perceived risks that are involved and result from with any purchase decision. The trusted adviser is one of the best persons placed to remove these buyers’ risks.
Being liked doesn’t bring value to the customer in his purchase decision. A trusted adviser will bring value for the customer during his buying just because of removing these risks.
The marketing efforts of the company can help building trust for the salesman with the customer.

As relationships in sales matter, both being liked and being trusted will help salesmen to get more deals closed.

Are you being liked or being trusted or both by your customers ?

Cutting marketing expenses

The current recession will require companies to scale back and decrease their operating costs.

Cutting back on:
- Sales can only be achieved by less salesmen and staff.
- Administration will require to lay-off administrative employees
- Research and development is again about firing and is a risk for the future
- Production quality will come back as a boomerang
One of the most obvious and most convenient to achieve is to decrease marketing costs as these involve third parties, hardly involves firing people. It’s the easiest but maybe not the best to do as during recessions you need as many qualified leads as possible.

Marketing costs

In a marketing budget the typical large costs are:
- Industry trade shows
- The yearly dealers, resellers and partners conference/meeting
- Agency costs
- Multimedia advertising
- Printed leaflets and product sheets (as pdf’s can be send electronically)
Or anything which involves multiple personnel and employees being off-site (travel and lodging costs).
These are the marketing expenses that are likely to be cut during a recession.

Marketing channel migration

As these marketing events and efforts represent important amounts of money, the elimination can result in having additional funds available allowing increasing the spending on other marketing channels and methods. Like email marketing, online advertising, webcasts, website lead generation, content marketing and social marketing.

Due to the recession, marketers will have lower budgets allowing them to have less off-site events and more online events or efforts. There will be a shift from:
- Physical to online marketing efforts
- Outbound to inbound marketing
in order to save costs. this will probably drive more visitors to your website requiring to increase your online conversions.

Less might even be more as the marketing channel migration will change how the company addresses to their potential and current customers. Putting the VP marketing or Marketing manager on a diet might even have a positive effect as the entire marketing mix needs to be reviewed.

Will you put your VP Marketing on a diet ?
What marketing cost will you decrease ?

Social media marketing is not advertising

Social media marketing is all about communication and not advertising. However many companies fail as they try to use it as push channels towards their clients or potential clients.
Pushing marketing or sales messages on to social media are unlikely to become real conversations. Moreover this might turn out negatively as only those who are against or upset will reply. Not exactly what you want.

Search statements and discussions

Instead social media marketing should start with investigating what lives on the Internet amongst customers, potential customers and competitors.

This can be done by using searches on:
- Google on specific sites
- Forums
- Twitter (using the search box).

Or using purpose developed tools:
- Social mention
- Whos Talkin
- Hootsuite

Listen

The next step is to listen in real-time to the existing conversations.
Any conversation or statement about:
- Your brand ?
- Your industry ?
- About specific services or products related to your business ?
- About your competitors ?
These can be good or bad.

Who are you talking to ?

Before jumping in, replying, answering to any discussion you should find out who you are talking to.
You have to become aware of their:
- Background: who is this person
- Location: local, country or far away
- Influence: in both social media as in real-life and business
- Relevance: not related, occasional or core

Search on LinkedIn (Google “Name LinkedIn’ works too) or on Klout to give you the required insight for influence and reach, expertise and network size.

Some marketing guru’s advice to mainly focus on influencers.
However:
- Every statement or discussion can be picked up and become important overnight.
- Behind every person there can be a client or potential customer.

Respond and discuss

Your answer should be to the point, authentic and compelling in order to have a positive discussion going on.

In any case don’t offend people and avoid starting a sales pitch.
Not:
- The corporate voice: exactly to avoid in social media
- Broadcast: responses should be personal as conversations are one to one
- High volume: immersing social media with your messages will not help
- Stale content: always the same stuff isn’t effective in social media (works in advertising)
- Egocentric: it is not about your brand solely
- Self-serving content: as this will only drive fans away

The importance is not your to show, expose or build your authority but to influence for your benefit.

Track

Then track the speed and type of replies with the aim of finding potential customers or business partners.

Are you dedicated enough for social media marketing ?

Sales reps

Sales reps are into sales, sales arguments with features and functions of products or services. Their main focus is selling the stuff which gets them a commission.

Salesmen

Salesmen are into explaining about benefits as selling to C-level people requires putting the solution into a business context. A successful salesman will try to understand and interpret the business requirements, issues and problems to be solved.

Their main focus is not the product or service that they eventually want to sell, but the business requirement, issues and problems that needs to get solved. Their goal is to find and present a feasible solution for the potential (or probable) customer.

Business perspective

Thus you need to look at the purchase decision from the business perspective of the potential client. It’s about the client and the feasible solution, not about the product or the service that needs to be sold.

Of course eventually the product or service will get sold – sales deal closed.

Are you a sales rep, a salesman or a businessman ?

Marketers as publishers instead of pushers

Marketing execs have always had the mindset of selling products or services using mainly interruption marketing with advertising, commercial messages through multiple channels. The more money spend the more likelihood of getting attention and promoting the brand or product. The more they pushed the more chance of success.

The challenge of content marketing for marketers is that they need to start thinking as publishers providing interesting and valuable content.
As content has become the currency instead of money, this is quite a change for most marketers: the shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.

Findable targeted content

Instead of pushing advertising, commercial messages or any other interruption marketing to potential customers, the roles are now reversed as the potential customer is now in the drivers’ seat:
- The headline and short introduction need to be enough teasing, compelling in order to attract an audience
- The content and information provided should be valuable and interesting enough to keep the interest and attention.

Making the content findable is another challenge besides creating interesting and valuable content, as you can have the best and most interesting content in the world, but if nobody can find it then all the effort and time is wasted.

Marketing the content

Just like advertisements and commercial messages were targeting specific market segments, different pieces of content need to be created in order to target each of the market groups.
Instead of pushing the marketing message to the potential customer, now the potential customer needs to find the specific content and take the time to read or view the content. The created content needs to be marketed !

Are you as marketer ready for content marketing ?

Social Media

If your social media is managed apart from the entire marketing mix, then why take the effort of investing time in social media ?
Often the social media is operated and managed separately from the rest of the marketing channels as if it is of a different kind just because it is new (was new). This can lead to a different strategy or approach of customers not fitting into the complete company or brand picture.

However in the end all marketing channels are a communication from the company towards the potential or existing customer. For them whatever channel they listen, read or view doesn’t matter as it is a communication from the vendor.

Marketing Mix

Your marketing mix should include social media as it has become an essential part of your marketing. The marketing budget should be managed over all the channels and all efforts together.

Managing and treating your social media marketing separately your efforts and investments are likely to be wasted.
All of your Tweets, Facebook messages, bog posts and blog or forum comments should be a part of the total marketing mix.

Your marketing should:
- Form one unit
- Having one message
- Consist of one strategy
and include your social marketing too.
Else you will waste time, effort and money and might end up with different strategies.

Is your social media marketing included in the marketing mix?

Mobile Outbound B2B Marketing

A previous post explained why mobile marketing in B2B doesn’t work for a number of reasons, but mainly because it is interruption marketing on our almost private device. As we all get enough marketing interruptions everyday, people are fed up with them. Moreover how can you ever know the marketing message is timely and appropriate ?

Mobile Inbound B2B Marketing

On the other hand inbound mobile marketing might work as people freely inquire about products or services giving up their anonymous behavior.
So instead of forcing people be interrupted and to read your marketing message, the Mobile Inbound Marketing stands a chance.

The challenge to engage

The challenge is getting people using Mobile Inbound Marketing by providing:
- Mobile website:
You need a mobile website which differs for navigational reasons
- Mobile Apps:
If you can imagine and build and application (on IOS and Android) that relates to your product or service it will be beneficial
- QR codes:
The QR codes can work for sign-ups, registrations, sweepstakes, give-a-ways, coupons
- SMS/texting:
The challenge is that you have to engage people sending your company a SMS/text message without you sending one. Somehow they must getting teased and take action upon with sending an SMS/text message.

Whatever mobile marketing method and channel you use the goal needs to be about building relationships with your potential customers and customers.

What’s your experience with Mobile Inbound Marketing ?

Brands have understood that their marketing message needs to be entertaining in order to succeed in this world overwhelmed by entertainment available for free or paying in any channel.
HP shows how printers can be presented in an entertaining way in their HP Invent video:

However:
Although the video is entertaining which is quite an achievement with boring printers that do nothing but print which has resulted in a few hundred thousand (>300,000) views (The Audience Is Listening), it still misses the most important passion or sentiment.

Entertaining is good to get the attention.
Emotion or passion is also required once the attention has been given.
Entertainment will evaporate quickly.
Emotion and passion will stay for a long time with humans.

Emotional Marketing

Brands that will not make emotional connections with their prospects or customers will be less successful.
The people to target need to connect to the product or brand on the level of emotions. As soon people get to love your product or brand, they will buy. In order to love your product or brand emotions are a requirement: hence the need to play to their emotions.

As Michael Masterson stipulates:
1. People like buying stuff and services, but they don’t like being sold
2. People buy things for emotional feelings, not rational reasons.
3. Afterwards, people need to satisfy their emotional decisions with logic

Passionate Marketing for advocates

If a brand can get someone passionate about the brand or product, he will become a free sales rep. for the brand as an advocate.
An advocate will not only by the brand, but also advice and recommend his relatives and friends to buy the brand or product for a zillion of reasons without being paid.

In order to get someone to become an advocate the emotion must be really deep as he will position himself in order to help your brand. Picking up advocates requires an enhanced emotional connection. The main driving reason is that these people want to help others.
Again you need to give them memorable experiences during the entertaining marketing message in order to create the passion for your brand or product.
This is not solely for B2C but also for B2B.

How emotional or passionate is your marketing message – or just entertaining or still boring ?

Aspirational marketing video

This might be one of the best B2B video’s ever made.
This video tells a powerful story of what glass could do instead what glass currently does. This sure inspires for next generation of products: aspirational marketing video.
It sure went viral as it got over 16mio clicks.

Too perfect

Although the video is well made, continuously shows interesting applications and manages to show more possible functions and features with glass which keeps the attention, it could have been more entertaining as it seems to be happening in a perfect world. In most cases a perfect world is not entertaining and lacks sentiment or passion.

Emotion, sentiment or passion is missing

For a start the video is too long and there is no build up in emotion.
Being nice and perfect is not enough to entertain the audience and to be remembered too.
In order to be remembered people need a sentiment or passion: that triggers their brains more than anything else. Something that strikes them in their feelings or emotions instead of just amazement for technical achievements.
As emotions and feelings are personal they will stay longer with the viewers.
What is required is emotion, sentiment or passion in your marketing: emotional marketing even in B2B.

Apple had the emotion, passion and sentiment in this famous 1984 commercial:

What did you think about both video’s ?