At the recent Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO of Selling Power told the attendees “How can you build bridges between sales and marketing? Buy them a cold beer!”  Gerhard said to me “The audience LOVED it.”

Gerhard Gschwandtner

In this really fun and exciting show featuring Gerhard (@gerhard20) with Jeff Ogden, President of Find New Customers (@fearlesscomp), you’ll learn why deep understanding of buyers is so critical and why companies need to create buyer personas.  Why these insights are so critical in your sales efforts so that you can “fish where the fish are.”

You’ll also learn why your salespeople need fewer leads and why sending sales into battle with a pocket-k’nife is a really bad idea.  In fact, you’ll hear an interesting story of how a salesperson can answer a buyer question on an iPad. Don’t miss it!

Gerhard says “Marketers flock together, but Sales are eagles and fly alone.”  What can we do about that? You will also learn why sales enablement does not belong in Sales or Marketing – it belongs in both. Finally, learn why every company needs a best-practices sales lead generation program.

And the big take-away from the show is this:. How to align sales and marketing? It’s simple. Take the other to lunch, have a frank conversation, and down a few cold ones. It’s all about people. Yes, beer works.

What do you think of this show? We love to read comments and appreciate those who share our updates on social media.

This blog recommends the great WordPress hosting of WPEngine. Get an awesome offer of two free months here.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV, where he interviews the world’s smartest business leaders.

To schedule a time with Jeff Ogden, click here

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips here

The post Sales and Marketing Co-Creation – The Power of a Cold Beer to Break Down Walls appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

For a related post, see “CMOs Must Learn to Walk in the Shoes of Buyers Today” Also wish to address this comment from Matthew.

The advice is good but I think it does not go deep enough. Most people do not produce enough content because they do not know how to create “engaging content”. Could be that they are internally editing or have pre-conceived (over corporatized) notions about what is effective/allowable.

I start with the mantra – Educate or Entertain.. better yet.. Educate and Entertain.

Perhaps some hints/examples of companies/entrepreneurs effectively doing this – without astronomical budgets.”

To Matthew’s point –  How does one go about creating content that educates and entertains, without first developing deep insights on your buyers?  Remember that we need to educate and entertain THE BUYER.  Only truly knowing your audience enables you to create content that is both educational and entertaining.  Hence, the pressing need for good personas.

Here are some of the key insights on buyer personas I learned in the Buyer Persona Master Class. I share them with you so you can learn why good personas are so important to your business. Buyer personas are interviews conducted by trained experts with decision makers in deals you won and deals you lost.

The goal of buyer personas is to gain useful insights to drive marketing results. For instance, why do some start to solve their problem and why do others simply learn to live with the pain? That is the conundrum of most BtoB sellers today – they cannot answer that question.

The insights gained from buyer personas need to collated and collected using best practices templates and tools. Done properly, this documentation is invaluable in content marketing, lead nurturing, sales enablement and other areas. If the buyer says she selected an offering because it was “easy to use,” trained professionals know to ask follow-up questions on what Ease of Use means to them. Pros know not to accept answers at face value.

Buyer Personas also help you document the language and words used by buyers in the buying journey. Done properly, they help Sales engage with qualified buyers.

Top marketing executives like VPs of Marketing and Chief Marketing Officers also benefit, because best-practices buyer personas help them quantify the messaging strategy and marketing criteria in order to get support for budget requests. You should also only focus on characteristics that tell you how to persuade the buyer.  Demographics, like age and college education are not all that important (however this is what most of the so called experts do.)

What do you think? Did you know that the award-winning marketing expert, Jeff Ogden, is trained in Buyer Personas by the Buyer Persona Institute?

This blog recommends the great WordPress hosting of WPEngine. Get an awesome offer of two free months here.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV.

To schedule a time with me, click here You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips here

The post The Critical Importance of Buyer Personas in B2B Marketing Today appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

This blog is powered by WPEngine. Your blog should be too!

The single most important factor for your blog results is this – SPEED. Both for SEO and real life customers.

“You have just one second to impress a visitor. Make that second count.”  - The Petersen Media Group.

When the Google spider stops by for a visit, it checks how fast your site is. Too slow and BAM you are dinged and  your search rankings drop. So if you want SEO results, get speed.

And when prospective customers stop by your blog, and it hangs up and does not respond, it is “Adios Amigo.” They are gone.

This is why site speed is of critical importance to you and your business results. Both Google SEO and your prospective customers want speed – and the more, the better,

Making the Move to WPEngine

Early in 2013, our blog developer, Jesse Petersen of the Petersen Media Group, ported our blog from the former host to WPEngine. Jesse could not stop raving about how much the site performance had improved since it was moved to WPEngine. As a result, the number one source of traffic today is search engines.

To learn more about the value to you of WPEngine, watch this video and then please visit our WPEngine page.

This blog recommends the great WordPress hosting of WPEngine. Get an awesome offer of two free months here.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV.

To schedule a time with the award-winning marketing expert Jeff Ogden, click here

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips here

The post The Need for Speed – Ranking in Google with SEO and Engaging an Audience appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

To all the dads and grandfathers, I wish you all the best.

I’m also thrilled to be the father of three wonderful boys:

1. Matt – now 20 and entering his junior year at University of Delaware.
2. Kevin – soon to turn 17 and entering his senior year of high school.
3. Tim – heading to high school in the Fall.

Are you doing anything special to celebrate Father’s Day? Please let us know in the comments.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV.  And if you want a great white paper on B2B demand generation, check out How to Find New Customers – just fill out the form on the top right.

You can schedule your free one hour marketing review here.

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips here.

The post Happy Father’s Day appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

Undoubtedly, many of you don’t tune into FearlessCompeitor.com, the blog of the sales lead generation company, Find New Customers, each and every day – so you missed some great posts.  So on Saturday’s we share highlights from the week’s best posts, and we hope you enjoy them.  We also did an experiment this week, moving to two posts per day to see how much traffic increases. We’ll share our data when we get it.

How to Turn a White Paper into a Content Marketing Machine

This is one of our most popular posts ever!  Everyone wants more great content to feed their sales lead generation programs. The tips in this post definitely struck a nerve. Hope you like it too.

Marketing Made Simple TV offers sponsors more value than ever!

One of the main reasons we’ve had trouble hanging onto show sponsors was our inability to deliver the number of marketing qualified leads that sponsors want. That problem is ended forever. We now deliver as many marketing qualified leads as the sponsor desires (and can afford).  We could not be more excited to re-introduce Marketing Made Simple TV to companies who sell to top sales and marketing leaders.

Hire Jeff Ogden of Marketing Made Simple TV fame for your executive interviews

This qualifies as a Homer Dooh!  As the host of Marketing Made Simple TV, I’ve interviewed famous business leaders hundreds of times.  And I figured out how to do Calls to Action and syndicate a show.  So when Young and Rubicam had a 90th birthday party in New York City and they needed someone to interview David Sable, their Global CEO, they called Jeff Ogden.  Why not interview YOUR top executives too?

5 Tips to Get SEO Results from Your WordPress Blog

Since this blog does very well in Search Marketing, I thought it helpful to share some of our tricks and techniques to rank well, in hopes that it help you too.

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates People – from Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink, the New York Times best-selling author, was a recent guest on my popular syndicated TV show, Marketing Made Simple TV. In this video, he shares surprising insights into what really motivate people.  It’s not money, by the way, unless money is too low.

What do you think of our weekly summary post? Is it helpful or not? We love comments and those who share on social media.

This blog recommends the great WordPress hosting of WPEngine. Get an awesome offer of two free months here.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV. Jeff also hold a degree in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

Want to pick the brain of an award-winning marketing expert? To schedule a time with me, click here You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips from Find New Customers here.

The post Highlights of This Week’s Best Posts appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

“Quality is of critical importance in Marketing Made Simple TV. This is of even more critical importance because we are talking to prospective new show sponsors.”

“Who are you and what do you do?”

That’s the famed opening question in every Marketing Made Simple TV show.  However, it was coming out as:

“Who are you and…”

The speaker lines have been getting cut off. Our show platform, Watchitoo, is actively working with their developers to research and fix the bug.

Our viewers and sponsors expect quality. The show is on hold till the bug is fixed.

The post Marketing Made Simple TV goes on hiatus appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

Each day I hear the drumbeat…Align Sales and Marketing for revenue results. One problem: The message is wrong and is not working. Marketing and Sales are as far apart as ever in most firms. At a client of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers clients the marketing team complained about the lack of cooperation from sales.

In the book at left, Chip and Dan Heath share insights on how to effect change when change is hard – like aligning two very different groups in your company.

The Rider and the Elephant

They feel the tension between emotions and rational thought is illustrated by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt in the book The Happiness Hypothesis where he introduces the analogy of a Rider on an elephant. It looks like the Rider is in charge, tugging on the reins, but when the massive elephant choose his own agenda, there is nothing the Rider can do. The six-ton elephant always gets his way.

In this analogy, the Rider is your conscious effort – willpower, rational thought. The elephant is your emotional and instinctive side.

Your elephant has overpowered your Rider anytime you slept in, over-ate, skipped the gym, said something you regretted, refused to speak up in a meeting, or hit the “snooze” button repeatedly. The elephant thinks short-term – looking for instant gratification. But the elephant is also emotion – love, compassion, sympathy and loyalty. Ironically, the elephant is the one that gets big things done.

To make change happen, you must appeal to both the Rider AND the elephant.  The Rider provides planning and direction, while the elephant provides energy. If you reach Riders only, the listeners have understanding but not motivation. If they reach elephants, but not Riders, they have passion without direction. What most blame on people is a process problem.

Align Sales and Marketing is a message that is squarely directed at Riders. It makes sense. But there is no emotion in it. And it is not specific. It does not give instructions. This is why the drumbeat of “Align Sales and Marketing” accomplishes nothing.

Illustrating the power of the Elephant with Work Gloves

The power of this approach was illustrated by a worker named Jon at a large manufacturing company. Jon believed his company was wasting vast sums of money due to poor purchasing practices. So what did Jon do? Did he create a PowerPoint presentation for his management? No. He knew they would not believe him. He needed a way to illustrate the problem.

With the help of an intern, he collected the work gloves purchased worldwide by his firm. The company used many suppliers and prices were all over the map. He collected these gloves and carefully cataloged them with prices and vendors.

Jon piled all the gloves on a conference room table and called in his management team. He explained that all these gloves were purchased by the firm, but there was no consistency. Here’s how he recalled the scene:

“What they saw was a large expensive table, normally clean or with a few papers, now stacked high with gloves. Each of our executives stared at this display for a minute. Then each said something like “We really buy all these different gloves?” Well, as a matter of fact, we do. “Really?” Yes, really. Then they walked around the table…They could see the prices. They looked at two gloves that looked exactly alike, yet one was marked $3.22 and the other $10.55. It’s a rare event when these people have nothing to say. But that day, they just stood with their mouths gaping.”

The gloves exhibit soon became a traveling road show, visiting dozens of plants. Soon Jon had the mandate he needed. The company changed its purchasing policies and saved millions of dollars.

In this story, Jon appealed not to just the Rider – with cold, hard facts. Instead, he appealed to the elephant – shocking them with the visual display of purchasing inefficiencies.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Sales/Marketing Alignment problem. It appeals only to the Rider. There is no emotional appeal whatsoever.

Another key idea from the book is the idea of specificity. Eat healthy is vague.

• Do I stop eating meat?
• What about in a restaurant?
• Is three meals a day best or do I eat more frequently?

But in the book they illustrate this problem by discussing the massive amount of fat consumed from milk. Skim or 1% milk would greatly reduce the fat consumed, but people use whatever they find in their refrigerator. So we really have a purchasing problem. We need the shopper to reach for skim or 1% milk when she shops.

Changing how people purchase milk using the Elephant

The emotional elephant was addressed by the graphic display of a clear tube filled with fat. It was explained that this was the excess fat in a half-gallon of whole milk.

For two weeks, the researchers ran spots on local media in Virginia. The campaign was punchy and specific. Looking at 8 stores, they found that the marketing share of low-fat milk jumped from 18% to 41%, eventually settling at 35%.

A key point here is specificity. If you want people to change, don’t say “act healthier.” Instead say “Next time you’re in the dairy aisle, reach for a jug of 1% milk rather than whole milk.” Tell them exactly what they need to do.

(Please note that “Align Sales and Marketing” sounds just like “Eat Healthier.”)

The authors share a basic three part framework for change:

1. Direct the rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. Make your directions explicit and clear. “Align sales and marketing” is not explicit and clear.
2. Motivate the elephant. What looks like laziness of often exhaustion. The rider cannot get his way by force (will-power) for long. You must engage people’s emotional side.
3. Shape the path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. Shaping the path is addressing the overall process. Maybe sales and marketing seem to be at odds, but if you can design processes to help them, engage you are shaping the path.

What do you think? How do you think we can add an emotional (elephant) appeal to the Marketing/Sales Alignment problem? How can we be specific (and direct the Rider?)

This blog recommends the great WordPress hosting of WPEngine. Get an awesome offer of two free months here.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV. Jeff also hold a degree in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

Want to pick the brain of an award-winning marketing expert? To schedule a time with me, click here

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips from Find New Customers here.

The post Aligning Sales and Marketing in Sales Lead Generation – Why It’s Not Working and What to Do About It appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

You should know today that you need a LOT of content.  So what do you do with that white paper? What if you had a comprehensive content marketing program instead? How?

To illustrate, take one of those white papers and:

1. Shoot a video interview of the author, discussing key points from the white paper (post this video to YouTube)
2. Split out the audio from the interview and turn it into a podcast (post to iTunes)
3. Develop a brief narrated introduction to the white paper in PowerPoint (post to SlideShare and myBrainshark.com)
4. Commission a transcript of the audio. Sit down with a highlighter and flag key passages. (Turn those into 3-4 blog articles.)

Now your one white paper turned into 7 or 8 pieces of quality marketing content, which will fuel your sales lead generation program and populate your lead nurturing and sales enablement programs too.

And if you are struggling to create engaging content, focus instead on gaining real insights on your buyers. The most engaging content is personal. Check out our Buyer Persona service.

This blog is powered by WPEngine – the best WordPress hosting on the planet. You can get a great offer on WPEngine here.

What do you think? Do you have anything to add or suggest anything I got wrong? We love to read your comments and appreciate those who share our blog posts on social media.

Thanks too, @buyerzone Fearless Competitor named top B2B Blog of 2012!

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV.  And if you want a great white paper on B2B demand generation, check out How to Find New Customers – just fill out the form on the top right.

You can schedule your free one hour marketing review here.

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips here.

This blog recommends the great WordPress hosting of WPEngine. Get an awesome offer of two free months here.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV. Jeff also hold a degree in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

Want to pick the brain of an award-winning marketing expert? To schedule a time with me, click here

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips from Find New Customers here.

The post How to Turn a White Paper into a Content Marketing Machine appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

Brian Solis

In this Marketing Made Simple TV show (click the button in lower right for full screen), noted thought leader and futurist Brian Solis sits down with show host Jeff Ogden for an interesting discussion on the future of business in this fast-changing world. Brian is also author of the new book, What’s the Future of Business?”

In this show, you’ll learn:

1. Why experiences matter to your business
2. How the future of business comes down to shared experiences
3. Why today’s designs (and thinking) are failing.

There’s also a great offer in the show. Just click the Yes! button to get the first two chapters of the new book for free.

Marketing Made Simple TV “TV on the Web” is a weekly show from the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. Our Producer and Director is Craig Yaris of Social Ribbit. It’s also syndicated broadly across the web and is supported by our show sponsors.

Our new and relaunched Marketing Made Simple TV show is superb at creating marketing qualified leads for our sponsors. To learn more, visit Marketing Made Simple TV sponsor page.

The post What’s the Future of Business? – @briansolis on Marketing Made Simple TV appeared first on Fearless Competitor.

You need a good sales lead generation program to create quality sales leads.

Jeff Ogden, author of The Definitive Guide to B2B Demand Generation – How to Find New Customers is looking for companies that exhibit this problem.  With a lack of qualified sales leads, you need to diagnose the problem.

Perhaps you purchased software such as Eloqua, Marketo, Act-On or Hubspot, and are not yet seeing the kind of results you would like. After all, it takes a lot more than software to entice prospective buyers to gladly hand over their email addresses. You need to grow your marketing database, hand the hot leads off to Sales, nurture those sales leads not yet ready to buy, and watch their behaviors to identify buying behaviors – so the sales leads are nice and warm when they go to Sales.

As an award-winning marketing expert, Jeff Ogden, President of the sales lead generation firm Find New Customers is ready and willing to help you. A list of our marketing awards is below.

Want to book a meeting to discuss your personal situation?  To schedule a time with me, click here

This blog recommends the great WordPress hosting of WPEngine. Get an awesome offer of two free months here.

The post Top B2B Marketing Expert Looking for Companies with a Problem with Sales Leads appeared first on Fearless Competitor.