Part II of my blogpost on how to be a topnotch B2B marketer.
It’s amazing how time flies when I see how long it took to find the time to finalize the second part.
Yet it was worth waiting since I’ve been involved in 2 change projects at the same time where I could practice my previous blog and can deliver this post with 2 recent cases incorporated.
10 must do’s: (Part II, 6 -10): post with must do’s 1-5
- Build an experience sharing platform: It’s amazing to see how much information and experience stays underutilized and leaves the company with former employees. An experience sharing platform, ideally, managed my marketing is pivotal to leverage, study and optimize the best practices. Sales-marketing alignment is the immediate result. The platform consists of a small set of sales-ready deliverables which are kept up to date per segment and key-contact in the buying process of prospects and customers. Regular sales meetings with best practice sharing and assisted by marketing are the starting point. Ask your sales to send a blackberry style email with the summary of meetings (especially on pains, challenges and capabilities) and make sure marketing has access to that information in order to keep the best practice up to date.
- Facilitate market ready innovation: The information gathered during the visits by marketing (see post with must do’s 1-5) and aforementioned internal meetings will deliver a wealth of information to help inform and educate R&D and product management on market needs and what they should be capable of doing. I’m still surprised to see how R&D, product- marketing and management are limited in their view and understanding of the market because sales is translating customer needs in features themselves leading to the battle of prioritizing development on the product roadmap. On the contrary of what they think at a first glance, R&D and product marketing/management will be able to be creative and innovative to an unprecedented level because they will understand the native customer environment.
- Educate your internal customers: Increase the value of the marketing department by playing a pivotal role in all communication from and to the market. Keep the following up to date:
- win/loss reasons by calling key decision makers per deal yourself a couple of weeks after a decision has been taken. Assemble those winning and losing buying criteria per supplier;
- best practice per segment and key-contact and use it as a base platform to streamline interdepartmental communication;
- prioritised market pain/capability area’s for which the product should be upgraded.
- This will enable you to monitor proposed product upgrades and new versions in terms of competitiveness and hit-rate thanks to a better coverage of market needs.
- It will also enable you to focus your external market education to a group of prospects who are seeking your leadership.
- Implement a lead nurturing program: You main mission next to the management of the experience sharing platform deliverables and educating internal customers is to deliver ‘real’ sales ready leads. The only ROI based approach is to start communicating with your targeted market on a continuous basis with ‘role-based’ messaging. Meaning language adapted to the specific role in the company of each of the different contacts involved in the decision making process. also see: necessity of lead nurturing
- Measure and communicate: Make sure you can measure most if not all of the marketing activities. It will help you to communicate progress on all these area’s. Some of the mentioned points might be quit heavy change projects and thus will take time, patience and continuous improvement. This is the best way to ensure a large enough budget to accomplish all of the 10 must do’s.
Have fun implemeting the 10 rules to be a topnotch B2B marketer and keep me posted on experience and/or challenges.
You typically have 2 main reactions of sales reps having problems to reach their quota. They start to:
- take excessive actions on their existing opportunities. They hope or are convinced to influence the outcome and decision date. These sales reps are typically faced with a starved pipeline. They will never experience the benefits of a balanced pipeline because of this. Moreover, they risk on ruining good opportunities by their behavior.
- call on more and more potential customers. They will take massive actions on each of them willing to have a meeting. This will lead to too many unqualified prospects in the pipeline and create time shortage at the same time. It will lead to a lot of good actions on the wrong prospect and/or wrong timing.
So in other words, both actions will never deliver consistent resolution in the long run.
5 strategies to overcome typical quota issues:
- Continuously qualify your opportunities:Is this really an opportunity? Will I be able to differentiate myself. Woun’t I be used to put pressure on the preferred vendor? Do I see a lot of similarities with already won projects? Will I be able to influence the buying criteria? Is a budget available or can it be made available. Can I get in contact with most or all decision making people? All of these are examples of qualifying criteria to make sure you spend time on the right accounts.
- Reduce your sales cycle: Stop using a sales-process. Use the buying clock. Think in terms of readiness to buy and adapt your actions and time between 2 actions. Who should be your next step contact? Use a structured way to prepare yourself. Think and report based on the outcome of your next steps instead of tracking the content of the next step. Keep all DMU members synchronized on their readiness to buy. Figure out typical time delays in the buying cycle and work ahead of time to overcome them.
- Increase your actual selling time:Figure out a way to decrease your admin time. Stop writing visit reports but send bullet-based short emails to your contact. Save them in your CRM and ask for feedback in order to stay in sync with your contact. Use CRM as your central repository allowing you to self-coach and become more effective.
- Build a pro-active opportunity pipeline over time:Make sure you work with marketing to create leads early in their buying cycle. This will allow you to educate them on their specific needed capabilities and link them to your differentiation. This will put the competition on the defence. It will lower your overall time spend per opportunity and increase your hit-rate at the same time.
- Improve your hit-rate: Get to know the impact your solution has on different people. Find the link between their specific problems, needed capabilities, benefits and results. Use that knowlegde to adapt your questions, value proposition and sales pitch to each of the individual contacts. Make sure you talk to decision makers (Source of Power), people negatively impacted by not having your solution (Source of Dissatisfaction) as well as influencers. Don’t make the mistake of having the project manager as your main contact. This is another reason why you need to get in early in de buying cycle. Add strategy 2 to the equation and you will experience massive improvement in your hit-rate.
The nice thing about these 5 strategies is that they create a snowball effect if you work on all of them at the same time. Make sure you share these ideas with your colleagues and help each other to become more effective with these strategies. Get pre sales support and marketing involved and create a value chain instead of trying to do all things by yourself. After all sales has become a team-sport.
In today’s world people are using the Internet to research and get smart even before they are willing to see a sales rep.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that a B2B marketer is using all tools at his/her disposal to educate the market in the early stages of the buying cycle. Doing so, should enable you to influence your target market based on your strengths. The prospect should seek your leadership by the time they’re willing to see a sales rep.
Being top of mind and perceived as being ‘different’ requires lead nurturing in which the Internet plays an important role.
Your website needs to combine the following:
- of course the traditional features and benefits but also deliver pain-based an educational content
- explain the impact of your solution and the capabilities it will enable for the customer
- explain the problem and capabilities looked from the different impacted roles in a organization. Have a look at the Protime (HR solution) website to see an example of role-based information
- the ‘about us’ should include the value proposition to your specific targeted market
- use compelling personalized landing pages in combination with email marketing in order to attract traffic to your website.
People will stay longer on your website, visit more pages and support your queeste to be perceived as a thought leader.
2 final notes:
- Use search engine optimization in order for prospects to find your content via search engines
- Make sure you balance the goal of capturing contact information and the risk of capturing up to 75% less registrations. So ask only the ‘really’ necessary information. You should also give the basic information without registration in order to allow search engines to find your content.
More than ever, this generation experiences the world as a rafting trip rather than a rowing-contest. This makes it impossible to tackle problems one at a time. A holistic approach, adapted to the specific environment, is the best way to a lasting solution. The marketing field is no different.
I see more and more companies seeking salvation in isolated short term plan of actions. Unfortunately these will only keep them out of the danger zone for a short while. Typical examples are: searching new target markets, one-off lead generation efforts hoping to find prospects that are ready to buy. This last one is a typical returning strategy in an attempt to find the famous needle in the hay-stack (lead generation).
Furthermore, today, more than ever, we have a multitude of tools and -techniques at hand. Numerous studies, amongst others the study delivered by the Aberdeen Group , have shown that optimal ROI can only be reached by using the correct mix of tools at all times.
Let me drill down on this new method of influencing your target market based on your own strengths (LEAD-NURTURING) rather than using lead-generation as a means of attracting new business. Lead nurturing means entering into a 1:1 conversation, on a continuous basis, with decision makers in your target market. This means communicating about the pains and the possible solutions your products and services can offer to solve these pains looked at it from the viewpoint of each decision-maker. The most common channels to market for lead nurturing are: email, website, blogs, whitepapers, documentation, speeches, 3rd party articles, follow-up by phone, webinars, podcasts.
Let me emphasize the most important advantages:
- The number of qualified leads will be at least doubled
- Cost of sales will be lower because your prospects will specifically seek your strengths
- Average revenue per order will be 57% higher (see Aberdeen study)
- Salespeople will succeed in winning more deals
- Next to your product-differentiation, your sales approach will also differentiate you
- A higher ROI of your marketing investments.
- Furthermore, these methods are cheaper than traditional promotional and advertizing campaigns.
Important to note is that the ROI is directly linked to the level in which you succeed to be perceived different. In order words: be different from your competitors instead of trying to be better.
Find more info on the Perpetos website:
To close off, some practical tips:
- Adapt the content of your message to the buying mindset of your prospect (meaning: Being interested, probably needing your solution or in the process of evaluating different suppliers)
- Define your product/market combinations directly linked to your your product-differentiation
- Make sure your website is optimized with the correct web key words (Search Engine Optimization – SEO). The website content must use language for all three mental stages
- Make use of Search Engine Advertising (SEA) to attract more traffic to your website
- Initiate a company blog. This is the ideal way to communicate with your customers and prospects. Don’t communicate about your products and services
- Use personalized landing pages to your website in emails. These will allow you to get more information about the click-behavior and the interests of each individual person
A step by step implementation of the above combined with follow-up by phone and email will guarantee your ROI.
Good Luck!
The lack of communication and Sales-Marketing alignment sounds like kicking in an open door. Yet, once more, I tumbled on the same problem when investigating lead generation issues with a customer.
2 immediate problems jumped out:
- Different metrics: Marketing had a lead gen KPI and Sales a conversion KPI. Both in itself good metrics’s but meaningless if measured in a separate way.
- Sales and Marketing were using a different definition for ‘a lead’
Here are some tips to improve the lead conversion rates:
- Write a common definition (universal lead definition) for ‘a lead’ and make sure it’s known by all concerned.
- define a process describing ‘who does what’ and ‘what needs to be reported’ to one another.
- Make sure Marketing talks to Regional and Country Sales about their lead generation programs prior to decisions. This allows the creation of an integrated approach and making sure Sales will be ready with an adapted approach to be part of the process.
- Define a common dashboard to track the results and attack funnel frictions from a corporate point of view instead of departmental.
- Implement a process and reporting mechanism based on the readiness to buy, such as the buying clock™, instead of a process based on steps already taken.
- Make sure that sales is using the same buying cycle mechanism for their forecast and plan of actions. It will allow them to
- Be focused on the customer and adapt their next step accordingly, instead of following a pre-defined series of steps;
- Adapt their next step in function of buying readiness of each individual person involved in the decision making process;
- Get all their contacts synchronized avoiding them to be the reason for complications (i.e. a DMU member you didn’t meet yet who becomes a non-supporter because of some wording or content in a proposal that was send too early in the overall buying cycle);
- Avoid doing the right type of action at the wrong time and maybe the wrong contact.
The Buying-Clock is based on the mental phases a buyer is going through from happy user over admitting pain all they to buying, implementing and using a new solution. The 24 hour of a clock represents a full cycle .
Stay tuned over the next coming weeks for more sales efficiency and demand generation tips.
