B2B Conversations Now

I just read an interesting post by Stephanie Tilton at Savvy B2B Marketing titled IT Pros Don’t Want to Register for Your White Paper. It dovetails into a recent post I wrote about the decreasing value of white papers as they become more ubiquitous. White papers still remain popular because they are a great source of information, they are just becoming less powerful as a lead conversion tool. As you read the article summary, ask yourself if price papers could augment white papers for B2B lead conversion.

Stephanie interviewed Jay Hallberg, VP of Marketing of Spiceworks. Spiceworks surveyed some of their 800,000 Small-Medium Business Information Technology users and found the following:

• 75% don’t sign up for white papers that require registration.
• Those that do share their information obviously don’t mind doing so, but they DO mind a pesky vendor that calls them 10 times over the next 30 days.
• IT pros want to reach out to the vendor on their terms via their preferred channel, e.g. phone, email, or chat.

For those vendors that persist in using white papers as a lead generation tool, the article suggests:

• Write objective, educational papers, not product pitches.
• Show your expertise.
• Let people comment on your white papers, provide feedback, and rate them. This will help you produce better material of more value to the prospect.
• Integrate social media and let your authors and product experts have a conversation with prospects. In other words, create a conversation as opposed to using white papers as a way to bait and hook people. The white paper should be part of an integrated approach that helps start a conversation, move it along, or close it.

As resistance to white paper registration increases, it will be interesting to see how B2B marketers adapt to boost lead conversion.

Tags: B2B Marketing, Lead Conversion, Lead Generation // 3 Comments »

While most B2B marketers are familiar with using white papers for lead generation, they may not have heard the term price paper™. A price paper is a document that helps prospective customers with budgetary information about complex products and services. For the B2B marketer, it is a valuable document that prospects want and can be used as a strong offer to motivate them to provide their contact information (lead conversion).

The above diagram shows two key ingredients for a strong B2B offer: Value and Scarcity.

[Read more →]

Tags: B2B Marketing, Lead Conversion, Lead Generation, Social Media // 1 Comment »

A new year always brings with it fresh ideas. Many reflect on the past year and yearn to make a career change. I was thinking of how B2B Marketers might pursue that change and the thought led to ask “what does a B2B marketing job description look like”?

I recently wrote a short white paper called “How B2B marketers became responsible for everything, including sales, and how to fix it”. Taking that concept as a starting point, I thought it might be interesting to come up with several B2B marketing job descriptions, each from a different point of view.

B2B Marketing Job Description 1 (from the B2B marketer’s point of view)

“The ideal candidate will be responsible for all marketing efforts including, but not limited to, industry direction, market share analysis, product vision, service offerings, corporate branding, community involvement, social media engagement, advertising placement, blog writing, video producing, podcast recording, campaign management, suspect capturing, prospect nurturing, sales hand-off, funnel tracking, case study development, closing material creation and, finally, ROI measurement.”

B2B Marketing Job Description 2 (from a VP of Sales point of view)

“The ideal candidate will surface new sales opportunities so we can close, close, close.”

B2B Marketing Job Description 3 (from a CEOs point of view)

“The ideal candidate will be able to quantify the marketing return on investment (MROI) and make me proud to be the head of the company.”

Put yourself in their shoes

What’s interesting about this exercise is that the C-suite paints in broad strokes while marketers tend to live in the details. Maybe to land that next new marketing job it makes sense to simplify your approach and focus on what those who are hiring are looking for.

Good luck in the new year!

Write your own description, I’d love to hear what you think.

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Conversion, Social Media // Add Comment »

Ask business executives about 2009 and many will answer that it was a rough ride. Finding new customers with active projects, much less with budgets, was tough.

However, some actually increased revenues by seeking new approaches to finding customers. Many realized that what potential customers need in a tight market is a way to determine budget fit. Using the psychology of self-service pricing, many B2B companies were able to boost their lead conversion rates by 250-300% and win new business.

Federal Appliance, a Dell EqualLogic reseller, uses a blog www.4equalllogic.com for technical users to drive traffic and then a self-service pricing offer to convert prospects. For the year ended December 31, 2009, Federal Appliance converted 3,219 website visitors with 2,323 being “sales ready”; that’s a 72% ratio.

Another emerging technology company, GreenBytes, specializes in inline deduplication appliances. Primary dedupe products are the next generation of products following on the heals of the already successful backup deduplication vendors like Exagrid, and DataDomain. In the 60 days that GreenBytes has been testing the effectiveness of self-service pricing they have seen a 71% ratio of sales ready leads.

As more and more technology vendors chase fewer customers we may see a rocky first half of 2010. For some that think beyond the traditional “whitepaper” and “free trial” offers and finally give self-service pricing a try, 2010 could be a stellar year.

Tags: B2B Marketing // Add Comment »

I just read yet another blog post about how hard it is to justify efforts spent on social media. The post was, of course, followed by many others comforting the poster that they knew how he felt. “There’s just no way to make the C-suite understand the value of the influence social media creates” one responder said. I must have heard a dozen prominent speakers at a recent Social Media Summit chime in with the same “poor us, we can’t quantify social media ROI…if only our bosses were smarter and could see how valuable it is.”

It’s hogwash and I’m tired of it.

The next time anyone asks you about Social Media ROI, simply say “Social Media is only part of our marketing effort. Our combined marketing campaigns, including social media, create a marketing funnel that is 5 times our annual revenue.”

Don’t believe me? Read Are B2B Marketers Sabotaging Their Own Success?

Happy Holidays! Now if you get “the” question during one of those wild office parties, you’ll know what to say!

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Conversion, Social Media // Add Comment »

I’ve been reading and hearing a lot recently about using sales triggers to find new customers. Until I really took the time to dig into Trigger Event Selling, I thought it was just a new sales fad that would lead to yet another sales training book. I was wrong.

What is Trigger Event Selling?

The best description of trigger event selling I’ve seen is from Craig Elias at Shift Selling. Craig states that trigger selling is “getting in front of the right person at EXACTLY THE RIGHT TIME”. The process usually involves automated tools that scour the internet for fresh news about changes at prospective client companies.
[Read more →]

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I’ve spent 20 years in the data storage/data backup industry. It’s not the most exciting business, but every now and then a new, disruptive player enters the space and catches the competition flat footed.

GreenBytes, Inc. (Ashaway, RI) has hit the ground running in what experts say is the next big wave in data deduplication technology - primary data de-duplication. Unlike DataDomain, Quantum and Exagrid that focus on deduplication for backup processes, GreenBytes has optimized its turnkey appliances to handle primary data.

The reason most dedup companies haven’t gone after the primary (inline deduplication) market is simple; most deduplication involves latency and latency is evil in I/O bound systems. The founders at GreenBytes have cracked the code on eliminating the latency problem and are moving full steam ahead to offer serious $/GB value for data hungry applications.

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In my last post Before Nurturing a New B2B Lead, Ask the Golden Question we talked about asking a compelling question for new B2B leads before you send the lead down the nurturing path. Our intent is to try to filter high-quality prospects and get them to the sales team for direct interaction.

For those who have not read the post, here was where we left off:

The Golden Question

“Mr./Ms.,
My name is YYY and I approved your request for ZZZ. This is a courtesy follow-up to make sure you received it. If you have not received it, please check your spam filter.

May I ask you one question? Have you defined the requirements for your XYZ project, or no? For future reference, we have compiled a “Top 20 Customer Requirements List” from our customers and would be happy to share it with you.

Thank you for your interest in WWW.

YYY”

At the end of the post (after asking the Golden question) I mentioned that you should be prepared to send a “Top 20 Customer Requirements” document to help set the decision criteria. I offered to provide an example document and so many people took me up on it that I thought I would simply lay it out here and provide you a real sample.
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Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Conversion, Lead Generation // Add Comment »

This is a follow-up post to Converting [social media] Conversations and addresses what to do when in fact you get that new lead. Having attended the recent Marketing Sherpa conference in Boston, my first thought is “push the new lead into the lead management system for nurturing”.

The process makes sense but what should the FIRST interaction with this new lead look like? Should it be a courtesy “thank you and here’s more about our products” or should it be more hard hitting and response provoking. As a B2B sales person for 15 years, I prefer the response provoking approach. Here’s why: The only thing worse than sending a non-qualified lead to sales is not passing one and finding out 6 months later that the lead turned into a customer…for your competition. Therein lies the dilemma for the modern marketer. How do you weed the good ones out quickly?

Ask the Golden Question
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Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Conversion, Lead Generation // 1 Comment »

The early word from MarketingSherpa West (San Fran) is that B2B lead conversion was a hot topic. As sponsors this year at both the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit and Inbound Marketing Summit (Boston only), we thought we’d get in on the conversion discussion, with a sales ownership twist.

Below is a slideshare deck outlining a process to “Convert the Conversations“. With Social Media becoming an increasingly potent generator of inbound web traffic, B2B marketers must find ways to filter the stream and motivate high-quality visitors to engage.
[Read more →]

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Conversion, Lead Generation // 1 Comment »