August 30th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by tim
Long sales cycles are frustrating not only because it delays revenue but because they also introduce the risk that you won’t. The longer it takes to bring a prospect from the mouth of the funnel to a closed deal, the greater the likelihood is that you either won’t finalize the relationship or that it will come in at a much lower amount than you expected.
July 26th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by tim
Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.
A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.
February 18th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by tim
If the sales cycle were kept to less than 90 days, everything would be so much simpler. Sales professionals would be able to manage their pipelines to their quarterly revenue objectives and make the decisions necessary to maximize the company’s results and their own. But, those days are long gone. This has led to a myopic perspective, in which leads that aren’t expected to close quickly are cast aside.
The result is an unfortunate dynamic, in which sales professionals are left scrambling for “hot leads” constantly. If they were to allocate some of their time for investment in lead cultivation, they would soon have a robust ongoing pipeline, allowing them to nurture every account and maximize the value of every opportunity.
The opportunity that many sales professionals miss — even purposefully skip — is substantial. Imagine how many leads are cast aside in favor of the needle-in-a-haystack that is ready to make a purchase almost immediately. These are next quarter’s hot leads — or they’ll get hot the quarter after that. In disregarding these leads now, the sales professional could be giving the opportunity to a competitor when the prospect is ready to buy.
February 16th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by tim
Before the ubiquity of information, prospects were able to get rid of the sales team with the simple demand: “Get me something in writing.” The sales professional, meanwhile, would guard information carefully, letting it slip out incrementally throughout the sales cycle, rewarding the prospect for moving each step closer to a sale. With websites, blogs and message boards available for virtually every topic imaginable, this doesn’t work any more. Most information is already out there.
Rather than give up and assume that the prospect has access to everything, however, there is still room for the controlled release of value-added information; it just has to be managed differently.
Don’t withhold information. That will lead a prospect to look elsewhere, and possibly end up in the arms of a competitor. Point your prospect to your blog, website, case studies and other information pieces — after all, this is why you’ve invested in them. But, make sure your sales professionals are equipped with additional insights — tailored to the prospect — that can be unveiled at each step in the sales cycle. This is where your marketing analytics become incredibly important.
A white paper cannot address a specific prospect’s specific pain points. That’s the domain of the sales force.
January 29th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services, Strategy by tim
Webinar: February 4, 2010, 12:30 to 1:15 PM EST
Prospecting for today isn’t good enough. Focus too much on the near term, and you’ll find yourself in a constant scramble for leads. Break the cycle now, and cultivate leads for the future. You’ll develop a pipeline for the future and gain a platform for strong, consistent growth. Don’t chase leads… cultivate them.
Join enter:marketing for this webinar to learn how you can cultivate your leads!
January 28th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services, Strategy by tim
There is no shortage of IT marketing agencies on the market that would be thrilled to have you as a client. You get calls regularly, have listened to countless pitches and reviewed what feels like a never-ending stack of presentations on demand generation. So, how do you choose? If you have a partner in place, how do you evaluate its effectiveness?
The most important aspect of your relationship, of course, is the result generated. You are looking for a return on your marketing investment, and sluggish demand generation is probably an indicator that you need to take a closer look at your IT marketing agency. And, strong results may be effective now, but you need to think toward the future — is your agency equipped to help you grow and mature?
To help you answer these questions, you’ll find below five characteristics of an
optimal IT marketing partner. Take a look to get a sense of what you are receiving
from your current relationship.
December 28th, 2009 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by tim
I hear the following from clients a lot:
Unfortunately, these are tactics in search of an objective. When these requests are delivered in full, those who requested it tend not to be happy with the effect it has on there bottom line. Why? They didn’t really want what the asked for. The need they don’t state – but which is most important – is almost universally, “I want sales growth.”
Start the demand generation and cultivation process with sales and marketing planning. First, determine your sales and marketing objectives at as granular a level as possible then, build and execute a plan that maximizes the value of your marketing investment for short-term opportunities and long-term growth. This may include events, social media and other tactics, but these activities aren’t the goals. Rather, success is measured by high-quality opportunities and top-line growth.
Ask for what you want is the first step to getting what you want. Demand “a marketing and business development plan that has immediate and long term sales strategy at its core and that can be 100 percent transparently tracked and managed so we can build our business in the direction we desire” from your marketing partner, department or from yourself. That’s a much better request than “I want a lead.”
December 7th, 2009 - Posted in General by tim
Prospecting for today isn’t good enough. Don’t get me wrong: if your near-term pipeline is empty, you need to fill it quickly. But, if this is your constant focus, it will become your constant problem. You’ll wind up spending all your time chasing leads, overpaying for them and suffering lower close rates. Why? You’ll be working against the clock constantly.
Breaking this cycle is the key to consistent growth … and keeping your sanity. You want leads for today, and you want a pipeline of opportunities that will mature at different points in the future – for example, three months, six months or a year from now.
Change the way you approach marketing, and this steady stream of leads becomes pretty easy to attain.
