blog

I manage a group of people whose roles and responsibilities have changed often and dramatically over the past two years. Responding to changes in our approach, in our products, and in the market we work in, the team looks very different now than it did in 2009.

Sound familiar?

As economic uncertainty has become the new normal globally, every company has had to reconfigure or face extinction.  Simply “good enough” is no longer good enough.  Luckily, at a small, growing company like enter:marketing, change is the name of the game.

When I first joined enter:marketing, enter:techconnect, the team I head up, was only two guys and a pair of phones.  We were working out how telemarketing could be leveraged most effectively in our direct mail campaigns.  A few months after, we were sorting out the finer details of how techconnect could best usher meetings to our clients all the way from qualifying to purchasing.  Now two years later, the team is building lists, qualifying prospects, managing events, and compiling reports.  And we tweak our processes every day.

The key is to never consider your system a finished product.  The needs of your market are never static, so why ever settle on just one approach?  By staying open to new ideas and constantly critiquing our results, techconnect keeps improving.  The economy will some day be better, but a core practice of tireless invention and self-improvement brings results no matter what the economic climate.

If you are still measuring your marketing value on a cost per lead or cost per meeting basis, you are not taking advantage of the services and technology available to make true business-relevant marketing decisions.

When you go into a marketing activity, in the least, start with a complete understanding of the following data points:

• Average Opportunity Value
• Average Closed Sales Rate
• Average Sale Value

Start there.

Then figure out how much you are willing to spend to drive one opportunity. Think 10X at least (this is a very rudimentary equation but for illustration purposes let’s go with it). So if your average opportunity is $100k, you should be willing to spend $10k. Then figure out what process will require, wait for it, the LEAST amount of meetings/leads to identify one opportunity. I know, I know. “But Tim,” you say, “that makes my cost per meeting and cost per lead go up!” Yes. Yes it does. Ask your sales team what they’d rather do, go on 10 meetings to get one opportunity or one meeting to get one opportunity. Chase 50 leads for one opportunity or 10 (this assumes you have sales that will even bother with leads). The answer to that is obvious. And,  if they can do their part and turn opportunity into sales, and do so at a decent conversion rate, well my friend, now you are cooking with gas.

When you stop to think about it, we’re conditioned to asses marketing a little bass-akwards and alf-hassed. Break the mold, take the time to approach marketing completely, spend against opportunity and sales measurements, and start seeing real, actual, business building results. Crazy talk I know….

(Note: look for a follow-up post on the obvious-but-ignored flaw in butts-in-seats approach to event marketing.)

Let’s face it, people love anything with their name on it. People like attention, and the feeling of something personal. This statement especially holds true in marketing. Rather than receiving a broad-based direct marketing pitch in your inbox or mailbox, it is more luring to receive something that is personal with your name and information tailored to your needs and tastes.

In addition to implementing names in direct marketing efforts, another effective way to gain attention is to implement a call-to-action to visit a Personal URL, otherwise known as PURL. A PURL is a unique URL that adds a name to the URL string (example: www.website.com/JohnDoe). Who doesn’t like a URL with their name in it? It’s personal and highly intriguing.

Studies show using PURLs with pertinent messaging increases response rates over non-personalized URLs. We’ve tested this theory internally here at enter:marketing, and we find that PURLs do in fact increase response.  Driving demand via a direct marketing effort, using a PURL, and a highly targeted personal landing page helps to keep the prospect engaged. Throw in light interactivity and slick design on the landing page, and you’re golden. It’s easier than it sounds, and it works.

Conventional wisdom holds that approaching a net-net prospect is a balancing game: desire to maximize your exposure to the prospect, versus fear of turning the prospect away with a barrage of contact. It’s a tough position; there’s no one right way, since the ideal balance is different for every situation.

At techconnect, we specialize in one very common situation: after contact with a prospect has been made, but before a meeting has taken place. Many people in sales essentially view this period as a void -maybe some research into the prospect, some pre-meeting game planning, but mostly just a lot of waiting for the meeting time to roll around. The old balancing game is prominent in the mind of the salesperson: you’ve already made direct contact with the customer in securing the meeting, and the worry is that further contact before the agreed-upon meeting date would make the customer feel harassed, blowing any opportunity before you even get to meet.

Basically, I think this concern is overrated. It’s not repeated contact customers dislike, but contentless contact. Anybody would be turned off by receiving the same information over and over, but we find that sending customers new, pertinent information in advance of a meeting (say in the form of a whitepaper on their stated interest, or a background on your company, or even a simple introduction to your tech team) not only reinforces the purpose and value of the upcoming meeting to a prospect, it also conveys that you are on the ball and genuinely interested in speaking. Where there is contact between the prospect and the sales rep before the meeting time, we not only see a higher rate of meetings transacting at their first scheduled time, but also higher quality opportunities being uncovered.

Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to building a successful lead nurturing program, you must inspire trust. Along with most aspects of life, consistency is key here. But above all, it is the relevance of your message that will ultimately engage prospects in the way that is needed to cultivate an interest to sales.

Successful lead nurturing is a process. Establishing a meaningful dialog by providing valuable education and information to prospects up front is important. It’s not a sales person calling routinely to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” Rather, it is about delivering insight and solutions in a non-invasive way so that the prospect perceives your company to have a superior level of expertise in the industry.

Is your process showing prospects that you have an understanding of their specific issues? And that your company has the knowledge and expertise to solve them? When your nurture program has a single point of focus on developing trust, you will plant the seeds that will produce more honest conversations with prospects.

“A guy don’t walk on the lot lest he wants to buy..” That line has been stuck in my head ever since I heard Alec Baldwin say it in the movie Glenngary Glen Ross. Then I thought to myself a prospect does not take our surveys and answers positively if they don’t want to buy. All of the questions we ask on our surveys always have an option of “N/A” so they can choose that option 100% of the time but many of them don’t.

The sales data that gets generated should be intelligent enough to let us know where the customer is in the buying cycle. Every sales persons dream is to know if the prospect is thinking about buying. Let’s take this scenario..

MJ: How have your leads been so far?
VAR: They have been mediocre, I mean we know what type of equipment they have but no luck in knowing what they need right now.
MJ: What would you say if I can get you fully verified leads with pain points they are experiencing in their IT environment and what stage of the buying cycle they are in, what would you think of that?
VAR: Where do I sign?!

What I do everyday is produce Glenngary Glen Ross leads! I think I am going to watch that movie again this weekend.

I am sure that most people can relate to an interrupting phone or a persistent daily email solicitation. I actually received a telemarketing call during the Super Bowl for a newspaper subscription. That’s got to be a tough job. Speaking of the Super Bowl, was that a Chatter.com social networking TV add?

Being a director of business development for a leading B2B IT marketing agency, I work with leading manufacturers, distributors, and resellers in the IT space driving demand and sales opportunities. Many of these companies have limited marketing resources, technology infrastructure, and variance in their marketing approach and effectiveness. Our charter is to serve as a virtual marketing department and our focus is the scarcest resource in business today, net new customers. It’s a fast paced environment where the race to find sales leads and engagements never ends, budgets and funds are elusive, and success is measured in the short term.

In a presentation last week, I was asked by a regional reseller what I thought were the most important keys to successful demand generation marketing. It’s a great question and one that will yield a variety of answers. There is certainly a lot to consider given the volume of marketing messages prospects receive, the growing number of marketing channels available, and all the interactive media buzz. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing is more exciting than getting a hot lead – a prospect who wants to make a fast decision. Your sales costs stay low, and you turn an opportunity into revenue as quickly as possible with little effort. If only they were all that easy, right?

Of course, it rarely works that way. Most sales opportunities take some time and planning on your part in order to become revenue. For larger sales, the cycle can take quite a while to come to a conclusion, and you may have to wait a few months before you can even get started in earnest. Since some of the best opportunities you have may not be ready right away, you need to develop a lead cultivation strategy in order to keep the opportunity warm until you can engage the decision-maker in the sales process.

It’s what you do before you get started that can turn a long-term lead into your next big opportunity. Invest your time in cultivating a lead, and you’ll be the first call when it’s time to start discussing a purchase. Also, you’ll make it harder for your competitors to swoop in and steal the opportunity from you.

Read the rest of this entry »

IT solution provider sales teams are often frustrated by their pipelines. They may scramble for a month or two, trying to keep up with high demand … and then it all goes quiet. For months, there seems like little to do except work through old leads and make a few seemingly futile cold calls. Even if the numbers look good at the end of the year, the process that gets you there can be pretty frustrating.

It’s possible to smooth out the pipeline a bit – and generate more sales at the same time. All it takes is a bit of marketing planning.

Read the rest of this entry »

What are the IT marketing challenges that keep you up at night? Well, if you’re anything like other marketers in the broader B2B space, it’s generating high-quality leads – which has become more important year-over-year.

The latest survey results from MarketingSherpa reveal that 78 percent of respondents saw this as a challenge in 2010, up from 69 percent last year. A distant second was “generating a high volume of leads,” up from 35 percent last year to 44 percent this year. Concerns about marketing to a lengthening sales cycle increased slightly, from 39 percent of respondents to 41 percent of respondents.

Read the rest of this entry »