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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.)

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.

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Hey, want to know the easiest way to bring in new customers? Directly target their needs by providing resources and services to help them with their projects. Okay, that’s consultative sales 101.

The challenge is, most of high cost sales resources are spent trying to figure out what those needs are and when these resources should be spent on addressing needs. Luckily, today’s marketing capabilities have the power to identify decision makers and their needs very efficiently. Leveraging this information to target buyer needs with value-added resources is a powerful path to net-new customers.

IT buyers are educated, leverage online resources and are always seeking out information. They have the ability and desire to be in control of gaining information for their projects. This is the opportunity. Marketing programs should be designed to connect with these buyers, collect sales intelligence with what they need and lead them into effective sales engagements.

This approach has awesome power in eliminating wasted time for both the sales person and the prospect.  The prospect immediately views the company as a company they want to work with because of their added value and expertise.

It was back in 1991 when the famous Bill Swerski’s Superfans skit aired on Saturday Night Live. Good ole’ Chris Farley sporting Chicago Bears gear and a memorable accent expressing how delicious Chicago’s “Saasage” is. Marketing is a whole new ball game today than it was twenty years ago. We still connect with basic marketing methods such as direct mail, but can they actually be more effective now that social media has created continuous exposure of marketing advertisements? Social media is clearly an effective method of marketing, but if you could actually place a piece of direct mail in the hands of your target market, wouldn’t that be ideal? We make that happen. The first step is becoming a Superfan of our clients.

When you take on the role of “Superfan” there is a responsibility to uphold. As an IT marketing company, we commit to being a Superfan of each one of our clients. Putting ourselves in our clients’ shoes allows us to dig deeply into exactly what their customers are looking for and how we can generate individualized and focused campaigns to reach those customers. More specifically, we create effective questions to ask our clients’ customers using tailored, attention-getting strategies to reach net-new leads. We hit them with a 1-2 punch. First, we line up a marketing program that will have a large number of target customers holding in their hands a marketing piece with information that draws the customer to an online survey. The second punch comes after they answer a few questions – Do you have a problem with XYZ? Yes? BAM! Here’s a solution! Let’s set up a call to discuss.

Yes, it takes the dedication of a client Superfan to drive success. No, we have not attempted to obtain the Chicago Bears as a client…yet.

Oh, yeah…Da Bears!

Have you ever written an email and wondered “What should the subject line be?” then proceeded to think about different options before realizing you just wasted way too long thinking about a subject line. There is a reason that Facebook is doing away with subject lines all together- they aren’t necessary, but when used correctly, they can be an effective advantage.

The one word that grabs a person’s attention, either verbally or written, more so than any other word is simply their first name. So use it. Having written thousands of emails, no email gets a higher response rate than one that starts with the person’s first name. You can add another few words after the name, however. They too should be action words that are relevant to the email and make the person want to read it. As a broad example, the subject line “Name- quick question” has garnered the most immediate responses.

In today’s world, the smart phone has become a part of the work place, so your emails should be easy to read on it! If someone is skimming down their emails while walking down the street, or sitting in a meeting, the subject line must pop out. Personal and to the point. Its that simple.

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.

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Increasing your company’s revenue isn’t enough. Strong growth on the top line sometimes comes with heavy sales expenses, which erodes your profits, ultimately delivering little value for your efforts. Profitable growth on the other hand, is crucial to your ongoing success, and it can be quite difficult to attain. You can protect your margins (and even widen them) by streamlining your approach to marketing and generating revenue at a lower cost. By turning marketing into an ongoing activity, you can generate higher revenue and profits simultaneously.

Think about your last big client pursuit. Your sales team invested heavily in it. In addition to hard costs around travel, entertainment and demonstrations, the team spent a considerable amount of time on appointments, understanding pain points and developing a proposal. Your technology professionals, no doubt, contributed heavily to the effort, increasing your sales costs further. And, you had all those marketing costs up front just to get the lead. If you started from scratch, you probably invested a substantial amount in bringing that lead in the door.

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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.

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How the handoff from marketing to sales occurs can make a difference in deal size … not to mention whether the sales force can close at all. Yet, the process doesn’t always work as seamlessly as it should. There are sales team needs that aren’t always communicated to the marketing department, and the marketing department often has access to information that it can’t effectively provide to the sales team. The result, of course, is a missed opportunity for revenue growth.

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Sometimes it seems like IT sales professionals treat a full lead pipeline as a security blanket. They like to know it’s there … but they don’t do anything with it. The sense is that just having lead available means the future is secure. After all, they can pursue them anytime they want, right? Unfortunately, leads don’t get better with age – especially the hot ones. Eventually, someone will meet a prospect’s needs, taking away the near-term opportunity and giving another company the chance to turn it into a long-lasting relationship. In the end, a full pipeline actually provides little security, if it isn’t approached with swift action.

Of course, there are other reasons why leads are left dormant. Some sales professionals prefer to chase leads that have big tickets, not recognizing that a small client now can become a big one later. And, every rep has his or her favorite accounts, which provide a consistent flow of revenue with little opportunity for growth. In some cases, fear is involved: nobody wants to chase an opportunity and lose.

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