blog

Are you looking at e-mail open rates as a success metric? Well, it’s time to get past that. While this measure does provide some indication of interest in your newsletter, it still doesn’t get the recipient into the sales cycle … and that’s what matters most! Of course, there is still some value to open rate, as it helps gauge interest in your message, but it’s only a first step, and you need to track the entire set of results.

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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.

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Do you spend sales appointments talking about yesterday’s news? That’s what everyone else is doing! Make your company stand out: help your clients understand what’s on the horizon. Get them set for the future, and you’ll deliver a far better ROI case — for them and for you.

The cost and return benefits associated with conventional IT solutions are inherently constrained. They are known quantities, innovation that has become standard. To provide outsized value, you need to introduce your client’s to what hasn’t become widely adopted yet, and implement technology that will keep them ahead of the game.

How does this work?

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Organic growth translates to missed opportunities. When you launch your corporate blog, don’t sit back and wait for readers to come to you … and then wait some more for them to step into your sales cycle. Instead, seek them out, and use your blog as a first step in lead qualification.

Combine direct and social media marketing, and you’ll gain a powerful demand generation tool.

Blogs do have a tendency to be discovered (i.e., to gain readers). Whether it’s through searches, a link on your website, a PR effort or tweets and status updates, traffic happens … it just happens slowly. And since high-value readers are likely to be only a small portion of your organic traffic, you could be waiting quite a bit before your social media marketing effort generates any leads. Take a proactive approach, and this changes drastically and quickly.

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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.

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The potential for social media to build your brand and drive sales is salient, but there’s more to marketing than electrons. Direct mail remains a powerful way to engage IT decision-makers and lure them into your sales cycle.

Direct mail is both effective and increasingly unexpected. E-mail inboxes fill up quickly with newsletters, pitches and white papers, making it easy for yours to get lost in the shuffle. But, a well-designed mailer with a powerfully conveyed message can pop – and it has to be touched, put on a desk and opened.

Paper isn’t easily deleted!

As you put together and execute your marketing plan, be sure to include a significant direct mail component in your mix of marketing tools. It’s another way to reach your market, and one that will make you stand out.

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Too often, we think we know the answer. We know our clients pain points. We know the solutions they need. We know how much they should budget for it. Unfortunately, what we purport to know is rarely what actually happens. Prospects may delay a purchase, alter implementation timelines or even go down an entirely different path. When this happens, IT sales professionals and implementation teams are often surprised, feeling that the change of plan came out of nowhere. If you pay attention, however, you’ll pick up cues along the way that can keep these surprises from arising.

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Generating high-quality leads is the top challenge for B2B marketers … by a mile. The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that 69 percent of respondents see this as a significant challenge. The next one — marketing to a lengthening sales cycle – came in at a distant 39 percent. Even generating a high volume of leads only attracted the attention of 35 percent of the survey’s respondents. Competing for leads across multiple media environments ranked last at 27 percent.

What does this mean for you?

Quality matters. Period. The top priority for solution providers needs to be lead quality — there’s no substitute for delivering a qualified, interested prospect on which you have plenty of intelligence to your sales team.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

The purpose of a corporate blog or other social media presence isn’t merely to add to the endless electrons that are produced every day. And, it isn’t merely to provide a free service to the world. You’re looking to advance your business. While this may entail providing a free service consisting of informative and useful content, the net result has to be a lead stream for you to exploit. To turn your social media communities and traffic into business opportunities, you need hooks.

It’s easy to go overboard. In pursuit of leads, many companies tend to use their social media environments as advertisements, promoting at the expense of informing. Do this, and you run this risk of losing your audience — as well as your investment in the social media marketing initiative. When you create content and interact with your community, play it straight: deliver information that your readers can use — but don’t be afraid to make it easy for them to enter the sales cycle. This is where your “hooks” become useful.

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By the time you’re knotting your tie for a sales appointment, the cards should be stacked in your favor. The best indicator, of course, is that the prospect agreed to the meeting, so he must perceive some value. And, you’ve been able to review all the information that came out of the lead qualification process. You know the pain points, at least at a high level, and you have a sense of the status quo within your prospect’s datacenter. You have a willing audience and all the information you need to make a sale.

So, why do so many appointments go nowhere? It’s a fair question. If everything leading up to a sales call is so clearly beneficial, it should always go well … right?

Often, the problem isn’t with the prospect – it’s with you. You aren’t asking yourself the right questions before you sit across from your client. Below, you’ll find three questions to ask yourself before your next sales appointment. Answer them, and you’ll find your efforts to be much more fruitful.

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