In this case, the big companies got the business not because they had better products and services, but because they were better in another respect: name recognition.  The marketplace gorillas got invited because potential prospects knew who they were, and they did not know our company.  Although our sales force was just as talented and experienced, they could only win if they had the opportunity to compete.  A big part of our job was to create enough market awareness to get our products and services onto the consideration list.

Remember that not all sales result from a paid sales lead. Ideally, a fair portion of your revenue occurs because a prospect finds you. In other words, they have market awareness about you.  This doesn’t mean they know exactly what you offer, or why you are better or worse than your competitors, but simply that they know you exist and have a vague notion about what you do.  Sometimes, this is all you need to get that invitation to the dance.

Here are some of the non-paid ways prospects can learn about you:

• Referrals (the best source of all)
• Press releases
• Articles
• Product review sites
• Cyber mentions
• Word of mouth
• Organic web search
• Industry analysts
• Community outreach
• Reputation of your key staff
• Social media

Don’t overlook the power of the last two items.  The known talent and experience of your staff (especially executives) can be leveraged to drive business.  Similarly, a strong social media initiative can get your name and brand position disseminated to a wide audience.  For example, Fusion Marketing Partners and our clients, have both generated significant revenue (and great new clients) by making ourselves known through free social media sources.

Yes, sales skills are important, as is lead generation, and many other attributes of a finely-tuned marketing and sales operation.  But market awareness is often the factor that decides whether you get a chance at the business.  Get yourself known. Get invited to more dances.  Close more business.

Carpe Occasio

Technorati Tags: Competitors, Market Awareness, Marketing, Sales Skills

You can find a lot of definitions for database marketing (just Google the term), but here is the working definition that I employ: “Building a permission-based contact list of suspects and prospects in order to facilitate re-marketing efforts.” Note that I used the term “permission-based” in my definition. You can’t practice good database marketing by buying a list of contacts that have no desire to hear from you and promoting to them relentlessly. At best you will just annoy people – at worst you will find your outbound emails blacklisted.

In my former life as a software company marketing executive, and in my current life as a B2B marketing consultant, I have used database marketing techniques to dramatically increase lead flow, lower the cost per inquiry, and improve sales close rates. In the early days of the direct marketing era, we used push marketing techniques like direct mail and telemarketing to generate leads. Today we are heavily oriented to online methods like pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), social media and permission-based email. But while the media has changed, the principles of database marketing are the same. Here are few of the most important:

1. Give people a reason to opt-in to your offers and continue to welcome communication from you.  This means making sure that you send plenty of non-sales information that is aimed at helping your prospects do their jobs better, and less of the sales-pitch variety.
2. Educate your prospects so that they know you are the branded authority in your area of expertise.  This way you will be the obvious choice when prospects need to buy what you offer.
3. Make it as easy to opt-out as you do to opt-in.  There is no good reason to make people go through hoops to opt-out of your contact list.
4. Find your right contact tempo.  For some types of communications, emailing once a week or even more often is acceptable. For others, once a month is adequate.  The idea is to contact prospects often enough to keep your name top of mind, but not so often as to annoy or chase them away.
5. Put real effort into your database marketing efforts.  Don’t treat this as an afterthought.

If you follow best practices in database marketing, you will be rewarded over time with a rich source of future leads and revenue. Your cost per lead and new customer acquisition will fall and your close rates will increase.  Many think of database marketing as yesterday’s tactic, but you can start using it to immediate advantage today.

Technorati Tags: B2B Marketing, Database Marketing, Marketing

I was speaking at a conference last week and saw this sign at a conference booth: “Stop here to get a large number of business leads, fast and easy.”  What the company was selling was names, contacts, raw suspects, but they were definitely not leads.  Many companies have spent lots of money on such promotions, only to be severely disappointed when the so-called leads turned into little more than what can be found in the Yellow Pages. Wishing that raw contact names turn themselves into real leads is definitely an example of magical thinking.

We recently talked to a potential client and laid out a very achievable plan to create a messaging platform, create content and build a new website in a four- to six-month period.  His answer:  “I need to be taking orders within 60 days with a website full of content.”  Given his modest budget and time constraints, this is an example magical thinking.

Another example: About two years ago, I spoke with a software startup founder who told me his ambition was to be “bigger than Google.”  This, despite the fact that he hadn’t received his first round of funding. Not surprisingly, the company is limping along with a small handful of customers. They may still make it, but not at the level of initial expectations.  Better to have set realistic expectations in the first place in order to save the disappointment later.

Of course there is the urge to reach for the stars and be the best you can be. However, unwarranted optimism can be detrimental to your business, for three primary reasons:

1. Bold pronouncements that are not backed up by adequate resources can cause you to lose credibility with investors, partners, customers and employees.
2. Setting goals that are unreachable can turn an otherwise solid performance into what is seen as a failure. Better to under-promise and over-deliver instead of vice versa.
3. Magical thinking regarding marketing shows a lack of discipline that will manifest itself in other areas of your business, especially product development.

Venture capitalists know magical thinking when they see it. Almost every startup founder has a PowerPoint presentation showing the hockey stick growth in revenue.  For example, the graphs will show year one revenue of $1 million, year two of $4 million and year three of $12 million. VCs are aware that only one company out of dozens will actually reach these numbers, so they automatically discount the projections. Entrepreneurs and investors both know that the numbers are unrealistic, but magical thinking is part of the game.

I suggest that you leave your magical thinking at home, create a solid and attainable marketing plan, execute relentlessly and live within the art of the possible. Your results will be just as good (or better) than what you will achieve with magical marketing thinking and you will feel a much greater sense of accomplishment.

Technorati Tags: Leads, Magical Marketing, Marketing

All of you hard-driven and numbers-focused marketers understand the importance of the quantitative side of B2B marketing. If you don’t understand this, you will face the displeasure of your CEO and/or CFO. You measure the number of inquiries, cost per inquiry, number of opportunities, specific media performance, and many other details.

Assuming you don’t try to run your business strictly by spreadsheet, all these types of measurements can be valuable. But they never tell the whole story. There is a qualitative side to marketing that is equally as important. There are a few essential questions you can answer in just a couple of minutes that can let you know if you are headed in the right direction. Best of all there is no data to collect and no spreadsheets to fill out. So take a break from the quantitative side and answer the following:

1. Do you feel that your current messaging platform (tagline, brand promise, value proposition and “about us” boilerplate) accurately reflects your company strengths?
2. Are you differentiated from your competitors in a way that is understood and appreciated by your prospects and customers?
3. Is the relationship between marketing and sales productive, poisonous, or something in between?
4. Is everyone in the marketing and sales organizations aligned in terms of messaging, process and reporting?
5. Is your lead handoff process well-documented?
6. Is the lead flow: strong, good, weak or non-existent?
7. Would your CEO say that the marketing department is an asset, liability or something in between?
8. Are your key marketing metrics improving, declining or flat?
9. Do you have a solid marketing team with key players in every position?
10. Are there weaknesses in your marketing organization or game plan that hinder your company’s chances for success?

B2B marketing is tough, but it is even tougher if you fail to do a periodic marketing assessment. The good news is that your marketing assessment doesn’t have to be based on tons of data. So grab a cup of coffee, put your email on hold and spend a few minutes pondering the state of your marketing effectiveness.

Carpe Occasio

Here are a few examples of buying roadblocks I have encountered over the past couple of weeks:

1. We are looking at new home and auto insurance. Our mortgage broker referred us to her in-house insurance brokerage. Despite the fact that I told the broker that we are ready to make a quick decision, she took over a week to get back to me. In the meantime, I researched the market online and found a great set of policies. This took me less than an hour—why did it take the broker a week?
2. A new restaurant opened in my neighborhood. The menu is confusing and the people behind the counter can’t answer simple questions (e.g., what ingredients are used in a particular dish). Even worse, they act indifferently, one of the greatest sins in a retail establishment. So why did the owner invest his/her finances, time and psychic energy in a business that is destined to fail due to controllable factors?
3. Our company, Fusion Marketing Partners, attempted to get a quote on a client project.  I assure the sub-contractor, that even though this is a fairly small project, it has the potential to lead to many others and will give us the chance to work together. The sub-contractor basically tells us we are wasting his time and to call back when we have something worthy of consideration.
4. A local gym brags on its website about how involved the owners are in the business, specifically mentioning how the owners and staff walk the floor assisting members, answering questions, and generally making their customers feel at home.  After a dozen visits, guess how many times I have been approached by a member of the staff or been asked a question about my experience as a new customer?  That’s right, zero times.
5. A software company that produces excellent information (white papers, presentations, etc.) buried this valuable content on their website so deeply that it took me at least five minutes and 6-8 mouse clicks to find one particular document. I was persistent, but many prospects give up in 30 seconds or less.

Examples 1 and 3 above cost the offending companies’ immediate revenue while 2, 4 and 5 put future revenue in jeopardy.  While these are just five examples of businesses that practiced stupidity and disinterest instead of intelligence and thoughtfulness, I am sure you can come up with your own list. Every time a company fails to follow up, ignores its customers, forgets to up-sell, or in any other way makes it hard for you to buy from them, they are giving money away.  And the first rule of business is: “Don’t give money away.”

The tragedy of all this is that it’s all completely preventable. There are no massive market forces working against you when you give money away. It’s what sports commentators refer to as the “unforced error.”

When was the last time you got together with your team to gauge how well you are performing at the point of customer decision? There might be a few simple behaviors you can easily identify, correct and start seeing immediate impact on your revenue and customer satisfaction.

Carpe Occasio!

Technorati Tags: Business, Buy, Revenue

At this point, I want to remind the executive that he or she is not the prospect, so how they personally feel about the campaign should not be the primary factor on whether we should launch it. What does matter is how it is perceived by the target market, and to what degree they respond to our offer. In other words, results are way more important than personal preferences.

You don’t have to be a marketing services consultant to face the personal preference challenge. If you are an internal marketing manager that has to go through one or more levels of approval, you probably have to deal with your own version of this challenge. In fact, you may be asking yourself why the same people that hired you because of your expertise now question your every move.

Of course senior executives should have something to say about outbound communications, whether they are initiated by an internal team or a marketing services provider. They need to know that the communication puts their company in a positive light and reinforces the brand promise. But when it comes to issues like color, length, timing, typeface, frequency and where the commas go—they are usually better off allowing the marketing team to do its job and assume responsibility for the results. In a competitive business climate, results are what truly matters.

In a prior life, I worked with a CEO who had very strong opinions about written prospect communications. He preferred long emails that focused on product features—the “tell them everything there is to say” style. However, I knew from experience that a shorter email focused on the prospect’s pain points usually performed better. Therein was the dilemma: Do it his way and get anemic results, or do it my way and create conflict (and possible unemployment), regardless of results. So I took the middle path and suggested an A/B test of his email format against my own. My email generated almost double the response. From that point, he stayed out of our email promotions.

By the way, there is a type of an executive at the other end of the spectrum—the person who seems to have almost no personal preferences. If you work for this type of individual you will have great latitude, which is a good thing, but may receive little or no feedback, which can be a not-so-good thing. You will also feel all the weight of achieving strong performance metrics.

One last point about the personal preference challenge: It is not only your boss or client that can be an impediment to B2B marketing success. You should keep in mind the famous Pogo cartoon: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  If you start confusing your prospect with yourself and impose your personal likes and preferences on your target audience, you will become your own worst enemy.

Technorati Tags: Email, Marketing, Marketing Services, Prospect

Do you want truly competitive differentiation for your company—with a value-added extra that makes the products and services you offer resoundingly unique and clearly better than your competitors? You can find it in The Big Idea—your unique brand promise.

A compelling brand promise is essential for creating a powerful marketing and sales engine. In fact, this is one of the most misunderstood, unappreciated, and neglected parts of the marketing process. Advertising visionary David Ogilvy was right when he said that “positioning” (his term for creating the brand promise) is the most important decision made in promoting a service or product. Ogilvy was also correct when he said that successful positioning has more impact on the results of a promotion than how an ad was created.

Because of this, I urge our clients to devote time to crafting their brand promise—especially before starting a new campaign. It is essential to define your brand promise because it will act as a guidepost against which you can track all of your tactical activities. Determine your brand promise, communicate it well and then keep that promise to clients and customers consistently. When your activities faithfully reflect your core promise, you know you are on-track. .

Every company or organization, and each product or service they offer, has its own unique brand promise and position. A company can hold different marketing positions among different target audiences. In addition, people can have their own unique positions, which are often built upon and reinforced through social media. Companies can gain major benefits by properly positioning their key executives through different marketing positions and social media..

What is a unique brand promise? The unique brand promise is what you promise people they will receive when they do business with you—what are you giving them in terms of product, service and customer experience. Your marketplace position is defined as “the manner in which an organization and the products or services it provides are perceived by prospects and customers.” People often use the terms interchangeably, but there is a big difference between the two ideas. You control your own brand promise, while the marketplace controls your position. If your brand promise is based on what truly differentiates your company from others, it is much easier to align the brand promise and marketplace position.

Of course, it is hard to be all things to all people, so I suggest that you get rid of the “me-too” approach— that is, entering the market echoing the same value propositions as your competitors. Instead, focus on a Big Idea.

The best way to think about your own Big Idea is to consider how you would answer if a prospect asked you the question, “What’s the big idea about your company?” Your answer to this question is, in essence, your brand promise. It is true that prospects ask themselves this question every time they consider your offer. And the reason many of them don’t buy from you is they don’t think your offer is a Big Idea. Why? Because you don’t tell them why this is true.

The “me-too” approach may be safer, but just repeating what your competitors are saying can also make you appear to be a commodity, and companies that act like a commodity will not be successful in a time when consumers have myriad choices.

There is a simple lesson here: be different; be unique. It is fundamental to your marketing success to find the Big Idea in your company and capture it succinctly. When you do, it will help your team create the best and most effective marketing strategy for any medium. Doing so will also help your customers find your products and services more easily in a landscape cluttered with competing messages.

Yet, as hard as we try to get away from it (using tools like TiVo, Sirius Radio, cable, and voice mail), persistent marketers continue to find new ways to track us down and share their messages, regardless of our needs or receptivity.  Here are a few examples of irritating push marketing techniques:

1. Anyone showing up uninvited.  Whether at the office or home, this is particularly irritating.  The exceptions are neighborhood scouts or sports teams.

2. YouTube now requires you to watch short commercials prior to viewing their content.

3. Newspapers that contain ads that are wrapped around the editorial content, so you have to go through multiple gyrations to get to the news stories.

4. Online, floating banner ads are becoming more intrusive and harder to ignore. They follow your cursor until you can find the ―X or “close” button.

5. Unsolicited telephone calls are still an annoyance — except they are now from so-called “market researchers” and charities, who are exempt from the privacy requirements. Who came up with that loophole?

Here’s the problem. Push marketing is intrusive and often ineffective because, at any given time, a majority of your audience—whether they are listeners, viewers, or readers—have no interest whatsoever in what you are promoting.  They may be interested in the future, but if you come on too strong when they are not receptive, you may turn them off forever.

In some cases, you may have a lead requirement that can only be met with push marketing techniques. If so, by all means use the necessary techniques to meet your lead objectives.  But often, you have a choice, and a more effective alternative is to practice pull marketing strategies.

Pull marketing centers around the idea that you actively draw clients or customers to seek out your product or services. You do this by discovering where your prospects congregate, making your information available to them in educational and entertaining ways and giving them incentives to come to you when they have a need for what you offer.

Instead of having a monologue (as evidenced in push marketing) with your clients or customers, you create a dialogue with pull marketing—a dialogue between you and the prospect.

Transitioning from push to pull marketing strategies is a subtle shift in thinking, but it is also quite powerful. Instead of asking: How many people can I sell to today?, the question becomes: How can I help people solve their problems? In the first scenario, you are a seller, almost an adversary. In the second, you are a helper whose expertise (and wise placement of messages) sells itself. Instead of just relying on ads pushing your value proposition, you produce valuable content (through social media and at your website) that solves problems. In other words, you become a trusted resource and thought leader who circulates a carefully crafted message that attracts the people who need you.

Nevertheless, there will always be an ongoing battle between consumers and push marketers. The latter will continue to try new and clever ways to force the former to pay attention and respond to their promotions. But I submit that a much more effective plan is to uncover a way to attract a larger share of the people who are already interested in what you offer and then convince them to do business with you.  It’s always easier and more pleasant when you can fulfill an existing need instead of trying to create a need.

In the push model, the marketer is seemingly in charge of everything—the timing, content and frequency of promotions. However, in reality, your consumer is the one in charge, because only he or she can decide whether or not to read or listen to your promotion and whether to respond.

When you are deciding how much of time and financial resources to allocate between push and pull marketing strategies, keep in mind that the battleground has shifted and the prospect is the one who holds the high ground. Rather than fight this reality, just accept who has the real control—and find the best ways to help people buy in the way they want to buy, instead of the way you want to sell to them.

If you enjoyed the perspective in this article, you might want to read another recent blog post on the subject of pull marketing strategies and timing.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Pull Marketing, Push Marketing

The topic of proper timing applies in spades to the marketer or salesperson. Smart marketers understand that all prospects are not the same, and to treat them as such is dangerous and ineffective. Prospect A may be at the initial stage of the education process, while Prospect B is close to making a purchase decision. It is naive to believe that you control the process—in fact; the buyer holds most of the cards because they are the ultimate decision makers. Use pull marketing strategies that make it easy for them to buy; meet them (online, by telephone, or in person) wherever they are in their buying journey and nurture them to an inevitable decision to do business with you.

Back in the late 1980s, a friend who was (at that time) something of a playboy type met a young lady at a Friday night party. He proposed that Sunday and they were married within two months. That’s not the way I would have done it, but 25 years later they are still going strong. Other friends have had very long relationships before walking down the aisle and most of us fall somewhere in the middle of these extremes.

The goes to show that the maxim “Different strokes for different folks” still holds true, regardless of whether you are talking about your eventual life partner or the customers that fuel the growth of your company. Like I said earlier, you need to meet prospects where they are, not where you want them to be. The point is that no one likes to be sold, but most people enjoy buying. This is why we are strong advocates for the buyer-friendly pull marketing process, which is composed of four parts:

Smart marketers don’t jump to the fourth step in the process, but rather use their online presence to cover most or all of the first three steps. When you do this, your close rates go up and the “effective sales cycle”—the time you actually spend working with the prospect—goes down. In other words, you increase your marketing and sales efficiency in a way that generates more revenue at less cost and effort.

Daily business life for the marketer or sales person is much easier and more effective when it is based on the natural timing of the buyer’s sales cycle. Follow the pull marketing principles I covered earlier: upgrade your website, attract more people at the top of the funnel, give these people plenty of great content, provide offers to turn visitors into leads, and have a solid plan to convert leads into new customers. That’s a plan that’s always right on time!

Technorati Tags: Marketer, Prospect, Pull Marketing, Sales

Months and years go by, and as you produce more content for your company, each addition deviates slightly from your messaging more and more, based on whatever inputs are strongest at the time: the most recent strategy, the latest hot trend-related blog post, the most recent “A-ha!” moment from leadership, or what have you. Congratulations. You have now succumbed to “message creep.”

The core of a marketing plan is the diligent hours that you spend with your team analyzing your product and service in the marketplace and formulating your unique competitive position. The first and most important reflection of this position is a statement of 50-100 words that crystallizes this position. Any potential client, investor, partner or journalist should be able to read it and quickly grasp what you do, whom you do it for, and why you’re the best at it. If it’s just a bunch of vague buzzwords and non-essential, self-congratulatory information you came up with on the fly, you’re wasting the interested party’s time.

Boilerplate isn’t the end of the document; it’s the center of all documents

Your boilerplate is a guidepost for producing strategic content for your brand with less brain damage and more strategic punch. I’ll give you an example: last year Fusion Marketing Partners did an overhaul of our core messaging. As part of this effort, we got everything we knew about ourselves up on a whiteboard and distilled all those thoughts, through multiple revisions, into a single, polished gem. When I’m working on a page for the new website, the first thing I do is cut and paste that boilerplate into my Word file. If how I’m describing our services doesn’t align with the company we described in that boilerplate, then I know I’m going off course.

I didn’t reproduce the boilerplate verbatim; I translated and expanded on the differentiators there. As a result, the new content lines up with the positioning we chose, and, as we add more pages to our new site, we’ll have more and more content that consistently expresses the key differentiators that make us a unique choice in the marketplace. That’s the strategic essence of the boilerplate. And it’s a time saver for when you’re writing. Why reinvent your company from scratch each time you sit down in front a blank page? Define your position as a key part of your marketing strategy and then mercilessly reproduce that value message, in some form, every time you’re developing new content.

Take a look at the universe of material that your company has generated. Do you see the expression of your core positioning reflected in each web page, each sales sheet? Does it even sound like the same company from instance to instance? If not, you have a messaging and positioning problem. Take the time with your team to succinctly define your strategy in words. Then staple those words to the forehead of everybody on your company team who has to write market-facing copy for your company. This turns your boilerplate from a long-forgotten homework assignment to a vital strategic tool that helps you fashion a coherent, compelling brand and market more successfully together.