I don’t know about you, but as a b-to-b marketer who focuses on telesprospecting and lead nurturing, even I’m a bit overwhelmed by the fervor around social media marketing.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve blogged for five years, and I’ve been Twittered, LinkedIn, Facebooked—and I’m waiting to be Pownced.
But I think all these activities specifically in terms of lead generation can be “mis-leading” us to think that the amount of time we spend connecting virtually translates into successful lead nurturing and boosted sales.
In terms of virtual lead generation activities, we all need to collectively understand both offline and online that the real key lies in actively creating nurturing, trustworthy and “edu-focused” communication with potential customers or partners. B2B marketing in particular is, at its basest definition, really about how to collectively service our clients so they can excel in their own businesses.
I challenge you to ask, in these days of social media marketing and emoticons in e-mails, if b-to-b marketers are still spending enough time adding the human touch.
Adding the human touch in lead-generation and lead nurturing programs is still one of the most vital ways to truly connect on a deeper level with your potential customers.
And the challenge for all of us—no matter what the advancements, what the decade and what the latest tools are—still comes down to creating a customer. Lead nurturing is about building trusted relationships with the right people. It is helping them understand that you understand their journey and decision-making process.
I believe the phone is still the single best way to reach decision-makers and to begin a dialog when you have a complex sale. Just as a real cup of coffee makes one linger and listen far longer than a virtual one.
However, the rules of calling have changed in recent years and what has worked in the past may no longer apply. Today's busy executives have less time and more to do, making them highly selective when deciding with whom to speak.
The following links provide tips on using the phone in your lead generation strategy and explains just how valuable the phone really is. Think of consistent and meaningful conversations with viable prospects, regardless of their timing to buy, is the way to build long, meaningful and trust-filled relationships.
Read How to Make Cold Calls (that start a dialog)
McGraw-Hill, my book publisher, made it possible for me to provide a complementary chapter from my book
Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Chapter 8 - The Phone
Marketing Needs Geeks, Not Gurus
Someone introduced me the other day as a marketing "guru". It was one of those moments where you drift off mentally and start watching the discussion like a detached observer. You could almost see the thought bubbles popping out my head. "Hmmmm. Guru?" It was someone I respect, so I was kind of flattered. Guru. Someone with answers. A man with a plan. But the more I started to think about it, the more I started to suspect my sense of flattery was misguided.
I mean, how many words do we have to describe someone who spends too much time thinking and then pontificates about the most grinding minutiae? Like, what "guru" really means. The only other title I can think of that's equally vague on the professional value I provide to the world is "consultant". And who wants to introduce a consultant when you can introduce a guru?
A few hours after basking in the afterglow of misplaced flattery, I got schooled on how tenuous the domain of gurudom can be. I submitted an article to a friend's newsletter on Marketing ROI, in which I took my usual stance of flogging marketers for flaunting buzzwords and failing to grasp deeper meanings. That's kind of like an old baseball mitt for me. Fits nice, usually does the job. Except this time I got called on it. My draft came back with some very diplomatic editorial comments. Translated into the vernacular, he said "Dude. You're beating a straw man. Add some substance." That a useful conversation about the current state of Marketing ROI thought, and demonstrated how deeply many individual threads of marketing thought are being mined by people out of the spotlight of social media. How could I be a guru when there's such a vast amount of knowledge I don't know?
And that's when a light bulb went off in my head. Why do marketers focus so much on elevating gurus? And why don't we have more geeks? A guru is always supposed to have an answer, while a geek is just someone who's really really interested in finding out how to make things work. The irony, of course, is that one of the archetypal bits of Guru wisdom is that it's not having the answers that matters, but getting the questions right.
But gurus don't ask questions--at least not the kind they really want answers to. If I'm a guru, I can't let people know that I may need to be brought up to speed on the latest in Marketing ROI. I Must Know All. On the other hand, if I'm a geek, I can just say "Cool. Show me how you do that! What else do you know?"
In a business world that is changing so blindingly fast, with a constant flood of new technologies, new ideas and new opportunities how long can any one guru conceivably last before they're obsolete? And how long before we notice they're obsolete and stop listening to their pointless babble? You don't have that problem with geeks, because geeks are always focused on learning--well, at least as much as they like to show off--and are always interested in gathering with other geeks to learn. Everyone wins. Well, everyone except the marketer who thinks an answer from a guru will save him from getting his ass kicked at the next board meeting.
I know it will be really hard to shed this deeply engrained need for the certainty that comes with the spouting of pundits. But what marketing really needs today is more geeks, not gurus. Everyone can be a marketing geek, while marketing gurus, if there really are any, are bound to look stupid in the long run. Why run the risk of having them take you along for the ride?
June 23, 2008
Marketing to the SMB
Over the holiday I read four business books but only one stood out as a “must read.” The book is “Drilling for Gold” by John Warrillow, and it’s full of very practical and insightful approaches to winning in the small/medium business (SMB) market.
Here are some US Census Bureau statistics that surprised me.
There are 5.9M companies in the US with fewer than 2,500 employees. But 14% have no employees (just owners), 61% have four or fewer employees and 37% have 5-99 employees. Warrillow does a brilliant job in blowing up the “SMB” into actual segments and delineating some very sharp differences between them. Warrillow presents three useful archetypes that help us understand business owners.
Mountain Climbers are business owners who are driven by growth and achievement. Though they represent only 2% of the SMB, according to Warrillow, they spend much more than the other two combined. They typically have 5-50 employees and grow 20% a year. I believe my friend Raymond Mendoza who runs Short Circuit Audio Car Repair is a classic “mountain climber”.
Freedom Fighters are owners who value independence above all else. They dislike being told what to do so owning a business is an alternative to the climbing someone else’s corporate ladder. They make up 24% of SMBs and consist of 1-50 employees with growth of less that 20% per year. They are ruthless in balancing work/life demands. As founder of Pacifica Group, I consider myself a classic freedom fighter.
Craftspeople are independent professionals who apply their expertise independently rather than working for a company. They make up 74% of the SMB. Warrillow calls them the “un-entrepreneurs” because they do not see themselves as business people but rather as gurus/experts. Crafstpeople typically work alone in a small office/home-office (SOHO) or with a few part-time helpers.
Warrillow urges readers to apply four principles when targeting small businesses.
1. Forget about the small business market: basically, he urges us to analyze the target customers and look for commonalities based on other more relevant dimensions such as demographics, geography, number of employees, psychographic traits, profit potential, etc.
2. Find an aggregator: chances are there is already a company that is selling to (retail/distributors), communicating with (associations), or assembling together (events), the market you also want to serve. Hookup with them instead of going direct.
3. Speak their language: small business owners hate being seen as small business owners. They want to project a larger image to convey credibility and safety to their clients/customers. Avoid such landmines by tuning into their psychology.
4. Find a simulator: small business owners live and die by their customer service so they will place equally high demands on their vendors. Find cost-effective ways to provide high touch experiences.
New B2B Study Shows White Paper Importance
Just arrived back from the MarketingProf’s convention with a fresh new study in hand from MarketingProfs Research Insights.
What’s interesting about this study is the examination of white papers in relation to B2B sales leads.
What follows is a detailed review of the findings:
Online content effectiveness for lead generation:
White papers were among the top 4 for effective lead generation. Here is the breakdown:
1. Newsletters (39%)
2. Press releases (30%)
3. Case studies (25%)
4. White papers (24%)
5. Webinars (22%)
6. Trials/demos (21%)
7. Blogs (12%)
8. Video (11%)
9. Podcasts (4%)
10. e-books (4%)
Report co-author Robert Lesser had this to say, “Even as new forms of content and online media are making waves, the tried and true such as white papers continue to be favored by B2B marketers.”
I am a bit puzzled about newsletters being used for lead generation. You first need a name and email address before you can send a newsletter. I think perhaps this might be ads in other people’s newsletters??
Lead nurturing: The study also found that white papers were very effective for lead nurturing, more than trials, webinars, press releases, blogs, video, podcasts and ebooks.
Optimizing Landing Pages: 4 Basic Principles
Landing page optimization is a hot topic these days; indeed, whole companies have been built (and are thriving) on nothing but ensuring your landing pages generate the most registrations possible. Still, many B2B marketers are still treating landing pages as an afterthought. For those companies, and perhaps yours is one of them, improving landing page conversions doesn’t require fine-tuning. It’s simply a matter of following a few, basic principles.
Case in point: in the course of discussing an upcoming campaign, a prospective client asked us recently for comments on their landing pages. I responded by telling them that I believed we could easily double their current conversion (click to lead) rate, and in the process increase the number of leads those forms generate by more than 100 percent, all by implementing some basic changes. Here’s what I told them:
To be effective, a landing page needs to:
* Sell the offer and reinforce the prospect’s decision to respond
* Offer a clear, unambiguous path to completing registration
* Present a clear, single call to action with no options, alternatives or distractions
* Require the prospect provide only the minimum amount of information
With those principles in mind, here’s where we recommended this particular company’s landing pages could be improved:
1. In most cases, getting to the registration form was a two-step process (Welcome Page, then Landing Page). I questioned why the registration form couldn’t appear on the first page. Reason: requiring any additional steps on the part of the prospect, particularly when the Welcome Page included links to elsewhere on the client’s site (see #3, below), would inevitably lose a subset of those who would otherwise register. Plus, having a registration form on the very first page serves as an effective “call to action.”
2. The amount of selling copy on the Welcome Page and Landing Page was inconsistent (and - for the most part - inadequate.) Ideally, that selling copy (including 3-4 bullet points describing key learning benefits the reader will gain by downloading the white paper) would appear on one single Welcome/Landing page, but if the 2-page structure needed to remain, it should go on the Welcome Page. A professionally rendered image of the white paper or content was a must also.
3. Both the Welcome Page and Landing Page utilized the corporate Web design template, which means they included both the main navigation bar at top, and links in a sidebar at left. These extraneous links were causing the company to lose a large number of prospects who would otherwise complete the form but were instead distracted by the alternatives and go off to explore the Website. We strongly recommended designing all landing pages to a template that mimicked the main site but which didn’t include any links to elsewhere on that site.
4. Where the company was losing most potential conversions was on the registration form itself. The number of required fields (including street address and two qualifying questions) was onerous in the extreme; simply asking for mailing address probably reduced the conversion rate by 50 percent alone. We strongly recommended reducing the number of required field to the bare essentials: name, company, title, e-mail and phone number (and perhaps zip code if needed for territory assignment). This change alone would dramatically increase the number of leads generated.
Anticipating that the amount of information required on each form was being demanded by the company’s sales management, we recommended a couple of potential solutions that would mitigate this:
* Pre-populate registration forms (for repeat visitors.) If a prospect sees most of his/her contact information already completed, he/she is more likely to provide additional information such as answers to qualifying questions.
* Implement a systematic, automated lead nurturing program that generates a sequence of personalized, relevant, rules-based e-mails to each new lead, responses to which would capture additional information that wasn’t captured on the initial registration form
If even one of these four issues sounds all too familiar to you, chances are you can produce a dramatic impact on your company’s conversion rates by making the necessary change. If you meet with internal resistance (the reason most sub-standard landing pages are what they are), consider an A/B test to help prove your point.