This can be especially frustrating and expensive when a sales team has invested a lot of resources to pursue a deal in good faith.

Clayton Christensen talks about the “overserved market” in his bestseller the Innovators Dilemma. Basically the logic is that for some customers an 80% solution meets 100% of the need. The 80% solution may be doing things the way they are done today even if it’s manual, error prone, inconvenient, painful, inefficient, costly, etc. This is home territory for Mr. Do Nothing since the pain isn’t perceived as great enough to justify change and to buy a new solution. Competing against Mr. Do Nothing starts with a different sales approach from the outset.

Qualification: Ask qualifying questions of prospective customers with as many stakeholders as possible. And be sure to get the opinions of likely dissenters early on such as the CFO.
• Why not keep doing what you’re doing?
• Why is this a must-have priority versus nice-to-have?
• What was the impetus to launch this project?
• Why not wait another month, quarter, year?

The answers to these questions will uncover some of the reasons that the prospect may later choose to do nothing. Knowing this ahead of time can tell you whether it’s worth your time addressing these objections or better just to qualify out early on.

Build Advocacy: Every change represents both a threat and an opportunity. Identify the potential winners and losers when a new solution is adopted. The biggest resisters of change are those who feel they will lose out somehow. Find out who they are and create a win for them if at all possible. Then there are executives who might reject the purchase late in the cycle. Map out the organization from the perspective of doing nothing and see how you can make sure each player can be a winner and an advocate for change:

• Decision maker
• Economic Buyer (e.g. CFO)
• User
• Managers (e.g. IT organization that will manage/support the solution)
• Evaluator/Influencer
• Legal
• Purchasing
Business Case: Confirm that there is a budget for this solution purchase. How was it justified and what assumptions went into it? Build a business case relative to doing nothing. Help the prospect see all the hard costs, missed opportunities, and business consequences of business as usual. Quantify, quantify, quantify. Your solution ROI must be relative to doing nothing not relative to your competitors. Here are some ROI elements that you might explicitly define relative to doing nothing:

• Revenue expansion (e.g. incremental sales)
• Faster time to market
• Reduced capital and operating expenses (e.g. facility, equipment, personnel, etc.)
• Risk reduction (e.g. security threats, financial risk, compliance)
• Improved customer satisfaction (e.g. increased customer retention and upsells)
• Productivity gains

In conclusion, the key to beating Mr. Do Nothing is to do something very proactive which is to treat this option as the #1 competitor. And that means starting the sales process with smart qualification questions and criteria, building a ground swell of support as well as air cover from executive sponsors for the new solution, and to help craft a solid business case that makes doing nothing seem irresponsible.

But over the years, in response to market and competitive pressures, their offering and programs had become so complex that it was unclear which of their partners were actually performing or even active. To add to this they had a multitude of contracts dating back to 2004 often with varying addendums and special commissions structures. It had become very unwieldy to manage the partners in an efficient, cost-effective manner. As a result, resources were constrained and even good partners suffered.

To help them, we conducted a detailed analysis – covering legal, operations, promotions, competitive, revenue and P&L factors – that was very revealing. Based on that we were able to make several recommendations about how they could optimize their program, make it operationally more manageable and more productive!

While I won’t share the specific recommendations we made to them, I do want to offer up some nuggets we learned as watch-outs in developing your channel:

1. Be sure to listen to Multi-Functional input: We found that programs are often developed and deployed without the proper inputs and this can result in unintended - and often bad - consequences. Legal, Operations, Channel marketing, Finance, Marketing (Promotions) and anyone else (even website managers who will enable any self-service online) who might touch partners should be invited to give their feedback to the proposed programs. What we learned was that you can circumvent many issues by doing this upfront. Don't reinvent the wheel. Someone in your organization already has one.

2. The evergreen KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid): Incentives for performance should be easy to understand and uniform for all. While "kicker" rewards are tempting to offer, be sure to only institute them if you can offer something really powerful for a potent return. Offering kickers just for the sake of it only adds complexity. You will be surprised at how many partners prefer simplicity to meaningless rewards that take up mental "space".

3. Be Competitive – "holistically”: Ask what alternatives your partners have? What will they do if they do not choose to partner with you? How will that choice affect your competitive standing? Be competitive in your offering to tip the balance in your favor but look at the whole picture – not just the monetary offering. Is your company more or less stable from a partner's perspective? What's your credibility vs. your competition? What's been your history on partnering – real or perceived? Are there other strategic reasons (e.g., related offerings, geographical presence, strength of parent company?) why they might prefer to partner with you – or not?

4. Don’t think of Monetary Incentives as the end-all: It's true that partners are in it for the money but often they will forgo the last few dollars to partner with a player who makes their lives simple. So look at your whole offering, the whole experience you offer them (how complex are your contracts? how hard is it for them to sign up? get paid?) and make it attractive so that you're "easy/iest to do business with..."

5. Ensure Operations can support the program as it grows: Often companies make the offering very attractive so everyone wants to sign up - but then everyone cannot sign up because the company cannot support it. Automating repetitive tasks, enabling self-service and minimizing and planning for exception management are critical in these matters. As you develop the program and involve legal also involve the operational side of the company.

6. Ensure the Programs do not become a Millstone: Once the partner is inactive and/or non-performing what happens? One of our findings was that a large number of contracts could be interpreted to entail "evergreen" commission payments even after the partner was terminated. As a result a large number of partners were collecting very small checks forever – not efficient for our client or for the SMB partner. While we recommended a solution to ease this, the best way is that such eventualities should be avoided upfront.

7. Apply the 80-20 "prune" Rule – but smartly: As in all things we found that it was the top 10-20% of the partners that were delivering most of the value. However be sure to segment your partners by performance to see who is performing and who's not and try to understand why. A lot will be revealed by this segmentation. We found that the next 30% (below the top 10%) were not performing but collectively accounted for a huge portion of the business. They could not be terminated without careful consideration. With deeper analysis and further market research we recommended keeping them but modifying their contracts to reflect their business realities and the client's needs.

Any of this ring true? Write to us.

Here's the problem with that model... long and detailed web forms often cause people to lie or simply leave altogether.

Testing and optimizing even a few key aspects of your landing pages can provide major gains for your lead-gen efforts to improve lead conversion and ROI.

Recently, I was a guest on a web clinic Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director, MarketingExperiments that examines three tests they conducted to demonstrate how you can use Incentives and Friction to generate more leads through your site.

The webinar was titled “Filling the Pipeline: How a LeadGen Test Strategy Achieved an 86% Increase” You can watch the webinar (no registration required) or read the synopsis. 

Perform a random survey of high-tech company Websites, and you’ll discover very quickly that there are widely varying schools of thought on this topic. Some sites (including those of some very well known brands) provide unfettered access to all content and require no registration whatsoever.

There’s also a growing trend towards the “resource center” approach, that is, a one-time registration that thereafter gives the approved visitor complete access to everything the Website has to offer.

What’s the best approach? It depends on your priorities, and to some extent your audience, but here are some thoughts to consider:

Should you require registration in the first place? If you care about sales leads, the answer is absolutely: yes. If your priority is getting your brochure or white paper or case study into as many hands as possible and not really caring who those people are or whether you ever talk to them, then: no.

There was an interesting discussion on this topic during a recent industry Webinar I attended. To quote the transcript:

“… this is a real-life example from Red Hat, where they set their webinars free. A lot of their webinars do not require any registration at all. You just go online and there it is. So how are they collecting leads from this? Well, they’re collecting plenty of leads because what’s happening is they’ve got that big, honking, ‘contact sales’ button there. They’ve got a ‘learn more’ button. They’ve got all sorts of buttons there designed to get the right lead to interact with them.”

To which I say: ridiculous. Yes, you’ll pick up some subset of the leads you might have captured initially through registration, but you’ll lose many more. With all due respect to the speaker, believing that you’re going to capture leads anyway because people are so desperate to talk to your sales department is, well, optimistic. And besides, this is Red Hat (open source software), for whom offering free downloads is a way of doing business.

So, yes – make people register. Next comes the question of how much information to require. In years past, the answer to this question has been driven by what information is needed to determine whether the person is a qualified lead. You see this legacy quite clearly on a number of sites. For example, recently I attempted to download a white paper from a well-known manufacturer of security appliances. Here was the process, painful as it sounds:

* In order to access the white paper I needed to create an “account” on the Website.

* In order to create the account, I needed to fill out a form with 18 (count’ em) separate fields – all required (I know, I tried to skip them) – asking how big my company was, what role I played in the decision process, whether I had an upcoming security initiative, and my timeframe for a decision.

* Then I needed to create a user name and password.

* Then I had to wait 2-3 minutes for a “validation e-mail” to arrive in my inbox.

* Then I had to click on the validation link to access the site.

* Then I could download my white paper.

Now if I was a network security manager, and not just some nosey marketing type, I doubt very seriously whether I would have bothered to complete the process unless I was extremely motivated to get that particular white paper.

Putting prospects through this type of initiation ritual is insane. But clearly it’s the result of some past sales VP saying “unless we know these facts about every prospect, I don’t want my reps calling them.”

News flash to all sales VPs: you don’t need to capture all that information as a first step. And to the extent you DO require that information, you’ll lose the opportunity to engage with some seriously interested prospects who are genuinely curious about your product but who want the information you’re offering NOW and don’t want to jump through hoops to get it.

Instead, use what’s called “progressive profiling.” You’ll need a marketing automation system or similar technology in place to accomplish it, but the basic tenets of this approach are:

1. Require very little information to capture initial registration.

2. Engage the individual in a series of follow-up communications via e-mail encouraging him or her to provide more information (in a way that doesn’t require that person to fill out the same information already provided)

3. Set a threshold for what defines a “sales ready” lead (i.e. the amount of information, or certain demographic criteria) and forward those leads to your sales force (automatically) once qualified.

In most cases, the information required for initial registration should be no more than name, company, e-mail address, phone number, and zip code (for lead assignment purposes). If there’s some other absolutely vital qualifying data – for example, the person MUST have Microsoft Exchange installed or there’s nothing you can do for them – then ask that too, but stop there.

Marketing automation systems also enable the “resource center” (one-time registration) approach whereby a visitor, once registered, can access additional content freely, either through a log-in process (as in the security site referenced previously) or because the system recognizes them automatically via IP address or cookie and “lets them through.” Some systems will also track when that additional content is accessed and what was accessed, record that data and populate it into the prospect’s record in Salesforce.com or other CRM system.

There are benefits to this approach – the most obvious being that the prospect only registers once, though you could accomplish the same thing by placing a registration form in front of every content asset but have that form pre-populate automatically for repeat visitors.

The downside of the resource center approach is how it’s presented. When I went to the security vendor’s site, I didn’t want to register for an account on their site. I wanted a white paper. To the extent you’re asking the prospect to register for something he/she didn’t request (a user account, or access to your entire white paper library), you run the risk of that prospect abandoning the process. Basic direct marketing 101 says: give your reader what he/she wants. If you decide to pursue the resource center approach, be sure to position it as simply an added benefit of requesting the initial content, i.e. “When you register for your free white paper, you’ll be automatically granted access to our complete resource library …”

Don’t let the registration process, and your decision of how to structure that process, be governed by your sales reps’ demands to know absolutely everything there is to know about an individual prospect before they will deem to talk to him or her. Instead, make the registration process as quick and painless as possible, even if it means requesting the bare minimum of information. Then employ automated lead nurturing to engage that prospect further, and trigger sales follow-up either when you’ve collected enough information, or else when that prospect has met “sales ready” criteria by your definition. You’ll generate many more leads and your sales reps will thank you for it.

For more information on the lead nurturing/progressive profiling model of demand generation, download a copy of our free white paper on “Lead Recycling: A More Cost Effective Approach to Demand Generation for High-Technology Companies.”

However, should we call them a report and place a dollar value on them to help improve their perceived value?

That is precisely what my friend and white paper peer Bob Bly recently suggested. Here’s what he actually said:

Does what you call your bait piece really matter? I think it does, because calling it a report or guide creates a perception of greater value—after all, thousands of publishers actually sell special reports and booklets for prices ranging from $3 to $40 or more.

I often put a dollar price for the guide or report in the upper right corner of the front cover, which strengthens the perception that the freebie has value; I don’t think this would be credible on a document labeled a white paper.

I’m wondering what you think about this?

Do you think for a business audience this would work or make sense?

Some of these applications were truly innovative, some were flavor-of-the-month knock offs. Many were simply automating some small piece of annoying manual labor. But all were targetted toward the same audience--marketing executives. Now, historically, marketing executives haven't been the most sophisticated consumers of technology. Most marketers with the experience to be a senior executive today went to school before the rise of the Internet, and any new wave of technology can be a learning curve. There are plenty of savvy early adopters, to be sure, but taken as a whole, the marketing profession is still in the very early stages of technology adoption.

So when hundreds of technology vendors meet up with marketing executives, they have a fundamental challenge. How do you communicate a value proposition that senior marketing executives will understand and appreciate? Well, you listen of course. What do marketing executives say they need? Not surprisingly, marketing executives frequently list the challenges that keep them up at night. Generate actionable leads.
Demonstrate marketing ROI. Deliver performance metrics and accountability.

And this is where the ideal of differentiation meets the survival imperative of finding common ground with your customer.

As a wide spectrum of application vendors face the obstacle of communicating their Techonology Difference to non-technical marketing executives, the vendors tune their message to the familiar things marketing executives want to hear. Leads. Metrics. Accountability. ROI.
Which is fine in the isolation of a sales cycle, but rather problematic as a general trend. Soon, the vendors are all singing the same tune as a chorus, and everything starts sounding the same to marketers. Everything is about generating leads, delivering metrics, providing accountability.
And then you find, as I did when I was doing my study, that anything remotely related to CRM that you put in front of a marketer elicits the same response. "I already have Salesforce. Why do I need this?"

This is the Emperor's New Clothes Factory. Who's going to tell the Emperor he's naked when it's vastly easier to sell more nakedness? And there's plenty of nakedness to sell. Selling ROI is great, until marketers stop innovating in the absence of a proven business case. Selling metrics is fine, but to paraphrase Einstein, not everything that can be measured is important, and not everything that is important can be measured. Selling accountability is wonderful, but accountability doesn't guide execution.
The problem is a general trend toward easily digestable selling points that minimize innovation and slow the marketing technology adoption curve.

Sure marketers will figure this all out in time. SaaS applications are gradually pushing back IT control over marketing technology, and the emerging next generation of marketers has come of age in a far more wired world. But the evolutionary cycle is excrutiatingly slow and littered with dead bodies. Can't we speed this up?

What we need as a marketing ecosystem is a big crucible where enterprise marketers and technology vendors can meet outside of the selling cycle. A forum where marketers can learn about technology innovation, and where vendors--particularly their product marketing teams--can better understand enterprise marketing challenges. With more common ground in our understanding of the marketing challenges technology can solve, vendors can develop applications that are not only compellingly different, but meaningfully familiar.

As it happens, I'm in the planning stages of this year's Elite Retreat in Hawaii, and this issue is shaping up to be one our tracks. If you're a senior marketing executive with an interest in marketing technology, or a marketing technology vendor, drop me a note and let me know what you think.

Perhaps a better question might be: What do social media have to do with demand generation? The answer is: plenty, but perhaps not in the way you’d think.

As a most basic example, blogs can be a highly effective lead generation vehicle, though most companies don’t take full advantage of their capability in this regard.

In contrast, however, my observation is that most corporate blogs – particularly in the high-tech B2B space in which we operate - will rarely contribute much to the lead funnel, except by accident, because they tend to come into being minus any particular mission, other than perhaps some vague notion of promulgating thought leadership. More’s the pity. Personally, I don’t see any issue with having “lead generation” be part of your blog’s explicit purpose, and then designing the blog accordingly.

So yes, you can generate leads through social media. However, where blogs and other vehicles may have the most potential in the context of B2B demand generation is not in lead acquisition, but rather in lead nurturing.

When we design lead nurturing strategies for clients, the most common objective is some variation on: “keeping in front of prospects so that they think of us when they’re ready to buy.” Even the most relevant, personalized e-mail content has the potential to wear out its welcome, but blogs (via e-mail and RSS subscriptions), Twitter feeds, MySpace and Facebook pages are an ideal complement to e-mail communication, perfect vehicles for maintaining your brand as “top of mind” with your chosen audience.

This was reinforced for me recently when I read a fascinating post at ReadWriteWeb about “brandstreaming,” a new concept in social media defined as “a consistent flow of content created by a brand.” And what is a “consistent flow of content” but merely another way of nurturing a business relationship?

What is your company doing to leverage social media and keep your brand top of mind? Not as much as some, I’ll wager. Take the example of Pandora, the online music service. Pandora’s social media initiatives include: Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, Get Satisfaction, Flickr, and MySpace.

That’s quite the checklist. To be fair, Pandora is a consumer brand, and on the social media bandwagon, B2C companies are miles in front of their B2B counterparts. Still it shows the potential.

Consider this. According to ReadWriteWeb:

“… content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months, and 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.”

Those are eye-opening statistics, and B2B companies aren’t immune from such trends. All this means that when you plan a lead nurturing strategy, e-mail may no longer be enough. Put another way: time to think outside the inbox.

This is an important question.

It came up while I was training a group of engineers on writing white papers.

First, are you doing interviews at all? If you’re not, you should. The best content is inside someone else’s head. Just think about all the time you spend reading and researching as part of your daily job. Now think about the experts you need to speak to. They have access to information you could never expect to find on your own.

So to the question: Who do I interview?

The first thing to think about is this, “What do I ‘not know’ and who has the knowledge I seek?”

As you prepare your project, a number of names will likely cycle through your mind.

When I do a white paper, here’s the types of folks I enjoy speaking to:

• Salespeople: These folks know how to best position messages for maximum uptake with customers.
• Product directors: These people tend to be responsible for the product, have thought about the industry issues and understand the needs of their customers.
• Marketing: Marketing people are sometimes guilty of drinking a bit too much of their own Kool-Aid, but can be excellent sources of information.
• Book authors: These guys (and gals) live on PR. Try getting a quote from them.
• Bloggers: The folks behind industry-specific blogs often have amazing access to information and people. Be sure not to overlook them.

Who am I missing? Lets hear from you…

In the article titled, "Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips," I give the five tips on how you can make your B2B lead management more effective, which are:

Here’s a short excerpt from my interview.

1. Create a marketing funnel.

Most organizations don’t have a marketing funnel; they have a sales funnel that looks more like a bucket with lots of holes in it where leads leak out. Marketing needs to create its own funnel to understand whether leads are sales ready or not.

The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring leads into one spot and qualify them. By qualifying them, I mean that the leads are ready to talk to someone from a sales perspective. Then there is the hand-off process between marketing and sales. I find that connecting the marketing and sales funnel together is really a big challenge. You have to understand your sales process to know at what point the sales team views a lead as an opportunity and begins actively pursuing it.

Lead generation really is about building relationships. It’s how can I help my sales team build relationships with the right people and the right companies. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready.

The bigger and better you make your marketing pipeline, ultimately the bigger and better you make your sales pipeline. In the end, this isn’t about generating more leads; it’s about generating actionable leads.

Continue reading Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips

You're also invited to join me at MarketingSherpa's Demand Generation Summit at your choice of Boston (Oct 5-7) or San Francisco (Oct 26-28.) I'll be speaking on a "Playbook for Effective Lead Management." Netline (who brings you the Inspire blog and Smart Marketers newsletter) is the "Welcome" sponsor at the Demand Generation summit.

Register for the event before September 5th and save $300.

Last year, MotiveLab syndicated a whitepaper with Netline, entitled “12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media”. We were a little overwhelmed with the results. Over the course of the past year, nearly 3000 people downloaded the whitepaper, and more than 1800 registered for the download and answered a short survey about their attitudes and approach to social media marketing. Recently we analyzed the results as two separate data sets divided into six month periods, and compared the first six months to the second six months to see any changes in attitudes and opinions. The report is available for free at the MotiveLab Web site, and the results are fascinating. I won’t belabor all the data, but it shows a clear acceleration in the adoption of social media as a marketing practice, and fairly balanced opinions about its value and application, despite all the frothy hype and counter-hype in business reporting.

To me, it looks a lot like the trend in adoption of the Internet over a decade ago. Lots of initial hype. Lots of backlash and debunking. But under the layer of media babble, a solid upward trend of adoption that tracks along with the experiences of businesses as they process the cycle of innovation, failure, adaptation and optimization. So don’t believe the hype. Find out for yourself what social media can do for your marketing.

What’s the problem: People don’t pay attention anymore (I am a prime example).

Think about it:

• Hundreds of TV channels to surf from home (at home and on your cell phone)
  
• Your email inbox crammed with a never ending-stream of messages
  
• Millions of possible websites to surf
  
• A mailbox full of junk mail, catalogs, …
  
• More commercials (on TV, the radio, …)
  
• Music over radio, satellite and TV
  
• Did I mention voicemail and newspapers?
  
• Let’s throw in social media, like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
  

All these choices create a huge problem for you. But there is a solution.

When I was a kid. There were pretty much three TV stations (ABC, CBS, NBC), the local paper and radio stations.

Now we live in the most fragmented information society that has ever existed.

In fact, it is overwhelming. So much so, that people are literally tuning out (my friend just canceled his cable TV service)!
This spells trouble to a lot of us!

So what can we do?

What are obvious the options?

Option A: Try to communicate across all the channels
Option B: Ignore how the world is changing and do what you have always done?
If you attempt to engage all the channels, it will cost you a fortune and kill you. There’s just too much and new channels seems to be emerging annually.

Hiding your head under a pillow will also lead to your demise. If you cannot see the need to change, you will slowly shrink your audience or kill your business.

So what’s the solution?

Narrow casting. This is a word I crafted to help convey the point. You now have an opportunity to build favor with very focused groups of people that have very specific interests.

Unlike the past, you can now build businesses, blogs, etc. in micro niches that are under served by the general market (and would be impossible to build 20 years ago).

For example, let’s say you are an artist who likes to teach people how to turn their junk into useful household products. You could very quickly build an audience and a rather large following by simply leveraging social media.

OR, you could use me as an example. I would have never been able to build 20,000 followers on a niche topic of white papers in the past. But now I was able to pull people together from all around the world that share a single thing in common: the creation and marketing of white papers.

The take home message: When your message is unique and highly relevant to a special group of people, all you need to do is focus on that group. Other like-minded people will flock to you.

How do you need to change: Stop being a generalist. Focus on doing one or a few things exceptionally well. Hand pick the channels where your people area and begin marketing. Ignore everyone outside your ideal target. Tweak, enhance, expand and repeat.

What do you think? Are you a narrow caster who has found success? I’d like to hear from you.

Drew spoke about his experiences in selling to this segment and his findings made a lot of sense.

The fundamental challenge of this space is rooted in the fact that SMB is far from a monolithic entity. In fact it’s a diverse group that can be segmented in as many ways as there are dimensions. I wonder sometimes if the whole SMB terminology is based in an enterprise paradigm of “there is us — enterprise — and then there is the rest of the world all of who can be lumped together into SMB”. Even from an overly simplified “company size” perspective, the very small business segment (1-5 employees) behaves very differently from the SB vs. the SM vs. the MB. In fact the larger MBs take on the characteristics of an enterprise and often lose all resemblance to a small business.

A few observations and principles that I’ve found to be helpful are outlined below. These stem from my work with clients targeting this group, from interviews I’ve done of target customers in this segment, analysis of market research I’ve done for clients and some excellent discussions I’ve had with inside sales teams (who are a wealth of knowledge in this space):

i) Finding the true Target Audience: Break down the SMB into smaller segments. Who is your true target, sweet spot? This is dependent on many questions (criteria) such as:

a. What are some of the pain points your solution alleviates?
b. For which segment is the pain point(s) most relevant? Most acute?
c. How much are they willing to spend to alleviate it?
d. How does that map to your offering? Your price point? COGS? Margins?

ii) Cost-effectively Reaching them: Think broadly — VARs, direct-online, inside sales, wholesale, discount warehouse, retail, etc.

a. Can your products align with VARs offering to create value (margin) for them?
b. What kind of support will your offering need? Will you offer this or should/can this be a value add offering the VAR can provide?
c. If you are going the VAR route you better make sure you can support them AND not compete with them.

iii) Solutions to Business problems – not Technology, not Products, not Features: We often make the mistake of selling our products. But SMB like all smart buyers are not interested in products, they are interested in a solution for their problems. So sell them on the business benefits they will derive — time saved, money saved, faster/better customer service they can deliver, and greater revenue, etc. — from your solution. Higher order benefits such as “peace of mind” can also work as long as they’re rooted in business-related benefits.

iv) A true SMB solution: Often large companies think they can take their enterprise solutions, strip them of a few key features and put them out there at a lower price and the SMBs will come. Not so. For example I found that “ease of use” and “ease and speed of setup and maintenance” were overwhelmingly important and an enterprise-based solution simply could not deliver on this front no matter how stripped down it was. Talking to your target audience and conceiving and developing the product from scratch is sometimes the best answer. As Drew mentioned, acquiring a true small business solutions company is another way to get a head start especially for a larger enterprise trying to get into this space.

v) More than Competition: You may think your competitor is that other company that is selling something similar. The bad news is there’s a lot more to consider. Think of all the ways in which your target audience can alleviate their business pain e.g., can they limp along without doing anything for a while i.e., do nothing? Can they hire two more people to do it? We may think of the problem in terms of the lack of product capability we are offering but the real problem is cost increase or revenue suppression or lack of a business function. For example a VoIP company may think they compete with another VoIP provider that can also offer efficient call response, etc. However from the customer’s point of view, can they solve this problem by simply having two receptionists?

vi) Value is everything – but not Everything: Small businesses are stingy. They want good value for money and want the lowest price. I understand this – I am one. But they don’t shop just on price. They are great at measuring value – and over time. So sell them on the immediate and the long term benefits. Show them how your solution will scale easily – up when they grow AND down when they are going through a rough patch. Offer them “pay for what you use” if you can. And don’t forget to talk about the “total cost of ownership” of your offering and your competitor’s (see 5 above). They will understand — and warm to — that.

Have you found these to ring true? Please write back if you’ve had similar — or different — experiences.

The people at Jellyvision don’t claim to generate leads. Instead, what they do is take an existing traffic stream, say the people that visit your Website, and convert those visitors much more efficiently to qualified leads. Behind each conversation they develop are hundreds, even thousands, of individual audio files that create an interactive, adaptive, incredibly natural dialogue with the viewer.

Think of Jellyvision as hosted PowerPoint, with audio, backed by a “live” narrator that asks questions of the viewer and then adapts the presentation accordingly. One of the things that most impressed me was the impeccable timing, what Jellyvision calls the “flow.” When you answer questions, the resulting audio response is uncannily – almost eerily – real. It really is like having a conversation with someone.

Say you want to present a story on your Website or campaign microsite about a new product, your company, your category – whatever, but you only want to generate leads that meet certain key criteria, for example: companies of a certain size. Jellyvision can adapt the conversation to weed out unqualified prospects (see what happens in the BEA demo when you tell the presenter you’re from a small company.) Jellyvision has also had success building conversations as “product selectors,” when a company wants Web visitors to self-select which product (or module or option) is right for them.

Jellyvision’s pricing varies according to the scope of the project and other variables. They charge on a “per-per-action” model, based on the number of qualified leads, or trial downloads, or product sales, or whatever the target transaction is that you want the conversation to achieve. That makes them not only an attractive proposition for any company looking for ways to improve Web conversions, but a potentially exciting way to add life to a Web site, microsite, or other online property without the upfront costs typically required to develop anything close to this type of multimedia production value.

Cool stuff.

A recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council's study, “Driving the Bottom Line from the Front Line,” assessed the go-to-market processes and capabilities of global companies. ]]> According to the study, "Surprisingly, over 46% of respondents gave themselves failing grades when assessing their own go-to-market effectiveness, with only six percent giving their capabilities the highest marks, and just 29% calling themselves quite effective." 

The study concluded that poor collaboration between sales and marketing is a key reason for go-to-market failure and this is where the leadership from upper management plays a vital role in successful execution. Todd Ebert over at the BAD Marketing Blog gives some additional insights on the CMO study here.

I agree with their findings. With that said, it requires more than just effective upper management involvement. I believe that effective collaboration requires each of us to better managers ourselves. 

Becoming an effective marketer goes far beyond creativity and careful campaign management. Like any other functional role, marketers will execute successfully, more often, if we are first and foremost good managers.   

Collaboration between sales and marketing and go-to-market execution will come more naturally if we each focus on our basic management skills: Leadership, communication, planning, organizing, staffing, and controlling.

I encourage you to check out The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. If you only read one book about how to improve your personal effectiveness I think you will find this book to be a good choice. It was written quite a while ago but it's a wonderful resource.

Related post: Why CEOs Must Be Actively Involved in Lead Generation

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.

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