Not companies buy but the people in the companies: the people can be managers, directors or CxO’s.

Transforming from consumer to business to consumer again

All these rational business people start out the day as consumers and when they get into the office they transform into a business buyer or decision taker.
At the end of the working day when they go home they become consumers again.

The transformation from Retail (B2C) to Business (B2B) to Retail (B2C) again and still they are not schizophrenic.

As only a few people in companies are decision makers, decision takers and influencers, most people stay consumers the whole day. The Transformers are the minority in the total population of the consumers.

The Transformers buy upon impulse, feelings and sentiment making subjective and even passionate decisions in their consumer life, whereas during their business hours they are expected to make objective and rational decisions. This is probably not the case as their decision taking will still be largely influenced by feelings and sentiments.

Transforming from Interruptive Marketing to Inquisitive Marketing

Interruptive marketing = outbound
Since ever marketing has been using interruptive communication methods to create interest, to drive customers to buy products or to visit the website. Interruptive marketing is the process of interrupting potential customers by email marketing campaigns, direct mailings, print advertising or online advertising.
Over the years customers have build up an immunity or ignorance for marketing messages: the pushier the ad, email or cold call, the less likely to follow-up.
People have developed sensors for not accepting or believing these ad messages anymore.

Inquisitive Marketing= inbound
At the same time the people have developed skills to search solutions on the Internet helped by the search engines that have gotten more sophisticated over the years.

The potential customer has transformed from being pushed by outbound marketing and advertising, to the customer who will search and inquire for information to solve the problems he has encountered: Inbound Marketing.

Just like the consumer is changing from undergoing Interruptive marketing to Inquisitive marketing, the Transformers are also changing from being influenced by the typical Interruption Marketing to the Inquisitive Marketing.
In this case the potential customer will be retrieving information and advices from several different online sources: mainly the Internet as this is a easiest channel and open 24 x 7.
In order to drive Inquisitive Marketing, you need to keep feeding the communication channels with new content.

Still these customers can become susceptive again at a certain moment of time and become sensitive to the old fashioned interruptive marketing by the suiting email marketing or for that moment appropriate advertising.

Knowing is half the battle

As G.I. Joe said: “…and knowing is half the battle,”.
You should know if your potential customer is susceptive for Interruptive or Inquisitive Marketing.
Therefore you need to identify precisely your potential customer by company name.
Inform about his interests in solutions.
Are you G.I. Joe (The Salesman) in a battle with The Transformers (The Customers)?

Do you know?
- How rational or subjective the decisions of your customers are?
- If they are into inquisition marketing or susceptive to interruption marketing?
Find out if you don’t know. You will need it.

Email communication issue

We encountered a commercial communication issue while organizing a voyage to Tuscany (Italy) by trying to book by email several Bed & Breakfast (Agriturismo) stays for our journey.
Not use of the Italian language as any online translation provides you the basic comprehensive Italian, but the email communication itself and the information provided.

It is relatively easy to find and select several Bed & Breakfast locations in each area as most seem to have a website or are grouped on portals. Sending them a standard inquiry email for availability of a room and pricing is the easy part, fast and can be done in large quantities.

The delay in replies
As these B&B’s are commercial enterprises that need to make money by booking guests, you expect to receive an email response within a few hours after sending. Especially as this is a very competitive market with very similar services provided (Location - Bed - Breakfast).
However typically it will take over 24 hours to get answers (A minority does answer within a few hours).

The incomplete responses
People browsing for solutions to their problem (holiday booking) expect a fast answer (reservation).
In most cases you will receive very short incomplete replies missing valuable information like the included services (breakfast included in the price? Kitchen in the room) and the method of accepted advance payment.

Thus for every response you need to reply the email and ask more specific questions.
As you send out many similar emails, it get hard to know which B&B is answering: including the name of the B&B and link to the website would be a great help in order to make your information gathering more efficient.

The failing follow-up
Once you have made the advance payment by bank transfer or credit card payment, it requires additional emails and telephone calls to get your confirmation of your reservation.
They seem to forget that however the advance payent has been made, the main revenue still needs to be generated: additional services, food and drinks. Especially the alcoholic beverages in the evening are an important revenue stream for the B&B businesses as these probably make the difference between break-even and profitability.

The missing the commercial drive
Although these bookings are their main income for the B&B owners, their commercial drive is very low.
Maybe the people who start a B&B want to be away from commercial pressure and want to feel on holiday every day. Still they will be facing the financial issues by not being commercial.

The 10 Email Commandments

1. Read
Read the email first before answering. Many emails are replied without answering to the specific questions or case.

2. Label
Label all incoming and outgoing emails in order to be able to retrieve them later.
Even more practical if your CRM automatically collects your emails by customer or lead.
Additionally you can add a keyword in the reply subject in order to know the content.

3. Max 24 hour delay
If you have an interested party, it seems logical you try to answer within 24 hours or less in order to keep his attention and the stay ahead of your competitors. Except during weekends of course.
People do remember the first reply, especially if it brought additional info or an additional benefit.

4. Answer the easy and short ones first
If you reply the easy and short replies first, you satisfy more people in a shorter delay of time and you have less pressure while answering the difficult and long ones as you are near the end of the process.

5. Efficiency: batch and completeness
In order to increase efficiency and limit your writing work it is best to:
- Batches: Reply emails in batches (every 2-3 hours): getting interrupted for email answering is not efficient.
- Completeness: be as complete as possible in your first email.
   Respond to all the questions asked.
- Pre-empt: in order not to get unnecessary additional emails:
   Provide the necessary information concerning your operations.

6. Standard email for standard business
In case your service is fairly straightforward and regular (like Bed & Breakfast), a standard email consisting of a few standard responses completed with the specific additional info.

If your service is complex or one-off (like project business) then your answer can take longer, but at least you would send out a confirmation of receiving the email with a possible first question.

7. Call to action
The reply email should have a clear call to action: what should the interested party do next. 
This can be the link to the payment page or the free sign-up.

In case of B2C (like B&B) the action is probably the purchase (payment), whereas in B2B a meeting, references or a free trial should be the action to aim at.

8. Keep the door open
In any case in Business to Business (B2B) the reply email should still leave the door open for further communications. Thus if you have questions, don’t spoil all your questions in the first reply email. 
Keep one or two for a follow-up email.  

9. Signature with links
Your signature not only should mention your name but also:
- Email address: in case your email gets forwarded and the original email address gets obscured
- Links: functional and useful website link(s): at least your website home page

10. Re-read
Before sending: re-read.
Once send - recall and correction is impossible.

How fast, complete and commercial are your email replies?

Controlled Marketing

Currently our marketing consists of:
- The website
- The almost daily blog post
- The micro blogging on Twitter that mainly consists of a catchy phrase and a link to the blog posts
- The regular press releases (except for summer holiday)
- The comments on blogs: only when we feel we can add something to the conversation.

We could easily spend money on on-line advertising especially in the geographic markets where we score lower.

These are all communications that we can control and master.

Marketing beyond control: schmoozing

What we see as the biggest challenge is to have bloggers start writing about LEADSExplorer as a sales and marketing web service. As we haven’t been schmoozing as Guy Kawasaki, it is likely we will be missing this: You need to establish the relationship before you need it. Therefore schmoozing is it!
Guy even wrote a sequel: The Art of Schmoozing as he has been schmoozing his entire career.

We do get into relation with bloggers and LEADSExplorer regularly gets mentioned in solution lists (TargetInfoLabs, WebMarketCentral, FrenzyBlogging, LeadsLoth ).
We also have sveral clients that blog too, but they don’t seem to be too keen to blog about our service. Maybe they are afraid of the competition reading and knowing their secret of success?

We are aware there is still a lot of room for improvement for increasing our visibility in the bloggers community. Building this visibility will not happen overnight but step by step especially as we aren’t located in Silicon Valley.
We are also a startup: our time is very limited and valuable as there are always a gazillion other things we need to get done like serving our customers.

Schmoozers and schmoozing characteristics

- Some people call it networking, others just call it schmoozing.
- It is not what you know or who you know, it is about who knows you.
- Good schmoozers first give favors, then ask for a return.
- The real great schmoozers give favors without expecting a return:
   you will give a return without them asking for.

Schmoozing digitally

Thus we need to schmooze or loose.
Even in this digital communications era (Blogs and Twitter) the schmoozing seems to be happening in analog (real life), which makes it very expensive. Real life schmoozing doesn’t scale.

The best we can do is to continue to schmooze digitally by:
- Asking questions
- Answering questions
- Mentioning our web service LEADSExplorer - website lead generation and customer retention.
- Having an online presence
- Create online connections
in order to get in contact and create interest with bloggers and influencers.

Will this help us reach our potential customer?
Is our target business customer the blog-reading type?
Can he be influenced by blogs and links?

How good are you at schmoozing?
Did you have any success with schmoozing digitally (over the Internet)?

Your competitors get referenced in blog posts; however your company or product isn’t receiving any of this interest.
In order to get some exposure on the same blog pages as your competitors you can only achieve by writing comments on these blog posts.

Finding the posts using social search
The firs thing to do is to find the blog posts.
You can scan and read many blogs but in order to be effective a social search engine is required.
These social search engines are different from the Google of Bing searches as they only focus on social websites including blogs.
- WhosTalkin
- Social mention: lists also the authors who frequently mention the search phrase: ‘Top Users’. A social rank score is also provided.
- Google blog search

What to write
Do read the blog post.
Do not post anything before you know what the blog post is exactly about.
Do not spam.
Do think positive.

Then investigate if the blog editor will review the comments before publication.
In case of a review you have to be careful not to write a sales pitch as it will never be published.
In case of a fully automatic posting, anything that is related will be published and not removed.

Next be creative and formulate:
- An additional information that relates to the post and your solution.
- A comment that challenges the competitor.
- A controversial comment still related to the subject.
- A short sales pitch: just a few benefits or features not provided by the competitor.

Avoid posting the same comment over and over again: Variation of the same theme is good enough.
Make sure your comment is interesting, beneficial for the reader, funny or remarkable.
A boring sales pitch with no additional value or no new insight will not be remarked and remembered.
The comments are a part of the entertainment provided by the blog.

The main goal is to have the readers click on the link or to have them search for your website.

The product of brand name
In some cases the product or brand name can be mentioned even supported by a link, whereas on other blogs the brand name is better omitted and only inserted in the link field provided.
Thus you have to choose between:
- Brand name and a link in the comment.
- Brand name in the comment and the link in the “Website” field.
- No brand name in the comment, but the search phrase for finding your website and the link in the “Website” field.
- Using your brand name in the “Name” field and use a generic company email address.

The result: brand name will be remarked or remembered
The best is posting the comment as soon as possible after the publication of the blog post, as then your comment will appear underneath the post. The nearer the more likely people will read your comment.
Additionally the search engines will index the comment and will count the reference and the link enclosed even if it is a “NoFollow” blog comment. Of course a “DoFollow” comment will be more beneficial for the page rank of your website.

Ride the marketing coattails of your competitors by posting interesting, informative or remarkable comments.
What’s your experience?

The sales process flow and evolution is independent from the quarterly closing.
So why thy to fit the closing of deals just before the end of the quarterly closing as required by public traded companies?

Selling under pressure
We all know that if you are pushing the client to sign a contract or purchase order there are 3 possibilities:
- All ends fine and you close the deal.
- The prospect asks for an additional discount.
- The prospect finds you too pushy and turns away.
- The competitor takes advantage of your situation and exposes more confidence than you. And gets the deal.
The purchasers know you are under pressure to achieve your target in order to make the budget and to get your commission. They will take advantage of your awkward situation and get a better deal for them.

Investment in prospects
After all the investments made and efforts done for: 
- Advertising
- Lead generation
- SEO (Search engine Optimization)
- Cold calling
- Nurturing
- Sales meetings
- Price quotes
- and negotiations that have taken several months, the closing of the deal needs to be achieved under great pressure and high speed.
All just for the sake of the quarterly budget and the quarterly closing.
All the investment made in the prospect is gambled against the quarterly closing.

If there would be no quarterly closing and the budget would not be limited by the quarter, the revenue of the company would be much higher. Higher revenue means more earning per share for the investors.
Thus more value for the share holders.

Advantage: Privately owned companies
Not having a quarterly close is an advantage for privately owned companies as their sales people are not under pressure of the quarterly closing. The sales process can have its’ natural flow and evolution.

All Board of Directors and shareholders of public traded companies should rethink this quarterly strategy as in the end they are in the loosing team.

How strong is the pressure exercised on you by your management to close deals before the end of the quarter?
How many deals slip through, decrease in sales value or are lost because of the increased pressure?

There are many blogs and even more comments on these blogs.
It takes time to read blogs, to formulate a comment and to write it.
Still many people do comment on blogs.

Why commenting? Spam?

The original idea of allowing comments on a blog post was to start a conversation with the readers. Engaging your audience with the goal to have more content on your blog for free.

However everybody who comments on a blog post has an agenda: a reason to comment.
This can be a hidden agenda or a very obvious reason.
Maybe all comments are spam?

Two main reasons for commenting:
1) Generating clicks: To attract visitors to the website as writing comments requires much less effort than blogging on a regular basis and no need to build an audience as you steal the audience.

2) SEO: To increase SEO by more links to the website and the brand name.
Some blogs implement a ‘NoFollow‘ for the link in the comments in order to make it less interesting for spammers, although Google does count the “NoFollow” links.
Additionally automated spam is rejected by the Captcha functionality or similar by using questions.
Still many blogs have a “DoFollow” policy.

What works to get clicks?

The earlier the comment is posted the higher it appears in the list of comments.
As the popular blogs have many posts, your post needs to be remarked and preferably be remarkable:
a) A controversial comment on the post: so controversial that people want to know the originator.
b) Straightforward advertising comment that relates to the blog post.
c) A well constructed sales pitch directly related to the blog post.
d) Funny comment that contains some truth and is related to the blog post.

Both the advertising and the sales pitch can be considered as spam, but in many cases they are published after verification by the blog owner.
In order to have a higher chance to get a spam comment published, only mention the name of the company or the solution and no link in the comment text as you can have the link underneath your name.

What gets real leads?

Any of the 4 comment types mentioned can bring visitors that can become leads.
However the advertising and the sales pitch will have the best results as it drives the most interested visitors to your website.

Why do you post comments on a blog?
What are your most successful comments?

Marketing budget to near zero

Businesses have cut their marketing budget near zero as marketing is often considered as an expense a company can do without.
Although marketing should be seen as an investment for sustaining the future of the company, marketing budgets get cut driving the marketers desperate.
In the end the marketing man or marketing department is left over with just the website as this is still seen as essential to have: if potential customers can’t find the company on the Internet it doesn’t exist anymore.

The marketing actions without big expenses

Marketing actions are not necessarily related to spending money.
Instead of wasting your time or the time of your staff, there are still several possibilities for marketing without spending large budgets: mainly related to the website:
1.   Change and update the website with new content: requires access to Content Management system.
2.   Work on titles, keywords and meta-tags to improve the website SEO: requires access to CMS.
3.   Create an account on the company or products name on the many social websites (Knowem): and add a link.
4.   Regularly send out a Press Release using several free press release distributors, we evaluated here.
5.   Subscribe to a web service that reveals the company names of the website visitors (at a small fee).
      Then qualify these company visitors as leads based upon the visit data (pages visited, returning visits,…)
6.   Create presentations and publish them on Slideshare - Scribd - Authorstream.
7.   Start a blog and post everyday
8.   Post on a microblog like (Twitter) whenever events happen.
9.   Comment on blogs related to your business. Find blogs using Alltop.
10. Referrals: ask customers for referrals and post them on the website.
11. Write case studies and publish them on the website.
12. Write white papers and make them accessible requiring registration on the website.

Be a creative and hard working marketer

These are all labor intensive activities that can have immediate and even long lasting effects: exactly what a marketer needs to achieve.
As a marketer you shouldn’t be desperate without a budget. Just focus on other activities that will demand hard work and creativity but will be beneficial.
This will keep yourself or your staff busy, productive and contribute to the company by increasing branding and creating awareness.

Desperate marketers should use their imagination and become more creative.
Are you a desperate marketer?
What did you try already with or without success?

Any change involves risk.
Some people like entrepreneurs will take risks, while other people not.

C-level prefer risk avoidance

Most people at C-level or management level prefer risk-avoidance.
All people are resistant to change, especially those at the top of a company as they have everything to loose and hardly anything to win.
Any decision that turns out badly can be used against them, what can lead to be removed from the function at the top of their company.

Selling is identifying the risks

Selling is not only presenting the benefits, functions and features, but mainly removing or lowering the risks.
Benefits, functions and features are important, but before any decision is being made the salesman needs to bring information to the table that proves the lowering of risk.

One of the goals of meeting with the customers is to identify the risks and the perceived risks that the decision makers have about your or similar solutions.
Although the risks or perceived risks will be similar in many occasions, still you need to identify them precisely by asking appropriate questions.

Selling is removing the risks

Once the risks known, removing the risks or perceived risks can be achieved by:
- References that are representative to the potential customer or well known brand names.
- Prove you understand their problems and show how your solutions will solve them.
- Present other bigger risks:
   - Ask questions about what would happen if they didn’t implement a new solution.
   - Tell them about their competitors moving forward on the solutions you propose.
   - Mention if any legal law exists as this is presents a risk too.

What are the risks involved with your solutions for the C-level?

Ecology and renewable energy

The new hype is green:
Green cars, green cloud computing, green light bulbs.
Green energy.
Renewable energy (no energy is renewable as far as we know)

Everybody is convinced we need to save the world by producing less CO2 gas to slow down global warming.

Consumers:
Ironically when it comes to having our daily meal we don’t cut down on eating meat, although cows produce more CO2 gas than cars.
Consumers need to see a direct benefit before they start buying green as in most cases it will involve higher costs.
Governments try to solve this by subsidizing investments in green technology or technologies that help to consume less energy.
Still people will continue to eat large amounts of meat.

Businesses:
If a company has to decide upon the higher costs involved with green or renewable energy it is unlikely they will chose this as this will decrease the operating income.

Companies will only buy green tech if:
- There are significant benefits compared to the higher costs involved.
- There is a clear image benefit for the company: improving their branding.

These benefits can range from subsidizes to image improvement of the brand.

The additional costs need to be covered by the benefit

The costs related to the green energy or green manufacturing processes have to be bared by someone in the entire production process or food chain.
In most cases, the decision of going green comes down to a balance between higher production or operation costs and the intangible benefit from the PR or increase in brand naming of the company as there is no direct related tangible benefit.
If the place in the production process, where the additional costs are made, have no relation to the tangible or intangible benefit else in the process, then the going green is unlikely to happen.
If the implementer of the green production process can calculate the incurred additional costs into his sales price then there is no problem. However in most cases this is not possible.

If you are trying to sell green tech to companies make sure you have a benefit beyond just going green as business don’t survive on idealism.

Don’t try to influence decision makers or purchasers of the importance of your company as a vendor or your market leading position.
Your market leadership, importance of the company or the importance of the company in the past doesn’t solve their problem.

Bragging doesn’t solve their problems
Bragging will not sell.
You need to understand their problems and bring solutions.
These solutions preferably include your solutions, but can also not include them if you don’t have a fit.
The goal is to build a trust relationship between the potential customer and you - the vendor.
Trust relationships are not built by bragging.

If during your sales pitch you mainly praise your company for being the best, the most innovative, the largest in revenue or the market leader, you will probably miss the sale as these statements have no real value for the potential customer.

The same applies to the company website: it should focus on solving the problems of the customers, not trumping the market leadership of your company.

Market leadership
Moreover being the market leader implies that it is likely you will:
- Give fewer discounts.
- Have higher prices.
- Not supply additional services for free.
- Give smaller companies with smaller purchase orders less attention.
As you will need less the sales revenue and your company has many larger customers who require your main attention.

Selling point
Your selling point can’t be you importance or market leadership.
Your selling point should fit as a solution to their problem. Sell the benefits of your proposed solution.

What’s your selling point?