Kevin Sasser in The Sales Wars blog says although many sales methodologies like solution selling, spin selling, strategic selling , selling to the vito (Very Important Top officer) exists and are promoted, the fundamental answer to success in sales is: G.T.T.F.P.Q.

Get To The Freaking Point Quickly

He questions why a potential buyer should care about the:
- Company history
- Existing customers
- Profile of executives and founders
- Analyst views
- Vision of the company
during the sales presentation or pitch?

Why be boring?
Why be bore your audience, when they are listening?
After all the money spent and all the efforts you have gone through for lead generation, cold calling, direct mailing campaigns, emailing campaigns, trade shows, conferences, setting the appointment you don’t deliver. What a waste!

Be happy: you have the appointment and the audience is listening.

Limited number of messages
People can only understand and absorb 2 or 3 messages at a time.
Thus if you waste these 2 or 3 during the intro of the company, then the real important messages on the product or solution are lost.

Grab the attention

In order to grab the attention immediately by telling or explaining:
- How to solve one or several problems of the company problems: tangible benefit
- How to make/save money for the company: tangible benefit
- How to make life better for management: intangible benefit

We would like to add to this:
- Bring something remarkable for them into the conversation: amaze, astonish or excite them
- Show them you understand their complete picture: maybe you are giving away free consulting
- Find a personal benefit for the decision maker (intangible benefit)
- Make ‘em laugh (intangible benefit)

Keep the pitch short

The main advice is to keep the pitch short.
Just claim your intention of the purpose of the discussion and ask for confirmation of this goal.
All of the points in the discussion during the meeting should relate to these.

Keep it simple, to the point and short – less is more.
So we named this Get-to-the-Point selling.

How to know what the lead needs?

In order to start your To-the-Point sales talk without loosing time as suggested by Kevin Sasser in G.T.T.F.P.Q., you better have:
- Investigated on the company upfront: The good, The bad and The ugly.
- Investigated on the people you meeting with: what are their drivers or hurdles?
- Know what they have been looking for on your website
in order to present exactly the solution they need.
All these investigations are supported by LEADSExplorer.

Creating a habit

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners refers to an article in the NY Times about how habits may be good for you by Charles Duhigg, when he asks: “How to make your product a habit?”

The NY story is about washing hands with soap in Ghana, thereby reducing the death rate from hygiene related diseases like diarrhea, which is supported by Proctor and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever.

Solution as a habit

Jeremy Liew questions:
“Entrepreneurs should ask themselves the same question; how can they make their product a habit?”

Additionally he states:
“For many startups, there are no existing behavioral cues, and they will have to find or create a cue that can habitualize their users.”
His advice is to start from an existing habit and associate or append on your solution or product.

The above example in Ghana is about B2C and most examples will be about B2C, but could it also be applicable in B2B?
Can you create habits in Business-to-Business too?
Once the solution has become a habit, it will be hard to change again.

Habits of business people:
- Do open their email at least one a day
- Take their mobile phone everywhere
- Read the newspaper every day
- Check their agenda every day
So how could we add our service to this list or associate our solution to a habit on the list?

Change is hard to do

Changing customer behavior is hard to achieve both in B2C as in B2B.
In order to change behavior, you need to offer something that is:
- Very valuable to them
- Career threatening
- High ROI (Return On Investment) or Fast ROI.
Economic downturn helps in changing as people are obliged to make changes in order to survive or become profitable again.

LEADSExplorer as a habit

Everyday we are eager to know who has visited our website, thus people in other companies will have the same drive.

Our solution might have an advantage on creating a habit, as our web service is about leads and customers. LEADSExplorer is about lead generation, selling and getting sales done: The lifeblood of any salesman.

We could offer an additional convenience service that could become a habit.
Still the complete service could become a habit as any salesman is interested in what his customers are doing on the company website and if there are any new leads showing up.

How about your solutions becoming a habit?

Real ROI of Blogging

Lewis Green of MarketingProfs defines the Real ROI of blogging by questioning the marketing efforts:
- Create customer experiences as measured by the happiness levels of our customers?
- Result in loyal clients?
- Result in revenues and/or profits?
- Result in leads and referrals?
- Result in getting us noticed?

Return On Investment

However a Return On Investment consists of an equation:
The investment of money, time, capacities, assets
versus
The return by revenue, benefit or profit

A blog is an Investment

We think Lewis Green has overlooked the investment part:
- The blog needs to be promoted, linked, and referenced.
- The blog requires writing about subjects related to your products or solutions
- The blog needs content
- The blog needs to be renewed with content several times a week
- Comments on the blog need to be moderated requiring time.
- The writing of the blog and the images used need to be interesting
- Editing of the blog for layout and links requires time.
- Nurturing: you need to nurture the audience with new content on a regular basis.
- Addressing the audience that would buy your products with appropriate content.

The investment in the blog is quite important and a return is only to be expected if the blog is marketed too and becomes a success itself.

If you blog, content is needed, and getting readers or getting noticed isn’t to happen automatically without efforts for promoting the blog.

Thus instead of just promoting your products or solutions, now you need to promote the blog too!

Addressing the right audience

Addressing the right audience (customers and leads) is possibly the most difficult.
You can blog on great ideas, concepts and content, obtaining a large group of regular readers.
However at the same time missing completely to address the target audience that would buy your products.
Thus a waste of time and effort.

The Return – the leverage

The main returns are those mentioned by Lewis Green:
- Leads
- Speaking opportunities
- Referrals from other bloggers
- Regular readers

We would like to add:
- Links: thus improving the findability and SERP (Search Engine Page Result)
- Authority: if the blog shows the knowledge of the blogger, it brings authority on subjects in your business.
- Trust can be created due to the regularity of the posts and identification of the blogger.
- Community creation in some extreme cases.

It all comes down to getting more sales.

The leverage

The return can be far more bigger than the investment, especially compared to costs for conventional marketing like advertising, direct mail, emailing campaigns, trade shows, conferences, …
This is where blogging becomes interesting: the leverage of the interest it can generate (viral). The leverage of getting more for less.

The ROI of a blog

The ROI of blogging is the equation between the effort and investment to create, promote and to continuously generate content for the blog and the return in sales value.
To be compared with the conventional marketing channels.

On June 27 we experimented with a “Press Release” on MicroPR from Brian Solis and the same day we wrote about it in this blog.
We only addressed one journalist directly as this was just an experiment.

As we are now 2 weeks later, the results are:
We didn’t notice any visits from the MicorPR or Twitter. We can have overlooked or these visitors came with a direct hit (this means they typed in the website url directly on their browser).

The main interest was generated by the blog post: 7 visits
- 5 visits from searches on Google: “Press release” & “Twitter” (or similar)
- 2 direct hit visits – thus these have read about it and copy/pasted the url directly.
5 companies, one press related person and one residential visitor.
The press visitor is from Canada Newswire.
The last new visiting company was on July 11 and had made a search on Google. “press release on twitter”

Apparently most visits have been driven by the blog post and not by MicroPR.

The majority of the visiting companies have visited other blog posts, but hardly any visit to the website of LEADSExplorer. Thus they are not interested in our service.
Strangely most visitors have returned as visitor, sometimes to read the blog again or to read other blog posts.

How do we know al this?

Our web service LEADSExplorer allows investigating the visitors:
- The origin of their visit: we didn’t notice any increase in direct hits during these 2 weeks.
- By page visited, and then track them throughout all of their visits on the entire website.
The complete investigation is on one webpage of the application by just pointing and clicking.

What did the experiment bring?

Additional visitors thanks to the blog post.
No press coverage. We didn’t expect it anyhow, but if you don’t try you will neve know.

On Twitter we have obtained:
- A few followers, but that won’t change our destiny.
- A short tweet conversation.

Press releases on MicroPR by Twitter doesn’t generate much interest as:
- Most visitors were attracted by the blog post
- We have other blog posts that generate much more traffic.

Improving by?

Maybe one has to address all of the possible journalists on Twitter?
Use a different style of writing in order to get attention?
Use MicroPR as an additional channel whenever one sends out a press release.
Give it time – there is no one using MicroPR for the moment.

Will we use it in the future?

Definitively: when we roll out a real press release, we will send out an abbreviated version through MicroPR using Twitter as one has to use all possible channels to get remarked.

Thanks to technology people have experienced the transition of service-when-it-was-available to service-On-Demand.

Entertainment

People got entertainment when circuses visit their town and village.
Movies brought repeat and predictability in entertainment: people could decide when to view a movie within a certain timeframe.
Television brought entertainment into the living room but with a fixed schedule: people need to make time to view.
Video brought the consumer even more in control: content and time could be selected.
Digital TV permits to select from a wide range of content On Demand.
YouTube brings real On Demand entertainment as the amount of content is vast and the scheduling is yours.

Music

People had to go to a concert to hear an artist or group.
Radio brought music in the house but with a schedule.
Vinyl records allowed scheduling the music yourselves.
Transistor radio allowed listening to music anywhere.
Digital radio brought the possibility to select from a vast amount of content.
MP3 made it possible to listen to your preferred music anywhere anytime with the additional capability to shuffle the different songs: On Demand

Banking

People needed visit their bank during office hours for all transactions and even for the balance of their account.
Payments could be made using forms and simply mailed to the bank
In order to speed up the process, faxing of the payment form was allowed.
Online banking allowed for any transaction at anytime from anywhere: On Demand
However banks are missing the new trend in P2P payments (Paypal) , P2P loans (Zopa – Prosper – Boober )

Travel bookings

People used to go to a travel agency for advice and book a voyage.
As vacation packages came into existence due to standardization, the voyage could be booked using the telephone or fax, but that never became popular as an uncertainty is involved due to the missing proof of booking.
Now people gather information online and book online: On Demand.

Personal communication

Letters where written and mailed to family and friends.
The telephone gave instant communication access, but still both parties needed to be near the telephone.
Mobile phones brought instant access to anyone anywhere almost anytime: On Demand.

Publishing – printing

Books were printed in batches and reprinted upon exhaustion.
Newspapers were printed at regular intervals.
Printing On Demand has or is likely to change this for the books.
Whereas newspapers just could become restricted to being publishing only online and no longer being printed.

Software solutions

A solution needed to be analyzed, then written and tested, before being installed on a server in house.
Next standard solutions could be tuned by setting parameters to fit your needs.
In some cases these solutions were hosted at a third party site.
Now people can choose from different web services at their demand.
Soon the different web services will be integrated in one platform enabling exchange of information between the different services (RunMyProcess) as if it was one application: On Demand business integration.

Meetings

Meetings were set up at a specific time in a specific location.
Conference calls eliminated the need for travel.
Webcast broadcasted (streaming) the information to a previously informed audience.
Videoconferencing brought almost face-2-face communications.
Webinars (Web conferencing) brought multi media into the virtual meeting.
Instant Messaging allows for On Demand face-to-face meetings including multi media (video).

Still in business people seem to be hesitating to use Instant Messaging: it is very direct and convenient method of face-to-face communications in a relatively secure environment.

Leads

People went to trade shows to get information and sales tried to qualify the visitors as leads.
Trade magazines brought information to the subscribers and who needed to contact the vendors (reply cards), to be qualified as leads.
The Internet brought all possible information to the desk as the search engines turned the World Wide Web into the largest trade show on earth 24 x 7. On Demand

If marketing and sales don’t anticipate they will miss out on lead generation and on selling as the buying process and decision making happens outside their control.

Thus marketing and sales need to monitor the website. Not just counting the visitors, but knowing who is visiting the website (Company), when, how many times and what (pages, time on pages) on the website.

On Demand Lead Generation?

On Demand Lead Generation seams rather a contradiction as leads don’t come by demanding for them and need to be found.

When a salesman is achieving his targets or is convinced he will be achieving his targets, it is unlikely he will be looking for more leads.
This for two reasons:
- One salesman can only serve and nurture a limited number of leads
- If he over achieves his targets too much, he will be “punished” next year by getting higher than realistic targets.
  Thus an experienced salesman wants to be in control of his pipe and funnel and limits the number of leads.

However in case the salesman is missing leads or sales, he sure will use any opportunity or occasion to get new leads. As in B2b the website is a source of leads, he will investigate in the companies visiting the website or the customers visiting the website for clues who the call.
Thus lead generation will be also On Demand for the salesman when LEADSExplorer is tracking the website visitors.

Lead generation could become “On Demand” too.

The trend is evident:
On Demand will be in all service businesses (B2C and B2B) or service departments of companies sooner or later.

Since yesterday LEADSExplorer has obtained a ranking of 962.000 on Alexa. This means that there are about 1mio website having more traffic than we do. And at least 160mio websites that have less traffic.

Inaccurate Alexa

Even though the data from Alexa is not accurate, it shows:
- The trend of whether your traffic is growing or not
- A competitor having a ranking 0.5mio lower, will also have less traffic.

Although Alexa is inaccurate, it is good enough for what we use it:
- To know how the competition is doing
- To check upon leads and potential customers

This chart is from SillyJokes.

How did we achieve this?

We did this by not:
- Advertising
- Participating in trade shows
- Spending any money on advertising or PR
- Spending money on directory listings.

We just have:
- Paid for the domain name and the hosting.
- Submitted our link to many free directory listings
- Written content (a lot) for the website
- Written articles and posted them in different versions on free article websites
- Created a few PowerPoint presentations and published them
- Written a few ‘White Papers’ and submitted them on free syndication websites
- Become winner on Red Herring, but that mainly influenced the number of visitors on Engago Technologies.
- Applied at three more contests, that only listed the company name.

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was done in house with very limited knowledge about it.
- We just looked at keywords
- We have chosen the url of web pages more carefully (the last 5 months).

There are many tips on SEO available on the Internet.

Submitting to free directories

We never used reciprocal links as this is too much work and might even turn negative.

Only a few directories or listings actually bring visitors.
Thus in the end free directory submission is not worth the effort for generating visits.
On the other hand these entries get indexed too, so it should help the SERP of the website.

Article writing

Writing articles generates little traffic.
And in some cases the articles get copied into blogs, bringing hardly any traffic.

White Papers

It is rather unclear if these really have brought any visitors as the free white paper syndications have themselves little number of visitors.
We can imagine that well renowned paid white paper syndications can bring traffic, but at a high cost.

Presentations

We have made a few PowerPoint presentations available online.
As there is no direct link from the presentation to the website it hard to define how many visitors actually came from these presentations.
We know we have quite a few direct hits to the website, but they can come from anywhere.
Just counting the number of views of the presentations is not correct neither as the website provides a link to these presentations to view them online.

Website content

The content on the website was the main driver to arrive at a ranking around 1.5mio

The content of the blog pushed LEADSExplorer over the 1mio.
The blog has a post almost everyday.
The blog is on the same domain name as the website.
Coincidently on Technorati the blog attained position 1.8mio (jumped from 2.5mio in just one day) and received authority 2 (yesterday only 1).
We believe Technorati is lagging far behind and very inaccurate.

Competitors

Some of the competitors rank lower, the larger part ranks higher.
Most, if not all, competitors have the ‘log on’ to their web service on their website.
This generates a significant amount of daily traffic as several times a day the same people of all their customers log on: thus they visit the website.
This increases significantly their position on Alexa.

Conclusion

If you provide content, then Google (or search engines) is your friend, giving you a high SERP on many keywords and keyword phrases.

Never forget:
You need to feed the search engines (mainly Google) continuously. If not the number of visitors will start dropping. Yes we are a bit Googlecentric.

Virtual trade show

Over the years the virtual trade show concept has been promoted several times and discussed by leading marketers like Mou Mukherjee, but it has never caught on or become successful. This probably due to the technology required and the experience of the visitor.

Although there are many advantages compared to physical trade shows
- No travel
- No lodging
- Scalability of number of people needed
- No geographical boundaries
- No hectic
- No big set up costs
- Availability 24 x 7

Several companies are offering these virtual trade shows:
- Unisfair
- GoExhibit
- ON24
- iTradeFair
- InXpo

These solutions offer reporting and tracking as the visitors do need to register.

The features of these shows are: customizing of the trade show and the boots, integrated web casting, 3-D feeling, multi-lingual and networking capabilities.

In the current economic environment with high fuel costs this time a virtual trade show might just succeed as this solution offers interaction with other visitors, document download, show presentations and chat.

Return on Investment
At the end of the day it will come down to the price and the effectiveness for lead generation. or the Return On Investment (ROI).
- Price:
If the price is right it could fly. If to expensive nobody will participate.
According to ON24 hosting a virtual show will cost a company between $20,000 and $50,000 to produce, whereas GoExhibit starts at $25/month (?) to host a tradeshow.

The cost for a company to participate in a trade show is defined by the organizer.
The organizer has besides the hosting costs, mainly marketing costs: for attracting exhibitors and for attracting visitors.

- The number of Leads generated

The ROI is the cost per lead: calculated by the total cost divided by the number of leads obtained or qualified.
A Virtual trade show has one big advantage over real trade shows: the costs are more precise and not scattered over many departments in a company (including many expense notes).

Registration is a problem
The registration before visiting is probably the biggest barrier for anyone to visit.
Some of the registration procedures are just too long and cumbersome: not just name, company and email, but detailed contact, function, company information and interests.
Moreover as the interested visitor is aware of the risk of being called and contacted by all the exhibitors, he could just not register and search the Internet and visit company websites incognito.

The Search Engines

The competition is fierce: The Search Engines – indexing everything on the Internet.
They have turned the Internet itself into the biggest trade show on earth, also available 24 x 7: the World Wide Web.
Most of the benefits for virtual tradeshows apply too.
And the user has a higher chance of finding exactly what he is searching for, as the search is not limited to the trade show environment.
However you need to equip your website with the necessary communication features: downloads, presentations, video, chat.
Thanks to different free web services downloads, presentations and video are feasible to embed in your website. Enabling chat on your website is a bit more complex, but still relatively easy to do.

The main thing that is missing is the website visitor identification.
This can be solved partially by subscribing to a website visitor identification web service, revealing the company name of the visitor, the language the geographical location.
The advantages are:
- The visitors are not aware of being identified and tracked.
- The visitors have the opportunity to search world wide, not restricted by the trade show.

Virtual trade show or World Wide Web trade show?

Is there a need to mimic a real trade show on the Internet?
Will people register for visiting a virtual trade show or will they submit a fake name and email address?
A virtual trade show organizer should advertise and generate interest from companies your company normally can’t reach out to.

Would it be better to equip the company website with additional features like downloads, forum, chat and website visitor identification?
Of course you have to generate interest for your website in order to get visitors.

If Virtual trade shows would remove their registration and use a website visitor identification service, the main hurdle for the visitor would disappear.

If Company websites would add on communication channels and use a website visitor identification service, the current visitors would be identified.

The difference between both solutions would be in the marketing and attracting visitors to the virtual trade show or to the company website.

In both cases you will miss the face-to-face contact. Still online marketers prefer Virtual Trade shows as they cost less and often result in more targeted leads.

In any case less people are and will be visiting trade shows as they can:
- Find their information online.
- The economic downturn will allow less travel.

The original goal of a Beta program was:
- To sign-up first-time users amongst a defined universe
- To improve the product, test its scalability.
- To get feedback on the use and usefulness of the application.
This allows adjusting the functions and features of the application to the market.

Benefits for the Beta-testers:
- Beta versions are cool because they are unfinished.
- Discovering a new solution before anyone else is thrilling
- A part of the solution can be missing – still things to come – makes them return more often.
- Having the privilege of a sneak preview makes you important

Dedicated and involved

Slowly the company builds up a (small) number of users, who can become dedicated and involved.
They can even put some of their own ideas into the application.
They can suggest changes.
This makes them involved and dedicated to your application.

Exclusivity and privilege

The people participating know more about the solution than their competitors or neighbors. It is exclusivity.
A Beta program could almost build a community as they are part of the elected group.

On the other hand, if you make the Beta public, the sense of privilege falls apart as the participation is no longer a unique experience.

Collecting potential customers

Now the concept of Beta seems to be inversed as the main goal is no longer the Beta test itself, but using it to collect potential customers who have had the honor of being selected to use a brand new solution at no cost.
The Beta program has become marketing tool for lead generation.

Word Of Mouth

Beta-testers can help to build the hype.
Some of these Beta testers could even become advocates of your service or solution.

If you have one or more Beta testers who let leak out features and functions of your solution in forums, message boards or blogs, interest from the market could be generated.
This is form of Word of Mouth that is most interesting as it is based upon a sneak preview not available to the public.
As the Beta is only for a limited number of people, the outsiders are interested in what happens inside the solution, creating more pre-launch interest.

Those who are not admitted can also complain publicly on forums about it and spread the name or branding even more as bad news spreads faster than good news.

Beta-testers to customers

Once the Beta turns into a paying solution, these Beta users won’t all run away or switch over to a competitor (churn) as they have become used to the benefits of the solution and thus become customers.
As always there is the resistance to change even from a free to paying solution.

By invitation dilemma

How to find and invite people or companies for a Beta, without making it public?

As we know the companies that have been visiting the website frequently, we invited them as they presumably are interested in LEADSExplorer.
Do you know who to invite?

Every day SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies offer their services in order to increase the number of website visitors for your website.
Blogs mention or comment about these companies like The Search Engine Herald.

Increase number of visitors is not good enough

Just increasing the number of your website visitors is not the goal in B2B, as visits are not leads.
You need to increase the number of visitors from companies and not residential Internet surfers.
Moreover companies that are from the market segment your products are suited for.

Big catch, no food

How can any SEO consulting service promise you any better lead generating results as they can’t show who is visiting your website before and after their services?
It is like fishing with a net and not counting the number of consumable fishes.
Big catch, no food.
So you can fish more ‘waste’ by increasing your SEO, if you don’t know who you are fishing.

Website visitor identification by company name

Knowing the visiting companies is the first step for SEO in B2B.
Website visitor identification by company name should be included in any SEO offering allowing to know your current number of:
- Residential Internet visitors
- Company visitors from your market segment
- Company visitor outside your market segment

Currently SEO consulting services just try to increase the total number of visitors, and they just hope the number of visiting companies from your market segment increases too.
It can be they just increase the number of retail/residential visitors: worth almost nothing.

Increase the number of visiting companies from your market segment

You are wasting money by inflating the total number of visitors and gambling on the hope that there will be more interested companies for you products.

Thus the next time a SEO company offers their services ask how and what they measure or count. If it is just the number of visitors and the number of pages visited, then tell them you are not interested.

They should account for the increase in number of visiting companies from the market segment your products or solutions are aimed at. As effective as possible.

This adds one more possible reason for SEO consulting services might have no future as John Hargaden questions.

Still there are other reasons to be wary of SEO services companies as Aaron Wall explains.

Joe Pulizzi reports in his blog about an interesting presentation by Ed Abrams, VP of Marketing – IBM General Business- Express Advantage and Business Solutions, at America Business Media – Spring Meeting

Communications: online in – conventional out

For IT Professionals online communications and information gathering are the sources of information as traditional publications like: IT Publishers, Magazines, Conferences, Seminars and Trade shows are lagging far behind.
The ‘On Demand’ aspect of the online information wins over the served information from the other traditional channels. People insist to get their information only when they want it. Not when someone pushes it to them.

In order to catch the interest of a possible customer, companies in IT should even more focus on their Internet presence:
- Findability on search engines
- Getting mentioned on specific or specialized websites
- The company website.

Online influences more than Word Of Mouth!

A study from a different research group finds similar behaviors for leading influencers in B2B:

The Word Of Mouth is less popular than one would expect as influencer, as both WOM of a Peer and WOM of a Friend are less valued than:
- The Vendor website
- The Search Engines
- The Information Websites.

Trade Publications, Trade Shows and online trade journals are least important.

The combination of Search Engines and the information resources of company websites and industry information websites have created an online trade show that operates 24 x 7 the entire year.

Be online to obtain visitors and leads

Any company in IT should make sure:
- Their website provides clear information
- The website or products are being found on Search Engines
- The company or products are present on Industry Info Websites
If they don’t find your web presence (website or any other), they will find the presence of your competitor.

If your company in IT wants to stay in the game, you better get found and have decent web presence on the Internet as your future sales depend on it.

Before the Internet the company needed to be present physically: a building, trade show, in printed media.
Now the company’s presence has become virtual: website, industry information websites, reviews, blogs, …

Virtual lead generation – virtual selling

Once your company is being found on the Internet, the people will visit virtually: no identification.
Then you need to identify the visitors (by company name: like a ‘Caller ID’) for lead generation.
Next qualifying the visitors as leads as else there wil be too many leads to follow-up.
Sales can start with a communication (Cold calling on warm leads) or even a conversation.
All these communications can happen virtually (online), without requiring face-to-face meetings.

Your potential customers are changing their behavior and work methods for decisions on purchases. Time for any vendor to adapt and change.