Branding is the most difficult part of marketing and it can take years to achieve recognition of the brand by people or potential buyers.
We consider our blog as promoting the brand of the solution.

Whatever channel is used by the reader:
- The blog on our website
- Reading using rss
- Reading on a blog aggregation website
- A micro blog excerpt with a link to the blog
The content that is linked with the brand name brings eyeballs.
Thus similar as advertising but paid with content.

However there are differences with advertising as the blog posts:
- Are the advertising themselves: spreading the brand name.
- Attract interested parties because of the content itself: target the market with content.
- The distribution is uncontrolled: from one original copy to many on blog aggregation website
- Can get bookmarked on StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller, Buzz generating more traffic
- All the different bookmarks and copies get indexed by search engines increasing search weight

Some of the visitors reading the blog will click through to the website, looking into the proposed solution.
The content of the blog posts have subjects related to the market we are serving, thus should attract the right audience.

The more people (like you) read our blog posts, the higher the change of getting remembered when it comes to buying a solution for lead capturing or lead generation using the website or nurturing prospects and customers.

The more noise our blog can make, the more our blog posts are getting referenced, the more eyeballs and the more branding.

At the same time the posts are building trust as the brand becomes a more familiar or recognized name.

So who do you call when you need leads from your website? (Not Ghostbusters)

The classical funnel is no more

The sales funnel has always been presented as a funnel, however as Ardath Albee (Marketing Interactions) in her blog post “What happened to the sales funnel?” points out the funnel has become a cylinder.

The classical view was capturing a lot of leads at the wide side of the funnel and ending up with a few leads converting into customers at the narrow side.

The funnel has become a cylinder

This has changed due to the times that have been changing:
- Leads select and choose your products or services
- No information flow control as information is available everywhere
- Buyers want strategic insights and concepts instead of solutions
- A buying journey instead of a sales cycle
- Push (like email marketing) is out, pull (like websites) is it.
- Peers, not companies, have become more important to decisions

The new marketing and new sales

This all needs rethinking of your marketing into the world of the buyer:
About the problems and issues of your potential buyers are dealing with, as they will first want to develop competence about their issues in order to be confident enough for making decisions.

The funnel has become a cylinder inviting leads at one end, who become customers at the other end.
During their journey through the cylinder your marketing and sales need to feed them and exchange concepts, strategic ideas and insights to move them further towards to their purchase decision. This decision they can then take with confidence by having acquired enough information and insight from different sources.

The new marketing role is to propose concepts, insights and strategic ideas, not just products and services.

The new sales needs to understand the specific problems and issues of the potential customer and possibly deliver consulting and exchange of information, not just the purchase price at a certain quantity.

Reach your leads early during their information acquiring

During the information acquiring part, the website will play an important role as potential buyers will screen and scrape the Internet for information, thus also your website.
In order to reach your leads early in their decision process you need to identify your website visitors by company name and monitor them on your website.
LEADSExplorer allows you to reach your prospects early in their buying decision process: from the very first visit on your website.

The journey through the cylinder

During the journey through the cylinder, you need to monitor the increase or decrease of interest in your products, solution or services. This is expressed by the number of website visits and the pages visited that is in relation to your communications exchanges.
The increase or decrease of interest related to your communications exchange is analyzed visually, as provided by LEADSExplorer, on a time-chart together with your communications exchanges for easy follow-up.

As the funnel has been converted into a cylinder due to the changes in the decision process of the potential buyer, your marketing and sales methods need to change too.
Starting with your website as a source of information upon your potential leads and customers.

Keep efforts on sales

When others are regressing, laying off sales people or minimizing their spending on sales during this recession, take the opportunity to continue your sales efforts in order to gain market share.

Constantly evaluating

Funnel or pipeline
Sales needs to be monitored closely by following up the pipeline and funnel for each salesman in order to continue or halt efforts on certain customers or projects.

If your company doesn’t have a systematic approach in place for producing a sales funnel or pipeline, then it is time to start implementing one.

Evaluation of product line, products or services
The pipeline or funnel and the sales revenue will indicate the product lines, products or solutions are having more chances to win customers than your other offerings.
If there is a clear laggard then the decision can be taken to no further spend on this less performing and increase sales and marketing efforts on the more popular product line, products or solutions.

Evaluate geographies
Similar can be applied to geographies: if a geography is falling behind in progress in funnel or pipeline or sales revenue compared to other geographies, then question if it is reasonable to keep the sales rep working and marketing keep on spending on this geography.
If there is no strategic reason for maintaining your sales and marketing presence, then kill it before it kills you.

Using the website as an early indicator
If you can monitor visitors by company name on your website, you know the behavior and the interest of the business or corporate website visitors for your products or services by the pages visited.
This will allow to:
- Segregate residential from business or corporate website visitors: those that matter
- Knowing the companies that are visiting your website.

This segregation of residential Internet surfers and business visitors gives you early warning signs about the increase or decrease of interest about product lines, products, services by:
- Number of companies
- Geographies of companies

The identification of companies on your website will allow to follow up on:
- Leads
- Customers
- Ex-customers (revisiting)
as you exactly know when, how many times, what pages, number of unique visitors by company.
(LEADSExplorer is such a web service for your website that identifies website visitors by company name and their website behavior).

Metrics are key to success

The key to success is to:
- Build the data for the funnel or pipeline as concise and uniformly as possible in order to have the a reliable metric.
- Evaluate your funnel or pipeline and sales revenue from different angles:
   .by salesman
   .by product line, by product, by solution
   .by geography
- Segregate the residential website visitors from businesses and use it as an early warning sign.
- Identify website visitors by company name for their specific behavior and interest on your website.

If you don’t have metrics in place that allow to monitor and evaluate your business, you will be less informed and thus more vulnerable and less armed to survive the recession.

No business is recession proof: you need to manage it recession proof using metrics.

Spending on marketing

If you can continue your marketing efforts during this recession as others are cutting back, your company will come out stronger and bigger than before.
That is easier said than done as there are at least 3 problems with this:
1) Cash: Enough cash to start with or sustaining your cash flow throughout the recession.
2) Spending inefficiently on marketing, you are wasting good money required to survive.
3) The size of budget for marketing as you don’t know how many years this recession will last.

How do you know upfront if you are spending wisely on marketing?
If we all could predict the outcome, then every company would be doing the same efforts and spend efficiently on marketing.

Marketing

On the subject of marketing there are the metrics of the past of each effort like advertising, mailing campaigns, billboards or events that should allow to measure the efficiency of each of them.
One could expect those investments in marketing that have worked and have resulted into leads and sales should still bring better results than those that didn’t generate any leads or sales.

However as recession influences your potential customers too, successful events like trade shows can turn out to become an overnight failure, as the recession will push companies to limit their spending on travel and lodging.

Online events or website: gaining importance
Any possibility for free or at a low cost for participating in events or acquiring information are likely to become more popular and more successful.
Thus online events or Internet search is likely to become more important as these will give access to or bring information to the employees, decision makers and influencers at a low cost.

Your company website, webinars, online presentations, online articles, white paper syndication are all likely to benefit from a higher rate of interest or participation.

These media have problems too:
- Broadcasting the existence of your information: SEO, links, creating awareness, branding
- Identifying the people or companies visiting your website, reading online articles, downloading white papers or participating in webinars. You need to know who.

For both type of problems solutions exist:
- Using the Internet as a communication channel (including email).
- Website visitor identification: know who is visiting or participating online.

Leads generated is the metric for marketing
The number of leads generated by each type of marketing effort, is key to continue the marketing spending by type for successful business.
Continue or increase those marketing efforts that actually bring leads, preferably quality leads.

Recession duration making impossible to budget marketing

The big unknown will be the duration of the recession that can span over several years, which makes calculating a budget for marketing over the entire recession probably impossible.

You know when the recession started, but you won’t know upfront how long it will last.

- Spend wisely and evaluate the leads generated by each marketing effort.
- Expect a change in marketing channels to more online.

If a company website can be boring.
Then a museum website could be even more boring.

In order to avoid this the Australian Museum has redesigned their website and have implemented open-communication methods:
- Commenting
- Tags
- User-generated content
in order to build a rich, interactive website.

Pushing the boundaries on content-rich websites

The presentation from Rus Weakley of MaxDesign below explains about the approach, the decisions, the pitfalls and the realization of the museum website makeover.

| View | Upload your own

Not only the (for museums) almost disruptive approach of the website is great, but also this presentation using only a few words or short sentences on each slide that make more impact.

Interactive website approach

1) Authors to communicate more directly and immediately
2) Users to communicate with museum staff and each other
3) Users interacting with content in several ways
4) Users to share their own content

What is feasible for a company website?

- Visitors commenting on any asset could be interesting for you as a feedback, but will they find your 
   content interesting enough to actually involve them selves?
   Most company websites don’t have much content or interesting content.
- Visitors tagging any asset: could be worth a try, but will they tag and what will they tag?
- Favorites: a business website will probably not have content that will be tagged. We tried it.
- Upload visitor content: it would be fantastic if your customers would upload their content.
   They would be your best advocates.

If a museum website can become interesting and interactive, could then some of these features of this approach also be used for making your company website interactive?
That would be disruptive too.

The quest is engaging your visitors or customers with your website for your content, products or solutions.

Any suggestions?

Podcasts are multiple audio or even a video recordings (or series) distributed over the Internet to a computer or portable media.
The difference with other streaming media is the syndication, the subscription for receiving the updates whenever new content is added.

Podcasts were originally intended to distribute radio-type of shows; many different uses have been found including marketing.

Currently podcasts are used for different marketing purposes on a one time basis, instead of a series of audio or video messages: new product announcement, educating potential customers, use of solutions, customer success stories.

Advantages

People are lazy, thus listening to a podcast is easier as it requires less effort than reading.
- Audio can have a better impact than text.
- Video can have an even bigger impact.

Podcasts can be played on moments the audience doesn’t want to read: like when commuting.

A short video will tell more than a thick manual as people are visual.

Podcast problems

Production costs:
For every level of higher impact you can obtain, the number of free variables becomes smaller:
- Audio: the voice, the pronunciation and the intonation need to be perfect
- Video: the body language and the expressions on the face need to match the content.
These will increase the production costs.

Writing:
Writing a text is straightforward and many people have writing experience.
Writing a podcast (especially a video podcast) is more like writing a script for a radio play or a TV show and less people are experienced.

Presenting:
Many people can write only few can present in front of a microphone. Even less are capable of not looking stupid before a video camera.

The distribution costs:
If the podcast is not popular, the distribution costs are easy to afford.
In case the podcast becomes popular (accidentally), the costs involved will shoot through the roof and go beyond your budget.

The audience:
Not every company has a high speed Internet connection or the employees have to share one fast access. This makes the podcast unbearable.

The fast forward:
- In case of a written text the reader knows more or less if you are skipping things.
- A fast forward on podcast doesn’t indicate what the listener or viewer has missed.
The audience has to sit through the entire podcast, whereas readers can scan a text fast

No copy/paste:
If your audience needs to make a summary for his CEO, they need to write it all down themselves. This is much more work.
One solution to this is providing a transcript of the podcast.

Languages:
Whereas a text can be translated into another language at a relatively low cost, a podcast needs to be reproduced for every other language requiring:
- To find the suited people
- To translate
- To produce the podcast

Findability:
The search engines are made for indexing text, thus with podcasts they are limited to the short summary of the podcast not revealing the entire content.

Social acceptance in the office:
Reading a text on the Internet in the office is considered as allowed as you gather information.
Listening to an audio podcast is already less allowed and is disturbing other employees if your audience doesn’t have an personal office: even in a cubicle
Watching a video during office hours is considered as entertainment, not as work.

Using podcasting as a marketing tool is not evident and might not reach your audience it was intended for.

Do you use podcasting for marketing purposes?

CEO: forecasting and budget

CEO’s of companies make business plans.
Making plans for the future is great.
Forecasting can be a waste of time as you are busy not selling.
The CEO defines the budget for revenue and spending on operational expenses.
This will become the targets for the organization.

Marketing: lead generation

Marketing spends money on market research.
Marketing and Product management define the new products.
Marketing defines the the advertising campaigns.
Marketing hires a public relation team that tries to influence or get interest from the media.
Marketing organizes direct mail and emailing campaigns.
Marketing updates the website.
Marketing organizes presence on trade shows.

All the efforts of Marketing should generating leads, which is the best starting point for getting sales.

Sales: getting the customers

Whatever management and all other departments do like defining, creating and developing products, forecasting and budgeting, getting the customers is the real game.
This game is death serious as the future of the entire organization depends on this.

There are many hurdles in this process of selling as plans have been made while during the same time:
- The market has been changing
- Technology has changed
- The attitude of buyers have changed
- The buying process is changing
- The competitors are changing
- The offerings of competitors changes too.

Getting customers is the hardest part or the real game, as all plans, efforts and budgets can falter when the salesmen don’t get paying customers.
Thus the most important of all in a company is selling and getting paying customers.

Still selling is a process that requires a human touch, a personal approach and cannot be automated in most cases of B2B.

Sales: getting repeat customers

Sales have one more challenge: getting repeat customers.
Having one time customers is fine, but expensive.
Having repeat customers allows to depreciating the invested customer acquisition costs over several purchases.

How important are the salesmen in your company?
Are they appreciated above all or not significantly better than any other employee?

Marketing tools scale well

There is abundance of tools and solutions for Marketing.
This is probably because information technologies is very efficient when a process:
- Can be automated
- Replicated over an over again
- Large numbers are available making automation profitable
- Large numbers enable to generate statistical data

The large numbers and the replicative feature comply with the one to many communications character of Marketing.

Marketing has a whole range of applications and web services available for:
- Email campaigns
- Direct mail
- Website analytic
- Inquiry forms
- SEO analysis
- Webinar
- Presentation software
- Lead management software
- Competitor analysis systems

All these tools scale very well as a relatively small effort can generate a huge amount of communication messages send out.

Sales tools don’t scale well

The salesman is into one to one communications: there for he has a range of personal communication media at his disposal:
- Landline telephone
- Mobile phone
- Email
- Instant Messaging

Besides these communication tools, there are several sales supporting or useful information technologies available:
- Contact managers
- Appointment / agenda solutions
- Contract manager
- Proposal managers
- Collaboration solutions
- CRM

The problem with all or most of these solutions is that they all require data entry.
Thus they do not scale well for the users as for every use it requires time, dedication and quality persistency (obstinacy?) of the user.

Information generation instead of data entry

In most cases there is not any data generated or captured from other sources in these solutions.
Thus these are time demanding solutions for the salesman.

However useful and time saving information could be collected and aggregated within the CRM or sales tools:
- Email collecting by customer: several CRM solution already provide this
- Internet information: many sources can provide information about the customer: company and people
- Website visit data collection by company: only a few solutions exist, but hardly any has a seamless integration without the need of data upload.
Thus instead of data entry, solutions for the sales rep could capture, aggregate and generate useful and interesting information that would make the applications much more interesting.

This automatic data collection and aggregation would help the sales tools scale better as they would save time.

Computer assisted selling

The future of sales supporting or sales assisting applications and solutions, should be assisting the salesman in his nurturing and selling.
Moreover the salesman should obtain direct results, have useful features and reap the benefits of such a Computer Assisting System, bringing effortless together all the information on the lead and customer. Not having the salesman to enter all the data himself as this is less beneficial for him.

In the end it is the salesman, who close the deal and makes the company operate, thus the sales tools should serve the salesmen.

How much do the software sales tools help you or do they require more time than they bring?

Is Marketing or Sales responsible for Lead qualification?
In some companies it is Marketing, in other companies this belongs to the Sales department.

Marketing is mass communication

Marketing is mass communications or at least communicating to many:
- Emailings
- Direct mailing campaigns
- Advertising
- Webinars
All of these methods are addressing many people in one go.
Just like fishing with a fishnet.

Lead generation is marketing.

BtoB Sales communicates one by one

- Cold calling is typically a Sales job, as this is a one to one conversation:
   Demanding time, effort and a personal approach.
   However cold calling is a specific kind of lead generation:
   Cold calling generates prospects.
- Sales conversations are too one by one.
- Sales meetings are one case at a time.
- Quotes are made personally for each potential client and send out one by one.

Sales is fishing with an angle.

Lead qualification

Lead qualification is also a case by case evaluation.
Thus this should be a part of the Sales function.

Moreover Sales people are much more aware about events, relations, trends and specific habits of his market as they are focussed geographical or by product group.

In the end it is the Salesman who needs to perform an close deals.
He needs to optimize his time on a selection of the best or most promising leads.
So instead of using the services from Marketing to select the potential customers, he should be in charge as his performance depends from it.

If your lead qualification can be reduced to a check list, then Marketing could take care. However in this will only be possible in B2B business with many customers for each salesman.
In true BtoB sales, every case is unique and needs a personal and specific approach.

Is lead qualification in your company handled by Marketing or by the Salesmen?

B2B Marketing is 1 to N

The Marketing department in a company has the though job of communicating with many people: 1 to N (many).
By segmenting the audience into groups, the communication can be made appropriate and thus more chance of generating interest.

Due to the numbers involved, statistic approaches can be taken for the evaluation and scoring of each marketing effort or campaign.

Loosing one of the many leads is not a big deal. Even loosing several during the communication will just decrease the statistics, but no apparent harm will be done.
In the company nobody will argue if Marketing looses some potential customers as nobody will exactly know.
Moreover if one marketing campaign is not successful, a next one can be.
Thus the Marketing department has the opportunity, the advantage of trying and experimenting multiple times.

Marketing will themselves measure their results on their efforts. Thus they can influence the statistics for their own benefit.

B2B Sales is 1 to 1:

Salespeople however have 1 to 1 relations during their sales process: between the potential customer and themselves.
In order to control, Management have lead management and funnel systems in place.

Loosing one potential customer and the VP Sales (or in the worst case the CEO) will be informed or notice this.

So Sales people can’t miss out on one potential customer without management gets notified.

The performance of Sales is measured by the amount of revenue the company achieves: accounting measures the performance of Sales. Thus not by themselves as Marketing can do.

This relates probably one of the reasons that most CRM implementations are not successful: the more information available in the CRM thanks to the efforts of the salesman, the more he can be controlled.
Entering data in the CRM consumes his time and can bring even more stress as has more information Management to control him.

B2B Sales 1 to 1 to N

The problem of the salesman becomes even more complex and difficult as within one potential client company many people are involved:
- CEO, CFO, COO
- Decision makers
- Influencers
- Managers
- Experts
- Consultants
- Board of Directors

They all can participate in the Business to Business purchase process.
Thus the relation is 1 to 1 to N, making the the sales process even more complicated and difficult as any of these can have objections.
This is why they call it BtoB Complex Sales.

Change from performance measuring to supporting tools

The performances of Salesmen are being followed almost step by step by management and the final result is measured by accounting, whereas the performance of Marketing is less clear and they can measure their own performance.

How can software tools, like CRM, become more adequate to support sales in their complex 1 to 1 to N relation, instead of being used as control and measurement instruments?
Can a CRM become a Computer Assisted Selling system?
Requiring additional functions and features geared to help the Salesmen with their work.

What would be needed for helping Salesmen to achieve even more with less control?