Marketing has a long time frame and addresses many people.
Sales is short term and is directly aimed at one prospect.

Marketing communication

Marketing needs to look into the future and have vision to communicate: else the market image of the company will be one without vision.
Marketing will need to prepare the market: the influencers and the decision maker for the next generation of solutions.
The Marketing communications will give confidence to the decision makers and influencers that the vendor has vision and is moving forward into the future. This is an important element in the sales process.

Sales needs to sell the current solutions

Sales needs to propose solutions that are available now.
Even more important Sales needs to give the confidence that the solution in the near future still will fit in.
Buying a solution that will soon be obsolete is not likely to happen: it is even hard to sell a soon to be obsolete solution with a big discount.

The Marketing and Sales crash

This is where marketing and sales can crash:
Marketing communicates stories with visions of the future solutions.
Sales needs to sell the currently available solutions.

If the visions communicated by Marketing makes the products or solutions Sales is trying to sell obsolete, then Sales will have a hard time to convince the decision makers in the company to buy:
- The benefits of the currently available solutions.
- The differences and advantages with the solutions of competitors.
- The ‘in house’ competitor created by Marketing.
These are three battles to win. The more battles the more change to loose one. By losing one battle, the sale is lost.

Thus the current solutions need to blend in with the visions that Marketing is communicating.

How does your company align Marketing communications and Sales pitches?

Marketing efforts and events don’t bring the so much needed leads as used to be.
Sales are decreasing.
Revenue decreases, costs remain the same and the outlook is not very promising.

The CEO feels the heat of the financial pressure: the need to have enough revenue to pay the bills to keep the company going.

The CEO goes into sales due to recession

As he is very proud of himself for his achievements in his early days in his career in Sales or as founder of the company, he takes the decision to address himself customers and find potential customers. He has done it before so he must be able to succeed.
He will show his sales people that he can generate leads and close deals even during these harsh recession times. He will show them how to sell.

Self confident he starts to call his customers and starts to look within his all so important relationships for leads. Still he manages to get a few appointments with customers and through relationships, but these are more out of politeness than because of any real demand.

After a few weeks or months he comes to the conclusion:
- His old sales methods aren’t working anymore.
- His long lasting relationships with customers are not bringing in any sales.
- He is not respected as he taught he was.
- They ask questions he doesn’t know the answer to.
- They expect immediate decisions as he is the boss: no time to think.
- The meetings turn out to have a different agenda than purchase.
- The meetings are rather short.

Soon his pride starts to evaporate and his ‘magic of the past’ is clearly gone.
Worse:
The few deals he brings in are sometimes not really profitable as he has taken decisions quickly during a meeting with a potential customer in order to get the deal.

He now has to face the truth there is no last hope. No more trick to pull out of his hat.
No way to go anymore as he has used up all his potential.

The 5 problems the CEO faces

He is faced with 5 problems:
1. His status with customers.
2. His trust relationship with customers
3. The moral of his sales people
4. The bypassing of his sales people
5. The respect from his employees

The CEO status with customers:
The status he had with customers allowed him to jump in when the sales process was not moving forward or a problem needed to get solved quickly. He could arrange things that sales people couldn’t.
After addressing the managers or directors of the customers, he has lowered or degraded himself to just another salesman.

The CEO trust relationship with customers:
The directors or managers of the customers knew they could rely upon the CEO for:
- Solving special cases
- Having someone knowledgeable listening to their problems
- Receiving even free consultancy.
As the CEO all of a sudden changes his act into selling, this trust relationship has been broken.

The moral of the sales people:
By addressing customers and potential customers directly, he has bypassed the sales people. This kills the relationships between customers and salespeople as they become second choice.
Additionally they fear that they will be missing their commissions.
These facts don’t make them happier or motivated.

The CEO bypassing of the sales people:
By addressing the customers directly, the status of the salesmen is also jeopardized: it is clear for the customers they no longer need to talk to the salesman as they now should address directly to the CEO.

The respect of employees for the CEO:
As the CEO fails too bring in any significant sales, the respect from the employees of his company will have decreased as his ‘magic from the past’ where he relied upon is gone.
He has proved to be not any better than any of the sales people. Thay can lose faith in him.

Instead of sales: demotivation and loss of faith

Thus instead of bringing in new sales, he has driven the company even further down:
- Customers will address to him directly
- Sales people get demotivated.
- Employees have lost their faith in him.

The death of the CEO salesman

No way out anymore.
What he should have done is to assist the salespeople during the last parts of the sales process in order to take the right or best decision when the customer or potential customer is ready to buy.

Is your CEO getting into sales?
With any success?

The lead process gap

Just like in the London Underground, for all leads in the funnel, there should be a warning sign and message spoken: “MIND THE GAP”
Marketing and sales are planning, executing and reporting separately which can even be in opposite directions.

Typically Marketing is into producing product marketing materials and collateral, setting up events or participating in events, building the brand.
All these efforts for the purpose of supporting the Sales, generating leads and customer retention.

Typically Sales is looking for every opportunity, keeping relationships with customers, calling customers, close deals, manage the sales process, aim for their bonus.

Typically the gap in the lead process is when Sales doesn’t have time for all the leads supplied by Marketing.
They find these leads generated by Marketing:
- Not qualified enough
- Not relevant enough
- Not near enough to a buying decision.
Thus leads generated by Marketing are handed over to Sales and then after a first scan of these leads and the contacts nothing happens.

The solution is in aligning goals and objectives which require a conversation and working as a team for generating real results.

The Sales Marketing conversation

Sales should be able to define what they expect as a lead.
Marketing should be able to make clear what they have as tools and methods to generate leads.

Sales Force Automation is not cooperation

If the handover of a lead is done by just sending an email (automated by a Sales Force Automation system) with subject: “Lead: Mr. Anthony Harding from Acme, Inc. has been assigned to you”.
The content of the email consists only of the same message and a link to the page in the CRM system.
In this case you can be sure failure is certain. No lead will be followed up.

For Salesmen this method is putting Marketing in the driving seat and giving them orders to execute.
One thing Marketing cannot do: is giving orders to Salesmen.
Sales people want to be in the leading position and don’t like receiving orders.
Sales people will prove the orders and leads of Marketing will not work.

Sales and marketing as a team

Marketing and Sales should be working as a team with Marketing in the supporting role. Sales needs to make the magic happen: convincing the lead to become prospect and then closing the sales.

The lead generated by Marketing should be handed over carefully to the Salesman with the required back ground information. This gives the Salesman the chance to give immediate feedback on every lead to Marketing.

Are you one team: Marketing and Sales?
Or is Marketing and Sales 2 departments running at a different pace with different goals?

Even during this economy purchases are made

All people are talking about the economy.
All media is talking about the economy: newspapers, TV, blogs, magazines
All CEO’s and CFO’s blame the economy for bad company results.

However there is no such thing as the economy, there are only:
- People that are leads, customers or ex-customers
- People in companies that are leads, customers or ex-customers
Even in the deepest recession or the worst depression, people and people in companies spend money for their purchases. The amount and frequency is less, but still purchases are being made in order to survive or to keep the business going.

The required Marketing and Sales optimization

Your challenge in Marketing and Sales is to catch that spending.
You have to catch the maximum of the spending for your type of solutions or products.
How to achieve this is the challenge.
The additional constraint is to achieve the maximum quantity of purchases or with the highest value while at the same time spending the least amount of money and efforts on marketing and sales. This is optimization.
You need to spend the least amount of money on marketing that obtains the highest amount sales preferably with the best margin requiring the shortest amount of time as money supply is limited.

It is not the economy that you have to blame for your bad results.
It is the lack of optimization of your Marketing and Sales: you need to optimize Marketing efforts and Sales efforts.

Lead generation or customer retention?

In order to achieve this optimization you need to measure how well and efficient every method or system applied is for:
- Lead generation: media, source, communication channels, messages, …
- Customer retention: media, communication channels, messages, …
- Sales process: communication channels, messages, relations, speed, …

In many – if not most – cases and businesses customer retention is more effective than generating new leads.
You know your customers; you know hardly anything of leads.
Thus mainly focusing on your existing customers for both marketing and sales could turn out to be the best thing to do.
Also investigate on how effective efforts of communicating with ex-customers are as that can be even more effective than generating new leads. The advantage you have with ex-customers is the past experience, knowledge and contacts you have with them.

What’s your optimization for Sales and marketing?

Nurturing with newsletters

Newsletters have been praised as the most cost effective method to keep contact with your current and potential customers. This is nurturing your customers with newsletters.
Thus every month or on a regular basis companies try to get your attention by sending you their all important newsletter.
All companies try to sign you up or cheat you in to receive a newsletter from them.

The fivefold newsletter problem

- The abundance of newsletters in the email inbox: all companies think they are important for you.
- The length of the newsletters: too long and the messages are ignored
- The news worthiness: not all companies have real news worth reading every month.
- The images: the planned impact of images misses as many email clients block the download of images.
- The real news message can be lost: the real news is hidden by all the preceding marketing messages.

The two last ones might be the worst cases:
- No images makes the newsletter without content: thus no message.
- due to the fact the customer or potential customer has received already so many newsletters from the company with little interesting content, by the time important news is communicated, hardly anybody will notice and read it.

The promoters of newsletter nurturing will stipulate that your subscribers can unsubscribe easily with every newsletter received. However as people are lazy, it is much simpler for them to just skip or to hit the delete button for every newsletter message.
Still a good newsletter service should provide you with the number of opens.

Keep them hungry: Less is more

Thus if you use newsletters for nurturing purposes, don’t over-nurture your customers as they will become fed up of your content.
Make them stay slim and hungry with short newsletters and few containing interesting content.
Then you will stand a chance to be able to communicate the real news and to nurture when it really matters. Thus keep them hungry for real news.

Only speak out when it is important – as silence is golden too.

How many email newsletters does your company send out?
Any worth reading?
Any customer wins thanks to the newsletters?

Ever wondered why B2B salespeople win sales?
According to a survey from CSO Insights salespeople define as their reasons for closing sales in software sales:

Marketing messaging is no help
Marketing messaging, account coverage and product availability are scoring the lowest.
That’s bad news for marketing.
The brand equity is important and that can relate to marketing efforts, but it can also be the brand name that has been build up since many years because of the long market presence.
Contrary what everybody would expect: even pricing is not that important.

Market leaders: easy closing sales
Closing a deal comes down to:
- Product superiority
- Existing relationships
- References
Thus if you are working for a company with the best products, that have acquired good references and you are since quite a while in the same business, then you will outsell the competition.
These 3 have nothing to do with the actual selling or selling skills of the salesman.

Challengers: the sales process – not the pricing
In case you are working for a challenger in the market you might have a superior product, but you will miss on relationships, references and brand equity.
Thus according to the survey you will need to win by providing the best sales process, ROI (Return On Investment) and service/support.
However, as your company is lesser well-known in the market, service and support still needs to be proven.
The good news is that you don’t have to sell on pricing. Thus you are standing a fair chance with fair prices, not undercutting the market leaders.

Market laggards: the sales process and get references
What if you are working for a market laggard with less great products than the challengers, then don’t lower your pricing, but focus on the sales process, provide for ROI calculation example and get some good references.

Conclusion
If you want to win deals in B2B, don’t hope on marketing messages but provide the best sales process and do present a ROI calculation in order to help the decision makers. In many cases they don’t have a clue where to start to make a ROI calculation.

More information about the survey and chart on CSO Insights.

Do you have any other reasons why you closed deals in B2B?

Social media marketing

You can have the most desirable product.
You can have the most hyped product.
You can have the best social media marketing supported by many bloggers:
Amongst the most renowned blogs and bloggers in the world: TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, GigaOM, Scobleizer and many more have all published many posts on the subject of the iPhone.

However when it comes to using it for what it was designed, then your product is not the winner.
Not exactly your intention.

Example the iPhone

The most hyped and most social media supported product on the market is undoubtedly the iPhone.
Still according to Bango the iPhone is not in the Top 20 for accessing the Bango service (enabling businesses to launch a ‘mobile presence’.
Actually the iPhone is in 24th position: even below the 2 Blackberry phones.
The phones from Nokia and Samsung are in the lead.

Apple managed to have the iPhone on everybody’s mind and lips, but when it comes to using people just don’t use it.

The effectiveness of social media marketing

This failure to score of the iPhone raises the question if this so called and very hyped social media marketing is really any effective?
Maybe people like to (small) talk, read and dream about a desirable hyped product, but when it comes to buying and using the decision can be quite different.

So how effective is all this social media marketing?

Is social media marketing another hyped bubble: packaged hot air?

As there is no product more promoted by social media marketing and apparently even this is not effective as the product (iPhone) is a niche product used by only a few, how could your product or solution ever benefit from social media marketing as it never ever will achieve the same level of hype and support like the iPhone.

If Social media marketing doesn’t work for consumer business, then why should it be any effective in business to business?

Maybe social media was and is not the next big thing.
Let’s move on to the next thing: Post-click marketing

What are your experiences with social media marketing?

Everyday or several times a week a blog post needs to be written.
Everyday you need to cook the evening dinner for your family.

Cooking is a challenge everyday

If you need to cook for your family, you need to have an idea, look for and find the recipe. Buy the ingredients. Then cook the dinner and serve the meal on time as the family expects the meal.
Good there are no dishes to wash if you have a dishwashing machine.

Almost every hour a show will air about cooking giving the necessary ideas for change. Still you can always cook the same dish as 2 weeks ago without receiving a complaint.

It is very challenging to serve a good meal that is being appreciated by your family.
Moreover as your goal is to keep your family together for the dinner, you have to excel over previous dinners.

Blogging is a challenge everyday

If you have a blog, you need to have an idea, look for the concept. Collect the related links and data. Then write the post and publish it on time as your readers expect your essay.
Good there is no physical delivery to be done.

Bloggers can relate to and refer to other blog posts to write their posts. However if you haven’t got a clue what to write, then you have a problem as you can’t copy previous content.

It is very challenging to serve a good blog post that is being appreciated by your readers everyday. Moreover as your goal is to expand your readership and reach you have to excel over the previous posts.

Out eating – Guest post

Having a guest posting on your blog is like take away food or going out for dinner to a restaurant.

Mothers and bloggers are related

Thus bloggers and mothers (assuming most family cooking is being done by mothers) are related as they both feel the pressure to achieve:
- To feed their family with food.
- To feed their readers with content.
Both require skill: cooking sa kill and a blogging skill.

Still there are big differences:
- Cooking happens at the kitchen at home which is a steady location.
   Whereas bloggers can blog from anywhere.
- Cooking limits itself to the family: thus limited reach.
   Whereas blogging reaches as far as possible: almost unlimited reach.
- Cooking can become hectic as other events occur.
   Whereas blogging has less pressure from other events.
- Once the meal has been eaten and digested it has become history.
   Whereas a blog post can live a long life on its’ own.

What skill do you have: cooking or blogging?

Social Media

Since the event of Social Media and the Social Media being praized for the next goldmine, Marketing and Sales have been digging into LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in the hope to connect with buyers and to find leads or prospects.

Chances are that the rate of success is very low as finding a lead or somebody interested in your solutions is like finding a needle in a haystack especially if you are in business to business.
This is mainly due to the fact there is no focus or no business intention in these Social websites.
The goal of people on Social websites doesn’t match your goal of getting leads.

You might try to build a relationship with people on these Social websites, but it will take ages before you reach your goal of lead generation as you miss focus and not all possible relations will relate to your business.

The company website for lead generation

Instead of wasting your time on Social Media, your leads are already right in front of you: on the company website.
Interested people, managers or even CxO people of companies will visit your website if they are looking for solving a problem. A problem that your solutions solve or help to solve as these problems or solutions have driven the visitor to visit your website out of more than hundred million websites.
If these interested people are on your website, you better take care of them.

All you need is to know:
- Their company name
- Their level of interest to qualify as lead
- Their name
As only 3% of all visitors will ever register for a white paper download, a web seminar or contact you directly (and in many cases using a web based public email system: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, …) most of your potential leads leave without any notification or trace.

Post-click marketing

These problems can be solved by using a web service that:
- Reveals the company names of your website visitors
- The level of interest based upon: origin on the Internet, search terms used, pages visites, language, geographic location in order to let you qualify each visiting as lead.
- Matches the visitor with contacts or incoming emails for knowing the name of the visitor.

Thus instead of scanning LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter in the hope to build a relationship with the goal of finding any lead, why not just browse your website visit information for qualifying visitors as leads and to cols call on warm (interested) companies.

Still looking on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter?
Or are you already one step beyond your competitors by knowing who visits your website?

Marketing has the long tradition of speaking to the audience:
- Advertising
- Direct mailing campaigns
- Email marketing
- Product placement
Marketing excels in creating a buzz.

Social media requires a conversation

Now the social media has arrived, marketing needs to change its’ communication pattern and method:
Instead of speaking to the potential customers, it has to talk with the potential customers.
If you talk to people the way advertising talks to people, nobody would engage in a conversation.

Communicating and getting people to engage in a conversation is a skill that salespeople have since ever.
If a salesman only pitches he will not sell anything. He has to have a conversation with his leads and prospects.

As Laurent from of Brandits & Netizens remarks: Social Media Marketing professionals have to talk with us, rather than talk to us.
The question is: are they capable to have a conversation instead of a sending out a message?
Marketing needs to learn the communication skills from the sales team.

Disruptive change in communication

This change in communication is tremendous: disruptive. It will take long to getting adopted as speaking to the audience and creating a buzz was rather simple one way communication.
Joining the conversation is a two way exchange and communication.

LEADSExplorer can help in the conversation with a website visitor or lead as it can help selecting the subject by knowing their interest from the pages visited on your website.
Once the conversation has started the increase or decrease of interest can be measured or analyzed visually using the visiting activity charts by company.

Are you as Marketing Executive ready for this?
Is your Marketing department ready for this?