Being a marketer in a tech company has some unique challenges as he is surrounded by technologists and engineers having another view on the products or solutions, the business and the market.

Translate technical stuff

In a technical company it’s all about technology.
However customers are business.
Translating the technical stuff into business stuff is all important as potential buyers need to be briefed and informed about the business benefits and business value.

The marketer doesn’t need to understand the technology entirely or be a technology specialist. His main task and challenge is to be able translating the technical solution into a business benefit.
Translating the engineering speak into easy to understand business value. Especially with an enterprise-class product where a divers range of decision makers are involved in the purchase process from different functions.
Your marketing needs to appeal to technical groups in non-marketing terms and to business executives in business terms and value.

Compelling business benefit instead of technical

The engineers, the developers and the CTO find their solution evident to buy, but for the customers the messaging needs to more compelling.
Not the greatness of the technical solution.
It is the perception of the added value of the product on the customers’ end which is important: it needs to be compelling.

The tech pits

The tech pit can occur or be present in different occasions or places:
- On the website
- On the product leaflets
- On the presentation slides
- During the product pitch

The website
Most purchases starts with an online search, so it’s key to speak the same language as your prospects.

The product leaflets
The product leaflets are not technical documents but they should present business value and business benefits for the customer.

The presentation slides
The presentation slides can indicate the technology used or an helicopter view of the technical solution but not more.

The product pitch
During the product pitch people easily wander into a technical presentation (in many case guided by the technical questions of one person in the audience), whereas most people listening to the product pitch just want a solution which they can trust to their problem or issues. A technical discussion can raise more questions and before one knows difficult to explain technical aspects are being discussed which increase the confusion and decrease the trustworthiness.

Submerged in technology

A marketer in a tech company has to deal with all these challenges as his colleagues all are engineers who prefer to answer and discuss technical matters – not the business benefits and value.
Moreover they often don’t see the benefit or the necessity of presenting the business benefits and business value. This can lead to discussions internally as the marketer wants to have completely different messaging about the products and solutions.

The marketing budget

In most cases technology people and engineers are not big spenders and will try to work cost effective: getting a return on every Dollar invested.
On the other hand marketers need to spend large amounts of money in order to get the messaging for the products into the market.
This is perceived by the engineers and technical people as wasting or burning money as no exact return on investment can be proved.
This can challenge or question the marketer’s position in the company.

The marketer faces difficult challenges and more than often his own position can be questioned or challenged, although they hired him in the first place to solve their lack of efficient marketing problem.

Can the marketer in your tech company fully exercise his job ?

VP Sales, VP Marketing and CEO’s wonder and evaluate if they should out source the lead generation for their business.
It seems easy: just appoint a lead generation service and pay a monthly retainer. Then effortless the leads will flow in.

The 6 month lead time for a new sales rep to become effective

In B2B it typically requires at least 6 months for a new sales rep to understand the benefits, unique selling points of the products.
Only after that initial time frame he will:
- Start making the suiting or appropriate propositions in order to generate leads
- Be able to engage potential customers into a conversation
- Have enough insight in the business and the market to qualify leads
This sales rep is working in your company and listening to colleagues from sales, marketing and other departments 5 days a week during 6 months.
This i 6 months of investment for the future.

Outsourcing lead generation will take longer to become effective

If you outsource, how will these outsiders learn and understand the benefits, unique selling points of your products. As they are not working or in direct contact with your other employees, it will take much longer before those outsiders understand how to generate leads for your specific business. They are not immersed in the culture of your company and confronted with your products everyday.

Moreover the outsourcing company will probably appoint several people to handle the lead generation for your products. Hence the knowledge need to be spread over several people as they . They need to understand the business, the products, the lot.
It will take ages before they will generate good leads that can be qualified.

Transferring leads is hard to do

Another issue is the transfer of the qualified leads.
If the outsourcing company has managed the leads which were qualified, then these leads need to be transferred to the sales reps. Transferring internally qualified sales leads from the Marketing dept. to the sales reps is already difficult, then it will be even harder to transfer leads from a third party to the sames sales reps.

Company outsourcing lead generation is driver less

In some cases for common products (standard office products) outsourcing of lead generation is feasible, but for most products or services the hurdles are important and the time frame will be longer than 6 months.

For filling you funnel and pipeline, you and your company would rely upon the efficiency and effectiveness of a third party. Outsourcing your lead generation is outsourcing the main driver of your business: the new leads are beyond your control.
However you will also miss all possible feedback from the market: it is already hard to capture feedback through your own marketing and sales personnel – thus it will be even harder to get market and potential customer feedback from your lead generation company.
VP Sales, VP Marketing and the CEO will all start losing their feeling with the market as they will miss the direct feedback from the sales reps. as it is no longer happening internally.

Outsource vs OEM

If you outsource lead generation, then you could as well just become an OEM manufacturer as they rely upon their OEM partners to generate leads and close deals, they also have no influence on their lead generation neither.

Do you outsource your lead generation ?

Many Social Media death claims

By just searching on the Internet you will be able to find a string of articles claiming Social Media is dead containing a series of statements and facts why social media is in decline.

Many reasons are given – many indications of decline.
- Less interest
- Me-too: early interesting adopter leave
- SOCIAL Media has become Social MEDIA
- Other forms of entertainment
- SEO of Social media kills it
- Spam
- Brands aren’t social
- Followers and friends are fake
- …

The Social Media hype cycle

As with all trends there is the hype cycle of:
- Technology Trigger with early adapters
- The Peak of Inflated Expectations: analysts, bloggers write about it
- The valley of disillusionment: after the first real uses with to high expectations
- The slope of enlightenment: the new hope or way to use it
- The plateau of productivity: generic use guided by consultants and specialists

Is Social Media in:
- The Valley of disillusionment right after the peak of inflated expectations ?
- Or has the plateau of productivity been reached a while ago and now it is going to decay for good ?
Probably the latter as the adoption rate and penetration within the world population has been massive already. MySpace, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter have (or have had) all hundreds of millions of users, thus the point of mass adoption has been passed.

Multinational corporations use Social Media: not so social

Social media has been tried, experimented and used by major corporations for their marketing with very different levels of success. Not just for one event or campaign but multiple campaigns.

Several well known brand names have swapped their budgets for conventional and even Internet marketing in favor of their Social Media Marketing.

Multinational companies have used all the platforms in the hope to have a viral campaign – only a few succeeded (Dove)

Moreover new functions in Social media Marketing in companies were created in order to lead the new marketing.

These are all clear signs that The Plateau of Productivity for Social Media Marketing has been reached some time ago.

Of course multinational corporations are not so social.

- MySpace is ever declining is popularity
- Facebook still has many users but the use per person is declining
- Twitter has been overrun by bots and people spamming and at the same time Twitter having trouble to make money
- LinkedIn has their users have a demand: getting a job or better job
- Google+ might have gotten lots of sing-ups but how few are migrating from Facebook ?

Noise instead of original content on Social Media

Currently original content on Social Media is hard to find. There is too much noise in the content on these social media by people who are marketing or selling stuff.
Additionally the content is getting buried by clever re-targeting advertising on these platforms. The real original content without marketing or sales intentions has become suppressed and almost extincted.

If Social media is no longer the place to be or to spend time for people (this happened to MySpace and will happen to the other platforms too), then Social Media Marketing will decline rapidly too. Moreover as the Return On Investment (Social Media Marketing ROI is hard/impossible to calculate) will decrease too.
Social Media marketing has just become another channel besides printed advertising, online advertising, TV ads, paid editorials, product placement, … and it could decline rapidly and significantly if people aren’t interested anymore to follow someone or to be a virtual friend.

The hype of Social Media Marketing is over.
RIP of Social Media Marketing is near.

Do you still follow people and companies on social media ?
What about your friends on Social Media are they any real ?

If there are hurdles for selling your product or service then helping to remove them will be beneficial as it will require less effort for the employee or manager who engages to propose to purchase your product or service.
If it requires to o much effort, time and creativity then people will pursue to start the purchase cycle by trying to sell internally.

Helping selling internally

Gartner, Inc (Research and Conferences) has understood that attendees interested in attending their conferences have to justify their participation as the cost is high (conference: $3,600 + travel and lodging it will cost over $4,000). In order to solve this they have created a justification toolkit in order to make it as convenient as possible to attend and present the received ROI post-event:

a) Getting the conference attendance approved: A letter to the manager: A customizable Word template with a cost/benefit analysis (download)
b) Taking notes during the conference: A ROI worksheet: A Word template to take notes during sessions, analyst briefings and sponsor meetings (download)
c) Post-conference reporting ROI: A trip report: A Word template for reporting ROI from the conference. (download)
d) Post-event brief will be send highlighting new and notable information, key takeaways, interactive polling results, exhibit showcase highlights.

The documents will lower the hurdles to be taken before and after the conference. After the conference the attendees will even have information and documents that can be presented and indicates the (perceived) ROI on the investment.
Gartner takes care of its’ customers in order to get more customers.

Market research: What are the selling hurdles internally ?

In order to know what is the hurdle or what are the hurdles to sell you need to investigate:
- Ask salesmen
- Ask customers
- Ask leads that never bought
If this is not possible then try to imagine what are the hurdles to sell your products or services internally in a company being an employee or manager or officer. What requires additional effort or work for the person that has a demand for your product or service which is holding him back. Any creativity or any effort required for presenting your product and selling it internally should be handed over to those who want to engage themselves to sell. Just lower the barriers. Make it more convenient for them.

Reach out to help customers

If you have found the hurdle then try to lower or remove it by creating supporting content or online demo or make reference cases available.
You only have to create this content once and it can be used by probably almost all of your probable customers.
It is like giving away some value for free in order to sell more: Seeding before harvesting.
Whatever you can do to lower or to eliminate the hurdles will boost your sales.

What is holding your customers back from buying?
Can you help them solve this problem ?
What does it take to create the required content or information ?

Traveling hazards that will happen to you as traveling salesman

If you are a traveling salesman then you will have:
- Flights being delayed
- Flights being cancelled requiring to wait for the next one
- Volcanoes and blizzards turning you into a stranded passenger
- Long layovers between interconnecting flights
Don’t worry each of these will happen one day if you are a traveling salesman – who knows all hotel room ceilings are white.

No rest, nap or sleep easily possible

Staying in the departure lounge of an airport is not the best place to be and have a rest as:
- Sitting and hanging in the chairs at the airport will start to hurt after a few hours.
- The available chairs are designed to avoid to lay down comfortably for sleeping.

Airline lounges are available for the frequent travelers who acquired enough air miles to get a premium card; Still you need to have booked with the appropriate airline and not flying cattle class. Although a lounge is great for getting away from the crowd but for sleeping it is not convenient.

The only real option to get some sleep is to hire a taxi and drive into town to take a room in a hotel. This comes at a high expense.

The mini hotel room

Japan is known for their capsule hotels but that hardly caught on anywhere else in the world as requirements differ from Japan.

More comfortable and practical are sleep boxes in the departure lounge. Each containing two bunk beds, a desk with power supply to charge battery powered devices, a TV set and space to store your luggage. These mini rooms can be rented for periods from 15 minutes and more at your convenience.

Sleepbox advantages:
- Quite place to rest (no crying babies) and sleep (real bed)
- Cheaper than taking a taxi to a hotel in town and paying for both.
- No worries about luggage getting stolen
- Economy class travelers can get a rest too (not admitted into the lounges)
- Cost can easily be put on the expense note
- Watch a TV channel instead of the continuous news or weather channel in the departure lounge.

If the rental price is right this will be a success. If not then forget about it.
Just make sure you set the wake-up alarm on your mobile phone as you don’t want to miss your flight.

Would you sleep in a box instead of hanging around in the lounge without sleeping ?

Leads no longer enter funnel and pipeline

Funnel and pipeline have been legacy for most companies as it still seems to function for most of them.

However times and attitudes have changed, especially with buyers, decision makers and their influencers.
Instead of addressing to a company for requesting information people search on the Internet. This can be in various type of websites: company website, forums, reviews and social media.
- They have no intention to become a lead
- They won’t fill out an online form to request information
- They will not send a reply card
- They will not call you
- They will not send you an email
Thus they don’t enter your funnel or pipeline as they don’t identify themselves for requesting information.

Remainders of the past: funnel and pipeline

Even worse: up to a certain level in their purchase process:
- They will not take your sales calls
- They will not be interested in an appointment
Instead of spending half an hour on a phone call with a salesman, an hour in a webinar or over an hour during a meeting, they will find themselves more effective by searching the Internet and posing questions on discussion boards and forums for getting less biased responses from peers.

As identifying, qualifying, appointment setting, tracking and managing the relationship have become impossible, the funnel and pipeline have become obsolete: they are remainders of the past.

No sales meeting but technical meeting

Only once they have taken their main decision that a purchase of a certain solution is required, they will invite a limited number of companies with apparently matching solutions they have selected during their purchase process. They are not so much interested in meeting the salesman as due to their research, investigations and discussions they probably know more than the average salesman. Hence they are more interested in meeting the sales engineer, the product manager, the project manager or even the CTO for getting information and explications about technical or implementation matters.

As it is only then when you can qualify your lead your funnel and pipeline are very short as the moment of purchase decision is apparent.
So what’s the value of an ultra short funnel or pipeline where leads will only briefly be present and have only two or three stages:
- First meeting
- Price quotation given
- Deal closed or deal lost

Do you still make your monthly funnel or pipeline?
Is it still relevant to predict your business and revenue?

Technical discussion during a sales pitch: to be avoided

In many cases it is better for a salesman not to have too much technical background or profound knowledge about the product he is pitching.
The more he knows the more likely he will enter into a technical discussion with the more technical people from his audience he is pitching to, which can lead to a sales pitch failure.

The problems with going into a technical discussion are:
- The story board of the sales pitch gets lost
- The very technical questions are (in most cases) not asked by the decision makers
- A technical discussion has no winner
- The unique selling points might not be retained but instead some technical details

Knowledge instead of purchase decision

Technical questions or challenges are posed by people interested in knowledge or interested in showing off their knowledge.
In the worst case these people are being used as influencers: then their questions can become a hurdle to progress with your sales process.
In most cases the only role for these people in the sales process have is to avoid big technology mistakes. Minor technology issues are not important for the decision maker.
In most cases it is unlikely to convince the challenger to change his mind as he wants to ‘win’.
Technology nerds are not going to take the purchase decision.

Too much information to be retained

Thus by knowing too much about the product and having a profound technical background a lot of time can get spend on discussing technical details which are not interesting for the decision maker.

During a technical discussion too much information is communicated and transmitted from the salesman or the sales engineer to the interested buyer. As people (thus also decision makers) can only retain and remember a limited amount of information from one session, it is likely the lively or engaged technical discussion will get a significant portion of this.
Hence by entering into a technical decision it is likely several of your unique selling points will not be remembered instead of some of the less important technical details . Thus your sales pitch has failed which might lead to miss to ever close the deal as they will go for your competitor without a technical discussion.

Focus on the sales pitch

Moreover once the technical discussion is over the salesman needs to pick up the story line of the sales pitch again which will be hard. It will be even harder to get the audience motivated again.

If technical detailed questions are posed or a technical challenge is pictured, the best is to note the question and promise to handle this afterwards by the company specialist on these matters. This will let you focus on the sales pitch.

This is the curse of knowledge for a salesman which is likely to spoil the sales pitch.

How good is your technical knowledge about the products you are selling?

Content marketing is all the hype in inbound marketing.
The problem is how to benefit from the content you have produced?

Registration is a transaction payment

Most websites require to register with your name and email address for download of white papers, presentations or valuable information in order to be able to follow-up afterwards.
This registration is a transaction payment: they have to pay with their identity.
However instead of gathering useful contact information most people will use a bogus web mail addresses in order not to pay with their identity. Their main goal is to deviate the expected marketing stream of emails into this account which they never really check upon. At the same time they also avoid getting interrupting sales calls from your salesmen.

Unfettered access gives deferred lead

On the other hand by allowing unfettered access to your valuable content it might seem you have lost this lead and you have no marketing tools to follow-up.
However it is likely the person will read your content, think it over, keep it in mind. We could call this a deferred lead, still having the potential to become a lead.

Content distribution has more value

If it is valuable and suiting content it is likely he will pass it on to one or more persons. This distribution of your content is very valuable – it has probably more value than having the email address of the person who has downloaded it as your content and brand name are getting exposure.

Customers’ networks

Even your customers have a need for information and updates.
If you gate for the content then they know they will receive a phone call from a salesman trying to get a meeting. If instead the information is free to download your content will flow freely into your customers through a different network of contacts than those reached by your newsletter.

Real leads with real demands

People who do register and have no demand or are not in charge or not influencers, like students, teachers, have also no value for your company. It is a waste of time and effort to contact them afterwards and an overload to manage your CRM system or email data base.

The real leads who have been able to consume, process and re-use your content will come back as:
- They have a real need
- You have made an impact on them with your valuable content
- The ease of getting the content really helped them giving some gratitude
They will act upon and call you.

Safety net

Website visitor identification services – which are like Caller Display of your website – are a safety net as they will provide you with the company names that have visited and downloaded your content. These services will allow you to address these companies using your normal outbound marketing methods.

Do you gate your content?
How many leads does it generate?

Fast and slow fires

In a traditional marketing campaign like advertising, email campaign or direct mailing you measure the ROI (Return On Investment) from the beginning to the end of the campaign. As soon as the campaign is over the effect is gone or almost gone as there is little or no influence afterwards.

A social media marketing campaign however is long lasting: you know when you start it, but you never know how long it will last. For example we still have a few blog posts driving high traffic from 3 years ago. So measuring the ROI becomes more complicated as the result and return can build up slowly over a long time span. Some social media efforts didn’t have much effect in the beginning but were long lasting. Others were an instant hit but their influence evaporated rather soon.
So having fast and slow fires in social media marketing.

So in order to measure the ROI of a social media marketing campaign or effort you need time and patience.

Initial investment

Measuring a traditional marketing campaign has the advantage that the initial investment can be measured easily – for example:
- The press release writing and distribution
- The creation of the ad and the ad space bought

In social media however the social is a part of the investment that has likely has happened before the start of the new campaign. The company or product has already:
- Followers
- Links into other social media
- Subscribers to the blog
- Generic Internet presence
Hence calculating the initial investment already becomes difficult as you build upon an existing network or support structure, which is hard to calculate in.
The actual effort of the campaigning can be rather small: just a blog post or even a few Tweets that get the necessary attention can be enough.
The part of the initial investment that is easy to measure can be much smaller than the total investment made previously which needs to be spread over all other social marketing campaigns.

Impossible Social Media Marketing ROI

As defining the initial investment is hard to figure out exactly and the return of your campaign can bring in results during many years, how can you ever define the exact ROI ?

Still even if you can’t measure your Social Media Marketing you should listen, monitor and analyze each of your Social Media Marketing campaigns in order to score and classify each of them. You will make distinctions between successful, not so successful and failures.

Social Media marketing becomes multifaceted billboard

The concept of the long tail has driven marketers and even sales people to Social Media websites in order to influence, market or to search for leads.

The problem with Social Media is that is soon becomes cluttered with marketing, advertising and spam messages:
- Often the people posting on Social Media have an agenda: to promote their products on industry specific Social Media as this allows to reach their target market rather directly at no cost.
- Companies will put advertising on interest-specific Social Media to reach target groups.
- Brand fanatics will keep on shouting about a certain brand downgrading the value of messages
These three types of messages won’t help the purity and originality content of the Social Media website – it will just spoil the content.

The more popular a certain Social Media becomes, the more it starts to look like a like multifaceted billboard with more commercial messages than original statements, experiences or advices. From that very moment on the interest group will lose interest and move on to another Social Media website.

Previously this has happened with many websites (Yahoo! Groups, MySpace,…) and is currently happening with Facebook and LinkedIn.

Sustainability of Social Media websites

The business owners of Social media websites should be careful about this evolution of their website.
a) The CEO should limit the amount of advertising space that can be sold.
b) The webmaster has the important function to monitor discussions and the remove certain messages in order to keep the information interesting and not to let the website become a billboard.

Avoid the short haul on the long tail

As a vendor or reseller instead of promoting your products directly on Social Media, which is like the short haul on the long tail, it is more important to get recognition, grow respect, get authority and even get followers by posting interesting and insightful information. It is then that you can make honest statements about your products.

Of course your competitors probably won’t take the time and spam the message boards which will lead to the decay in popularity of the Social Media website.

How is your approach to Social Media websites: to spam or not to spam ?