B2B Marketing Automation

Most businesses bought or have a subscription for an email marketing system or B2B marketing automation system allowing them nurturing their leads and customers.
The problem with these lead nurturing programs is that they are too generic and are missing the human touch.

Personal touch challenge

Previously the salesmen would contact their customers and leads on a regular basis with a conversation that is very specific for each lead or customer and thus very personal, now with all the marketing automation tools this has become rather generic and not personal.
The challenge is to have sufficient segregation in the different market segments of your leads and customers in order to send out more appropriate emails.
- Can you define different segments for your leads and customers in order to send them different emails ?
- What exactly should each sub-group be interested in ?
- What content should be send matching their interest ?
- When should the emails be send ?

Adding the personal touch

One good indicator is when your leads or customers visit your website again. They will use search terms to find your website or use a direct access. These search terms used will already indicate their interest.
Additionally the pages visited and the duration of each page visited will give good indication of the interest.

This is why LEADSExplorer allows sending emails using templates to visiting companies (leads or customers) with the benefit of being able to edit the template in your email client to give it a human touch before sending it.

The buyer is the loudest

If the buyer is the loudest man, you have to wonder why he is so loud as only you (salesman) and him are in one room.
There is no reason to impress, impose or to convince you as you just try to sell to him.
The purchaser must have other problems, which could be for even reasons not related to your offering. Or he is under pressure to buy from you.
He is definitely the weakest in the room.

The influencer is the loudest

Apparently the influencer or adviser tries to impress his manager during the meeting. He will have good reasons for doing so:
- He is unprepared
- He previously gave the wrong advice
- He prefers a different vendor
- He needs to score with his manager
- He is insecure
- He needs constant attention

Influencers and advisers don’t need to raise their voice as they should be knowledgeable and their information valuable making every one listen to them.

The CxO is the loudest

Apparently the CxO is used to speak out loud. His employees have gotten used to listen to him. This might hide the real issues and problems the company is confronted with as only his view is projected.
As a salesman you need to find out about and solve the real problems without upsetting the CxO. So your solution might have to solve 2 problems at the same time.

The salesman is the loudest

If you as the salesman are the loudest then it is likely your sales pitch hasn’t impressed and your sales deal is probably ending at this very moment.
The only way to solve this situation is to start asking open questions and hope for getting better insight in the problems and propose a new solution or to explain your solution in relation to their real problem.

The quietest in the room is probably the strongest as he will only speak out about matters that really matter to the business.

Overwhelming technical specs

Do you find it also so confusing finding a smartphone due to all the functions, features and the technical definitions and abbreviations used?
- LED-backlit LCD, Oled, Amoled, Super Amoled, Retina, TFT LCD, Super LCD 2, Super PLS LCD, IPS LCD2 (in-plane-switching LCD)
- Capacitive touch screen, resistive touch screen
- QVGA,WQVGA, HVGA, WVGA, FWVGA, SVGA, DVGA, WSVGA
- Single core, dual core, quad core
- Gingerbread, ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), Froyo, IOS, Windows Phone 7
- Exynos, ARM Cortex A9 (Tegra3), NovaThor U8500 dual-core, Snapdragon 4 dual core, Cortex A9 quad core processor,…
- Adreno 205, Mali 400Mp, ULP GeForce, SGX 540 GPU (Graphic Unit Processor)
- MFLOPS on Linpack multithreaded, Antutu, Vellamo, Sunspider, Quadrant, GL Benchmark Egypt Offscreen, CF-Bench, Benchmark Pi, BrowserMark, NenaMark 2 benchmarks
- HSDPA, HSUPA, EDGE, GPRS, HSPA+
- 2G, 3G, 3.5G, 4G, 4G LTE (what happened to 1G and 5G ?)
- Tethering, Mobile Hotspot, push to talk
- Wi-Fi b/g/n, DLNA
- MPEG4, H.263, H.264, WMV
Seems like the more exotic it sounds the better?
Do you understand any of these tech specs?

A phone is needed – not an engineering master piece

Do you know the differences between or advantages of all these technical items, specs and features?
Do you use all these features and functions ? Do you know how to use all these functions and features?
In the end you just want a well performing phone that allows you to receive and make calls, browse the Internet, send text messages, answer emails, take pictures, listen to music, maybe even watch video’s and play games.
All these technical terms which could be as well drivel doesn’t bring any real information.
It is not because of all the tech specs it will be a better smartphone.

Usability instead of tech specs, functions and features

What you want is to:
- Know the readability of the screen in sunlight
- How fast you can start a function
- How easy it is to use a feature
- How good you can type an SMS (texting) or email or MultiMediaMail
- How easy it is to retrieve an email or find a website
- How long can you use it before recharging (larger displays will consume more)
- How good is the camera (which is not defined by the pixels but mainly by the lens)
The underlying technology has no importance for the average user.

The iPhone was averse from technology – Smartphones compete on tech specs

In the beginning there was the iPhone from Apple that brought a usable device. Then due to competition more and more technical terms were promoted as marketing terms making it all too confusing. Now there is an overwhelming number of smartphones in different form factors and sizes with less or more or more more features at different price levels.
In order to differentiate they market all the technical functions, features and the stylishness.

Smartphone reviews as guide

Instead of staring at all the technical items and systems contained in a smartphone you should need to get your hands on and use it for several days. However that’s not possible.
Hence you need to rely upon reviews of third parties:
- Phone Arena
- Mobilesyrup
- GSMArena
- Engadget
- PC Advisor
- Slash Gear
- Know your mobile
- Techradar

Usability and basic functionality

There are many factors which are more important than technical specs of a phone. Just the usability is one of the main requirements: if you can’t or don’t know or never use 75% of the nifty technical functions and features then they have no importance.
The phone should fit your needs.
And you should be able to make calls and receive calls without a hassle and your voice and their voice should be loud and clear. How the manufacturer achieves this is not of your worries.

Are you overwhelmed by the functions and features too ? Confused ?

Defaulting countries influencing leads and sales

Each time there is financial turmoil (another country or financial institutions of a country is need for money), then we notice a decrease in lead generation and less sales are being closed. Whenever the financial storm weathers out the lead generation and the sales closing picks up again.
Still the lost sales are never recouped.
Have these opportunities gone elsewhere or did they no longer consider the solution as an option due to changed conditions ?

Marketing and sales efforts during financial turmoil

Should we line up our marketing and sales efforts with the financial turmoil ?
The marketing events and campaigns are hardly effective when financial disaster strikes.
The sales misses to close their deals when financial doom scenarios are broadcasted.
During a financial storm it seems that people avoid to take decisions as the future is hard or impossible to predict.
Thus the conclusion is why spend money and time when the results are minimal ?

Lining up marketing and sales with financial disasters is more effective

By lining up marketing and sales efforts when apparently the worst of the financial disasters are over the ROI (Return On Investment) of marketing expenses and sales efforts will be much higher as no or little money is being spend when the return is low.
Less marketing and sales is more effective during financial turmoil. Less is more.

How is the financial turmoil affecting your lead generation and business?

B2C cowboy marketers

In consumer business the crowd is attracted by advertising, SEM, multiple links from reference sites, optimized SEO, email marketing, direct mailing, blog and social media. All these marketing efforts will drive traffic to the website. Different systems and methods are in place to optimize the flow through the website to the checkout.
The marketers in B2C are like cowboys gathering their cattle and then herding them towards the railheads (the checkout).

B2B marketers are not herding cattle

In B2B similar marketing techniques can be used to drive interested parties to the website
However in most cases in B2B the lead generation process seems to stop after the landing on the website.
However what happens after the click is less well organized in B2B. Once the interested person has landed on the website the grip on the process becomes less evident as in B2C. For starters there is no checkout!
It is like cowboys gathering their cattle and then not herding them further as there are no railroads. In B2B the marketers just watch and hope the visitors convert into leads.

What do you know about your visitors ?

Do you know who lands on your website ?
Do you rely upon the hope they will contact you (which they don’t do) ?
Do you have traffic but little conversions ?
Do you know what each visitor was looking for ?
Do you know how many times the same visitor came back ?
Do you know how many times visitors of the same company came to visit your website ?

Why don’t you have answers to all of these evident questions ?

You should have a web service that reveals the companies visiting, allows knowing their interest and level of interest in order to herd each cow as a leads on your website towards a sale.

Information and entertainment overload

Content marketing is a great concept as you offer content for free in the hope to draw in potential customers to your website.
However in this era of information and entertainment overload and overflow your content need to get noticed. How good or of great quality your content is, getting noticed between all the other content on the Internet is the real challenge.

Search engine results: title & content extract

In most cases content will be found through search engines. This requires a title and search matching content which will be displayed in the search results.

The title should catch enough attention to generate interest. Due to this your titles need to be aggressive or challenging or contrary like gossip newspaper headings. Still the heading should only tease: only tell what’s on the inside and not sell what’s on the inside.

Keep control

The extract of the content that will be displayed in the search results is beyond your control as it is related to the search terms used. This you cannot predict. Still this extract of content is very decisive for people to click upon your website link.

What you do have under control are the different versions you can create about one subject. Each time using different keywords and different phrases.
The more versions you produce and publish on the Internet the more you increase the chances of being clicked on as the likelihood of any match and grabbing the attention will be higher.

The more and louder you shout and the more controversial your title and content, the higher the chance of grabbing the attention.

After grabbing the attention and people landing on your website you still need to convert visitors into leads.

Content marketing guidelines exist, but you still need the creativity to write the attention grabbing header and content.

Content spreading

Spreading your content using organic search (search engines) is not enough. The content should be interesting enough to have people forward it to their colleagues or peers. This forwarding is probably the most important as people will receive an email or see it posted on social media (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn). The recommendation of trusted parties like a friend, colleague or peer are utmost important. Thus your content needs to be more than attention catching as it should be quality content that people want to share.

What was your most catching content ever ?

Pitching on discussion boards

The goal of engaging the users of LinkedIn, discussion boards were started. The idea was to have conversations and exchange of information between people of the same industry.
However the exchange of knowledge and advice was quickly grabbed by salesmen and marketers to pitch their solution. They saw an opportunity to address their market segment directly at hardly any cost as only time needs to be invested.

Discussion boards will die

Just like on conferences where you can find more salesmen than potential customers, the discussion boards of LinkedIn are becoming crowded with salesmen or marketers.
Of course people can block topics, discussions and comments as spam, but it hardly happens.

The problems is that with all the vendors on the discussion boards the real potential customers are becoming thin. It is like phishing in an almost empty pool.
The sales pitches will probably kill the discussion boards on LinkedIn as the opportunities will decrease. At the same time the investment in time will not generate enough leads anymore. Resulting in both vendors and potential customers having left the discussion boards.

Do you pitch on discussion boards ?