There are many services offering leads in bulk at a certain price as if leads are a common product available per pound.
As leads are the oxygenated blood for your company it seems unlikely that valuable leads in B2B can be obtained from a service company. Only your marketing and sales reps are qualified enough to generate your sales leads.

Instead of spending money on leads from an unidentified source with undefined qualification of those leads why not invest in a web service that reveals the companies visiting your website, why they are visiting and how interested they are.

Do you buy leads from a service company?

Perception influences decisions

What the public or the potential customer has perceived from an action or a reaction of your company, will last and influence their future decisions related to buying or not buying your products or solutions.

Perception examples

It’s all in the perception:
- You lower your prices because the market has lowered their prices previously.
This gives the impression you had to lower your prices in order to sustain sales.
In reality you could lower your prices because you have changed to a new production process.

- You add on a look-a-like model or solution.
The perception is you needed this model as else the competitor would win too much market share.
This model was on the road map but the competitors were just faster.

- You offer a new technology only after several competitors have launched products using this new technology.
The impression is you are only innovative if you are being forced to. You are certainly not leading in innovation.
Instead of rushing into a new technology you test and evaluate first.

- You extend your warranty as others have already done so.
You give the impression you were loosing market share quickly. Or you had doubts your products could be longer under warranty.
Instead you have increased your quality allowing a longer warranty

- You extend your support services after the competitors have already a 24 x 7 support in place.
Seems you were too sure of people buying your products and solutions without need for additional support.
Instead you want to increase your service and have extended your support availability.
Even though there were many other reasons

Marketing to counter perceptions

Even though in most cases there is another reason for your action or reaction based upon good business drivers, still the perception of the market and your potential buyers will be different as you are no longer seen as a leading company.

The perception influences all decisions even in case the reasons have another driver than the actions of the competitors.
Appropriate marketing could turn around these wrong perceptions by showing the real reasons. Countering perceptions is one of the biggest challenges for marketing.

How do you counter these perceptions ?
What does your marketing do ?
Does marketing provide any help ?

The benefits

The benefits for a company to exhibit at a trade show:
- The marketing message gets exposed
- The solutions are on display
- The partners will meet you
- New partners can be found and discussed
- Leads can be generated
- Your sales team has a terrific time: luxury hotel, food, drinks and fun increasing loyalty
- You can check upon all your competitors and see the level of interest received
- Chance to meet CxO people without an appointment
- The resulting sales pays for the investment
- The trade show showed your company is on top for both products and interest generated
- You actually close new deals on the trade show
- Improving your relationships with your customers by dining and wining
Ok – we have looked into this too positively

The disadvantages

The disadvantages for a company exhibit on a trade show:
- The high cost can be wasted almost entirely due to not resulting in sales
- The sales reps and pre-sales engineers could be doing their normal work instead
- The leads generated will never qualify
- The cost per lead is way too high due to the high expenses and the low number of leads
- Interested people you talked too have a too low level in the organization
- Too many badges have been scanned without qualification making the data worthless
- There was more interest for your hostess than your solutions
- The freebies were popular but not your solutions or products
- You have talked more to partners than potential customers
- You and your sales team missed sleep and some got a cold resulting in less productivity the week after
- Several members of your sales team managed to fish for a job with your competitors
- Several laptops or tablets or smartphones were stolen during the trade show
- Your sales team was hanging around with each other instead of addressing interested people
- Collecting freebies was more important than looking for and qualifying leads
- Your sales team is convinced your competitor is doing much better
- Your sales team was more interested in the dining and wining than convincing interested parties
- Too many nights out with existing clients resulting in no additional sales
Ok – we sometimes exaggerated but most actually has happened.

There are both benefits and disadvantages for being present and exhibit as a company on a trade show. You have to weigh the benefits and the disadvantages and come to your own conclusion.

So to be or not to be exhibiting on a trade show ?

The salesman at the golf course

Formerly the salesman or sales manager could be doing his business during an afternoon golf with other businessmen. This setting has been portrayed and idealized over many years.

The salesman:
- Could do his business with people he knew since long
- Had a Rolodex with business cards where he could rely upon
- Was more an account manager than a sales guy

His world was organized and nothing could really interfere in his sales or customer retention process.
Business, golf and pleasure all fitted well together.

Communication technologies

Communication technologies have changed the way people do business over years:
Fax
Fax introduced the speed of immediate delivery of documents – no physical transport required.
Thus the salesman didn’t need to visit and collect the order anymore.
That meant less face to face communications, thus less information exchanged.

Email
Email brought the increase of speed in written communications – both ways.
There were no more delays as with mailing letters and waiting for a physical reply.
The salesman could communicate more directly and have faster interactions.
This has increased his productivity, as he could respond more quickly and could work on more deals at one time.
Additionally there is an administrative benefit as the emails are kept automatically in a folder. Hence no administrative filing and easy retrieval.

Mobile phones
Mobile phones made the salesperson available everywhere.
Previously calling could only be done in the office or at home which limited the availability during the week of a salesman.
Using a mobile phone, the salesman can discuss with the potential customers or customers anywhere and anytime.
Instead of face to face communications requiring appointments, calls could be made whenever possible and appropriate.

The Internet
The Internet has bought several changes:
1) Information distribution
The internet made company, product and services information available to interested parties and to customers, without needing to ask the salesman
The salesman was no longer in the loop with interested parties and customers
This has led to the rise of the “Unknown Buyer“.

2) Rolodex
The Internet allowed finding and / or retrieval of possible contacts within an organization or company.
At first this started with simple searches on Google using the domain name.
Then the specific organized websites like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Jigsaw, Zoominfo, Xing, Spoke, Viadeo, …

The partly free availability of contact information:
- Decreased the power of the salesman with the Rolodex significantly.
- Changed cold calling forever.
This has increased the competition and will continue to increase competition as people within companies have become addressable.

3) Webinars
Instead of paying a visit, sales people could set-up webinars in order to give an on-line interactive sales presentation.
No travel required for a first meeting with the interested parties: hence fewer costs and less waste of time for travel.
Again the salesman could follow-up on more leads than before and quickly move on if the potential customer is not interested.

Still playing golf?

The Salesman can still spend his days on the golf course, while his invited business friends will be receiving phone calls or emails from competition on their smart phones whilst playing golf.
By the time the game is over, the competition could already have sent a quotation by email received on the smart phone.

Are you still playing golf too ?

From Content to Converting

Getting found on the Internet is the start.
Having interesting content is good for traffic.
Having much traffic is quite an achievement.
Converting visitors into leads is the main goal.
Converting more visitors into leads is the challenge which requires Conversion Rate Optimization (also called CRO).

The 12 keys for Conversion Rate Optimization

1. Fast loading pages in order to show the message
2. Avoid redirects, this consumes too much time of the 3 second attention span
3. The subject of the page should match the reason why the visitors landed there
4. The title should closely resemble the key phrase used to drive traffic
5. One page = One simple easy to understand message
6. Relevant images, which people understand an remember, supporting your message
7. A clear proposition
8. Information that is useful and will be remembered
9. Create content beyond your products or services
10. Generate trust with badges, certifications or references
11. One call to action per page, don’t confuse the visitors
12. Short forms with minimal fields to complete

Test and re-test on a regular basis as drivers and reasons to buy change over time.

How efficient is your conversion rate ?

Most B2B websites are designed from a vendor or supplier prospective.
- The design should be approached as if you were your potential customer.
- The content should be written abut what the customer is looking for.

When designing and creating content for your website think like your probable customers.

The design of your website should not be defined by your products or solutions, but by the problems and issues the customer are looking to solve.
What is the intention of the visitor? What is he looking for and what will he be expecting to find next? More information, contact details, specs sheets, local resellers?

The content should not solely be about the greatness of your products but should address how your solutions solve their problems and issues.

How customer minded is your website?

Consumerization of IT

A few years ago a new business model for B2B had emerged onto the market: Consumerization of IT.
Just like consumerization happened for mobile devices pushing companies to buy smartphones, the same would apply to software.
The concept was by getting enough consumers as users which will create interest in the media, the software/web service would trickle over into the enterprise world – even into Fortune 500 companies.
Several start-ups started to build web services that where well-designed and easy to deploy. This allowed them obtaining large shares of consumers these services were based upon the Freemium model: a free basic version and a paid subscription for more features or more space.

B2B Sales Cycle

Although many employees are using these web services at home and even in their work environment (as long as IT isn’t aware), resulting in pop-and-mom and very small companies to embrace these web services (paid or not), the sales to enterprises and large corporations never happened.
The sales cycle in B2B still requires sales reps, salesmen, product marketers and enterprise grade marketing.
Moreover the requirements of consumers don’t match the requirements of enterprises having Active Directory, LDAP, Oracle or IBM DB2 requirements.

Dropbox, Yammer, Box and many others can testify about this failed business model.

Internet and websites have changed the business of most companies, especially in lead generation, however not for closing the deals as the salesman is still required in B2B.

What’s your B2b business model?
How many sales reps or salesmen do you have ?

As salesmen are professional in sales why should they need sales training?

Sales is the most valuable for any company as sales decides about the success of products and as such the company. Thus any improvement or efficiency that can be achieved will be beneficial for your company.
The question is if sales training can help the salesmen selling better or more.
These people are into sales in the first place. They have their ways and habits how they sell. Chances of changing these is near to zero as salespeople have a high ego and have a proven record of selling. If not they would not still be in sales.

Sales trainings about the products and competitors will help as this will give them more insight and background information in matters that is not their specialty.

Sales training on how to sell seems as effective as learning the hunter to hunt.
Those who need sales training shouldn’t probably be in sales in the first place.

How effective were your sales trainings ?

Apparently Social Media is working for B2C companies.
However in B2B much less or even not at all.

Purchase Cycle Differences

If we examine the purchase cycle the differences are apparent:
- In B2B people will investigate and compare products and solutions far more than consumers
- As the purchase cycle is quite long in B2B quite a significant amount of information will be gathered before and during the process by different people
- The B2B purchases are (supposedly) rational decisions
- During the purchase cycle you will start to know the different people involved personally or you will know them at least by name.

- Consumers still have a high level of impulsive buying with much less investigation during their short purchase process.
- In B2C only after the purchase you might obtain the name and address of a customer if they fill out the warranty card or the money back voucher.

Customer Retention Differences

If we examine the retention of customers:
In B2C you don’t know your customers
In B2B you will exactly know who you are dealing with: the decision makers, the influencers, the purchasers and the opponents

Social Media Differences

Hence in B2C a generic platform like social media can be used as mass messaging is feasible and can reach your customers.

In B2B you can and should talk and discuss to each of them individually as mass media messages using Social Media are unlikely to reach your target.

What is your take on Social Media in B2B ?
Any Social Media success stories in B2B ?

Lead generating services

Do you get these type of emails and messages in your LinkedIn inbox for selling leads too ?
Contact us today, because…

I’m available to you now through email: suryc@contctsworldwide.com
Thank you for your time and I look forward to serving you soon

Mission Impossible: generating leads for third parties

Wondering how these companies are able to have leads for products or services they don’t even know about their existence.
These companies don’t have the expertise of your sales and marketing staff. They can’t bring any value to the lead generating process as they hardly know anything about your company and your products or services.

Why would anyone trust such services from companies as it is likely to end up with a list of contacts who are nonexistent or without any value.

Generating Leads is toughest challenge

Generating leads is one of the most difficult parts of any business as many factors have to come together timely:
- The need or requirement
- The moment: timely
- The offering: the suiting product or service matching the demand
- The perception or image of the vendor
- The approach towards the customer
- The contact person

It is likely impossible that an external company can provide such a service.

Website as lead generator

Although your website it out on the Internet getting visitors that are interested and show their interest by the search terms used, pages visited and the number of returning visits. Still this information indicating potential customers is hardly being used as the visitors will not contact you (max: 3%) and it requires a web service to reveal the companies visiting, the search terms used by a company, the pages visited ranked for level of interest and the number of returning visits from a visitors or all visitors from company.
Your website holds more valuable information than any of these lead selling services.

Do you use lead generating services ?
With any success ?