Popstars

Madonna has sustained her music stardom and success for over 25 years by reinventing herself.
Most pop stars are one day hit wonders or have maximal 2 or 3 hits. Then their success, fame and income fade away. Taste, culture and demand have changed and so does the success of most pop stars. Taste, culture and demand are changing continuously.

Changes in society and business

As a successful salesman you believe your sales skills will last for ever as you can turn anything into gold while being successful.
However times, culture, attitudes and demand are changing too in business. Changes of people in companies. Changes in business. Changes in market. Changes of attitudes. Changes of purchase cycle. Changes of decision making an taking. Changes in perceived value. Changes in society.

What worked previously will not work anymore sooner or later.
Your introduction, your catch phrase, your lead generation, your sales pitch, your jokes, your sales cycle, your way of closing all can and will become dated – outdated. Beware this can happen fast over a short time frame: years instead of decades.

Avoid becoming obsolete

The functions and features of products or services change every year, but these are easy to keep up with. The tangible and intangible benefits are the ones that are more difficult to deal with as they are related to the changes in market, economy, culture and business in general. Your sales pitch might even become obsolete as people expect a service instead.

Just like a long lasting pop star, a salesman need to reinvent himself as attitudes and the way people investigate to buy products and solutions change as society changes. make sure you don’t become obsolete.

When was the last time you reinvented yourself ?

In order to influence a purchase in B2B there a wide choice of methods, tools and channels that can be used:
1. Website
2. White papers
3. Case studies
4. Technical articles by third parties
5. Analyst reports
6. Reviews
7. Popular or known bloggers
8. Webinars / Webcasts
9. Video/screen cast
10. Free trials
11. Proof of Concepts
12. Nurturing by email
The problems is that they all are effective, some more than others depending on your market and the product or service you sell, but it is nearly impossible to propose all of them effectively as it just will cost too much money and time.
As a result you will have to make a selection what is best for you.

1. Website without a website people will doubt you are a legit company.
The website plays a large role in all phases of the purchase process.

2. White papers are effective, show your authority and knowledge, but can be too technical or too rational which limits them to the technology influencers. people will download the white papers but gating for this content won’t help much as often free web mail addresses are being used.

3. Case studies have the advantage of a recognizable brand name and a story of a problem getting solved that resembles the existing company. Thus even CxO will read it. However getting the case study written and approved is a long investment.

4. Technical articles by third parties are just to be too technical limiting them completely to engineers and technology influencers.

5. Analyst reports have the advantage that these reports are to be paid by the company or can only be obtained upon request to one of the vendors making these reports more exclusive which drives the interest. Moreover this a a view or insight fro ma third party which is highly respected. There is also a risk involved if the analyst gives you a below average rating.

6. Reviews have the benefit of combining a technical insight, an easy scoring and a short summary for the offering of each vendor requiring not much effort. Even CxO’s will read the conclusion and look into the scoring. Again your product needs to score high as else the review will have a negative effect on your sales.

7. Bloggers that are popular or known will bring their authority and supposed knowledge of the market to the table, which will be taken for granted. As their reviews in their blog posts are short, CxO’s might just read it and stick with it thus you better get a good appraisal.

8. Webinars / Webcasts have the benefit of knowing who is in the virtual meeting allowing for interaction and follow-up. Of course no CxO will ever participate in a webinar, leaving you with technologists, managers and influencers.

9. Videos and screen casts can be great and can be boring – can convince or leave the decision maker indifferent. The cost of creating and professionally editing a video can be high as it needs to be entertaining. One of the problems is that a video is only effective if it is not too long (2minutes) resulting in having to cramp too much information into the short time. And people will press the Fast Forward button missing.

10. Free trials are very tempting and you have to hope the product sells itself. if your product is complex or has special features then you have to make sure people will use these features to make your product stand out.
Actually a free trial can slow down the sales process as the customer first need to install the product which requires time and effort and then during the 15 to 30 days the customer should be using your product which is beyond your control. During the free trial the sales process is being halted as all await the result and conclusion of the free trial, which can take time too.

11. The Proof of Concept is rather similar to a free trial but is mainly to show the solution is actually working within the environment of the customer, but it requires investment of time and money of both the vendor and the customer.
Still the question remains if the potential customer will actually use the system.
And again the sales process is completely halted during the POC (weeks if not months) and the duration of the POC conclusion report (weeks).

12. Nurturing by email is very important too as without it most of the above will be much less effective.

Probably all tactics and methods have their place depending on your market, type of product and what your competitors propose and use. In B2B you have probably be able to offer most of these methods and marketing content as you have to use whatever the potential decision maker expects or requires. Don’t send him an invite for a webinar when he wants a video/screen cast.
Or you have to send a white paper to the technology influencer and a matching case study to the CxO.
Free trials or Proof of Concepts are probably the last step after a longer decision process in order to select between two competitors.
The influence of content by third parties are very important just due to teh fact they are third parties.

What do you use and is effective ?

Web analytics

In B2C Marketers drive their visitors to the check-out like cowboys drive their cattle. They are both herding their cattle towards their goal.
Cowboys used their eye vision and their horses whereas marketers use web analytics to get insight in the flow on their website. The difference is that not a single cow can escape whereas many visitors will escape by leaving the website. Are marketers under performing cowboys ?

Companies versus traffic

In B2B it is not about driving the traffic as cattle towards the goal as:
- Each visitor can be a potential customer and shouldn’t be lost
- Each visitor belongs to a company thus the need to know which visitors belong to which company
- Each visitor has specific needs
Web analytic systems aren’t sufficient and sophisticated enough to know about each visitor and every visiting company.

Website visitor identification

This requires a different kind of website visitor information that:
- Reveals the companies visiting
- Indicates the interest for your products or services by company
- Shows the level of interest by company
- Shows the increase or decrease of the interest level over time by company

This information will allow contacting the interested companies timely with a to their needs suiting message.

Are you a Cowboy or a B2B Marketer ?

Analyze traffic

If you analyze your web traffic you will find that only a few pages attract most traffic. These pages have the better content for your target market. Writing quality and publishing content is the most effective to get the highest volumes of traffic in your business. It is worth more than anything else. It’s your best investment ever.

What is quality content ?

The problem is what is the better content ?
When are you writing the quality content ?
How do you know upfront what is quality content and what is not ?
Is this blog post quality content or not ?

How can the quality of this blog post or any content be measured while writing and editing ?
Of course we know that popular keywords will generate more traffic than less know keywords. Still it is not sure using the most popular keywords the traffic will come as the content still can be mediocre.

Traffic is not leads

Even if we would know how to measure our content quality upfront and it would bring traffic, then still the type of visitors is decisive for generating leads or not. Thus great quality content but missing to address the target audience has no value.
Even if your great quality content generates massive amounts of traffic but without generating leads or landing customers then the better content is worth as much as garbage content.
the quality content needs to bring the required interested and potential customers.

Doomed to produce much content

As we don’t know upfront what is the better content and if it will bring the necessary potential customers, we are doomed to write a lot of content with the hope to produce every now and then the better content which also attracts the target market segment that holds potential customers.
It’s almost like trial and error leading to the production of massive amounts of content.

Once upon a time there was MySpace which became successful (partly due to email spamming). This resulted in a rush of companies to be on MySpace by the advice of marketing guru’s. Companies even bought assets – like a place or even an island on MySpace – in order to be present when the hype was in full force.

Flickr was only praised over a short time for posting pictures of your company event or product pictures on this online photo album with the goal of generating leads and customer retention.

Even Craigslist (classifieds) and ebay were once hyped for promoting your products and brands.

Then rather quickly Facebook grew in popularity and made history of MySpace. Once popular all companies had to have a page on Facebook.

In the mean time Twitter became the platform to engage with customers and prospects. Thus marketing communications, customer service and even CEO’s needed to tweet as the same marketing guru’s told them to.

Although LinkedIn was never really much hyped for lead generation still there is value for B2B companies to be present on this social media. On the other hand it is not really taking off as an advertising platform which might be a good sign as it is mainly used for relations, discussions and finding new jobs or finding new employees.

Currently Pinterest is being hyped as the place on the Intenet to have your product pictures placed and linked to your website. Getting a link requires paying it even from pictures anybody can have placed on Pininterest.

Why do marketers always run after the next hot hype ?
Is it that they need a new hope on opportunity ?
Or re the marketing guru’s in search of a new message to sell ?

When running a business getting sales is of up most importance. Without sales, there’s no business.

There are 3 sources of possible buyers in B2B:

New leads

These are the most exiting, the most promising: the unknown, the big expectations.
However they will be the most expensive as:
- Leads need to be generated
- Contacts within a company need to be found
- You have to define the Influencers, the Catalysts, the Decision makers, the Gatekeepers
- Products and solutions need to be explained
- Relations need be build
- Trust needs to be gained

Finding visitors on your website is a simple solution for low cost lead generation. Qualifying visitors as leads based upon website visit information is a straight forward task these days. Finding contacts within a company is now much more feasible, thanks to the information available on the Internet.

You know the search terms they used and the pages they visited. This allows you to address the contact with the best suited message and solution.

The leads generated by the typical channels will also visit your website, revealing their real interests in your products and solutions. Using a website visitor identification service your sales people will be alerted when they visit.

Customers

Keeping relations and customers is far less expensive compared to finding new leads or making new customers.

When customers visit your website again, it is often exactly the right time to contact them.
Your website visitor identification service will notify you about this event.

And again, by the pages visited you will know what they are looking for so you can address your relations with the appropriate message and information.

Ex-customers

Although they have selected another vendor, you still know the different people involved within the company.

When such a company visits again, there must be a good reason… time to find out!

Once a lead is qualified it gets distributed to the salesmen. As all salesmen are not equal, the lead management should match the best salesman with this particular lead.
However typically a lead gets passed on to a salesman based on the geography as most sales teams have been organized by geography.

In this way a salesman will get all kinds of leads: the large and the small, the business focused and technical, the special cases and the standard demands.

A salesman is good in persuasion, convincing and selling. However he will not be able to sell all products or services of a company equally. Certain salesmen will be better in large deals having a long sales cycle, whereas others prefer fast closing deals. Some salesmen are more technical educated than other who are solely focusing on business matters with tangible and intangible benefits.

There are salesmen who can handle difficult deals or difficult customers or complex sales better, but who are not interested in making price quotations for yet another standard product with a predefined discount.

Hence lead management and distribution should not be based upon geography but related to the nature, capacities, maturity, past successes and interests of each salesman.

Do you distribute your leads based on geography?

Gossip instead of prospecting

Sending salesmen as attendees to a conference or any other industry event has many purposes like brand presence, prospecting and lead generation.
However when two salesmen colleagues go to such an event it is likely they will stick together and start discussing their experiences with the company and remarks about colleagues. Subjects ranging from the latest gossip about other employees to criticizing management and reasons of lost deals. Budgets, bonuses, commissions and even potential customers will pass the review.

Lone rangers

This probably originates from the fact that salesmen are like lone rangers: they hardly ever meet as they are alone on the road for meeting customers or prospects throughout the year. And there is not control of management about their doings on the conference. The conference or the industry event brings them together, which happens only once or a few times a year.

These mostly negative discussions are only interrupted by attending the presentations and answering the all important telephone calls or emails on their smart phones.

Sole attendee to keep focus

Instead the salesmen should be focusing on the people present in the conference in order to tell them about the products or services of the company for creating presence, awareness and even look for potential customers amongst the audience.

As these discussions about internal matters seem to be part of their normal drive the only way to avoid these and make the presence on the conference of industry event effective for business is to send only one salesman. Then he is likely to focus on prospecting, awareness building and lead generation.

Will you still send more than one salesmen to conferences or industry events ?

Early versus qualified leads

Obtaining qualified leads requires less time to be wasted on dead-end leads and will result in more sales in less time.
Obtaining leads early in their purchase cycle has the advantage of being able to participate earlier in the discussions and influence the outcome which might result in more sales but with much more effort and time.

The dilemma is that getting early leads is getting less qualified leads.
Still all salesmen want more leads !

Lead scoring and lead profiling for the easy salesman

A lead scoring method or system can help out to filter out quicker the better leads. The same is true for lead profiling in order to increase the speed of qualifying leads.

In most cases salesmen want leads that will buy in the shortest amount of time. However if they only would obtain very probable customers then sales would have not much of challenge in the job as they just need to visit or call the lead, make a price quote and wait for the purchase order to arrive. The easy life of a salesman with hardly any challenge.

Early leads for the value-add salesman

In order to obtain very probable customers the lead qualification, lead scoring and lead profiling will be very strict and precise allowing to pass only very typical customers.

The job of the salesman is to fiddle out the real issues and problems of the potential customer and propose the best matching solution and at the same time remove the level of risk of the purchase as much as possible. This is the salesman that brings added value for the customer and probably added sales for the company.

This value-add is exactly what a stringent lead qualification, scoring and profiling won’t permit. Hence the better, higher value or more profitable leads could be thrown away before the salesman even knows about them.

So what do you prefer: qualified or early leads ?

Relevant for Google & Co

The more keywords you can present to Google or Bing the more chances of getting found on the Internet. Hence the requirement for creating as much content as possible: variations on the same matters related to your solutions.

Just hoping on one piece of content on a particular subject will score less or has less change to get found than a series of content on the same subject. Content marketing and SEO are a gamble as no-one can predict the outcome.

Relevant for visitors

As you need to create variations of the same content, the problem is that your content still needs to be relevant for the visitor landing on your website.

If your content is rubbish then the visitor will not appreciate it and leave – probably to never come back as you have wasted his time.

Hence maximize the amount of content, make sure it is relevant and brings value to the reader. And above all make it entertaining.

Improving on SEO will help the findability of your website. You will land more visitors and have more traffic. However if the landing page is not meaningful, worthless content and not relevant the visitor won’t stay on your page.
Hence the challenge is to create as much content as possible without spoiling the visit value for the visitor.
Creating massive and quality content is a skill and art.

How well does our content score for SEO and your visitors ?