Reading emails before action

When an email lands in your inbox do you really read the email content or:
- Do you just reply with your standard reply email ?
- Do you forward it without really reading to your supervisor as prescribed by the workflow ?
- Do you try to up-sell in the first reply ?

It is imperative that you read the email and answer appropriately to his request for information or solve his problem or issues. That is the first goal of your reply as you need to satisfy his first demand.

The impression of the potential customer

If the potential customer gets:
- A standard reply then he will feel unimportant
- Forwarded to a supervisor then why was he wasting time communicating with the first person
- A solution but also an up-sell then he will feel the focus is too much on up-selling as the expected revenue is not enough
- A reply several days later then he might have taken his decision already
- A not then he is left in the cold and needs to hope other vendors bring a solution

The cheapest leads

You should grab this kind of opportunity as these are the cheapest leads you can get: apparently without any effort from your side or your company they present a potential sale for you for free. You or your company save upfront the cost of the lead generation.
All you need to do is:
- To read the inquiry email
- Investigate into the company: what does the company do
- Investigate into the person who addresses to you (using LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Viadeo or even Facebook)
- Reply solely to his question as an expert as you still need to build trust.

Read the emails of potential customers and answer them appropriately within 24 business hours.

Do you really read the emails of potential customers?

Limited reach

If you are eager to find prospects or projects then it is likely you won’t find them.
Maybe you are to pushy by being too much focused on getting a lead or even a sales cycle started. People feel this and this probably turns them away from you.
Promoting too heavily your product or services by grabbing every opportunity to mention your solutions will not helping to achieve your goal of leads and prospects. People will perceive you as a salesman eager to score or in the need to score.
The number of contacts you can make is limited. Hence the number of your pushy sales pitches is limited too as your reach is limited.

Email marketing tried to solve this problem of limited reach by blasting out marketing and sales messages to a massive number of people. The effectiveness of email marketing in B2B is probably decreasing significantly because of the pushiness.

Mouth to mouth expands reach

On the other hand when you listen to people and advise them with your real business expertise you will create a different attitude. The perception will be different.
The chance that the person you are helping will become a lead or prospect is still minimal, but the reward is in their network.
If you really help them with your advice, it is very likely they will mention it to their peers in face-to-face conversations and during social happenings as people crave for interest. Thanks to you they have something interesting to tell.
Or on a next occasion in a social environment the same people you have advised previously can introduce you to new people with similar business issues.

Giving advice and sharing your expertise will significantly expand your reach.

Business guru

Thus instead of being a salesman on a commission, you should be a business guru with expertise to share and giving advice freely. Make sure they remember you and get their contact details. The contact details should be used forming inform about the success or fail of your advice and not for starting sales pitch. Again listen instead of speaking.Even if your expertise wasn’t successful they appreciate it as you are concerned about them.

Are you a salesman or a guru ?

Hoarding expertise and information is history

All the information and expertise of a salesman that allowed getting an appointment is now available on the Internet. This can be provided by your competitors or by peers on social media (forums, LinkedIn, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc).

If you keep your expertise and information to yourself then your potential customers will find it on the Internet from another source. Thus bypassing you completely. This could make your company and its’ products obsolete as people won’t find you on the Internet.
Not getting found increases missing sales deals. Hence hoarding information and expertise is history.

Share your expertise, knowledge and information

Instead you should share your expertise, knowledge and information in order to keep up with competitors and make sure you are being considered for all the possible shortlists. It is not solely your products, the feature and functions of your products, the quality of products and after service and the brand name that will get you on the short list as your company and products might get overlooked or simply net found during the research phase of the purchase cycle.

Not gating for content

In most cases influencers and decision takers will not contact you before they have made up their short list. In order to get on the short list it is better to provide information and expertise without gating for this content as this is part of the sales cycle. Asking for contact details is a hurdle in your sales process and won’t help sales.

Instead of waiting and hoping getting invited to present all of your knowledge, expertise and information during a sales meeting, you need to publish this as it will:
- Bring traffic of interested parties
- Build your authority in the business
- Get you on the short list
Only when on the short list you will be contacted for information about your solution and price negotiations. This kills the concept of opportunities moving through the funnel as it has become ultra short.

Are you still hoarding your expertise ?

Leads in funnel – Sales deals

Marketing needs to prove their marketing spending’s by showing as many leads as possible.
Although Marketing will qualify the leads before entering them into the funnel they have the tendency to let more leads qualify.

On the other hand the more under-qualified leads the Salesman gets the more time he waists by qualifying each of the leads in his sales funnel. Hence the lesser time he can spend on the really well qualified leads. This creates the perception with salesmen that the marketing leads are of lesser value. In the worst case the salesmen will even ignore the leads from marketing as they prefer to work on their leads.

Rewarding

Marketing is rewarded for the number of qualified leads it generates into the funnel.
Salesmen are rewarded by the number of sales deals they have closed.

During sales meetings and revisions by the sales manager the salesmen are evaluated not only by the number and value of deals they close but also on the success rate of their funnel. Moreover their pipeline is used to get a forecast of sales which is all important business and management information.

Hence salesmen should be in control of leads entering their funnel which is not always possible with the current Marketing Automation tools. These Marketing Automation tools and CRM system often start from a marketing campaign and feed the potential leads directly into the funnel.

Commissions for Marketing and Sales

Instead of marketing being rewarded for the number of leads entering the funnel, they should be rewarded just like salesmen for deals closed. In this way they would take the time to qualify leads better as every lead requires time and effort from a salesman. The more effective the salesman can work the better for both.
Marketing and salesmen should both be rewarded on a sales commission for deals closed.

This split commission would bound the collaboration between Marketing and Sales as they both will have the same goal.

How is the distribution of leads organized in your company ?

Content marketing

As people are fed up with interruption marketing (ads, emails) it seems that content marketing is the way to go as people prefer to search online for solutions and products.
Content marketing will drive your inbound marketing for the complex sale in B2B.

Having just a few text documents, presentations or video’s might be sufficient for starting the process of generating interest, however you need to cover the entire purchase cycle and address to all of the people involved in the purchase decision. Your content needs to support the purchase process just like a salesman would do.

Purchase process and buyer persona

Hence you will need to identify:
- The different steps in the purchase process
- The different people that get involved
You need to identify the buyer persona’s. The different steps in the purchase process need to be supported by appropriate content for each of the people involved. Even if in one step different people get involved then different content needs to be created as a user-employee has different takes and views than a manager and again different than a CxO or VP:
- Functions will interest users
- Features will interest managers
- Benefits will interest CxOs

Content inventory

For each of the process step and for each of the people involved you will need to create a piece of content in your content inventory.
In order to do so make a spreadsheet having on the left the steps in the purchase process and the top the buyers persona. Then indicate who is involved in each step. Then define the content that is required for each cell in your spreadsheet that you indicated. Then start creating texts, presentations or video’s.
This will make sure you have no gaps in your content marketing.

What’s the status of your content marketing ?

Being liked versus trusted

The customer might like you as a salesman or sales rep. but that doesn’t mean they trust you.
People might buy from you because they like you, but that will be limited to smaller amounts of money as they need to trust the salesman for larger purchases.

Getting sympathy or being liked might be a first step in the right direction which might lead to being trusted.
On the other hand being trusted doesn’t mean you are being liked. The customer can trust someone without liking him.
Being trusted will help getting larger sales deals closed.

A trust relationship will last longer and is much stronger than being liked. Just being nice to people doesn’t mean these people will trust you for their decisions and money.

Trusted adviser

The goal of anyone in B2B sales should be to become a trusted adviser as this opens the number of opportunities with this customer. The main role of the salesman is to take away or to minimize the risks, the apparent risks or the perceived risks that are involved and result from with any purchase decision. The trusted adviser is one of the best persons placed to remove these buyers’ risks.
Being liked doesn’t bring value to the customer in his purchase decision. A trusted adviser will bring value for the customer during his buying just because of removing these risks.
The marketing efforts of the company can help building trust for the salesman with the customer.

As relationships in sales matter, both being liked and being trusted will help salesmen to get more deals closed.

Are you being liked or being trusted or both by your customers ?

We all want leads at the lowest cost.
Preferably quality leads at no money.

Leads come at a cost

The problem is that in most cases (if not all) leads don’t come for free. It is possible to have an accidental sale where the lead has presented himself from a market segment you haven’t addressed or didn’t target at all. These are the real exceptions, as generating leads is costly and is in most cases a result of a process that has been running over a long time.
If you have generated yours leads through advertising, email marketing, social media, cold calling, trade shows, conferences, website or any other event or marketing effort, they all have required a considerable investment. Not all those investments have been equal and not all marketing investments have the same Return On Investment.

Social Media lead generation

Since the event and availability of Social Media consultants and bloggers have been preaching how easy it is to generated leads through these social media. However it is not: Social Media also requires time, effort and creativity that needs to be invested.
Having your video go viral world wide requires much more than just recording a video and posting it on YouTube. It even appears that most successful viral video’s, which weren’t cheap to create and make, have been supported by a massive email campaign.

Leads requires investment: money or time

In order to generate leads you or your company have to invest. This can be money or time.
If there is ample money then the problem is to choose the best to invest.

If you have limited amount of money then time is what you can invest: like cold calling, content creation.

Optimize the laggards

Still there are investments that companies make but not exploit them fully. Like their website: it costs time and money to create the content, to present nicely the content on the website and to generate traffic. However of all the traffic generated only a minority will contact or be converted into leads. This ad website result can be improved significantly as else it is a waste of time and money.

Analyze for leads

The best way to address the problem of lead generation on a budget is to start with an analysis:
- Who are your current customer: what industry, business, size
- Why did they bought your solution or product ?
- Define your target audience based on your current customers
- Study and understand their buying methods
- Design several market strategies that could work
- Then test these different marketing strategies on a small number
- Discard those that have no or little result
- Alter and tweak those methods that show some result

The best way to generate leads on a budget is whatever way you know to do yourself and seems to work.

How do you generate your leads cost effectively ?

In order to succeed in business with your business or sales you need to know your business and your offering by identifying:

1. The value proposition:
What value does your business or solutions bring ?
What is your value proposition ?

2. The uniqueness:
Many companies have me-too products. Still most of them have at least one unique function or feature that sets them apart.

3. The no competitors:
If you have a completely unique offering then be aware people won’t know about the offering or solution you bring. You will have an uphill battle to explain your solution as hardly anybody has ever heard of your solution.
It is better to have some competitors than none.

4. The perception:
How do you want your business or products to be perceived ?
Outstanding, high quality, low cost, cheapest on the market, exclusive, average but without any risk, market leading, innovative, conservative, …

5. The match with perception:
How does the reality matches with the perception you portray ?
If there is a discrepancy or a gap between portrayed perception and the real stuff, you will need marketing to fill the gap.

6. The business specialty:
Does business have a specialty ?
If your business is common and plain, then how will it get noticed ?
What sets you apart from the rest ?
If your business has a specialty then your marketign can focus on this making it easier and less costly.

7. The target market:
Have you identified your target market ?
The more precise you can identify your target market the better, cheaper and more effective your marketing campaigns can be runt successfully as you don’t need to address to the masses.

8. The target market demographics
Your target market consist of companies who are staffed with people. You should know the demographics of the people that advice on the type of solutions you offer (influencers) and the type of people that take the decisions like:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Personal interests
Don’t offer free football tickets in a golf or sailing environment. Know your demographic profiles.

9. The proposition:
According to the type of people you address and communicate a different message is needed:
- Users want functions
- Influencers van features
- Managers advantages
- CXOs want benefits
What change or improvement can your business or solution bring for the people in each of these subgroups of your target market ?
Who will get you the easiest or best to a successful deal ?
Who do you want to promote too and who do you avoid to address ?

10. The SEO:
As your website is an important part and tool in any B2B lead generation and sales process, you need to make sure you use the best SEO in order to get the people from your target market based upon the demographics and the proposition.

11. The channels:
Besides the website you need to consider other channels that are appropriate to send out your marketing messages as they need to match your the demographics of your target market and be suited to carry your proposition.
This can be email, online ads, printed ads, direct mail, cold calling, trade shows, conferences or even social media.
try to figure out which channels are likely to be used by the people in the demographics of your target market.
If they don’t read newspapers then don’t advertise in newspapers.
If they don’t visit trade shows then don’t waste money on trade shows.

12. The lead qualification:
Can you define the qualities or characteristics your lead has to have in order to qualify ?
The better and earlier in your sales process you can qualify your leads or you can dismiss your leads the lower your sales costs will be.
At the same time your feedback to marketing will be faster allowing marketing reacting or adjusting their marketing campaigns.

13. The distribution:
If there is/are a middleman(me) in your distribution (distributor and/or resellers), you need to know how profitable your business is for them. Is it worth for them to invest time (training) and money (storage space) in your business ?Can they make enough or more money on your business or products compared to competing products and solutions.
If there is noting in it for them you won’t sell.

14. The feedback:
All feedback from your channel (distributors or resellers) and end-users is utmost important as you always can improve.
Find ways to get feedback. Even if it comes at a high cost.

The better you understand your business, the better you can promote your business and sell more.

How good do you understand your business ?

Currency exchange fluctuations

Once upon a time currencies were relatively stable and a price list could be valid for one year. There was no risk if your price quote was 3 months old.

Currently the currency exchange rates change significantly over a short time.
Publishing a price list becomes a daring undertaking. A gamble on the currency exchange rates. The validity of the price list should be less than one year – maybe even just 3 months in order to limit damages. In any case it leads to confusion for all: salesmen, distributors, resellers and customers.

Turning business into a gamble

Currency exchange rate changes and fluctuations can turn a profitable offer into a money loosing sale as both purchase prices and the sales currency fluctuate fast. Giving a price quote with a validity date of 6 weeks later has become a gamble.
Business shouldn’t be a gamble, but due to the fast changes in exchange rates it has become a gamble. Especially as you can’t predict if your sales currency will go up or down compared to the currency you are purchasing your products or services.
Seems only one thing is sure: the currency exchange rate will have changed significantly during the validity of your price quote. With a bit of luck the currencies get back to the rates when the customers signs the deal.

Uncertainty forecast

As your sales numbers and your purchase prices will fluctuate due to the changes in exchange rates, how will you be able to forecast sales revenue, margin and income ? Simply: NOT.
This uncertainty is exactly what businesses don’t need in these difficult times of recession. if you can’t predict sales, margin and income, you aren’t able to know your cash flow and make your cash planning.
The more uncertain an entrepreneur becomes, the less risk he is willing to take, which leads to less business and innovation.

If these currency fluctuations continue then bartering seems not such a bad idea

Recession opportunity

All we hear in the media about the economy is gloom and doom.
If you as entrepreneur or salesman start believing in all this negativism then your business will shrink. Instead you should see the gloom and doom or the recession as an opportunity due to the fact people in business will need to start looking for new or alternative solutions as they need to sustain their profits or make their business survive. It is not because the economy isn’t growing at full speed that there is no business. There is as much business as before, but people and companies will try to spend less money or more wisely.

Market leader

Of course in case you are the market leader or working for the market leader, it is likely your sales will decrease as your competitors are being solicited by your customers or typical clients in order to select the most appropriate solution in this new economical climate.

Avoid gloom and doom thinking

As an entrepreneur or sales rep you should avoid to think that the gloom and doom is the end of the world, but see it as an opportunity to find new customers. If you don’t believe in this opportunity then you better stop your business or leave sales.

Of course getting new customers will be harder than ever before, but there are still opportunities out there.
Stay optimistic and aim for getting new customers.
The gloom and doom should be an opportunity to reach out and acquire customers you would never be able to obtain before.

Are you thinking negatively or positively?

Content marketing

The idea behind content marketing is that your freely shared informative content is used for converting suspects and prospects into leads and customers.
You trade your content for:
- Thought leadership
- Lead generation
- Direct sales
- Branding
- Customer retention
In general: generating interest in your products or services.

Demand and supply

For all products and services there is a valuation or perceived value by demand and supply. Hence this would also be valid for the content you offer for your content marketing.
The better the value of your content the more likely you will obtain your goal.

However even if there is a demand, the content needs to be found. As there is supply form any possible source and from your competitors it will be a challenge getting your content found on the Internet.
Hence content marketing requires promoting, positioning and marketing your content on the Internet.

Content targeting

All your content is not suited for all of your audience.
The content that is interesting for managers is probably not the same that matters to the CxO level.
- Managers need to know about advantages
- CxO level wants to know about tangible and intangible benefits
Hence you need to market your content to different segments of your audience.

Uniqueness or edge

Content that is generic and conforms to the general opinion will be hard to market. The content needs to be unique or have an edge compared to others.

Stickiness or engaging

For your content marketing there are several results that can be obtained with the content consumer:
- Stickiness of your content: the consumer of your content will remember it long after or compare with all other content he discovers or encounters. Making your content stick out.
- Engagement through your content: the content consumer engages and takes action

This is the trading value of your content:
- Demand and supply
- Segmented targeting of your content for each type of content consumer
- Uniqueness or edge
- Stickiness or engaging

Most marketing messages are geared towards generating leads in order to close more sales deals. This type of marketing is aimed at almost immediate results. Most companies only invest in this type of marketing.

Although more leads will eventually lead to more sales, it is the last step that remains the most important: the purchase decision.
The purchase decision is influenced by many parameters:
- The proposed solution
- The price
- The benefits of the solution
- The inconvenient issues of the solution
- The salesman
- The brand name
- The trust
Hence marketing can play an important role in the decision by building the brand name and trust in the company and its’ products.

Building a brand name requires time.

Building trust for a company or its’ products requires even more time.

This type of marketing is likely to be very beneficial in the long run as this will help during the essential phases of the purchase process:
- Getting on the short list by the brand name and awareness
- The purchase decision for the trust in the company or its’ products

Marketing is so much more than just lead generation.

Target all

If you trying to:
- Try to target every possible buyer with your website
- Interest all possible people with your email
- Please everybody with your blog
- Address your advertising too generic: a too wide marketing segment

Hence:
- Your website will become to cluttered with too many different propositions
- Your marketing message in your email campaigns will get deleted immediately
- Your blog will become too mainstream
- Your advertising will not affect anybody or have an impact on anybody

Results in nothing

All your marketing efforts will have no real focus on specific issues or problems or target group.
The marketing message will miss all possible impact as not a single potential customer will remember, consider and eventually buy your products or services.

Niche market for success

Instead seek or carve out a niche market, which you can analyze for their issues and problems, allowing you understanding the constraints, views and perceptions. This will enable you to:
- Specifically target a market segment
- Create email campaigns concerning a specific issue or problem
- Cover the interests of this target market in your blog
- Advertise about the issues, problems that your solution solves and the benefits

Don’t please everybody with your marketing – just your target group.

Growing big in your market segment is already a big achievement.

What is your target market ?

Attitude change implies marketing change

As people change in attitudes and methods of work, marketing needs to change too. Instead of using purely outbound marketing approaches with mainly interruption marketing, companies are now becoming aware of the significant benefits of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing offers new opportunities, new technologies and new techniques.

Inbound marketing for ‘Generation Me’

Inbound marketing allows the probable customers to be in the drivers’ seat which they really want as our society and attitudes have changed by the ‘Me Generation‘. This generation is direct, has self-esteem, wants entitlement, is thin-skin, are dreaming the impossible dream, have educational drive, don’t want no boredom, blames external forces, has it tough to make a living, finds it impossible to make changes.

Funnel and pipeline almost empty

Potential customers will only contact you when they have made up their mind: the specifications, the features and the short list. They have collected all this information from different sources like the Internet and competitors.

As a result your funnel will shorten considerably and your pipeline will be almost empty as you will only know the leads just before they are going to make their buying decision: during the ‘last round’.

Contact prospects early in their buying cycle

The challenge now is to contact your probable customers early in their decision process: when they start to visit websites for craving for knowledge.
This when the caller display of your website is a must have as it also provides their interest and level of interest in your products, solutions or services.
Using this knowledge you can re-target these highly interested visiting companies by email.

Outflank competitors

As your competitors will need to wait until the probable customers contact them, you have long established a relation with them and have taken the opportunity to nurture them with adequate and relevant information as you exactly know what they require. This will allow you to outflank competitors using inbound-outbound marketing.

How are you handling in marketing the change in buying attitude ?

The Conference decline

As Sales or Business Development we used to go to conferences in order to encounter people that could become leads and prospects.

Until the majority in the venue had sales purposes: from the speakers to the attendees: most are into sales.

The Social Media decline

Although the Social Media (like Linkedin, Ecademy, Viadeo or Xing) started out with discussion platforms with good intentions, it soon became apparent more and more discussion were turned into a sales pitch or the discussions were stared as a sales pitch.
- The speakers of conferences have turned into discussion starters.
- The salesmen in the audience have turned into discussion comment posters.

Exactly the Social Media face exactly the same decline as the conferences due to the majority being into Sales.
And if the discussion started is not a sales pitch it is likely to be a job posting.

Hence slowly the interest in discussions on Social Media will die too.

Do you participate or start discussions on Social Media in order to promote your business ?