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?

Sales Hunter – Sales Farmer

In the classical sales roles of Hunter and Farmer:
- The Sales Hunter identifies the suspect or prospect, does the lead qualification, defines the solution to be proposed and sets an appointment with a contact
- The Sales Farmer closes the sale and will nurture the relationship further

Outbound marketing

Using Outbound marketing like email campaigns or call-operators, Marketing controls the process of finding, identifying and qualifying the prospects and eventually setting the appointment which can even be a webinar.

Inbound Marketing

In the event of Inbound Marketing using Content marketing, Internet and Website marketing, the efforts of the marketing department are taking over the roles of the Sales Hunter:
- Marketing creates and publishes content mainly on the Internet.
- The Internet search engines lead the possible interested parties to the content of their interest.
- Eventually these people will end up on the website of the company which is also controlled and managed by Marketing.

Two cases:
a) When the potential customer addresses to the company or fills out a contact form a large part of the tasks of the Sales Hunter have been accomplished.

b) In case the potential buyer refuses to identify himself, web tools are available to:
- Identify the company visiting
- Qualify as lead based upon the pages visited and the number of visits by the same company over a short amount of time
- Define the interest in a product or solution from the pages visited
- Find contacts within these visiting companies
Setting the appointment with a newly found contact will be still a challenge but is feasible and could even be executed by the Marketing team as some of the web tools can even help re-targeting the visiting company by email.

Closing the sale

In B2B the closing of the sale will in many cases or businesses still require human intervention. However when the interest is high and the product or service straight forward the price negotiation can be done using email.

Nurturing

The building of the relationship and the nurturing can typically be achieved by newsletters and informative emails on a regular basis by Marketing without requiring any Sales intervention.

The processes and actions described above are already happening in many companies slowly eliminating the salesman. Of course this is less applicable and feasible in the complex sale.

Do you feel too the salesman is getting kicked out slowly?

Bought email list

Would you shoot with a machine gun at a herd that someone else has driven together? You would have no clue or certainty what animals are in the herd. Chances are you would be shooting the wrong animals.

This is what happens when you execute an email campaign using a list bought from a provider when you send out a massive email campaign. You haven’t got the slightest clue of their interest, requirement and timing.

Email interested parties only

If instead you would be able to use a sniper rifle and could aim at only the specific species you need that are coming to your bait. That would be more effective.
Your website is your bait as it contains content that attracts the people from companies that are from your target group.
After qualification as suspect why not re-target by email companies these companies that have visited your website and that have shown interest in your products by their visit, pages visited and returning visits?

Still marketers in companies buy email lists while at the same time interested parties are visiting the company website.
Is it because buying email lists is easier?
Or because the lack of awareness of these new type of solutions?
Or because it is just too obvious to re-target your visitors by email?

Do you buy lists and why ?

Most people don’t want to register for the download of a white paper.

If they are asked for registration a large part simply clicks away to the next link in Google search. Those who do register often use web email addresses which they use for diverting all email marketing and possible spam emails.
As a result your harvest of useful email addresses is limited and the distribution of your marketing message is even more limited.

Without registration most people that have found your white paper will download it and after reading will distribute it further when they find your content interesting for their colleagues, peers, partners and friends. This way your marketing message gets distributed but you have no clue who your readers are.

You could argue that if your white paper is interesting enough, they will contact you anyway. People who contact you are more likely to end up working with you with less effort compared to people that were lured into giving their email addresses. They gave their email address because they wanted the white paper, not because they wanted to do business with you.

Still, some of us are hunters and like to chase leads instead of sitting idle by the fireplace waiting for them to drop in.

You could include a link to a specific page on your website which you describe with a teasing title within your white paper, catching the visits of most interesting parties. All you need now is a web service that reveals the companies visiting this page, keeps track of further pages visited and informs you about all visits (and future revisits) from every company. Often, this will give you more lead intelligence than that bunch of free web email addresses you captured on your white paper registration form.

It is probably better to remove the white paper registration as the benefits of the white paper distribution without registration can be far higher.

What are your experiences with forced compared to voluntary/no registration?
If you are using forced registration now, would you want to try voluntary/no registration?

Email marketing list

It might be a surprise but the length of your email marketing list has no importance !
Is a list of 125,000 names any better or worse than a list of 25,000 names ?
What’s the value of the list ?

The people on the list are just people who are opt-in or names and addresses you have bought from a list broker.
There is hardly any relation between them and potential buyers.

Value of mailing lists

How do you know who is a potential buyer on your list ?
How do you know what product really interests them ?
How do you know when they are interested in a certain product ?
How do you know you are wasting your and their time instead of successfully nurturing ?

The shorter list can contain more interested and potential buyers than the long list.
Even having no list can have more value in case you have more prospects than you can handle.

Reaching out to potential buyers only

You can email the people on the mailing list with hundreds of messages and still not getting one purchase. Meanwhile you will have to do maintenance on the huge list to keep it updated as people change jobs and companies.

A much shorter list containing only interested parties with real buying potential is much more valuable than a very long list.
Your website can provide this list of potential buyers as you can reach out to your leads early in their buying cycle using a website visitor identification service. Moreover they are showing buying intentions as shown in their visit behavior.
By knowing the product that interests each of them, will allow you addressing them with matching nurturing messages.

So no longer brag about the length of your email marketing list as only sales results count.

Boring B2b Marketing

In most cases B2B marketing is just boring.
- Nothing exciting
- Anything impressive
- No emotion
- No fun
- Not to be remembered

B2B Marketing describes briefly the problem, the solution and presents the facts and figures and maybe some references or testimonials.
If a potential customer is not completely interested there is little chance he will remember the brand, the product or the benefits.

B2b marketing wants to portray an image of seriousness, reliability and trustworthiness of the products or services and the company which leads to boring marketing.

Personal instead of boring

For most companies it would be too daring to bring excitement and emotion.
Moreover the goal for seriousness and trust could be lost

So instead of boring marketing automation programs that are way too generic, bringing relevant and personalized messages to each of your potential customers would be a great step.
What you could do for client oriented marketing:
- Website that provides relevant information while visiting
- Emails that deal with the problem or need of a specific company
- Re-targeting companies visiting the website with an email message that matches their shown interest
- Cold calls with the appropriate questions and messages

These methods are likely to engage your potential customers of your target market without the immediate need for excitement, emotion or fun.

Entertaining for capturing the audience

If you really want to capture a large part of your target market at once your marketing will need to be entertaining in order to have the audience listening.

Even the serious Microsoft achieved it in B2B:

How boring is your B2B marketing ?
What are you going to do about it ?

Budget half is wasted in marketing

William Hesketh Lever (Lord Lever), Rance Crain, John Wanamaker, Walt Patrick, Henry Ford all stated that half of any marketing or advertising budget is wasted, but they all wondered which half of the budget or money.

Sales wastes even more

In sales much more than half of all expenses are wasted if you count in all the sales trainings, cold calls, emails, appointment setting, trade shows, meetings, travels, lunches, presents, demo’s, presentations, …
Only a fraction of all efforts from a suspect over a lead to a prospect, lead to a customer – and then the customer still needs to pay.
The only difference is that the wasted part can be calculated for sales as all efforts for each paying customer can be tracked.

Marketing and sales applications

For marketing many applications and services exist for helping, managing, streamlining, tracking and proving the efforts and expenses of marketing.
From demand generation, lead generation, CRM, social CRM, social media monitoring tools, SEO, SEM, advertising optimization to press release submission software tools and services exist.
The range is enormous making the choice difficult.

On the other hand barely any solution or service for sales exist besides a Rolodex, an electronic Rolodex (Contact management system) and a CRM.
So little support for salesmen and sales managers for a process which is much less effective than marketing (or any other business process in the enterprise). Business spend more money on a process that is less well managed.
Hence the need for a serious and effective sales tool.

A tool for sales

This is where LEADSExplorer can fill in some of the empty space by providing suspect and lead generation information, re-targeting, customer and ex-customer follow-up.

LEADSExplorer is based on the fact that buyers, influencers, decision makers from both potential customer, clients and ex-customers will visit the company website during their B2B purchase process in search for information on the products, solutions and company information.
The service provides business important customer intelligence information by supplying the names of the companies visiting, additional company information, the visit data and scoring of level of interest and the effectiveness of the communications exchanges.
So for both newly to be acquired potential customers (suspects or leads) the company provides the useful data for salesmen as well as for clients and ex-customers.

The benefit is in the use of the information to:
- Address potential customers or customers with messages or information that matches their interest and need for a solution
- Alert when a customer or a leads visits again
- Re-target visiting companies using email.
- Monitor the nurturing and communications with the lead or customer regarding their increase or decrease of interest.
- Feedback for having an indication of the progress of the purchase process and it’s status or probability to win.

LEADSExplorer is a key and useful tool for sales (and marketing) and includes a CRM and emailing feature.
It is your sales and marketing assistant.

What do you use as sales tools ?

Your funnel is leaking

The marketing dept undertakes many enterprises to generate leads:
Trade shows, email campaigns, web seminars, …

After they have qualified the leads, they are handed over to the salesmen.
Typically the salesmen hardly take time to look or to use these leads. Only a minority of all those qualified leads will ever really be taken care of by the salesmen as these leads are not “theirs” but from “them” (marketing).
Thus the great funnel is leaking leads massively.

Even when a lead is being pursued by the salesman, it can be forgotten as:
- The opportunity seemed lesser
- The disconnect between salesman and lead contact
- The contact was not available to talk
- No meeting could be setup
Many more reasons to forget about the lead than reasons to follow-up on the lead.

There are 2 solutions:
- Plugging the leaking funnel with a lead management system
- Improve the lead qualification

Lead management system

A lead management system can be considered by the salesmen as invasive or disturbing as it will send out reminders by email.
Salesmen will find ways around these systems and avoid using it.
As an example: they will call the lead and find out immediately there is no real demand. Done.

Salesmen will prove they are wasting their time with the leads from marketing.
Still a lead management system can help as leads won’t get lost of forgotten.

Improve lead qualification

Increasing the lead quality by a better qualification will the lower number of leads and they become more interesting to have a look at. This will persuade the salesmen to invest their time.
Salesman needs to invest his time to make his sales.
His time is limited capacity and he needs to maximize it in order to make the most sales.
He decides the type of risks he takes by spending his time on certain leads or not.

Newsletters

Every lead generated should receive the company newsletter in order to keep communicating, just in case the salesman isn’t communicating.
If the salesman hasn’t followed up, maybe the lead will make contact again after reading the newsletter.

Promotions

Similar with promotions: send the leads the promotions in order to keep them interested and continue the communication.
It is possible they will contact your company again for getting the benefit of one of the promotions.

Visiting company alerts

Whenever a company (qualified as lead) visits the website, the salesman should receive an alert.
A company visiting means the company is interested and the salesman should take advantage of this knowledge.
The service should also indicate the interest for products or services.

Conclusion

Applying all these solutions will minimize or plug the leaks in your funnel.

How leaky is your funnel ?
How do you plug the leaky funnel ?

In these times of minimal budget organic search is often regarded as ‘the solution’.

Organic search seems low cost at first:
- Just optimize the website: SEO
- Write valuable content
- Get links

Search Engine Optimization of the website by tweaking based on content, metatags, keywords and link-building for getting recognized and found in search queries.

Although metatags, keywords and basic on-page SEO are relatively easy to define and put in place, the real problem is in the content:
- Writing valuable content isn’t easy and requires inspiration, creativity and knowledge.
- Not everybody is a great editor or copywriter.
- You need to keep posting valuable content and make sure your content is up-to-date.

You will only get links if your content has value and isn’t a rehash of the same ideas found everywhere else.

Obtaining organic search visitors is hard labor and costs time and money. Time you could have used to call upon your customers or to do prospecting. Money you could have used for getting PPC traffic and immediate results (visitors). Organic search might be a one time long-term investment providing that your content doesn’t go stale over time. A site full of outdated information might be worse compared to providing nothing at all.

You are also at the mercy of the search engines latest whims and algorithms: there’s absolutely no guarantee that they will keep on bringing you traffic and let you keep your current position in the SERPs. Google doesn’t owe you anything, couldn’t care less if your site disappears from the SERPs and doesn’t even need to give you an explanation if it does.

Now, compare all of this to spending some hours figuring out an AdWords-like service and getting your first visitors almost immediately spending only a slight amount of money (usually). Investing in organic search/content development might not be the hen with the golden eggs that it’s often depicted to be.
For most businesses, the conversion rates of organic and PPC/paid visitors are also nearly the same.

Are you investing in content or ppc?
Are you absolutely sure this is the way to go?

The relational versus the attention process

Selling is a relational process.
Marketing is a getting attention process in the hope to obtain a relation afterwards.

A relation begins with a communication and become a conversation that can end up even in collaboration.
Attention begins with a communication that hopefully gets attention from the target market.

Context content for the potential buyers

Selling involves a communication from person to person with immediate response or feedback, whereas marketing is mainly a communication from one to many with no direct response, feedback or involvement from the addressed persons.

Thus marketing can miss completely their intended goal and has no chance to adjust their message during their communication. Sales people have the advantage of being in immediate communication exchange that is supported by other signs of interest like body language, facial expression or the tone of the voice.

The question for marketing is how to create a marketing communication or message consisting of content that has context for the potential buyers as relations can only be formed by an affinity to “content”.

Relational content

Only in case the content creates a relation it has any value for both the receivers and the company paying for the marketing.

Relational content creates value the receivers:
- Any sales conversation should create value for the potential customer
- Any marketing communication should create value for the target audience

Relational content creates value for the broadcaster:
- The value is in the interest gathered from the potential customers.

Reaching the potential buyers

Even if there is an affinity to the “content” communicated, it can reach the wrong audience or interest the wrong audience.
In the case of a sales process a potential customer is clearly identified and qualified thus less error will occur.

Hence marketing needs to measure in order to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the content broadcasted.

Sales has only a few communication channels: email, telephone and meetings, whereas marketing has many channels to choose from: advertising (print – online – television – radio), press releases, direct mail, email, letters, post cards, leaflets, billboards, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media.
The more channels there are being used the more difficult to control the communication process and the more difficult to measure the efficiency of each channel.

Still all marketing channels have one thing in common: they all refer to the company website.
Currently in Business to Business it is very likely potential buyers will first visit the company website before any other action, communication, internal sales or decision.

Measuring marketing

Sales can prove their existence by just showing the revenue generated or the funnel value.
Marketing needs to measure everything as that is their only way to prove their existence.

In B2B if marketing could measure the number of really interested potential buyers that are visitors from companies of their target market, marketing would know and would be able to prove their efforts and spending. Additionally they could adjust their message real fast if fewer visitors should show up on the website.
It is important to segregate the company visitors from the residential Internet visitors as the latter are unlikely to buy from a company in the B2B market.
In order to measure marketing in B2B, all marketing needs to know is the names of the companies visiting and their level of interest (at least exclude the bouncers).

Measuring is the only way to know if your content is in context and bring relational value.

How does your Marketing dept. measure their marketing efforts?

The blog visit problem: the bouncers

The blog drives most of the traffic of the LEADSExplorer website. The problem is that most people just read one or two blog posts and then leave again. A large number of them read just only one post.
The blog posts are addressing the target market as we receive a relatively high amount of B2B companies visiting the blog posts.
However the main goal of promoting the lead generation and customer retention web service is not achieved as the connections with the main website are being ignored or overlooked.
The blog doesn’t drive traffic to the main website.

The solutions:

Text links
Several months ago, as a first trial we have inserted changing texts that link to the main website in-between two blog posts.
Only a very small amount of people have clicked on them to switch to the main web service website.
Maybe these texts are:
- Not apparent enough
- Resemble too much text-link ads or Google Adsense: due to ‘advertisement blindness’.
- Not interesting enough: If you know how to explain what our service does in just a few words and without sounding boring: let us know!

Whatever they are hardy getting clicked upon as if people are blind to them.
Maybe we made them look too much like advertising as found by this Nielsen study.

Buttons in flashy colors
The Free 30-Day Trial button on the main website gets clicked quite often.
Hence in order to draw more attention we decided inserting 2 buttons in flashy colors:
- Introducing the web service.
- The 30-day Free Trial teaser.
They are sure more apparent than the ‘quiet’ text lines which we have kept in place as they support the buttons by explaining the goal of the web service.

The buttons are below the blog post, thus we added the introduction button for the website also in the right hand column for those who don’t scroll completely down: The fast bouncers.
Maybe this one is overkill. We don’t know – but we’ll let you know when the results start rolling in.

Post exit pop-up for lost visitors
It is widely know that people hate pop-up buttons, probably even more post exit windows that pop-up when the visitor leaves the website.
As we consider the visitors who just read one blog post as lost, we would like to test if we can generate interest from a part of this population for our service using such a pop-up.
The pop-up will only be triggered on the blog for the first time visitors or when returning after several months.
The challenge will be finding the most appropriate text to convince the bouncers to look into our web service.

Success?

If these systems can persuade just a minority of the blog readers to visit the website, these actions can already be considered as successful.

We will let you know:
- What was effective or not.
- If we got complaints about the first time pop-up.
- How much more visiting companies did convert to sign-up for a free trial.

How about your website traffic?
How does it compare to the blog traffic (if you have a blog)?

The goal of any website is to attract traffic, which needs to be converted into leads.

Is your website acting like a vacuum cleaner sucking in targeted visitors?
Or
Is your website a fishing net catching visitors swimming by your website accidentally?

The vacuum cleaner

Using a vacuum cleaner you will only clean the spots you are aiming at.
A website will dynamically attract visitors who are looking for specific information on your website: exactly those people or companies you are aiming at.
The motor and the fan are the keywords, tags and content of the website.

Still some tiny dust will escape again through the exhaust port of the vacuum cleaner as it is not captured by the dust bag.
The more effective the website is (the bag), only the not interested visitors will leave by website again (exhaust port).

This seems to be happening with our website on the subjects of “Lead generation”, “Customer retention” and “Visitor identification”.

On the Internet many people are searching for a specific solution or to solve a problem.
In certain cases they end up on your website.
The bag collects those visitors that are really interested, just like in the sales funnel.

Although people are looking for a solution, in case of LEADSExplorer which is in the emerging market of Inbound Marketing, they don’t expect a solution that reveals the company names of the website visitors.
Inbound marketing is novel and so is visitor identification using IP (even more novel). Thus it takes a while for people to grasp and understand the solution, the importance and the reach.
The website sucks in a larger number of visitors that are not always immediately interested in our offering due to the disruptiveness of the solution offered. Something which will improve over timeover time as this type of Post-Click Marketing solution becomes more known.

The fishing net

A fishing boat drags his nets through the water. The nets can have large or small meshes for catching a certain size of fish.
If the meshes are very small, all kinds of fish end up in the net.
Moreover the fishing net can be very wide and the fishing boat can sail anywhere: thus less precise than the vacuum cleaner.

In the case of the fishnet, all kinds of people on the Internet will end up on your website for many different reasons.
If your content is very versatile and featuring a lot of content, which comparable with a fishing boat sailing anywhere having very wide fishing nets with small meshes, all kinds of people will visit your website. No focus.
Moreover your website content can be re-used or referenced by many other websites, thus generating all kinds of interest for many different reasons.
The funnel is much less effective as is starts out very wide and quickly narrows to a thin funnel with only a few leads captured.

We believe this is happening with our blog: as it generates a lot of traffic. People come by many different links, bookmarks, references and subscriptions to read the blog. The blog posts are being re-used, bookmarked or referenced on many occasions, thus catching traffic from very diverse sources.

The blog generates a decent amount of traffic, but these visitors are hardly interested in what we are offering.
After reading a blog post, only a few will click on a link to visit the website itself in order to find out about our offerings on lead generation or customer retention.

From the group of people that leaves the blog without visiting the website, only a few will visit the website on a later occasion for investigating about our services. Thus some of them do retain the message concerning our lead generation and customer retention web service.

Conclusion: Vacuum cleaner of Fishing net?

The best is if your website is like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in only those people who are really interested.
A fishnet will catch too many different visitors looking for different solutions or just out of generic interest.

Still every visit to the website is like advertising for our web service: eyeballs. Thus not all the efforts for generating visitors by a fishing net is wasted.

Is your website a vacuum cleaner or a fishing net?

Sales farmers to become lead hunters

If you have been in Sales with the same company since several years you have become more an account manager for your regular customers providing you with a steady income.

Due to the recession, the outlook for 2009 is grim.
You will need revenue from new customers as your existing customers will not bring enough revenue.
Thus it will be probably the year change from farmer to hunter for you.
Prospecting times are here again as you need to keep your total revenue in line with previous years.

The Sales problems you are facing:
1) Lead generation at low cost:
Unfortunately you need to decrease your expenses at the same time, thus you require generating leads at a low cost.
2) Customer retention at the least effort:
At the same time you want to keep an eye on your current customers with the least efforts.
Difficult to combine these two challenges.

Lead generation with interested companies

In business to business most purchases start with an Internet search (7 out of 10): both potential new customers and your current customers will search on the Internet for information and comparison of products, services or solutions.
Thus both potential and current customers will visit the company website.

If a new company visits the website, thus a potential customer, you should know the name, origin and their interest in order to be able cold call (by telephone or email).
By contacting people you have found using Internet Data Mining on those companies, it is likely to generate more qualified leads as you know what they were looking for by the pages visited or the search terms used to find the company website.
This method will save you time and effort.

Customer contact

When a customer visits your website again, you should be alerted in order to call upon your customer armed with the knowledge of their interest from pages visited.
As this communication will be timely, it will save you time and effort.

Lead nurturing and customer retention

Once you have started a conversation with your contacts with customers or contacts found with prospects, you can follow up their reactions by the induced visits upon your communication(s).
As every communication (telephone, email or meeting) is registered in the CRM, the visits and communications can be plotted side by side on the same time chart for visual analysis of your efforts allowing you to improve on your lead nurturing or customer retention.

Post-click marketing

All or most of these features are provided by ‘Post-click Marketing’ solutions, like LEADSExplorer, helping you to turn from sales farmer into an efficient lead hunter again.
At the same time continuing to farm your existing customers even more efficiently at less effort.

Are you preparing to become a sales hunter again?
Cold calling and/or emailing for generating leads?
Will you be using a ‘Post-click Marketing’ solution?

Finding relevant content

Losing 50% of potential sales due to inadequate online information is what IDC claims for technology vendors.

The key considerations for technologists and business buyers during the purchase process are:
- Content type: in-depth information to white papers, case studies, articles and vendor collateral
- Content format like: audio, video or a document
- Accessibility to different information

Only 42 percent of the time people find relevant content.
Due to lacking of relevancy the chance to close a sale is reduced by 45 percent.

During the purchase process there is also a change of content types: from documents in the early stages to webcasts during implementation scenarios and shortlists.
And strangely documents rule again during the final decision.
Thus the best your website could are documents.

Different content for different people

Make sure your information is what they require as this would satisfy 56 percent of the respondents.

The problem with providing the required content in B2B sales, which is a complex sales process, is the number of people involved in the process. Thus you need different documents for the different people: evangelist, purchaser, influencer, manager, VITO, recommenders, advocate, naysayer, …

The best sources for information are your sales people, who actually meet most of these people. They should help to define the content for each of the people involved in the buying process.

Next you should know what parts of the website are being visited by people from companies, not the residential surfers. There you need to put your content – apparently documents (pdf) are good enough.

You can download the IDC report “Technology Vendors May Be Losing Close to 50% of Their Potential Sales Due to Inadequate Online Information” here (after simple registration).

What content and documents your company website provides?
Could you indicate or define the different content for the different people involved?

The classical funnel is no more

The sales funnel has always been presented as a funnel, however as Ardath Albee (Marketing Interactions) in her blog post “What happened to the sales funnel?” points out the funnel has become a cylinder.

The classical view was capturing a lot of leads at the wide side of the funnel and ending up with a few leads converting into customers at the narrow side.

The funnel has become a cylinder

This has changed due to the times that have been changing:
- Leads select and choose your products or services
- No information flow control as information is available everywhere
- Buyers want strategic insights and concepts instead of solutions
- A buying journey instead of a sales cycle
- Push (like email marketing) is out, pull (like websites) is it.
- Peers, not companies, have become more important to decisions

The new marketing and new sales

This all needs rethinking of your marketing into the world of the buyer:
About the problems and issues of your potential buyers are dealing with, as they will first want to develop competence about their issues in order to be confident enough for making decisions.

The funnel has become a cylinder inviting leads at one end, who become customers at the other end.
During their journey through the cylinder your marketing and sales need to feed them and exchange concepts, strategic ideas and insights to move them further towards to their purchase decision. This decision they can then take with confidence by having acquired enough information and insight from different sources.

The new marketing role is to propose concepts, insights and strategic ideas, not just products and services.

The new sales needs to understand the specific problems and issues of the potential customer and possibly deliver consulting and exchange of information, not just the purchase price at a certain quantity.

Reach your leads early during their information acquiring

During the information acquiring part, the website will play an important role as potential buyers will screen and scrape the Internet for information, thus also your website.
In order to reach your leads early in their decision process you need to identify your website visitors by company name and monitor them on your website.
LEADSExplorer allows you to reach your prospects early in their buying decision process: from the very first visit on your website.

The journey through the cylinder

During the journey through the cylinder, you need to monitor the increase or decrease of interest in your products, solution or services. This is expressed by the number of website visits and the pages visited that is in relation to your communications exchanges.
The increase or decrease of interest related to your communications exchange is analyzed visually, as provided by LEADSExplorer, on a time-chart together with your communications exchanges for easy follow-up.

As the funnel has been converted into a cylinder due to the changes in the decision process of the potential buyer, your marketing and sales methods need to change too.
Starting with your website as a source of information upon your potential leads and customers.