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.

Web analytics provide generic website data

In B2C by using website analytics (web measurement and analysis) the marketing department is able to define what the customers are looking for on the company website. This is based upon statistical data and averages as the number of visitors is high: thus enough data available.

However in B2B the number of visitors is low compared to B2C.
Moreover every visiting company should be treated in unique way as every potential customer has a high value.

When using a web analytic solution or service, it is not possible to know what your leads or customers were looking for when they found your website or returning to your website. This due to the fact these solutions provide numbers and statistics about all your visitors without differentiation.
The web analytic solutions consider all visitors equal in order to provide generic data about your website, whereas in Business to Business you need data for every company visiting.

In BtoB the visitors are unique

As a first step the visiting data should be split up over:
- Residential visitors
- Non-interested company visitors
- Company visitors

Knowing what your leads are looking for is an important factor in order to:
- Write content for your website or blog that draws in your potential customers.
- Contact the most interesting or most promising companies for lead generation.
- Eliminate not interesting organizations / companies.
- Engage your company website visitors.
- Nurture the leads and the customers that are visiting.

Method for BtoB website data by company

In order to improve over web analytic solutions, the first step is to know who is visiting your website. Who are the companies that are visiting your website?

Next you should classify the website visitors in one of these categories:
- Leads
- Prospects
- Customers
- Ex-customers
- Competitors
- Financial institutions
- Media (journalists, bloggers, …)
- Suppliers
- Consultants
- Individuals (residential Internet access)

Then you can define what leads or customers are searching for when they visited your website by:
- The search terms used.
- The pages visited.
- White paper downloads.

What is needed is a solution beyond web analytics, providing website visit data by visiting company.
Providing data and information by company that can be used by marketing or salesmen for contacting by cold calling or lead nurturing.

What do you know about your website visitors?
Who are they? What companies?
What are each of these companies looking for on your website?

Reporting to the sales manager

On a regular basis sales people need to report to their Sales Manager.
There are several cases to be distinguished:

1) Enough sales:
The Salesman has enough sales leads in his funnel, thus he will only declare those he is absolutely sure of. And he will keep quiet about the other possible sales.
He has no need to raising expectations or even have his targets increased.
If he would miss one of the mentioned leads, then he still can present one of his leads he still has on hand.

2) Below target:
The Salesman is below target. Still he needs to prove he is doing fine.
He will come up with any possible lead, more or less qualified, which might generate sales.
He knows how much and when he is really going to close, but keeps this to himself.

3) Way below target:
The salesman is significantly below target.
Additional to presenting all possible leads, qualified or not, he might even present one lead that will bring sustained growth for the company based upon the potential number of users or consumers of their customers.

Clueless Sales Manager looks into the CRM

The Sales manager will not get the correct picture of the funnel for the company as some of his salesmen will understate their sales funnel, while others will exaggerate their number of leads.
As he doesn’t know who is under over estimating, he is clueless as he has no hard data.

Thus in order to have a reference, he will be looking into the CRM for contacts and contact history, allowing him asking questions about companies, contacts and meetings.

This is one reason why the CRM is being used to verify the number of leads and the number of contacts. In order to be able ask questions about contacts within companies in the CRM.
The CRM is being used as a management control instrument, and not to enhance customer relationship.

Website visit report by company

If the Sales Manager could get a report about the visiting companies on the website of the company with the frequency and intensity of their visits and their interests, he would be able to ask more specific questions. Thus his questions would be more precise or to the point.
Additionally he could offer help and insight into the sales processes of his salesmen using his experiences, as he could visually see the reactions upon the communications with the contacts in the companies and their visits.

This would allow him to ponderate the declared leads and funnels from every salesman based on a better conversation, which will give him better data for the funnel of teh company.

Progress is just best guess

One of the problems with Sales and the Sales process is the biased and subjective estimation of the progress made in the sales process and funnel.
This is mainly because the feedback originates from the person who is selling and thus personally involved in the sales process.
Very biased – very subjective.

Sales cannot ask the potential customer to fill out a form, in order to inform them objectively about progress of the sales process.

Measuring sales progress on the Internet

Measuring sales progress objectively would be possible if you could make a link with the Internet
On eBay any seller can see the bidding, and thus knowing about the sales process.
Like this one eBay:

Still the video gives you the picture, as on the Internet everything can be registered and thus measured.

Measuring the progress

If Sales could measure or capture independently through a different channel without being noticed:
- The level of interest of a potential customer
- The changes in level of interest of a company
The lead qualification and funnel could be based upon more exact data than the currently complete subjective salesman information.
Lead management would become real easy.

Measuring tool

The potential buyer will visit your website before and during his buying cycle. This is how the buyer leaves measurable information behind:
- The pages visited
- The time on pages
- The duration of his visit
- The number of visits
- The number of unique visitors from the potential buying company.
- The interval between two visits
- The frequency of visits

This is what LEADSExplorer provides for every potential customer company:
- The level of interest
- The changes in level of interest during the sales process presented graphically
- The interest in detail based upon the pages visited and the search terms used aggregated by company.
- The effect of the communication messages, telephone calls and meetings upon the sales process on a chart.

Don’t rely anymore on subjective information.
Get an objective measurement of your sales processes, as you too need to know the progress of your sales processes.

Are you happy with your Rolodex?
Then stick with it.
But don’t complain if:
- You can’t write enough on the business cards.
- You can’t take it with you
- It is cumbersome to write all the contact details on
- Keeping the data up-to-date is painful
- Copy/paste doesn’t exist
- Writing on the cards without taking them out hurts
- You need to trim some business cards to fit into the Rolodex
- You can no longer read what you have written 2 years ago
- You need several on your desk

However if the IT system or the Internet breaks down, you keep on working!

Do you want an electronic version?
Use Microsoft Exchange Contacts on your desktop that your company has paid for.
But don’t complain when a virus misuses your contacts and don’t forget to take back-ups.

Do you want a simple yet effective CRM?
Get one of the web based CRM systems that you can access anywhere.
But don’t complain about the limited yet sufficient functionalities and the difficulty to integrate with other applications.

Do you want a big complex software system that requires training?
Use one of the big established CRM solutions if you can pay for and your company has the right reasons to use it: like call centre integration.
But don’t complain if you can’t use it effectively, get lost in the many features and the consultants seem to stick forever.

Do you want a mailing system?
Buy one or get it as a web service as offered by many vendors and use it independently from your CRM.
But figure out first where to get all the required contacts and addresses.
And don’t complain on the massive number of mails you need to send in order to get one reply of a possible lead instead of the many tire kickers.

Do you want an email tracking system for your emailing campaigns?
Get it as a service then your IT department doesn’t need to be involved.
But figure out first where to get all the required contacts and addresses for your mailings.
And don’t complain on the massive number of emails you need to send in order to get visitors on your landing page that still need to find the rest of your website interesting.

Do you want to enhance your lead generation and cold calling?
Use a web service that reveals your website visitors by company name, allowing you to qualify these as raw leads (or not interesting) by the pages visited and the nature of the company.
But don’t complain if you need to upload the company data in batch to your CRM and thus have no real time info for tracking your leads and customers in your CRM.

Do you want to improve your lead generation, cold calling, nurturing of leads and customers and sell more?
Get a web service that reveals your website visitors by company name (using IP address), allowing you to qualify these as raw leads (or not interesting) by the pages visited and the business of the company.
Follow these leads up in the seamless integrated CRM that is being feed continuously with visiting data from the company to be used for lead and customer nurturing and selling more as you know exactly at any moment about the behavior of the employees of the potential customer on your website.

Get LEADSExplorer with the bonus of getting your emails organized in the CRM.
But don’t complain you didn’t have this before.