The management of sales leads is critical to generating marketing ROI. Sadly, sales leads often land on the scrap heap because marketers throw leads over the wall and then expect salespeople to catch them.

I was recently asked by someone how to utilize lead distribution to gain the best results. That’s a complex question when you think about it.

Almost every company that has salespeople has those who are stronger performers and those who are weaker performers. However, when you add sales territories and fairness into the mix, this is far from easy. So do you invest your hard-won leads in your top performers, or do you try to help your weaker salespeople?

Many of you reading this post do not have a choice of who you distribute leads to. What can you do optimize your lead distribution process for higher conversion?

Qualify all marketing leads as sales-ready before the hand-off

The key is to match readiness of the lead (i.e., future customer) with expectations of your sales team. Otherwise, you’ll have a serious disconnect. You need to qualify and examine each lead as if they are “sales-ready,” meaning they are ready to speak to a salesperson. You can find this ideal point in the relationship by leveraging lead scoring and lead qualification. There is only so much information that you can get off a Web forum or that someone will volunteer in an email.

For more, read: “Lead Qualification: Stop generating leads and start generating revenue.”

Make the hand-off to Sales, but still, help drive conversion

If that relationship were a baton, there would be a point in time when both Marketing’s and Sales’ hands are on the baton, and you are making that introduction. It has to be clear at what stage Marketing is going to hand the lead off so that Sales can run with it and so that you don’t drop the baton or drop the relationship.

Set up a service-level agreement with your sales team

The logistics for the lead distribution process are established with each sales representative and, in general, completed by email within 24 hours of the generation of the lead. In extremely “hot” opportunity cases, where lead distribution is needed instantaneously, the sales representative will be contacted by telephone, text, etc., on a real-time basis. In CRMs like Salesforce.com, you can automatically notify salespeople when activity has developed in their territory, vertical market or other criteria that you deem to be important.

One company I worked with centrally qualifies all their leads (via phone) against their universal lead definition within two hours, distributes and requires their field sales force to follow up on those that are sales ready within eight hours. If a qualified sales lead is not followed up by the assigned salesperson within 24 hours, they can count on an email or call from their sales manager. If a sales lead goes more than 48 hours before being touched, that salesperson risks having that lead assigned to someone else — someone with more selling time capacity.

Schedule appointments for the sales team — Help eliminate “telephone tag.”

For lead generation campaigns, I recommend that Marketing or inside Sales sets appointments for the sales force or its channel partner with leads. Reduce the “endless game of telephone tag” that can occur between sales representatives and qualified prospects. By presetting appointments during the sales opportunity generation campaigns, you can dramatically improve the efficiency of the lead follow-up process and increase productive selling time.

Develop a centralized process to track lead follow-up by Sales

Lead follow-up supports the real-time tracking and reporting of leads that may be selected based on multiple criteria.  Ideally, you will be able to track leads at any stage in the sales pipeline, as well as by industry vertical, sales person, territory, marketing campaign, lead score and forecasted purchase time frame.

Test your lead distribution approach

If you have influence or control over lead distribution, here are some methods you can test to optimize conversion:

1. Match leads to sales skill

Each lead comes with different needs. Chances are they can be categorized in the qualification process. Consider using tiers to prioritize what level of expertise leads require based on the need. More general inquiries can go to inside sales reps and qualified first. Do not frustrate field salespeople with requests for brochures and marketing resources. No matter what, make sure you are sorting those needs and distributing them as quickly as possible.

2. Match leads based on product or industry vertical expertise

People sell from different backgrounds, giving them unique talents based on their experience, current and past customers, personality and motivation. Leverage this. The more you know about your salespeople, the more you can use that information to match them with leads they’ll have the most success. This is why round-robin lead distribution can be deadly to conversion. It assumes every salesperson is the same.

3. Match leads based on location

If you have a large distributed field team, you’re probably already doing this in regional territories. However, smaller teams and inside sales teams can leverage localized lead routing. Don’t lose an opportunity to help your sales team make local connections.

What’s worked for you to optimize lead distribution? I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Photo courtesy of  Family Business

You can follow Brian Carroll on Twitter @brianjcarroll.

You might also like

Introduction to Lead Management [More from the blogs]

Lead Generation That Converts Leads into Sales Opportunities [More from the blogs]

15 Tips to Generate More Leads in 2015 (Part 1, featuring tips 1-5) [More from the blogs]

The post How to Improve Your Sales Lead Distribution for More Conversion appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Lead generation can take you on a long hike. The one thing I can guarantee you about the journey is that more is not better if you don’t know how to nurture. The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

That said, I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not putting enough toward progression.

Get out your walking shoes, and take a journey with your customers.

I define lead nurturing as consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution), regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” True nurturing involves a sometimes long and circuitous path, but along the way, you’ll be building long, meaningful and trust-filled relationships with the right people.

Salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without support. If you’re wondering what kinds of content helps progress leads further faster, ask your sales team. Start by asking your sales team questions like, “What’s the content you share with leads that helps them convert?” or “What’s the content you use to help take people to the next level?”

The first step on that path to success is to start thinking like a customer.

Step #1: Walk in your potential customers’ shoes to build a customer journey map

Be the customer. Get out of your building and be as close as you can to their experience by actually observing the behaviors of your customer. After you’ve gained a solid understanding, build your customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map? It tells the story of the client’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship.

The journey map is about helping you understanding the fundamental interactions that your future customer will have with the organization. What are their motivations? What are their questions with each marketing touch point? Try to understand what they want and the concerns they’ll have when they talk with their peers. The goal of customer journey mapping is to gain customer wisdom.

As you do that, consider the questions that customers have in mind before they make a buying decision:

• How will this product or service help my company?
• We’re doing OK, so why do we need this?
• Is there another company out there that is better?
• Will their solution work? Can they prove it?
• Is the company credible?
• Can we afford it?

Help prospects find the answers to these questions, and you’ll remind them of the benefits of working with you. You’re creating value by giving them useful information in digestible, bite-sized chunks.

Step #2: Plan your lead nurturing path with a focus on progression

Invest as much in forming creative and content for lead progression as you do for lead capture. I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not enough toward progression.

The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

It’s worth noting:

• The tactics employed and the frequency of touches will depend on the solutions you sell and the buying cycle of the prospect.
• You need to create different lead nurturing tracks based on demographic criteria, such as size, industry, role in the buying process and more.

Step #3: Walk the path with your customer

In a complex sale, the journey can be long and challenging to help people move from initial interest to purchase intent.

Your only job is to make certain you nourish your customer along the way and guide them with a meaningful compass toward the right and best decision for their needs.

Think of your marketing team as trail guides who will need to point out all the sights along the way that are useful in the decision-making process.

Slow down, and walk at the customer’s pace, even if that means taking the long route with them when it comes to buying your service or product. If you hurry them along, you might end up with an exhausted customer who doesn’t feel good about the journey and won’t turn to you to continue the path to purchase.

How you sell me is how you will serve me.

Most economic buyers evaluate you based on this, “how you sell me indicates how you will serve me.” Here’s where that little statistic I mentioned earlier comes in. A study of business-to-business buyers shows that sales people who become trusted advisors and understood the needs of economic buyers are 69% more likely to get away with a deal.

The complex sale requires that your prospect:

• Must be familiar with you and your company and with what you and your company do.
• Must perceive you and your company to be expert in your field.
• Must believe that you and your business understand his or her specific issues and can solve them.­
• Likes you and your company enough to want to work with you.

Remember you can’t automate trust. Trust-building should be the theme of your nurturing efforts.

Building trust with your future customers

By providing valuable education and information to potential clients up front, you become a trusted advisor. You are then perceived to be an expert. You don’t sell; you don’t make pitches. Instead, you provide insights and solutions all within the realm of your expertise and, as a result, become the first company they turn to when there’s a need.

Make your marketing program’s single point of focus be to develop trust, and your business will become more profitable and less reliant on competing on price. Selling, per se, is reduced in the interest of more open and honest conversations with prospects. You win more business on a sole-source basis, and more new business referrals come your way.

Step #4: Keep Walking the Journey

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from 20 years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 40 to 70% of potential sales. Research compiled by the MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report showed, “marketing departments with a lead nurturing campaign reported a 45% higher ROI than marketing departments that did not utilize a lead nurturing track.”

If inquiries are directly passed on to salespeople, reps, partners or distributors for follow-up, beware.  You may be leaving as many as eight out of 10 sales prospects on the sales path for your competitors.

Now, get your compasses out and begin the long-yet-fruitful journey toward an effective lead nurturing program. You’ll be surprised how many potential customers will want to join you along the way.

Photo Credit: Sujay Sarkhel.

You can follow Brian Carroll, Twitter @brianjcarroll.

You might also like

All You Need to Know about Customer Journey Mapping [From Smashing magazine]

The post Lead Nurturing: 4 Steps to walking the buying path with your customers appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

As marketers, we deal with a lot of change. Seriously. The marketing world is exploding. We’re dealing with an explosion of touchpoints, channels and marketing technology.

We need to navigate creating more content, generating more leads and achieving more results. Even our customer buying process has changed. Our clients move deeper into their buying process before they need to engage our sales team or us. And, there’s more change inside our companies too.

Change is the New Normal

According to Adobe’s Digital Road­block report, “64% of marketers expect their role to change over the next year, and over 81% expect changes over the next three years.”

A recent study from Econsultancy finds that the majority senior marketers believe the most important soft skill to develop is the “ability to embrace change.”

How Do I Respond?

How we respond to change affects our life personally and professionally. And yes, it does impact how effective we are at marketing and life.

The way I used to deal with change was just push through it by burying myself in work. The problem was that approach stopped working. I’ve learned you can’t hide feelings that come with stress.  They leak out in unexpected ways like exhaustion, a short temper, and unexplained sadness. These are just a few ways that unexpressed emotions reveal themselves.

Here six ways I’ve learned to deal with change and help others do the same:

1. Remember that attitude is everything

Managing change starts with your thinking. If you change how you think and what you’re focusing on, you’ll change how you feel and what actions you take. Consider this statement from Charles Swindoll, “Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.”  You’ll have a better attitude when you take care of yourself. Another way to help you attitude is to look at your body language. Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Check out Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk on body language.

2. Be more reflective

Try fitting in 15 minutes of reflection to the end of your day. It makes you more productive. Harvard Business School psychologist Francesca Gino researched meditation and showed employees taking just 15 minutes to write and reflect at the end of the day performed 22.8% percent better than those who didn’t.

Researcher Brene Brown teaches if you don’t allow yourself to feel strong feelings,  you can’t feel the good ones.  And The more you experience your emotions, the more empathy you have for others. Empathy is the essence of customer first marketing.

But you can’t be empathetic toward others without being empathetic toward yourself first. Facing change head-on is the ultimate exercise in developing empathy. Try Expressive Writing. The benefits are enormous.

3. Get support and be open to asking for help 

Surround yourself with encouraging people. This list will include friends, mentors, coaches or qualified therapists who can help coach you. And ask for help when you need it.

4. Take care of yourself

It’s hard to be available to the other people who matter in our lives unless we take care of ourselves. When we give 110% (i.e. more than we have) and never take the time to replenish and rest, we end up depleted. I’ve made it a special point to eat and sleep well, and get enough exercise – it’s the best mood enhancer. Recently, I’ve been learning meditation: sitting quietly and breathing deeply. It’s a challenge for a person like me who measures progress through productivity. But, meditation provides a sense of peace and mindfulness that productivity alone can’t begin to touch.

5. Develop a clear vision 

There’s an old proverb that says “without vision, my people perish.” Your company needs you and your marketing leadership more than ever. Work to define a picture of yourself, your team, and organization. What’s your personal mission statement? How will you serve your customers? Focus on what you can do to navigate changes. What are the new roles that you’ll need to play to help your organization adapt?  Here’s a helpful post from HBR.com on how to develop a shared purpose.

6. Get comfortable that change will happen to you

This step requires accepting what is and being present in the now. We’re deluded if we think that everything is going to be the same tomorrow as it is today – change can happen in a split second. If you know change is coming, consider it a privilege.  Too many people don’t have that luxury. Help your team prepare that change is here, and it’s coming, and it’s inevitable.

I hope this helped you get some ideas on how to deal with change to help you be more effective and marketing and life. What’s worked for you?

The post How to deal with change and be a better marketer appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

You may have noticed the B2B Lead Blog has a new look.

Image credit: PhotoDune

That’s because it’s my personal blog again. After a stint at MECLABS (resulting from the acquisition of InTouch) I’ve been given a great opportunity to do something new.

Over the next few months, I’ll launch my new company and while I work on my next book, a sequel to Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.

What Does This Mean to Readers?

It means I’ll continue to share ideas, strategies, and approaches as I learn.

Back when I started this blog in 2003, I couldn’t find resources and practical ideas related to lead generation for complex sale. So I started writing this blog to share what I was learning. That was 13-years ago and so much has changed.

The Internet, customer buying behavior, digital marketing and the rise of martech have created a whole new marketing and sales world. We’re leveraging tools and approaches nonexistent a decade ago. And new companies and careers are now built up around them.

Preparing for the Future of B2B Marketing

The future of marketing and sales will include more technology like machine learning, predictive data analytics, and self-optimizing systems. These tools will enable and augment marketers in ways we haven’t imagined.

But here’s the thing, at its core marketing, sales and lead generation will always be about building relationships. Technology can’t replace our intuition, and there’s no way to automate trust. Building our customers belief and trust takes time. And that’s why I’m doing new research because we need to be prepared to embrace the future.

What’s Next for the B2B Lead Blog?

I’m doing research on empathetic marketing and I’ll share more about that soon. I’m also excited to bringing you other thought-leading voices in sales and marketing via interviews, guest blog posts, events, and exclusive content.

Lastly, if you subscribe to this blogs via RSS, please update your subscription to the new feed at the top right of the page or use this address: http://www.b2bleadblog.com/feed

I look forward to keeping up with the accelerating evolution B2B lead generation, demand generation, and marketing for the complex sale, and helping you do the same.

Thank you for reading all these years.

The post A New Chapter for the B2B Lead Blog appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Have you intentionally linked your b2b marketing, sales, and strategy? 

If not, don’t worry. You’re in good company.

Most companies struggle with this according to the Frank Cespedes, author, and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, “selling [or marketing,] no matter how clever and creative can’t generate good financial returns unless it’s connected to strategy.”

I met Frank while we both spoke at an event in Santiago, Chile. We had a memorable time sharing ideas, and research. I thought Frank had a practical approach to aligning sales and marketing. So, I reached out to him and interviewed him about what he’s learned through his research for his most recent book Aligning Strategy and Sales (Harvard Business Review Press).

Writers Note: I edited this interview for length and grammar only.

Brian: What inspired you to write about Aligning Strategy and Sales?

Frank Cespedes

Frank: Despite decades of attention to so-called strategic planning, there is remarkably little research about how to link strategy with the nitty gritty of field execution especially sales efforts [and marketing].

American companies annually spend about $900 billion every year on sales efforts. That’s not marketing. That’s sales compensation, the travel and entertainment expenses, incentives, the infrastructure, etc. To put that in perspective, Brian, that amount is more than three times what companies spend on all media advertising– Super Bowls, everything else. It’s more than about 40 times what they spend on digital marketing and it’s more than 50 times what they currently spend on social media.

That’s a lot of managerial time and effort as well as money, and the reality is that sales forces are, by far, the biggest and most important part of strategy execution for most firms, especially in B2B markets.

How did you develop this idea?

I was an academic at Harvard Business School for about 11 years working my way up the hierarchy and always was doing research in sales related areas. My research started with distribution channels, B2B distribution channels, morphed into sales.

Then I ran a business for 12 years. And then I came back and said, ‘I’m teaching strategy. I know something about sales. Let me see what people have written about the connections between strategy and sales.’

What I found was a gap: lots of books and articles about strategy, and countless books and articles and training programs about selling, but virtually nothing about connecting these activities. So I figured two things.

The world does not need another book about strategy.  And I don’t think, to be blunt, the world needs yet another selling methodology, but there just isn’t much if anything about linking the two and that was the gap that I set out to address, practically and based on the research about these topics, not one-off anecdotes.

Brian: If you had only three questions you could ask executives to diagnose sales and strategy alignment what would those be?

Question 1. Do you have a strategy and can you articulate it?

Most companies and most senior executives, confuse strategy with other important but separate things like vision or mission or purpose or values. Those are important, but they are not the same as a strategy.

A strategy at a minimum always has to pass the following three tests:

• External consistency. In other words, does our approach deal with the threats and the opportunities in the external market today, not yesterday?
• Internal consistency. How do we put things together in sales, in marketing, in operations so that two plus two equals at least four? It’s internally consistent but also if we have some competitive advantage, it’s going to take longer or cost more for competitors to imitate us.
• Dynamic consistency. Every strategy has a sell-by date. No strategy is forever. It’s very unlikely that any company is going to get an e-mail from the marketplace that says it’s time to change. And it’s not the responsibility of the market to be kind to any company and its strategy.

It’s the responsibility of managers to understand what’s going on in their market and adapt. That’s what I mean by dynamic consistency. If you have a strategy, you should be able to articulate its core components—Objectives, Scope, Advantage–in 50 words or less.

Question 2. Are we clear about the market segments where we do and don’t play and what are the buying processes?

These questions are fundamental to making decisions about Scope in any strategy. And in those areas where we choose to play what is it that we do or can do that, we believe us some advantage? You have to be clear about that if you’re going to do effective selling because where you play drives the buying processes that your sales people will encounter, and again this is central. Value is created or destroyed in actual interactions with customers and their buying processes, not in meetings or planning documents.

Question 3. Do we know what the important sales tasks our sales people must do to succeed in the marketplace are?

Sales tasks are very actionable things. They ultimately tell us where we should and should not spend, money, time, effort, investments in what areas of the of the conversion process in the sales funnel. And the critical tasks for any company are determined by their strategy and what that strategy means for the segments and buyers the sales force deals with; a generic selling methodology does NOT determine the tasks. This is important because, despite what most sales trainers still preach about selling and sales people, the fact is that the most important thing about selling is the buyer and their buying processes, not the personality or pitch of the seller.

I think my three questions are relatively simple, but I believe that they’re fundamental. Do you have a strategy? Are we clear about where we play and not play in the buying processes in those areas where we play? And what are the important sales tasks?

Brian:  What are your best tips for getting sales and b2b marketing aligned around strategy?

Frank: Well, I think the questions I just articulated in answer to your earlier question are also relevant here because again there is no such thing as effective marketing or effective selling if it’s not connected to strategic goals and business objectives.

And many, many marketing and sales managers are very often either unaware or indifferent to the strategic and financial goals and objectives in their companies. They need to align with those goals and, conversely, they need to speak up and earn a place at the C-Suite table. Then, they have to be accountable.

Using the Seller’s Compass

Let me just say one thing about marketing, one thing about sales. The figure “Seller’s Compass” helps explain the process of aligning sales, marketing, and strategy (used with permission). 

In marketing, I think your work [Lead Generation for the Complex Sale] is very relevant to lead generation. We all know the data. This data has been remarkably consistent for years, so there’s obviously something systemic going on what many people call the lead generation black hole.

How many leads from marketing are used? Lots of money is wasted, and that’s the right verb. It’s wasted on social media and other chic tools, and many marketers are ironically proud of that. They’re proud of the lack of metrics currently.

I wrote something about this last year in Harvard Business Review, Is Social Media Actually Helping Your Company’s Bottom Line? That gets us right back to one of the core aspects of marketing in many businesses, at least in relationship to sales and lead generation: what’s a good lead and are we clear about that? No company or marketing manager or sales manager can correctly answer that question independent of their firm’s business strategy.

That strategy helps to determine the necessary sales tasks (including relevant and efficient lead generation) and, as the “Seller’s Compass” figure indicates, the job in sales management is to get actual selling behaviors to align with required sales tasks.

Three Levers to Align B2B Selling Behaviors with Tasks

In turn, managers basically have three levers to do that: People (hiring, training, development), Sales Force Control Systems (including organization, metrics, and compensation plans), and Sales Force Environment (how sales managers manage and apply the control systems, including performance reviews and links with other functions in the company).

On sales, I think what they need to talk about compensation and incentives. The data has been remarkably consistent,  at least during my lifetime. According to the surveys, once we get beyond fixed salary, about 70% of sales comp plans base incentives on sales volume. In other words, based on [sales] volume regardless of the profit margin of that sale or the cost to serve that customer.

When you have an incentive system like that, either the implicit or explicit message to the sales force is that any customer is a good customer. The message is a variation on the old biblical aphorism, “Go forth and multiply.” That’s what [sales] people do. They go forth, and they bring back a diverse set of customers that have very, very different implications for product, for the selling cycle, for post-sale service, for capacity utilization and operations, for the cash flow profile of the company.

All of this flows ultimately in any business from what sales people sell at what price and how fast. At some point, it doesn’t matter what senior executives think their strategy is. The de facto strategy of the company is those aggregate sales that are coming in. Conversely, those executives should continually ask, Why do we pay people the way we do and do we understand the daily behavioral implications of our comp system?

Conclusion

Again, companies spend massively more on Sales than Marketing and, as Mark Twain once said, “If you put a lot of eggs in one basket, then keep your eyes on that basket!” The most pressing things executives need to talk about for [aligning] business strategy with daily sales efforts are those questions I mentioned earlier and, in most firms, there are vast areas for improvement in all of those topics.

You might also like:

HBR: Any Value Proposition Hinges on the Answer to One Question

HBR: Putting Sales at the Center of Strategy

The post 3 Good Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

B2B Lead generation is rapidly changing process for companies with the advent of MarTech. 

In this recorded webinar be sharing where B2B marketers can focus and what are the “best few” things they can do to improve their b2b lead generation efforts immediately.

In this webinar you’ll learn what you can do to improve the following:

• How to get sales and marketing collaborating with these questions
• Get more opportunities with lead reengagement
• Build a lead scoring approach for qualifying that really works
• Nurture early stage leads more effectively
• Use your empathy to develop marketing messaging that connects

If you’re want to get the most out of your B2B lead generation, make sure you attend this webinar.

Watch the recorded webinar now  

The post 5 Things You Can Do To Improve B2B Lead Generation appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

People aren’t ready to buy when we want to sell. Think about it. 

This common statement has big implications if you’re doing account-based marketing (ABM) and lead generation.

Why doing more lead generation activity doesn’t help  

CEB discovered that a typical for B2B customer is 57% into their purchase process before they directly engage a sales rep or talk to a supplier.

Marketers often believe they solve the issue of clients being further in their purchase process by driving more early-stage leads to sales. Unfortunately, I’ve learned this does little to help sales people because they get stuck. The question for sales often becomes, “How can I progress this relationship when there isn’t a motivation or felt need?”

What are trigger events and why do they matter?

In all my experience working with complex sales, I’ve not seen a customer buy without a trigger event driving their motivation.

In my book, I define a trigger event happening associated with a consequence so significant that it causes new behaviors, new ideas, and new opportunities. Trigger events aren’t new, but I haven’t seen many people use them or fully appreciate their value. Every company will have some trigger events that matter more than others because of what they sell solves various problems and addresses different motivations.

Trigger events helped this company increase sales conversions by 400%

For example, a SaaS company I worked with that sold product management software and discovered a trigger event was when a CEO started publicly talking about innovation. They tracked companies where a CEO spoke publicly about “improving innovation” or “being more innovative” in annual reports, investor/analyst calls, and other mentions. Those companies had a 400% higher probability buying their software than businesses that didn’t.

This company provided free tools, resources and guides that helped the people they who would likely have the most pressure to improve innovation. This approach helped their lead generation get more and better leads. Why? Because their account based marketing focused where there was already momentum and a likely motivation for change.

The physics trigger events for Account Based Marketing

Hang with me here, and you’ll see the connection I promise. Newton’s first law of motion – also called the law of inertia – is often stated as “an object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to remain in motion with the same speed and the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

The physics work similarly in the account based marketing and the buying process. Trigger events serve as an unbalancing force. They cause momentum to shift and change. This point is hugely important because the main reasons people don’t buy is because of the status quo. And sometimes when they’re moving, the momentum is going in the opposite direction you want. So unless, there’s an unbalancing force acting on your potential clients and customers, they’re more than likely to do nothing.

Do you know the key trigger events for your clients and customers? I’m going to share how you can discover and use trigger events to focus your account based marketing, lead generation, and sales approach.

3 Steps You Can Use to Discover Trigger Events for ABM

Step 1: Create a list of your 5 to 10 most recent customers

Review the figure I set up showing the trigger event mind map (click trigger event picture to enlarge) It shows some of the possible trigger events. You can use this to as a starting point. Then answer the following questions about your 5 to 10 recent sales:

• How did your relationship start?
• What was the compelling event that drove their interest?
• What were the external challenges or business issues they were facing?
• Who was involved as the buying process evolved? What was driving their motivation?
• What created the urgency for them to progress and move sooner?
• How was interest created? Where did start and who was the driver?
• What were the challenges they were facing?

As you answer these questions, note which trigger events were unknown until you had a deeper conversation. Also, note the trigger events that you could see before you spoke to them.

Step 2: Create automated system capture key trigger events as they happen

You can research new business opportunities based on trigger events, for little to no cost, by leveraging press releases, websites, and newswires. What keywords would you use to locate these trigger events on the web?

To begin collecting trigger events, I’d you can start by using the following tools:

• Owler is the free competitive intelligence platform you can use to uncover competitive insights, news, and alerts.
• Google Alerts is a free tool track company name and any keywords you choose.
• LinkedIn can get updates for individual, company profiles announcements, news, job postings, status updates
• Twitter for @company @product @people mentions. You can also use #hashtag based search for triggers and company names.
• Edgar, SEC filings and listen to earnings calls (if they are public companies)
• InsideView – a paid sales intelligence platform that delivers triggers in real-time.

*I’ve used Owler instead of Google alerts for eight months and I find it helpful. I like the daily snapshot that emails me news and alerts on companies. It also helps me track my industries, competitive information, customer news, and potential customer news.

Step 3: Start using trigger events for better and more lead generation 

Understanding trigger events can help your development of timely and relevant messages. Relevance is one of the most difficult things to achieve with sales, marketing lead generation outreach but trigger events can help a great deal. For more on this read 5 Lead Nurturing Tips to Create Relevant and Engaging Emails.

Triggers help you understand a potential opportunity to focus your message and be more relevant and helpful. Some ways you can use could in include the following ideas:

• Give the sales team resources and related messaging based on triggers
• Sending emails with links to articles that might be potentially relevant based on triggers
• Creating special offers for potential clients who are experiencing specific trigger events
• Posting links to relevant content on your social media pages to capture those experiencing those triggers to engage with your further

Conclusion

Using trigger events with your account based marketing and selling can help your sales team be more efficient and effective. Why? You’re putting the law of inertia to work in your favor, and that can help shorten your average sales cycle. Also, you’ll spend more time connecting with people who have a higher likelihood of having a motivated need for you have to sell.

I’ve learned it works best to start simple. Begin with some basic trigger events and then build upon your foundation over time. Remember it’s an iterative process. You want first to crawl, then walk and then run.

Are you using trigger events? I’d love to hear your comments, experiences, and tools you use.

You may also like:

30 Types of Sales Trigger Events and How to Track Them

What Are Trigger Events And How To Use Them Effectively

How to Leverage Trigger Events for better leads and Faster Sales

5 Lead Nurturing Tips to Create Relevant and Engaging Emails

The post How to Use Trigger Events for More and Better Leads appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

When I’ve talked with marketers about their B2B lead generation results, I’ve heard statements like, “We’re generating a ton of leads, but they aren’t converting” or “We need to increase quantity” or “We need to generate more qualified sales leads.”

Marketers spend a lot of time and effort doing inbound marketing but they often struggle getting those leads to convert into pipeline opportunities and customers after they hand them off to sales.

In this post, I’ll share proven ways get better opportunities from your lead generation. Because there’s so much to share, I’m splitting this post into two parts with today’s post featuring the first eight.

1. Create a universal lead definition. 

If you are trying to measure lead generation and you don’t have a universal lead definition (ULD), which is an agreement what the word “lead” means, you won’t be successful. This point is particularly the case in high-growth organizations, where the number of leads is growing all the time. Without a ULD, salespeople will have a tendency to focus on the companies they already know and relationships they previously had and ignore the others. They need to keep their numbers up and don’t trust uncertain leads to move the needle.

To get past this, you have to sit down with the sales team and ask, what are the major things that you need to know for you to feel that something is viable?  These are the key points of information that sales often wants to know about a lead:

• Role in the organization
• Their role/authority is in the buying process
• Their motivation
• Stage of investigation

It’s important to remember that the first definition process is iterative. It’s not a one-and-done thing. Revisit the universal definition and make changes. And be asking questions, including “are we asking the right questions?”

2. Use your empathy.

When you’re in the trenches, it’s easy to get caught up in marketing acronyms, data, and analytics. What you need to remember is that, ultimately, your lead generation comes down to connecting with people.

This personal connection comes down to one idea — empathy. Learn about the importance of putting the empathy back into customer interactions, and then read some simple strategies for achieving empathetic marketing.

3. Use the phone. 

The phone is the gold standard for qualifying most leads. I’ve found that you could e-mail, do web profiling, lead scoring, and measure all these touch points. But in the end, if you want to know something, you need to pick up the phone, talk to someone, and engage them in a conversation. Also, if you plan on doing account-based marketing (ABM), this is key a requirement.

4. Follow-up about potential customer’s motivation first.

One of the mistakes I see in lead handoff is that sales will notice that someone downloads a whitepaper. Then they do a follow-up call and want to set up an appointment. Nope. That’s not going to get you anywhere. You want to be able to engage them in more of a discussion rather than trying to make an immediate qualification.

To do that, you need to ask a question that helps you understand their motivation: What question were you hoping to answer by downloading our white paper or what motivated you to download our white paper? The next question is, was that you were asking the question, or was that someone else in your company asking the question? The goal is to be a trusted advisor or a relevant resource to your audience until they move to the point of being ready to talk about initiatives or a project.

Instead of trying to sound interesting to others, be interested in them.
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 5. Start re-engaging your old leads now.

Consider going back to your 3-month-old or old leads and re-engage them in some meaningful way. My research has shown that about 70-80% of leads marketers generate end up getting lost, ignored or discarded.

Rather than continually struggling to find new leads for the sales team, marketers must develop a lead re-engagement process that requires the sales team to return slow or unwanted sales leads to the marketing team. The key is looking back to your past marketing activities to find the gold lost in the sales pipeline. If you want to make a difference in this year, go back to review the leads you generated last year last year, and there’s a lot of opportunities there.

6. Learn what qualifies as lead nurturing.

What is and isn’t lead nurturing? A silly question, I know, yet it’s one that marketers often answer incorrectly. This concept of lead nurturing is more nuanced than it seems. Lead nurturing involves providing prospects with relevant and valuable information and helping them on their buying journey and adding value regardless if they ever buy from you. This specialized treatment is much more likely to result in a conversion than sending out generic promotional emails. Learn the exact definition of lead nurturing, and read some examples of what does and doesn’t make the mark.

Lead nurturing is consistently sharing relevant and valuable content with viable prospects.
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7. Tip Filter content by role and by the stage of the buying process.

Executives get a lot of similar content. But if you can demonstrate that you’ve done filtering on their behalf, you can get through to them. I’ve found that readership will up significantly by sending one targeted piece to leads rather than a generic newsletter targeted to everyone.

Begin by asking your sales team:

• The questions do your customers ask most often?
• What are they likely concerned with now?
• How likely issues are they facing?

Find content — such as articles, blogs, and white papers — that addresses these issues. Pass this content by your sales team, and ask them whether their customers would value it. As much as you can, repurpose content. For instance, white papers can be transformed into articles and articles into blog posts.

Once you’ve determined who they are, you need to support a continuing conversation. For example, if you have a Webinar, you send them a follow-up email with more information and then call to ask, did you find that webinar helpful? Did it bring up other questions?

8. Connect with leads frequently and relevantly. 

To remain relevant to people during the nurturing process,
you have to be consistent. My threshold for consistency is to reach out to leads at least once a month. Different marketers have different thresholds, but I would say that quarterly isn’t enough to be remembered—there is just too much noise in the way. For more tips read 6 Ideas to Create More Relevant Lead Nurturing Emails

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10 Ways to Optimize Your Lead Conversion Rate

The post 16 Proven Ways to Get Better Opportunities Now (Part 1) appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Marketers spend a lot of time and effort generating inbound leads, but they often struggle getting those leads to convert into sales opportunities and customers after they hand them off to sales.

In this post, I’ll share 16 proven ways get better sales opportunities from your lead generation and account-based marketing. There’s so much to share, I split this post into two parts (read part 1 with tips 1-8 here), and today is part 2, featuring tips 8-16.

8. Nurture longer-term leads frequently and relevantly. 

To remain relevant to people during the nurturing process, you have to be consistent. My threshold for consistency is to reach out to leads at least once a month. Different marketers have different thresholds, but I would say that quarterly isn’t enough to be remembered—there is just too much noise in the way. For more tips read 6 Ideas to Create More Relevant Lead Nurturing Emails

 9. Educate and help with your lead nurturing. 

Most case studies and whitepapers have a sales edge to them. That won’t work for lead nurturing. The content must be educational and helpful. One partner worked with an outside publisher to develop educational Webinars and brought in some editorial support to help them develop some thought leadership pieces that didn’t focus on products or sales.

Share information that sticks with them. Give your potential customers educational content that helps them grow as an individual or a company. Here’s a nurturing litmus test: Can prospects benefit from the information you provide, regardless of whether they buy from you? Read more on stop cold calling and start do lead nurturing

Educate and help with your lead nurturing. Share information that sticks with them.
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10. Use third parties to add credibility.

Most marketers try to generate all the content they send to leads themselves. But third parties can do that work for you and, more importantly, validate what you are doing in the marketplace. For example, one partner started partnering with analysts that covered their industry. They paid a fee to re-purpose the research and shared it with their target audience.

Meanwhile, linking to third-party media articles costs you nothing. You don’t need to get permission to send hyperlinks to items that you think are relevant. It helps to personalize the emails. For example, you could write, I saw this article in IndustryWeek that I thought you might find to be relevant based on our last conversation. Having precise profiles of the different leads means that you can automate that process. Read how the halo effect drives lead generationn.

11. Build trust and connection from a single voice. 

Remember that people pay attention to who is sending them emails. Anonymous general info@ email addresses may save money and be scalable, but they don’t build connections. The re-engagement or nurturing process has to start with a human being. You need to have a person behind the email and the phone call. And it should be the same person. Our goal is to build the relationship through people to the point to where the lead is sales ready and then hand that link off to the next person.

Customers pay attention to who is sending them emails. People buy from people, not companies.
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12. Market to their role, not their title. 

It seems like everyone is a vice president these days. You need a quick process to identify the person’s function and role in the company rather than going the by title. With a partner, we developed a method for determining a contact’s role and function in the enterprise based on a series of conversations. Unless you do that, you don’t have a way to segment them accurately and send them the right content.

13. Nurture accounts/organizations, not just people. 

It’s important to have a technology platform that supports account based marketing so that you can track all activities with all leads inside an organization. Especially with B2B, selling happens at a corporate level and a business unit degree in addition to an individual level. You need to be able to track interactions to be able to determine the program of selling the entire organization.

Give prospects tools and content to help them have crucial conversations inside their company.
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 14. Create a clear connection between marketing and sales. 

The point at which marketing hands a lead off to sales is like a relay race: It’s important to keep moving fast without dropping the baton. At one partner, we got sales to commit to contacting all leads within 48 hours if they had the following three things:

• The sales lead conforms to the universal lead definition
• Confirmation that the lead wants to speak to a sales representative
• Qualification information for each lead

It’s important to document the process so that both sales and marketing can track all steps and evaluate the process objectively

 15. Begin marketing and sales “huddles” to gauge progress.

A football team would never think of skipping the huddle between plays. Sales and marketing should view their work together in the same way. They need to talk frequently about what’s happening with their leads if they want to see ROI. It’s important to close the loop on every lead and to discuss ways to improve the process. In my experience, sales and marketing should huddle on leads at least once a month. Here are some questions to ask:

How many of the sales leads we’ve given you in the past two weeks are active?

Have you talked to them and are you moving forward?

It’s also important to celebrate wins together as part of these huddles. You need to feel that you are all part of the same team. When that happens, you start seeing improvements at all levels. For example, one partner had an administrative person at the meetings enter information about leads into the CRM system as people were talking. And soon sales began to see why they needed to capture accurate information about leads in the system. If they do it, they know that nurturing will happen on their behalf.

A football team wouldn't skip the huddle between plays. Neither should sales and marketing.
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16. Bring your passion for creating a better future for your team.

Building clarity around the lead process helps build your passion for making a difference in your organization. It creates closer ties between marketing and sales and helps sales do its job better than ever before. You will begin qualifying leads in a disciplined and rigorous way. And that brings a significant improvement in revenue generated from marketing. Read more on Where’s the Passion in B2B Marketing?

The post 16 Proven Ways to Get Better Opportunities Now (Part 2) appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Do you know what CEOs want most from B2B marketers? They want clarity about marketing results.

CEOs lament, “Why can’t I see clear measures and ROI from our marketing?” They expect their marketing leaders to provide clear metrics and be accountable to meeting their numbers just like their sales leaders.

These CEOs get frustrated because their marketing leaders share metrics like sales lead activity KPIs, engagement reports, and some squishy metrics around a brand that aren’t tied directly to revenue.

The State of B2B Marketing Metrics

For example, I read this chart in via MarketingCharts about the State of B2B marketing metrics. They report, “The majority of senior B2B marketers are using basic marketing analytics tools such as web analysis (91%) and spreadsheets (80%)…” citing a recent report [download page] from Regalix.

Additionally, I found this great comment from Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions  in TrustRadius’s new 2016 Buyer’s Guide to Marketing Automation. She sheds light on why this is such an issue. Ardath said:

They [marketers] have a hard time proving value, as they cannot tie to revenue. Many only can do last-touch attribution. They lose visibility once a lead moves into the sales realm. Marketing is often removed once it goes into sales, which is a mistake. There’s no continuous thread.

Read on to learn what you should measure.

You can start working on these six key marketing measures now. I’ve seen marketers who really dig in and answer these big picture questions get an edge. Also, they ultimately they get bigger budgets and have more influence inside and outside their companies.

6 B2B Marketing Measures that Will Give You an Edge

Here are six big picture questions you can answer work on solving and measuring to give you an edge help your CEO get clarity.

1. What’s the impact are your marketing investments making on sales productivity? On the sales pipeline? On revenue velocity?
2. What’s your return on your marketing investment (ROMI)? How much are you putting in marketing and what are you getting out in revenue? The difference between these two numbers gets expressed as a percentage.
3. How many and what percentage of your new customers are marketing generated (i.e. what customers started via a marketing lead). Also, this measurement is easier to track if you have a closed loop system.
4.  What has your marketing done to help shorten our time-to-revenue? What has your marketing done to lower the combined expense-to-revenue ratio of sales and marketing activities?
5.  How much revenue can you attribute to sales leads coming from your marketing or lead generation efforts over a given period?
6. What’s your customer acquisition cost (CAC)?  What’s the total cost of your lead account based marketing or generation efforts during a particular period? This number includes Marketing team total compensation, Vendors, marketing technology, costs, and materials)

Conclusion

I’ve suggested 6 B2B marketing measures to you and edge and give your CEO clarity. These are high-level measures will are supported by more detailed metrics you need to dig in to gather and use with your team and share with other departments. Please comment and share your insights with fellow readers. What B2B marketing metrics are most important for CEOs?

You might also like:

Lead Generation That Converts Leads into Sales Opportunities
Going beyond the sales lead
31 Tips for Improving Sales and Marketing Lead Generation Alignment

The post 6 Metrics That Will Get You an Edge and Your CEO Clarity appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

What are the five ways you can immediately improve your account based marketing (ABM) and selling?

I recently did an interview on CRMRadio.today with Jim Obermayer founder of Sales Lead Management Association and Funnel Media Group.

In the interview, we talk a little shop about the fundamentals of account based marketing, what’s new (and unchanged) in the world of the complex sale, and how empathy marketing is the way forward.

Here’s a transcript of that discussion:

Paul:  Welcome once again to another episode of CRM Radio Today; the voice of CRM today and tomorrow. It’s a live streaming weekly program right here on the Funnel Radio Channel for at work listeners brought to you by the Sales Lead Management Association and many others with your host Jim Obermayer, hey Jim!

Jim:  Hi, we’ve got Brian Carroll on today, and we’re going to talk about five ways to improve account based marketing and selling. In a world where account based marketing and selling it seems to be permitting so many discussions, every time I turn around I hear someone talking about it, it’s backed I think by the expanding technology choices that are out there.

I thought I would go to one of the experts of the industry Brian Carroll. He is an evangelist, speaker, author who wrote the best-selling book – Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. I’ve got a dog-eared copy, and he’s got a very, very well-known B2B lead blog with 20,000 people on his LinkedIn group. He recently finished as a chief evangelist over at MECLABS, and he’s now helping B2B companies understand and execute some of their modern demand generation chores so I thought we would tap Brian right away to talk about this.

Brian, what are the five ways to immediately improve account based marketing and selling? 

Brian: So the five things are getting sales and marketing collaborating, not just aligning but collaborating, re-engaging past leads; so going further with relationships you have at the back end. Third is being able to know the lead scoring approach that really works. The fourth thing is being able to nurture your customers more effectively and instead is using your empathy to put yourself really in the buyer’s shoes.

Jim:  Empathy, huh?

Brian:  Yeah.

Jim:  Well we covered lead nurturing today that’s why Paul said there’s a thread that’s going through these things with David Lewis over at Demand Gen International. He’s got his program on the show at 9:30 on the channel at 9:30 this morning, we went through the whole lead nurturing thing. But let’s tackle each one of these as we get into it but before we get there, tell us what you are doing now that you’ve left MECLABS, and you are back loose in the marketing world so to speak as Brian Co.

Brian:  Yeah, so I am doing three things. I am speaking and teaching what I’ve learned through my 20 years’ experience and working with the complex sale and B2B lead generation. I am doing consulting and so working with companies on growth strategies to help them get more out of their existing lead generation budgets. And third I am researching a new book which is going to be around empathetic marketing, and so I am in the process of running field test and experiments with companies both B2B and then also we are testing in nonprofits.

Jim:  Well that should be really interesting. I look for to that. Do you have any date or publisher yet for that?

Brian:   I don’t. Right now we are validating the research and so as things progress I’ve already had the framework and several publishers interested, but I really wanted to ground what we are talking about based on real results and what works.

Jim:  Well good, I can’t wait to go ahead and read that one when it comes out with all of the new technology behind it I am sure that you… considering that it’s coming from you I am sure there will be solid research behind it that will make the case so to speak.

So let’s take a look at this account based marketing that you seem to know quite a bit about, and you mentioned there are five ways.

First of all, you say getting collaboration between sales and marketing, can you delve into that a little bit more for us?

Brian:   Yeah, so there are three things to get clarity around, and I think the first thing when you are executing account based marketing is getting a common language, and that would be around your ideal customer profile.

Within that, two of the personas that are driving that and I find quite a few companies don’t have a unanimous agreement between marketing and sales as they are executing programs. So account based marketing, it’s essential, and it is part of your process because some of the accounts that sales teams may choose may not align well with the company’s ultimate growth strategy and vice versa. And so we need to be really clear on who’s an ideal customer, why they are, what are the attributes?

And then as you develop your segmentation, your list, your approach, that’s important, the other is getting clear on how sales and marketing are working together and that’s creating service-level agreements. And you know what? When I encounter account based marketing, there are three flavors.

Some companies are doing lead focused operating and they are making the transition account based marketing. Companies are doing some account based marketing and lead focused marketing. And then there is those that are focused purely on key accounts, and that’s how they do things.

And so the common language getting alignment and then with this it would be clear and having a service-level agreement of what is sales doing, what is marketing doing and how do they collaborate to ensure that no account is missed and that there are no critical missteps that happen regarding engaging and building those relationships. To its core, account based marketing is really about building relationships.

Jim:  I like everything you said there. I think the ideal customer profile which sounds so common, but I go on sales calls, and a salesperson says oh, we’ve got the entire team going to listen to our presentation today, well who is on the entire team?

Well, we’ve got executives that are on the team, we’ve got the product managers that are on the team, we’ve got engineers that are on the team and the customer service people who are on the team. I would ask well what kind of messaging are you getting for those five different people, and they scratch their head, they say well it’s a sales message, and so I hope it is for each one of them because each one of them has different needs; very, very interesting. I also like your service-level agreement that you get from people.

Brian:  Yes.

Jim: That service-level agreement between sales and marketing I call it the rules of engagement of follow-up and reporting; etcetera, etcetera, so that’s great. What about the second part here? –

What was your second item here? Was it re-engaging past leads?

Brian:   Past leads and past accounts. And so one of the fastest opportunities to drive revenue when you’re doing account based marketing is to engage people that already know you and to re-engage them.

For some reason, an account didn’t buy, and there is research from the Corporate Executive Board, MHI Global looking at how customers buy and really what we are up against more often than not is no decision. So you are up against the status quo and for whatever reason an initiative didn’t move forward, it got slowed down. And so what I find is the salespeople are focused on the next quarter or the next quarter after that so about two quarters or half a year.

And so if something’s not moving forward, accounts feel there’s an opportunity closing in that timeframe, I find that they let up a bit, and so this is a great opportunity for marketing to begin re-engaging these past opportunities. And how do they further the conversation? Maybe a person left, maybe a company went through acquisition, there are all kinds of different things.

And so what I found is that even when people purchased from competitors, you can go back and re-engage, after implementation and after a period of time. Actually, last week did a webinar, and I was teaching a case study of a company that found 40% of their new business, their new revenue was coming from leads that were over a year old. And 20% of their new revenue was coming from the leads that were less than a year old so my point being is that these longer-term accounts that have gone dormant for whatever reason are really the next best place you can find opportunity.

Jim:  Those old leads are very valuable. And the research I’ve done for the years working for several of the inquiry measurement companies, sales lead management companies that are out there. I found consistently 45% of all the people who inquire you can consider qualified because they say they are going to buy something whether it’s your product or another product, they are going to buy something.

And depending on what your market share is you might only close 10 or 15% of those buyers but the rest of them are still in the marketplace – 22, 15, 10 to 15% buy in three months, 22 to 26% buy in six months and 45% buy within a year. That all depends on the sales cycle, how long the sales cycle is. If the sales cycles are 18 months to two years you’re going to find a lot of those decisions get pushed off and yet salespeople are merrily trotting off looking for the next hanging fruit – very interesting. I scribbled all your five things down right at the beginning which was a great part there.

What about the lead scoring that you had mentioned?

Brian:  Yes so right now with lead scoring, the thing that I found companies are struggling with is when they implement marketing automation. And they are doing things with behavioral or predictive lead scoring and predictive analytics and account marketing or segmentation etc.

Most companies I talk to say they aren’t 100% satisfied that these tools give them what they need to prioritize where they put in the human touch, whether you have your sales development reps as part of your account based marketing, or your field sales teams engage.

I taught last year at Dream Force, and I was recently up at an event in Toronto and in a room of 250 or 300 account based marketers, I might just have two or three hands raised up, that they are happy with their lead scoring. So this is a big problem, and the problem is I found is that we need to be clear on at what point is a lead or an account is sales ready.

So when I am talking about leads, I am talking about qualified accounts and opportunities. And you can have multiple leads under a single account. So with your lead scoring program, what you need to be clear on is based on your universal lead definition, for you to be 100% satisfied that you’ve got those 5 to 7 must have questions your sales team needs, feel comfortable calling a lead, giving you feedback that you have that answered.

I recommend people get clear on the universal lead definition and then begin layering that into the predictive scoring. Otherwise what you will continue getting is their sales team will look at scored leads, and they will cherry pick them, and they will pick the ones that appear the most qualified or that they know the best because they are trying to prioritize their time based on what’s giving them the most effective selling time. What salespeople really need with account-based marketing is more effective selling time with qualified opportunities and accounts.

Jim:  That’s what the salesperson always asks for. We are going to take a quick break here and just a word from our commercial sponsors and then we will get back to the other two items that you had mentioned out of the five ways to immediately improve account based marketing. We have been speaking to the author and evangelist Brian Carroll. Paul over to you!

[Break]

Paul: All right after all that let’s get back to Jim and his guest!

Jim:  We are speaking with Brian Carroll the author and entrepreneur and speaker and the author of B2B Lead Blog that’s www.b2bleadblog.com and Brian’s been turned loose back… you’ve always been out there but your back on your own in the industry, we are happy to have you back out there Brian. And he’s been attacking the subject; five ways to immediately improve account based marketing. He hit the first three in our first half of the program now we are getting back to the last two. Brian?

Brian:  Yes, we are going to be talking about the last two which are really around nurturing your customers more effectively and then how you can use your empathy to reconnect. And I can give some examples of that as well.

Jim: Excellent! So nurturing? Is nurturing only email? Is also nurturing mail? Is nurturing telemarketing? Is it all of the above?

What’s the most effective way to nurture people today?

Brian:  I think lead nurturing is about having continuous meaningful communication with viable potential accounts or customers and doing that regardless of their timing to buy. And you know, what you really are looking to do is add value and help people and help your customers progress through their buying journey and making that decision do they even need to buy? And what would be the best approach in identifying the problem?

So email is currently the favorite tactic we as marketers use for nurturing but I think that the best pairing is combining email with the phone, levering marketing automation to help you focus on the relevancy piece. And also being able not to send through a blast cannon of your marketing automation or email system, the same message to everybody. And so this is being relevant, and that you are focused on specific personas, you are differentiating.

Also, you can differentiate based on industry and segments and so it’s very important not to focus just on channels or focus on content because those are just really the ways. But we’ve got to get clear about what we are really trying to do, is help that customer goes through their buying journey and progression. And we are naïve to think that nurturing is one person, or one company is going to do that.

We need to have them not just have conversations with us but have those crucial conversations that need happen inside their companies to make a decision. And this is a big thing with account-based marketing where we have a complex sales is five or more five, 15, in some cases 25 people or more will be involved in that buying process. So you’re not just nurturing one person, you are looking to nurture multiple individuals in an organization.

Jim:  Boy, that first statement was so succinct, meaningful communication with qualified buyers where you are adding value to the buyer in their process and their trip to buy this product – my words. But you’ve got me writing faster than I can write clearly here which is one of the better explanations I’ve heard about nurturing. What combination do you recommend in nurturing?

What is your opinion about those nurturing devices?

Brian: Yeah, so there’s a lot of different things. I would say the approaches for nurturing in your toolkit include email, the phone whether it’s done through sales development reps, inside sales, your field sales team, then you have events which there is a myriad. It could be live in person events, it could be webinars, it could be workshops, and so the other piece is direct mail. So where you can send and for some people in your audience I mean it’s never because people aren’t sending direct mail. But I’m talking about things where it might be a handwritten note. You might be sending someone a copy of a best-selling book you say I read this book, I thought about you, and I loved this book, it helped me it might help you.

But what you are really looking to do is to progress the relationship. And within all these, so salespeople or inside salespeople, content gives you a valid business reason to call. I’ll provide an example of what is not a nurturing call. I get these calls frequently because I’m keeping up with the industry, I’m downloading e-books, and I am reading different things.

And so what isn’t nurturing is sending me an autoresponder that’s after I download a white paper it’s offering me a demo. And the great thing about marketing automation, it allows us to be real efficient and very responsive, but the problem is that people were assuming that my interest was moving immediately to demo and in a way it was like asking me on the first day before we even had said hello.

I think what we need to do is look at how we are communicating with customers, and I would start right now with your sales team who is often struggling after they talk to someone, things are progressing, but there is always that question in their mind of how do I progress this conversation?

What isn’t nurturing is calling to say: “I am calling to touch base” or “I am calling to follow up.” That isn’t because really what it feels like to your buyer, to your customer is I am really checking to see if you are ready to buy yet. I am really ready to see how far you’ve moved along. And instead, it can be: I was giving you a call because I saw you attended our webinar and what I want to do is provide a summary to put together key talking points.

We heard feedback from other attendees that they wish to their team were here so we put together a summary for you to one – have as notes and two – pass along if you think it would be helpful. It’s a whole different conversation because at its core what you are trying to do in nurture as I said it’s really about helping people go through their journey.

Jim: Okay, that makes much more sense, you are not asking for the sale. As you close things you are providing value.

Now, what’s our fifth item here for us – empathy?

Brian:  So empathy is our intuition as marketers to be able to connect. And for our listeners out there who are in sales, who are in marketing, you’re with a group of friends, and you are sitting there talking. I just had a situation where I was out with my wife and a college professor, a therapist, a pediatrician, an attorney and they are like what do you do? I described I was in marketing.

You could just feel the energy like oh – that means you are trying to manipulate people, and you are pushy, or they have all of these different things in their mind. And the reality is that those in marketing and sales, we have this reputation with customers because of what other people’s behavior has been. And what we need to do and what empathy is about it’s not feeling what someone else is feeling, it’s identifying how they are feeling with how you felt in that same situation because we can’t honestly feel how others feel. But our empathy allows us to feel that and so if someone’s crazy busy and they are overwhelmed we can acknowledge that.

Some examples would be for example thinking of email communication, and I could give you an example of what isn’t being empathetic and an example of what is empathetic marketing.

Jim: We’ve got two minutes.

Brian:   Okay. So from an email that says: you are just one step away from getting free access to our award-winning software system, quickly make this webinar, and you just hear that it sounds like a sales pitch. And what would happen if we started thinking about all customer and began to do something like this: I noticed that you started the process of getting free access to our tool, but you weren’t able to finish. Are you concerned about giving out your phone number? Are you worried about high-pressure sales tactics and mandatory contracts? We think our product sells itself, so we’re just you to provide you with whatever assistance you need to get up and running whatever way works best for you.

So it’s a whole different approach using empathy and by the way, that’s a real world test. And the first version had 1% of people click through and complete, the other version went to 7% and that was a 395% improvement just by being more empathetic to how that customer is feeling and thinking.

Jim: I would like to try to come back and talk about this on another program sometime. We’ve been speaking with Brian Caroll our entrepreneur evangelist, speaker, writer of the lead generation for The Complex Sale and got a new book coming up and don’t forget his blog. Love to continue but we’ve got another program following us.

How does someone reach you, Brian?

Brian: They can go to the B2B lead blog right through Google, and you can find me and contact me, and I look forward to hearing from our listeners today.

Jim:  You’ve been very helpful today; you’ve been very helpful with your time. Thank you, Brian Caroll, for addressing the subject five ways to immediately improve account based marketing and selling. Paul, over to you!

Paul:  You’ve been listening to another episode of CRM Today; taking a look at CRM today and tomorrow right here on Funnel Radio.

You may also like:

Lead Nurturing: 4 Steps to walking the buying path with your customers
Lead nurturing via email series and content marketing
Content Marketing Tips for Lead Nurturing
You can’t automate trust

The post 5 Ways to Immediately Boost Account Based Marketing (ABM) appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

I had coffee with a potential partner, and our conversation ebbed to us talking about business philosophy, marketing, and lead generation. I talked about freely sharing ideas and helping people. He replied something like,  “I think companies [like yours] give away too many of their trade secrets on their website and blogs. They provide too much information freely. If I wanted to compete or copy you… all I would need to do is read your site or blog. The purpose of a website is to convert, to get people to respond, and generate leads.”

My response

Customers have a general lack of trust of brands, and they don’t want us to treat them as targets. If all we do is focus on getting a conversion and winning the sale, people will tune out or opt out.

Study brands like Slack, MailChimp and Drift. They freely give away ideas, tools, and resources. They focus on helping their customers having a great experience at every step of their journey.

We can learn from marketers like Dave Gerhardt at Drift. Gerhardt shares a story about how his CEO, David Cancel, called him one day and told him “I think we should get rid of our forms.” Read his post, Why We’re Throwing Out All Of Our Lead Forms And Making Content Free.

Gerhardt realized that marketing was becoming more about getting people to convert i.e. fill out forms or jump through the next hoop. According to Gerhardt, this results in us, “treating people like leads and email addresses instead of treating people like people.”

Use your empathy and put yourself in your customer’s shoes. People use the web and social media for research; they’re looking for fresh ideas, insight, and actionable information. That’s why you shouldn’t put your best thinking behind web forms and registration pages.

When you give people what they value or find useful without expecting anything in return, you build a connection and eventually trust.

My potential partner was still skeptical.

A lesson from NASCAR: The Driver not the car

I have a friend who is a huge NASCAR fan. He loves the competition because it’s more about the driver and team than the car. All the cars are pretty much the same. It’s the driver and the crew that make the difference. I think it’s like that with business today.

Most companies sell the same basic car. The driver and crew in this metaphor can be seen as your thought leadership, your ideas and ultimately how well you help your customers that set you apart from others. That’s what your clients remember. And today you’re features and benefits may stand out, but sooner than later everyone’s car has the same features or at least they claim they do.

This concept is particularity important for companies engaged in a complex sale, where up to 70% of a customer’s perception of your brand reputation comes from their interactions with your people. I believe that the individuals and companies who succeed today are those who learn faster and teach/help others with what they know more efficiently.

You can leverage some of your ideas to help people and build trust.

Forget the sales pitch 

Trust gets earned by being helpful, relevant and honest with your potential customer. Don’t worry about the sale pitch when you’re sharing ideas and focus on building trust. Remember what I said about “not expecting anything in return?” Your content or ideas should educate, and inform and be valuable even if people never buy from you. That’s the acid test. Those who find your ideas helpful and useful will be able to figure out that they can contact you and ask for more of what sparked their interest.

What happens to those that keep the ideas to themselves?

Jure Cuhalev has some great thoughts on giving away ideas and what happens when people hoard them. Cuhalev writes, “…I have a theory of what happens to them. They start losing their ability to produce new ideas since their current idea preoccupies them. They think about it all the time to the point that they cannot think of anything fresh.” I don’t disagree. When I give away ideas and content, I find that can come back to me improved.

Think like a designer. Give ideas away to improve them

David Kelly is the founder of IDEO and one of one of the most visible product designers in the world, especially in the world of high technology.  The following quotation from Kelly goes well beyond design. When you read it to replace “designers” with your role (i.e. CEO, Marketer, Seller and so on).

According to Kelly, “Successful designers just send out their vision to the world; and then, when somebody else builds on it, that’s okay. They’re not protective of their ideas because they’re so used to having ideas. A creative designer has an idea a minute. Publicizing an idea is a way to improve on the notion—someone else can build on it, expand it. If you’re fluent with ideas, as most design people are, you don’t have to be fearful. You don’t protect your one good idea because you’re afraid you’ll never have another good one.”

For example, Elon Musk and Tesla Motors (TSLA) are treating their patents as open source. For them it makes sense. When you can you can invent ideas faster than you can patent them, why not keep ahead by developing and sharing your ideas and secrets?

Again, it’s not the car. It’s the crew and driver.

You might also like:

101 simple ways to build trust

Big Ideas by Seth Godin

7 Ideas for Building Trust in Sales, Rain Selling Blog

The Designer’s Stance an interview with David Kelly, Stanford

Tesla Giving Away Its Patents Makes Sense

The post How giving useful ideas and secrets builds trust appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

How can you drive fast growth with marketing?

In this interview, you’ll hear from Jim Fowler, founder of Owler on what he’s learned to grow fast. Owler – a free competitive intelligence platform – went from 0 to over 500,000 users. And they’re on pace to exceed a million users by the end this year.

I first met Fowler when he was the co-founder of the cloud-based contact management platform Jigsaw which he sold to Salesforce.com for $175 million (now Data.com).

Writers Note: The transcript has was edited for publication.

Transcript

Brian: Jim, tell us about your organization 

Jim: Sure, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be on the show. Owler is a competitive intelligence platform. It’s used by all business professionals, but our biggest participants are sales and marketing folks that really need to keep their finger on the pulse of their competitive grasps. That means, their competitors, their customers, their prospects, their partners, etc.

The general trend here is there’s just so much information out there. Our goal with Owler to become a must use tool that gives a lot of very crisp information in a way that people can absorb it. That’s the key thing is that we’re a tool that helps people outsmart their competition of the competitive intelligence platform.

Brian:  Your brand name is derived from your last name, right?

Jim: One of my marketers came up to me as we were naming the company, and we were looking at a bunch of different names like Jigsaw.  I love that name. I mean, its a simple word putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Yeah, it worked great. That was a high bar to get over. She came to me and went, “Fowler, I’ve got the perfect name for our company: Owler.” I laughed and said, “Yeah, ha ha. Funny.” Thought she was joking. She’s like, “No, I’m serious. First of all, it’s five letters. Number two is that owl, wisdom, and people will be able to spell it. Most people aren’t going to associate it with your last name, which is true.” You’re more astute than most, Brian.

I was embarrassed by it at first, but now I love it. Of course, we have a cool little owl. By the way, the Owl’s name is Jimf, so Jimf Owler. Any of your listeners who are users of Owler, and I imagine there are thousands, they’ll be familiar with our owl that we call Jimpf.

After you sold Jigsaw to Salesforce.com why didn’t you decide to ride off into the sunset? 

What inspired you to start Owler?

Well, that is a great question. I can tell you there’re a few times along this path that I’ve wondered that same thing. Startups are not easy. I kind of equate a startup with a bag of problems. There’s just a bunch of issues to solve. You know, I was still a pretty young guy. Jigsaw was a great acquisition. It was a $175-million-dollar acquisition at that time. By far and away the largest Salesforce has ever done. Now, that’s pocket change for those guys. They’re doing massive stuff.

I think that you realize that you don’t really do it for the money, especially once you’ve had an exit. You realize that the creation, the ability to go out and make something out of nothing and create a company that employs a lot of people, but more importantly, build products that people love. I mean, that’s what gives me a charge. I’m really pleased.

At Owler, we’ve doubled our user base over the last ninety days to 500,000 active users. We’re going to blow past a million active users on those things by the end of the year. We’re starting to look at ten million, which is about one-tenth the size of LinkedIn. That becomes a globally important company. I think that’s what really drives founders is that you want to … It’s like being a chef. You want to cook food that people love, and when you found a company you want to create a product or products that people just love. It’s a big endorphin hit.

How did you acquire so many active users so quickly?

Yeah. There’re a couple of things that I’ve learned both at Jigsaw and Owler. The first answer for all your listeners out there is it’s never easy. That sounds great, but what you need to understand is back in ’13 and ’14 as we struggled a way to get a product that was really engaging, there were many days where … When you first asked why didn’t you ride out into the sunset, there were many days during that time where I just went, “Why am I doing this?”

If you’re feeling pain, that’s the normal situation. Jigsaw never grew this fast. Jigsaw was more of linear growth. This is really hockey sticking, which is super fun.

The on the ground advice I will give is the first order of business is to dial really in SEO. SEO is something that everyone hears and understands, search engine optimization, but that’s the free traffic that you get. Really getting your SEO strategy down is critical. At Jigsaw, we spent a lot of time and effort on paid SEM, search engine marketing, and different types of paid traffic. It’s not only expensive, it just isn’t as effective in our experience as SEO.

There’s always an eighty-twenty rule, by the way, for startups. I’m a big believer that you want to focus on the eighty and then once you become a more mature company focus on the twenty. This is a classic principle that eighty percent of your return is going to come with twenty percent of the effort. And then the last twenty percent of your return is going to require eighty percent of the effort. So make sure that you’re hammering that first eighty percent return with twenty percent of the effort and really focusing on that.

I find it’s with all of the traffic driving things that you do. That’s number one, but to me, that’s the one that you cannot disregard. You have to pay attention to SEO.

What are some of the other lessons have you learned along with way?

These are things that most of your listeners probably already heard, but I will reemphasize them because they’re trite and true. I’m a real believer that your product is your marketing. Obviously, if you’re an expensive enterprise product that’s a little bit different because it takes more time to get users, but I still argue that it’s the same.  … Is that you can sit there and beat on all of these different ways to get traffic and users, but when you have a product that people love that is your best marketing because that’s when it starts getting viral.

For us, we found this at Jigsaw, and we’re finding it even more now is that SEO gets people exposed to your product. Then once they do it’s a viral impact, and now the viral side of Owler is what’s making it grow so fast. SEO doesn’t grow exponentially. It grows linearly, whereas viral grows exponentially. You can only get the hockey stick with some sort of viral component. Yes, you can spend a bunch of time with different software that helps get the word out and all that, but I’m kind of old-school in that way that you know it when you see it. When the virality is there, you know it, and when it’s not, it takes time, and you need to keep working on just making sure you have a product that is compelling. I recommend a parallel path on SEO and product optimization.

What do you see is the future of B2B sales marketing?

I would say that the biggest trend that I see … I used to talk about this at Jigsaw, and I’ll continue to talk about it now. Sales people are going to continue to have to become better marketers.

With Jigsaw, we provided a set of contact data so that you could communicate with people directly with phone numbers and business email addresses. I said at the time, what this means is that the people on the receiving end of these communications are going to get more and more and more communications. It’s kind of a funny thing. Sales and marketing, their job is to communicate with people that don’t really want to be communicated with, but they need to be because they need to buy stuff.

I think that we’re going to continue to see the buyers or the receivers of these communications get more and more of it, and it’s become more and harder to rise above the noise. What it means is sales people are going to have to become better marketers. They’re going to have to work hand in hand with marketers to get them.

Marketers, frankly are going to have to become gods, because their job is just getting harder and harder. I mean, people have no attention. We’re in the age of a hundred and forty character limit is all people will read, and this makes the job tough. I just think that with that in mind all of our communication is crisp, simple, scannable data.

For instance, our descriptions of companies are one sentence long. We only allow a hundred and forty character description of a company, because we know people won’t read more than that. I just think understanding these trends is critical regarding future success. It’s going to continue to accelerate, is my prediction.

What would you say to B2B marketers out there who want to help their sales team sell more effectively today?

I’m a big believer that marketing’s number one job is to take away sales people excuses for not making their number.

What you don’t want is you don’t want the finger pointing. You know what I mean? Marketing’s typical, “Hey, I’ve got this budget I spent on it, and sales are so lazy they’re not even following up the leads that I’m driving them,” and sales will sit there and say, “Marketing, you’re sending me crap leads.” As a CEO and knowing both sides of this and having come up through the ranks as a VP of sales and sales person before I founded Jigsaw, I’m just a big believer that it’s all about numbers.

Sales are the most measurable department in your organization after finance. What mind boggles me is how rarely people really measure sales all across the board. They’re getting better, by the way. Data is becoming more available everywhere, but to me, that’s marketing’s job is to take away their excuses. It’s basic funnel management that you need a certain number of leads cranking in. There’s always going to be a little bit of fight around the quality of those leads, but to me that’s just all it really is marketing providing the air cover, being able to bring those leads in in whatever is the most cost effective way. To me, it’s that simple to where you’re just going, “This is a sales issue. This is not a marketing issue.”

I always look at, by the way, is the further part of that … I think the way you want to manage sales is to expect nothing from marketing. Anything you get from marketing is a bonus, and then, of course, it’s the CEO’s job to go hammer marketing to make sure that they’re meeting sales.

I think that when you approach it with those two ways you have a very healthy look at how it’s supposed to work instead of making it adversarial.

Are there any success stories that you could share?

Yeah. Jigsaw we did this really, really well. There was a real healthy tension between marketing and sales, where marketing was really pushing and … I would say that the best way to do it just has a way to manage the leads. I mean, there’s so much software out there now for the marketing … All that marketing automation solutions that have come so, so far since we did it …

Regarding feeding sales, I don’t have any magic pills. There was a sales methodology and is today one that I still recommend that I think your listeners will find interesting. It’s what I call an email sandwich that was very effective as a specific example.

Yeah, tell us more about it.

Yeah. From a sales or marketing … It depends on which function it’s going to align and where in the pipes you are. When you’re out there trying to push new business, you’re trying to take a company from what I call a suspect. We believe that these folks should be buying our products to a prospect, which is we know that they have needed budgets. There’s a lot of communication that goes there.

I’m – again, you’ve heard me use the word old school a little bit … I’m a big believer in this concept of email sandwich. Email, phone call, email. Email, phone call, email. There’re folks out there that love to just email, and there’re folks out there that go, “Oh, email … No, you got to call them.” I’m a big believer in using both of those in a sandwich way.

This is where marketing and sales really need to work together because marketing is usually expert at AB testing messaging to get people to respond to something. Sales are the point of the spear. They’re the ones that are really learning what works and what doesn’t work and have really good communication between these. That’s what we did well at Jigsaw. We’re focusing on our user growth and engagement of billing the database. We’ll do it as well, but I found that this helps sales and marketing get in sync of sales doing kind of the test bed of what works and then marketing finding ways to automate that to marketing automation. To get that first email out and making sure to leave the voice mail so they can hear your voice.

That’s another key thing from a sales perspective is it humanizes the experience. It’s harder and harder to leave voice messages now. Phone systems have changed even since Jigsaw was sold, but there’s still ways to get your voice in front of people that humanizes it. Again, this is building on what I talked about earlier about sales people becoming better marketers.

Then, of course, following with email. I just found these email sandwiches are a simple concept to understand. You test the heck out of them regarding what works with different audiences, but I just find that that brings sales and marketing really closely together, and it’s a structure that everyone understands and can focus on.

Brian: It’s a great suggestion. I think at the age where I believe that we’ve overemphasized, or the pendulum has swung too far to inbound marketing. What you’re advocating is humanizing your brand by having human beings and a human touch connect with your customer. There’s a real person behind the company that the email is coming from, a real person.

Do you have any tips or advice you give to sales or marketing leaders who want to grow revenue rapidly?

I would say that my biggest tip is be absolutely aggressive about your time. The number one mistake that I think I’ve seen marketing and sales people do is they spend time on that nonproducing. The long side of the Pareto principle. They’re not sitting down from the very beginning going, “Okay, what is the twenty percent of our effort that produces eighty percent of the return?” It’s always different for every company regarding what are the things that are going to move it.

To me, I know it sounds formulaic, but I believe this is the problem. What I push as a CEO is what is the twenty percent that’s moving the needle of your effort and then put eighty percent of your time into those programs. Do less, not more. Figure out what works, and don’t go out there and try to put too many balls in the air. I think that’s the number one mistake that I see that can hamper you driving revenue.

The post Fast Growth Marketing: From 0 to 500,000 Users appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Have you ever wondered about how can you use LinkedIn for better lead generation and business
development? In this post, I interview Susan Tatum, Partner at The Conversion Company. I met Susan through following her writing on her blog and her work in the LinkedIn community.

Brian: What inspired you to do your work with LinkedIn?

Susan: To fully answer that question, we have to go way back to my college days where – during a miserable year of studying pre-law – I discovered a passion for using communications to get people to do things. With guidance from my counselor, I switched to the Journalism school and began studying advertising and PR. Psychology and persuasion were a significant part of the curriculum.

Then came a couple of decades of marketing positions – mostly in the technology industry. During that time, we saw massive changes in how people communicate — fax machines, email, websites, blogs, mobile devices and, of course, social media. By then I had my own marketing company and at first, I spent a lot of time explaining to my clients – who were all B2B companies – why they didn’t need to run out and get a Facebook page. I had studied it and couldn’t see a way that Facebook could contribute to a complex B2B buying decision.

But it was obvious to me that another significant change was occurring both in how we get information and how we communicate with each other. So I kept my eye on it, and several years ago I saw LinkedIn begin to morph from a job site to a true business networking site. I knew this was big, but I didn’t know how to use it until around 2010 when I found a couple of people who were successfully using LinkedIn to generate leads, but they were focused on internet marketers and solo-preneurs. I contacted them, and together we modified the process to work in more complex selling situations. Since then my team and I have continued to refine and build on the process.

What are the some of the problems you see people repeating over and over again on LinkedIn? 

I see sales and marketing people trying too hard to automate and template-ize their actions, focusing on quantity and not quality. They’re approaching LinkedIn like a email blast campaign, and this is not what the network is about. As a result, we’re seeing a tremendous amount of what’s spam in inboxes, groups and connection requests. This does not make your prospects want to know more about you.

That’s the most annoying and dangerous mistake I see right now, but I also see many disjointed programs that fail to incorporate all the pieces of LinkedIn. For example, company pages that don’t reflect the brand or are just another place to post social media updates – the same as you would on Facebook. From a marketing perspective, visitors to a company page tend to be further along in the buying process, and this is your opportunity to move them to your website. Another example is personal profiles that don’t even mention what the company or product is about. Yes, these profiles are owned by the individuals; but you can bet your prospects are looking at your subject matter experts and executives, and I’ve yet to run across one who wasn’t willing to help promote the brand with a little help.

What are tips and advice do you have for people want to use LinkedIn more effectively for business development/lead generation?  

It may sound boring, but a little thinking and planning goes a long way. We start all of our engagements by talking about objectives, target audiences, and metrics. Why are you running a LinkedIn program? Who do you want to reach? What do you want them to do? All the usual questions. You also want to get a clear understanding of what’s meant by “lead generation”. Are you trying to drive traffic to a landing page or do you need to develop opportunities for a business development or sales call? Just like any other marketing program, the answers to these questions have a great effect on the actions you’ll want to take on LinkedIn.

If your goal is to drive a lot of traffic somewhere and they need only be marginally qualified (i.e. right title and industry), try sponsored updates and ads. If you’re more interested in engaging and developing the right people, and quality is more important than quantity, here’s my advice:  Think of LinkedIn as a one-to-one channel. Stop sending mass InMails. Do not auto-post. Take advantage of the powerful LinkedIn database to identify individual prospects, learn what drives them and select the best ones before you reach out to them. Prepare your message specifically for them. Don’t expects buyers to self-qualify. That’s your job.

Do you have any tools or template readers can use for inspiration to get things going in the right direction? 

Our blog, www.theconversioncompany.com/blog, contains a wealth of information about strategy and tactics. I recommend subscribing to it. Within the next couple of weeks, we’ll be publishing a LinkedIn Profile Guide that contains some very useful questionnaires and templates.  We’ll announce the availability of that guide on our blog.

Related resources:

How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Leads
Lead Generation: 5 tips to generate leads faster on LinkedIn

The post Tips on how to use LinkedIn for Better Lead Generation appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Writers note – This as a primer for my session at Dreamforce 2016 next week.

We have more marketing channels and more content than ever before, but it’s become harder to actually connect with customers. Today’s crazy-busy customers are weary of pitches, cold emails, hype, and manipulative messages, and as a result, they tune them out.

Neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio stated, “We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.” In our rush to obtain leads, drive opportunities and move the sales needle, it’s too easy to forget that we need to address the emotional needs (fears, hopes, wants, and aspirations) of our customers.

This fact is particularly the case for companies that have a complex sale where B2B buyers face daunting decisions that involve huge risks.

Our customers aren’t saying, “We need solutions.” Instead, they’re saying, “We need to solve a problem.”

So what would happen if we focused on helping them do just that?

I believe you can’t answer that question unless you know precisely what your customers want. We need to let go of our assumptions of what we think they want and put ourselves in their place.

This approach requires empathy, which according to Miriam-Webster, “is the ability to share someone else’s feeling.” To feel what they feel and think what they think. To put it another way, we need to walk in their shoes.

What is empathic marketing?

Empathy is your marketing intuition. Empathetic Marketing is about moving out of our mind and into the mind of the customer. Moving away from business-centric thinking to customer-centric thinking and speaking to our customer’s motivations. It’s built on the following ideas:

• The best marketing feels like helping
• Marketing isn’t something you do to people. It’s something you do for people
• Empathize with your customer’s feelings and walk in their shoes to understand their problems
• Think like your clients when they set out to solve a problem and discover each step they may take to solve that problem
• Understand ways you can help make your customers lives better
• Provide your customers what they want by understanding what motivates them.
• Helping clients identify and solve problems
• Give customers content and expertise that helps them gain clarity
• Empower employees who touch your customers with the resources, training, and tools to really help them

Here’s an overview of 7 ways to practice empathetic marketing. I’ll expand on these points during my Dreamforce session and in future blog posts.

Put your customers first

Instead of trying to sound interesting to others, be interested in them. Understand your customer’s motivation (what they want) and make sure it’s something you can deliver. So much of what we see today are product-centric claims aimed at impressing the prospect. The root word of emotion and motivate is the same. Buyers base most of their actions on feelings and then backfill with logic. That’s why it’s so important to get beyond the product to and speak to the end results and the feelings the buyer seeks.

Listen and seek to understand 

Most people don’t listen with the intent to understand – they listen with the intent to reply. First, we need to get out of the building. Join sales people on customer visits and just listen and seek to understand customer motivations. It’s shocking how little of this happens. Too many marketers rely on survey data or focus groups to tell them how customer’s think and feel, but that’s not enough.

Empathy is not the product of survey data. It helps you intuitively interpret the context and understand the pressures the facing your customer.  The key to understanding another person is empathetic listening – trying to understand everything (including the nonverbal signals) the other person is communicating. What’s emotions are motivating them? You listen for feeling, for meaning, for behavior and other signals.

Stop pushing, start conversing

Focus on developing conversations, not campaigns. Don’t err on the side of pushing our agenda rather than extending an invitation to converse. To the customer, it feels like “somebody wants something from me” rather than “maybe they can help me get what I want.” You need to demonstrate that you’re interested in their world and their motivations. Use empathy maps and personas to understand your customer and how to better connect with them in conversations. For more on this read Copyblogger: Empathy Maps: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head. Invite, listen, engage and recommend.

The best marketing feels like helping (because it is)

Our marketing and lead nurturing are anchored on this idea. As customers, we can feel when someone’s trying to push us to do something. And we also recognize when someone sincerely cares. They’re not trying to push their agenda, and they’re genuinely trying to help us. Ask this as your approach your marketing: Is it how we’d like to be treated? Is this how we’d like a friend or loved one to be treated?

Give content they’ll want to share

This content organically emerges from the first four points of placing the customer first, understanding them, conversing with them and helping them. But so much of today’s content does not do that. We’ve become publishing machines, creating content for content’s sake. Customers don’t need more content. They need useful content that helps them convince colleagues inside their companies to choose a different path. Much of the content I see lacks that empathetic context, and content without empathy is just noise. It’s become very noisy in the B2B marketing.

Remember that proximity is influence

Empower those closest to your customer (your sales team, sales development reps, inside sales, and customer service people) to be able to achieve the points above. We formulate our opinions about companies based on our interactions with their people.

Practice empathy personally to set an example

Be the change you want to see. Our customers are everyone we serve – including our staff and our coworkers. Show how it’s done by practicing empathy yourself. This idea requires a different kind of thinking to drive a different way of doing marketing.

Here’s an example of an A/B test from MarketingExperiments of an email sent to prospects who began a form completion but did not complete it. Note the difference in tone.

The email on the left was “sales speak.”  The tone of the email on the right was changed to be more empathetic and yielded a conversion rate of 7% versus 1.5% for the control email. By addressing the customer’s anxiety (with empathy) through the tone of the email, they saw a 349% increase in total lead inquiries.

I recently wrote about Dave Gerhardt at Drift in this post. Gerhardt shared about how his CEO, called him one day and told him “I think we should get rid of our forms.”

Gerhardt realized that marketing was becoming more about getting people to convert i.e. fill out forms or jump through the next hoop. According to Gerhardt, this results in us, “treating people like leads and email addresses instead of treating people like people.” When you give people what they value or find useful without expecting anything in return, you build a connection and eventually trust.

Closing thoughts

This all may seem altruistic, but it’s not. It has an economic benefit. If we can give customers what they want, we can create a competitive advantage that will reap higher margins and profits.

For example, Slack (currently the fastest growing start-up in history) practices empathy in their marketing and empathy is part of their core values. In this interview, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stated, “It’s very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.”

Additionally, IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest design company. As part of their boot camps, employees are learning how to apply empathy to connect better with colleagues and clients. They’re learning how to tap into their customers’ and colleagues’ feelings and need to come up with better solutions.

IDEO’s Empathy on Edge puts it this way, “When organizations allow a deep emotional understanding of people’s needs to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams and even their organization at large—they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.”

Our job is to make each person we connect with online and offline—feel as if they are the most important person in the room (because they are.)

What are your thoughts?  Do you think empathetic marketing is achievable for you and your organization, why or why not?

Will you join my session at Dreamforce 2016?  It would be great to meet up. Check out How Empathy Will Improve Your Marketing & Sales Pipeline

You may also like

Why Empathetic Marketing Matters and 7 Steps to Achieve It
Podcast: Why Empathetic Marketing Can Give Your Customers An Amazing Experience
Podcast: 5 Ways to Immediately Boost Account Based Marketing (ABM)
How to Put the Customer First in Lead Generation

The post How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

Do you want to get better at social selling or help your sales team do the same?  If not, you should. Here’s why.

B2B marketing has gone through a modernization to align better with how people buy. Now it’s time for sales to step up. According to Jill Rowley, “…we’re long overdue for transformation, a modernization of the way we sell…”

I recently interviewed Jill Rowley Chief Evangelist and startup advisor for #SocialSelling. Jill’s made a huge impact in the marketing automation community. She’s a modern marketing expert and is now applying her innovative thinking to social selling.

Writers Note: The transcript has was edited for publication.

Brian: Jill, can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Jill: Sure, Brian. Thanks for having me today, I’m excited about the discussion. I say I’m a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. The reason is, of the 13 years that I was in software sales, I sold into marketing for 10 of those years.

Because my buyer was marketing for a decade, I really feel like I am trapped in a marketer’s body. Now, for the past three-plus years, I have been helping big and small companies think about social as a channel, and how do they embed social into their selling. I work with big and small companies on how to approach social selling from a programmatic, organizational level.

What inspired you to start social selling?

Wow. I think it was just frustration from the lack of results of other channels, regarding being able to get the attention of my customers. I think even before that it was because social was new to marketing, and marketing was trying to figure it out.

Because I wanted to help my customers, my buyers, with their marketing initiatives, I needed to understand what social marketing was. Also, I saw the potential for social and how it would help me, as an individual salesperson, be where my customers are, be visible and valuable to my customers, to be part of the customer conversation. I definitely saw it as a research tool.

Are you finding salespeople still are being asked to hit the phones, to send out more emails?

Yeah, absolutely. The mandate for most sales organizations is, make more calls, send more emails. They’re hiring more people to do those things, and actually, they’re hiring more junior people who have no business acumen, who have no sales experience, and they’re just doing more. More isn’t more better, I know it’s not grammatically correct, but more relevant is better.

If you look at, contact data has gone to zero. I can get pretty much get anyone’s phone number and email address. And I can send an email and call to anybody. Everybody’s doing it.

Now as a buyer, you’re receiving tons of generic, not-relevant emails. You’re getting a whole series of them, because now there are these automation tools that will automate a cadence, or a series, of emails. By the seventh touch, the seventh one is, “Have I offended you,” or, “Are you stuck under an elephant, has a rhinoceros eaten you?” That’s just ridiculous. These are tactics that are absurd.

Brian: I’m laughing because I’ve received these emails, and it’s painful.

It just seems like it’s getting worse. Why is that?

It’s getting worse, because the technology is now going into the hands of the salespeople, and they’re being measured on more. I think sales leadership really needs to step up.  And sales leadership needs to realize and recognize, that the buyer has changed more in the past ten years than the previous 100. The way that people buy, and go about getting information, has dramatically changed, and the way that we’re selling hasn’t. Really, we’re long overdue for transformation, modernization of the way we sell, to match to how people and companies want to buy.

What are some of the social selling mistakes that you see marketers and salespeople repeating over and over again?

I literally just had this question, being interviewed for a Forrester research report on social selling. The biggest mistake is taking old school tactics and putting them in new school channels. That whole “more” approach, and “all about leads” approach, “my company, my product, my customers, as a salesperson. Not “you, your company, your business objectives.” The “me, me, me” approach is now in social and is being amplified.

It’s frightening. There’s a woman who is an aspiring social seller, and I got an invite to connect with her on LinkedIn, and it was generic. She’s an aspiring social seller, and she sends me a generic invite to connect on LinkedIn. I don’t accept the invite. I reply, and I give her a link to The Art of a LinkedIn Invite.

Essentially, you have to personalize your invites to connect. That aspiring social seller did respond and thanked me for the tip, but unfortunately, my guess is her behavior won’t change. Because she’s in the “more,” she’s in the “just do more, connect with more people, send more tweets, share more content,” and not thinking about more relevant.

How do you see empathy applying to social selling?

Empathy is necessary. You have to look at things through the eyes of your customer. You have to appreciate their point of view. It’s a gift really, I think, being able to look up someone on LinkedIn, and see where they went to university, see what skills people are endorsing them for.

For you, Brian, lead generation, B2B marketing, strategy, CRM. Now I get who you are and what you’re good at. I read recommendations that people write about you. If I’m thinking about where I invest my time, if you’ve got glowing recommendations I want to work with you.

There’s this ability for both salespeople to learn more about their buyers. But at the same time, there’s this ability for buyers to find out more about the salespeople too. They make decisions whether to engage or not based on whether they think that that sales person actually can help them solve their business problems.

Brian: It sounds like it applies to helping people connect better with their customers.

Empathy gives them the ability to build a rapport, to allow for that connection to happen.

Jill: That’s exactly right. An example is, I’m helping someone out at AT&T. He runs sales in their federal group, and he’s been asked by the leader of the public sector team to present to their 4,000 public sector employees on how B2B buying has changed. In doing my research, not just no that broad topic, about how B2B buying’s changed, but I’m looking for indicators of how AT&T’s already changing.

I spent some time on AT&T’s website, and on their blog site, and lo and behold, I found a video interview and a blog post of his boss, of Kay Kapoor. She’s the president of public sector at AT&T. I found this blog post and this video interview with her, and I shared it. It was all about women in tech, which is something I authentically care about.

That’s another thing. If I didn’t authentically care about women in tech, I would never have shared that piece of content. But I authentically care about it, so I shared that interview and blog post of Kay on LinkedIn, and I tagged her. Because I want her to see that, I’m getting to know her. Ultimately, I want to have the conversation with her about how we can take a programmatic approach to social selling within her public sector team, and how I’m the person that she wants to work with if they’re going to invest in social selling.

Are there any other tips you have for our listeners who want to get better at social selling?

Yeah. This is going to sound harsh, but I always say if you suck offline, you’re going to suck more online.

Social amplifies both the good and the bad. Today, your job isn’t to rush anyone to the signature, to go for the kill, to hunt and farm your customers. You’re a facilitator of a journey. Your job is to help the customer solve the problem, achieve the goal, and if it’s your solution that they need, your job is to facilitate that purchase process. The mindset has to start there.

This absolutely requires training. There’s no question in my mind, regardless of whether you’re a millennial who has grown up with digital devices and access to social networks, or you’re a baby boomer who is a digital immigrant.

I think that these networks each have their own culture. Twitter is much more conversational. LinkedIn is all business. Please, no death announcements on LinkedIn, I see a lot of that lately. Seeing a lot of Facebook-type content being shared on LinkedIn, and I don’t think we should go there. How do I actually find good quality insightful content, as a rep, that I could share in my networks, that isn’t just all of my company branded content?

These are these things that require new skills, and that to me means there needs to be an investment in training. I think about it from the individual seller, but also at an organization level. I think the group should take a much more prescriptive and programmatic approach to deciding how they’re going to, and what they’re going to train their salespeople on, and tying it to the overall governance of social media policies, et cetera.

Are there any stories that you’d like to share with people who’ve followed your approach?

Yeah, for sure. There are definitely individuals and companies doing this well. I would say that we’re still relatively early days in figuring all of this out. ON24 is doing a really nice job of training their salespeople. They’re working with a partner company of mine, Sales For Life.

They put all of their reps through the Sales For Life 10-week training program. There’s a certification process at the end of it where they have to demonstrate that they’ve used social to source a new opportunity, so a real certification. It’s good for that salesperson too because now that’s something that’s a skill, and something that can be helpful in getting another job. Not just getting their next customer, but potentially their next job. And their leadership is bought in at that sales director level.
Other resources?

One of the things that I love to do, I go to LinkedIn’s annual conference, and they always post their video content on YouTube. There’s a bunch of presentations from real companies doing real social selling work, and so I recommend that as a resource as well.

What excites you right now about the future of sales marketing?

I feel like I’m pulled in two different directions. Because one, what excites me is what I see coming to the sales industry that I saw develop in marketing over a 10-year period, of an explosion of new technologies to help automate, to help segment, to help personalize, to help measure, to help improve conversion rates. We see the same thing start to happen in sales, and some great tools are being developed, and available for salespeople.

Artificial intelligence, I’ve published some blog posts recently on LinkedIn about how I think AI is going to change sales. There’s some really exciting stuff happening in AI around how that’s going to make the best reps even better, allowing me to do less of that administrative work, and freeing me up to spend more time thinking about the human side, which is, how do I be more empathetic?

To be more empathetic I need to know more about my customer. Now I have more time to research them. I can listen to their CEO on their investor presentations. I can speak with more people within their organization. I’m able to spend more time on the strategic and human aspects.

On one side I’m talking about technology, on the other hand, I’m talking about being more human. It’s the balance between those that excites me the most, is striking the right balance between tech and human.

Brian: So we’re going to have this technology to help us augment and apply our empathy, which really gives us the intuition to know how to connect best.

These tools won’t automate trust. But they’re going to enable us to be able to spend more time making choices and doing things that build trust.

Jill: There you go, it is about building a trust, and credibility. To earn your trust, it needs to be about you, not about me. Mutuality matters so there needs to be mutual benefit, but one of the expressions that I loved that I learned from the president at Eloqua was, “To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.”

I like Tim Sanders’ book, which basically says that the best salespeople share their knowledge, they share their network, and they show they care. I think that’s really where a lot more of the emphasis needs to be placed, in both sales and in marketing and even in product design, thinking about it through the eyes of the user.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Jill: The absolute easiest and fastest way to get my attention is on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @Jill_Rowley. Then LinkedIn, if you want to invite me to connect on LinkedIn, send a personalized invite.

If you’re doing it from the mobile app, up in the top right-hand corner of the mobile app, there are three little dots, and if you hit those three little dots, there’s an option to hit personal invite. If you hit, connect it’ll send you the generic invite. I say generic invites are #socialstupid or #justplainlazy, #firstimpressionsmatter, #everyimpressionmatters. Never, ever, ever, ever send a generic invite to connect to anybody. Personalize it. Those are the two best ways to reach me.

The post Better Social Selling, an Interview with Jill Rowley appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

We need to stop treating our customers like objects with our marketing and treat them like people. Be human first by recognizing their humanity. So how do you humanize marketing? 

Let me explain. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve become weary of all the “personalized” emails that I’m receiving lately. It’s not that they’re all bad (but plenty of them are); it’s because, at the core, there’s something deeper going on. In sum, I’m treated as an object to convert rather than a person who may need help. 

Virtually all the polished emails sent to me use marketing automation. And they’re mostly focused on getting me to do something. In most cases, that something is a click. I’m given a call to action link or a button to click on.

According to the CMO Council, “Only 20% of marketers are able to predict the next best action for their customers.” Additionally, Forrester Consulting discovered, “65 percent of marketers struggle to employ emotional marketing as they turn to automation to improve customer engagement.”

We have all this technology to connect with our customers, but they’re increasingly tuning us out. Why? Because they don’t feel it’s authentic, or emotionally relevant, and marketers are using marketing automation in a way that misses the bigger picture.

What if you put your full attention on one customer, one buyer, one potential at a time? Could you do a better job connecting and a building a relationship? Think about it.

It Doesn’t Take a Marketer to Know When It’s NOT Humanized Marketing

As our marketing technology, machine learning, and tools become increasingly smarter, so are our customers. Your customers know what real feels like. And they feel it when you’re sending them an artificial or generalized message.

But as a marketer, I know better. A real human being wrote a template. The email (even if it’s well written) and personalized in a few places, still feels hollow. Why? Because it’s scaled. And I know the game.  And, our wise customers do too.

Here’s the thing: as your sophistication grows, your customers become even savvier. Customers know authentic- sincere – communication from the scaled messages you send. They feel it. And as customers, we’re aware of it too.

Marketing Dehumanized: What It Feels Like to Be an Object

At its core, marketing is about building relationships. To do that we need to build trust.

So why is it we do things in marketing that ignore this truth? Why do we do things that we think scale when at its core relationships are not scalable?

In this post, Jon Westenberg writes:

Treating people like leads instead of humans just doesn’t work. It doesn’t sell. It doesn’t push you to any level of success. You want to suck at marketing or sales? Dehumanize your prospects. And dehumanize your interactions with them.

For example, we can feel when someone’s trying to push us to do something. We know when we’re treated as objects (we’re just a conversion, a click, or an increase in lead score). It’s dehumanizing.

We also recognize when someone cares. We know when a person wants to help us, and they’re not trying to push an agenda or manipulate us to action.

How to Humanize Marketing for Your Customer

To humanize marketing, apply this truth from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. He said, “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.”  Successful marketers are starting to recognize this truth.

When you are marketing to people, you’re trying to get them to do something or buy something. But when you’re marketing for people, you’re advocating for them. You’re doing something that helps and may make a difference. It’s time to become an advocate, rather than a marketer.

Marketing isn’t something you do to people. It’s something you do for people.
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How often are you trying to move your customers to do something that will benefit you i.e. click, sign up, register and buy? Our marketing efforts are driven by our goal, our KPI, our quarterly income or profits. There’s nothing wrong with those measurements. It’s just that our intentions may become twisted when we start with our personal agendas as a driver.

What do you measure?  When you measure the wrong thing, your marketing can become wonky quickly. We’re not just seeking clicks. We want to connect and form lasting relationships with our clients.

Four Ways to Humanize Marketing to Fit Your Buyer’s Journey

When you think about your buyer’s journey, consider being sincere about helping them. If you automate your engagement, you need to emphasize the human touch more. That means that both you and your sales team need to have actual conversations with your buyers.

Use your marketing technology, database, and ability to segment to refine your initial understanding of your target audience’s needs. Focus on helping your future customers achieve what they’re trying to do at each step of the journey. Is this hard work? Yes. That said, I believe this is where marketers must focus their energy to make sure the buyer’s journey stays personal at each touch point.

There are things that customers expect to be scalable. For example, email newsletters. Still, they want relevant content. They don’t expect that every single newsletter personalized to their interests. That said, if enough of the content is irrelevant, they’ll unsubscribe.

People mentally unsubscribe before they finally remove us from their inbox. Customers move from interested, to ambivalent, and ultimately apathetic quickly.

Next, I’m going to suggest a few ideas on doing things that don’t scale. Why? Because they involve effort and our customer’s, appreciate and they can feel it when we invest extra energy.

1. Help like a concierge

If you want to know how to approach applying empathy to your marketing efforts, consider how a hotel concierge operates. What is their goal? To help meet the needs and be helpful to guests. Why can’t we approach our marketing and sales the same way?

Do concierges give the same advice and input to all hotel guests? Of course not. They do things that don’t scale. Still, they’ve prepared themselves to answer some of the same questions.  For example, what are the best shows? Where are the best restaurants for each occasion? How can I get a reservation on short notice? Where are the grocery or liquor stores etc.?

But the key is that they listen, they’re available, and their goal is to help. What can we learn? We can approach our customers by doing things intentionally like a concierge.

2. Do things that don’t scale

Our sales people do things that don’t scale all the time. If we don’t change our approach, we’re going to kill the value of marketing automation. You can’t automate trust. But you can build it over time by being intentional and seeking to add value with each touch. That’s at the core of doing things that don’t scale.

That might be opening Outlook and actually sending a personal message. Or picking up the phone talk to your potential customers. It is critical to know what customers want to serve them better. For more on this read, How to Put the Customer First in Lead Generation.

Our job is to make each person we engage with feel as if they are the most important person in the room.

3. Shift your focus to relationships

All marketing, selling and lead generation is about one word: relationships. It’s not about technology; it’s about people. We need to take the time to do things that don’t scale. This is from a terrific book, The Passion Conversation:

We form relationships in two ways. The first way is through dialogue, a virtuous circle of interacting through listening and responding that causes more interaction, listening, and responding. Relationships grow through conversation. The second way we form relationships is through a process called reciprocal altruism. That’s a fancy term to explain where people freely give to others with nothing expected in return.

Check out Lead Nurturing: 4 Steps to walking the buying path with your customers

4. Use applied empathy now

Empathy is your marketing intuition. Use your empathy to move out of your mind and into the mind of the client.  What’s the bottom line? Move away from me-first thinking to customer-centric thinking and speak specifically to their motivations.

If you don’t do this, you’re treating potential customers (aka leads) as objects and not as people. If you do that, your goal is to get them do so something. Instead, I advocate that you seek to understand them first; to know their motivation and learn what interests them. And even better, to know what might be helpful to them to get what they really want. For more read, How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline.

Ask this as you approach your marketing: Is that how we’d like someone to treat us? Is this how we’d like a friend or loved one to be treated? Finally, if you are in doubt follow this: Do unto others as you’d like to have done onto you.

Conclusion

Humanized marketing is about building people-first relationships.  Remember this: When you are marketing to people, you’re trying to get them to do something. But when you’re marketing for people, you’re advocating for them. You’re doing something that could help and make a difference. By following these suggestions, you’ll make a huge improvement in how you connect with your customers.

It’s your turn now. Have you humanized marketing for your company and if you did, how did it impact your use of marketing technology? Also, did I forget to mention any key points or components in the article? Let me know in the comments below.

The post 4 Ways You Can Humanize Marketing and Build Relationships appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

The year 2016 is quickly coming to an end and the holiday season is a time for reflection and preparation.

I’ve compiled a list of the 10 most popular and shared posts on the B2B Lead Blog, chosen by marketers, just like you, to help you get ready to have a great 2017. My methodology was compiling the aggregate social shares across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.

1. The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue

For the majority of B2B companies with complex sales, marketing-generated leads rarely account for 50% of revenue and often it’s often much less.

To keep valuable field salespeople productive, many of the more innovative sales and marketing departments build “sales development” teams including Oracle, Marketo, HubSpot, HP, and  Salesforce.com. Just to name a few.

Dave Green interviewed Trish Bertuzzi (@bridgegroupinc), author of the popular book, The Sales Development Playbook.

Read The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue

2. How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline

We have more channels and more content marketing than ever before, but it’s become harder actually to connect with potential customers.

Empathetic Marketing is about moving out of our self-thinking and into the mind of our customer, thus, moving away from me-first, business-centric thinking to customer-centric thinking and speaking to our customer’s motivations.

Slack (currently the fastest growing start-up in history) practices empathy in their marketing, and it’s part of their core values. Additionally, IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest design company. During their boot camps, IBM employees are learning how to use empathy to connect better with clients and colleagues.

Read How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline

3. Better Social Selling: An Interview with Jill Rowley

Do you want to get better at social selling or help your sales team do the same?  If not, you should. Here’s why. B2B marketing has gone through a modernization to align better with how people buy.  Now it’s time for sales to step up.

I interviewed Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley), Chief Evangelist and startup advisor for #SocialSelling. “…we’re long overdue for transformation, a modernization of the way we sell…,” Rowley said.

Read the Interview with Jill Rowley on Better Social Selling

4. Tips On How to Use LinkedIn for Better Lead Generation

As a follow-up to this popular 2015 post, How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Leads, I interviewed Susan Tatum (@susanptatum), Partner at The Conversion Company. I met Susan through following her writing on her blog and her work in the LinkedIn community.

I see sales and marketing people trying too hard to automate and template-ize their actions, focusing on quantity and not quality. They’re approaching LinkedIn like an email blast campaign, and this is not what the network is about – Susan Tatum

Read the Tips on How to Use LinkedIn for Better Lead Generation.

5. Six Metrics That Will Give You an Edge and Your CEO Clarity

Do you know what CEOs want most from B2B marketers?

They want clarity about marketing results. And they expect their marketing leaders to provide clear metrics and be accountable to meeting their numbers just like their sales.

MarketingCharts cited a recent report from Regalix which stated, “The majority of senior marketers are using basic marketing analytics tools such as web analysis (91%) and spreadsheets (80%)…”

Find out the 6 B2B Marketing Measures that Will Give You an Edge and Your CEO Clarity.

6. Four Ways You Can Humanize Marketing and Build Relationships

We need to stop treating our customers like objects and treat them like people. So how do you humanize your marketing?

According to the CMO Council, “Only 20% of marketers are able to predict the next best action for their customers.” Additionally, Forrester Consulting discovered, “65 % of marketers struggle to employ emotional marketing as they turn to automation to improve customer engagement.”

Humanizing marketing is about applying this truth from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio who said, “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” At its core, marketing is about building relationships. To do that we need to build trust. By following the suggestions in this post, you’ll make a huge improvement in how you connect with your customers.

Read about Four Ways You Can Humanize Marketing and Build Relationships.

7. How to Use Trigger Events for More and Better Leads

Using trigger events with your account based marketing and selling can help your sales team be more efficient and effective.  Why?

You’re putting the law of inertia to work in your favor, and that can help shorten your average sales cycle.

Also, you’ll spend more time connecting with people who have the motivation to actually buy what you have to sell.

Find out how identifying the key events helped one company win more sales and increase conversions by 400%. And learn 3 steps to determine which trigger events are most important for your Account Based Marketing (ABM).

Read more: How To Use Trigger Events for More and Better Leads.

 8. Five Ways to Immediately Boost Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

What are the five ways you can immediately improve your account-based marketing (ABM) and selling? I was interviewed on CRMRadio.today by Jim Obermayer (@SalesldMgmtAssn), founder of the Sales Lead Management Association and the Funnel Media Group.

Learn the five ways to improve account based marketing and selling immediately.  In the interview, we talk a little shop about the fundamentals of account-based marketing, what’s new (and unchanged) in the world of the complex sale, and how empathy marketing is the way forward.

Read about Five Ways to Immediately Boost Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

9. Fast Growth Marketing: From 0 to 500,000 Users

In this interview, you’ll hear from Jim Fowler (@fowlinator), founder of Owler on what he’s learned about expedited growth. Owler – a free competitive intelligence platform – rapidly went from 0 to over 500,000 users and they’re on pace to exceed a million users by the end of 2016.

Find out how Owler acquired so many active users so quickly and learn the lessons discovered along with the way to help you with your 2017 marketing strategy.

Read about Rapid Growth Marketing: From 0 to 500,000 Users

10. 16 Proven Ways to Getting Better Leads Now

Marketers spend a lot of time and effort doing inbound marketing, but they often struggle getting those leads to convert into pipeline opportunities and, eventually, customers after they hand them off to sales.

In this post, I’ll share proven ways get better opportunities from your lead generation. There was so much to share, I split this post into two parts

Read 16 Proven Ways to Getting Better Leads and Opportunities Now (Part 1) and (Part 2)

Honorable mentions:

How Giving Useful Ideas and Secrets Builds Trust

Three Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy

Conclusion

As you saw, this analysis of the most socially shared posts provides a glimpse into the topics readers found most relevant in 2016. The issues of lead generation and account-based marketing continue to be big in 2016 and for a good reason. Every marketing touch, conversation, and social connection, is centered on developing relationships.

Also, these posts show that 2016 was the year of the customer and being buyer-centric. When you’re in the trenches, it’s easy to get caught up in marketing acronyms, martech, data, and analytics. What readers showed is that demand generation, B2B marketing, and sales comes down to connecting with people. And this personal connection comes down to one idea — empathy.

I look forward to continuing to bring you useful information, tips, and insights in 2017.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

The post 10 Most Popular B2B Lead Blog Posts of 2016 appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

What can you learn from growth hacking and how can it help you develop a mindset to better your B2B marketing?

To help answer this question, I interviewed Neil Patel (@neilpatel), co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics. He also helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue.

As marketers, we can reject having a growth mindset without realizing it. What does this mean?

First, marketers generally follow this approach: We plan, then, we execute. Do you see what’s missing?

We’re missing a test stage in the middle.

Second, we expect peak performance from ourselves (and others) while attempting new things and having little time to practice. I don’t know about you, but when I try something new, I don’t do as well the first time.

Consider professional athletes for a moment. They have time to train and practice before the season starts. They practice during the season, and they even get an offseason.

As a marketing pro, do you get an offseason? Heck no.

Finally, I find marketers struggle with perfectionism or fear of failure. This challenge can get in the way of your growth too. Personally, I struggle with perfectionism more than I’d like to admit. As I talk with other marketers, I know I’m not alone.

So, what can you do?

Growth Hacking starts with a Growth Mindset

According to Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their best-selling book, Switch, “The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure- not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route.”

“Think like a software developer – build, test then iterate,” said Martin Jones, Senior Marketing Manager at Cox Communications. You need to create the expectation that failure is part of the marketing process. And you need to test.

Instead of building campaigns where everything relies on a single successful launch. You need to adopt a more agile approach.

Traditional Marketing vs. Growth Hacking?

There’s still some confusion on this. The following infographic is helpful. The phrase below, “Make people want the product (traditional marketing) vs. Make a product people want (growth hacking)” sums it up pretty well.

Source: Traditional marketing vs. Growth Hacking – Infographic

I interviewed Neil Patel because I wanted to get his input on growth hacking specifically because he’s rapidly grown several multimillion dollar companies and he’s written the definitive guide on the subject.

 Author’s Note: This transcript was edited for publication.

Brian: What do marketers need to know about growth hacking and what makes it different? 

Neil: The big difference in growth hacking, to some extent, is an evolution of marketing. And marketing used just to be, “Hey, I’m a person who’s going to acquire traffic, and maybe I can make it convert.” Right? Now I’m converting whether it’s AdWords, or Facebook ads or even SEO.

With growth hacking, it’s not just about, ‘Hey, can I get traffic from SEO or paid advertising?’ A lot of it is that can you leverage your existing community members (customers), and your product itself.

#GrowthHacking uses the product itself as a distribution channel
Click To Tweet

Dropbox is one of those cornerstone examples of growth hacking, right? Refer friends and get more space. Tweet about it, get more space. Connect a device to multiple devices and get more space.

And the funny thing is, most people don’t see connecting the device to multiple devices and giving free space a technique to grow the business, but it is because if something gets linked to multiple devices, it makes the product stickier for Dropbox. The unit increases, the storage use increases, and that increases the likelihood of that customer willing to pay for the service later down the road.

Brian: So, it’s about looking creatively at ways of seeing your customer relationships and how you can leverage the relationships you already have in a way that benefits the customer and helps growth?

Neil: Yep.

How can someone get started in thinking like this and develop a growth mindset?

Neil: You’ve got to start thinking outside the box. Don’t just stick to conventional channels. Try to tap into your creativity. What could you do creatively with the product, the design, your sales, etc.? Right? You can grow a business in many ways. It’s not just driving traffic.

Who are some examples of companies that use growth hacking? 

Uber’s doing well. Sidekick from Hubspot has done well. Those are all creative companies that are marketing growth hacking.

Authors note: check out Growth Hacker: HubSpot – How to Grow a Billion Dollar B2B Growth Engine

What are the obstacles that get in the way of growth hacking?

Neil: You need a lot of people, team members, a company behind it. Growth hacking doesn’t happen just with one person. You need people from different teams involved to do it.

Brian: Okay. I’m a customer of Buffer, and they seem like they’ve been growth hacking.

Neil: I would say Buffer’s using a lot of growth stuff, right? Just look at their homepage. They use lots of education. It actually helps create sign-ups.

What advice would you give those utilizing traditional marketing who want to start?

Yeah. I would say with growth hacking, what ends up happening is when you get a few people doing it within an organization, it just starts happening right? You don’t have to really get everyone in the group involved. You want a team that could feed off a pizza. If it takes more than one pie, you have too many people. When Facebook does a lot of changes, it’s not a big team. It’s usually like a team that eats off one pizza.

Can you share some resources for marketers to learn more about growth hacking?

You can check out growthhackers.com I don’t contribute much to it, but I know that’s a great resource.

Is there anything else you wanted to share with readers? 

Neil: The big thing that I would focus on is creativity. The opportunity lies in what people aren’t tapping into already. I don’t believe that channels like Google, Facebook, or SEO, video, etc. are going to be the end all be all. And I always believe there are new opportunities and channels out there and creative ways to grow a business. You’ve just got to continually think of them.

Brian: In some cases, I’m hearing that could be alternative channels, or it could be putting a twist on or looking at existing channels in a different way that others might not be seeing.

Neil: Yes. Like looking at new channels that people aren’t seeing. I’m just saying try to think outside the box.

Conclusion

As you can see, growth hacking isn’t a fixed strategy. It requires a growth mindset. Thinking this way, and adopting lessons from growth hacking, you’ll achieve more and dwell less on failure. Additionally, understanding your customers and what they want is important too. This requires empathy.

“People with a growth mindset- those who stretch themselves, take risks, accept feedback, and take the long-term view- can’t help but progress in their lives and careers” – Chip Heath and Dan Heath

How will a growth hacking mindset benefit you and your company?

The post What Can B2B Marketers Adopt from Growth Hacking? appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.

How can marketers better connect with people we hope will become our customers? Over the past year, I’ve been researching why there’s such a disconnect between marketing and customers so I can understand how to bridge that gap. Why? Because right now, the trust gap between marketers and customers has never been bigger. For example, […]

The post Stuck on words: how can marketing connect with customers better? appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.