Closework Consulting

Put on your prospect's shoes! How to create an effective lead generation machine.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:53:00 +0000

As marketers, we have to figure out how to create value, whatever that may be, with potential buyers of our product or service, at precisely the "right time". If we do that, our chances of creating a real lead suddenly increase dramatically.

So what's the "right time?" Its when the buyer realises they have a real problem and they need to fix it. Its causing them pain, a gap has emerged from where they are now to where they want to be. They have too much of bad thing or too little of a good thing.

To propose that "content is king," will not win you any prizes for original thought, its a concept that one might argue has been true for many, many years, but has gained currency in recent times. There are so many ways to access "stuff" that the vehicle for accessing your favourite content is becoming less relevant. This trend has accelerated with cheap and widely available web access. It doesn't matter whether you access your favourite journalist's most recent article via a newspaper, the online version of said paper, podcast, RSS feed or Tweet.

However what is increasingly challenging, is marrying great content to the right context for the consumer of that content. What is irrelevant one day may become suddenly relevant the next due to a change in circumstances. Timing is everything.

Your content needs to stimulate your potential buyers to think about their problem and the consequences of inaction. Your white paper, blog or newletter must show you understand what their problem looks like and feels like, you need to be able to demonstrate you can walk a mile in their shoes.

Do you really think your prospect cares deeply about the release of verison 9.62b of your latest product, more than thy want to read about how to solve their most pressing problem?

But how do we know when the buyer has "seen the light?". How do we make sure your content is at front of mind at that crucial juncture?

Two things need to occur.

You need to design a deliberate content recycling tactic as part of your marketing plan. Recycling relevant content to buyers (ie content that discusses the problem they have), dramatically increases the chances that its in front of their eyes at the right time.

Secondly you need to be able to track the point at which they convert from simply interested reader to troubled buyer and then you need to tell the right sales people to call them.

Write with precision, from your prospect's perspective and recycle this content. Design a process and invest in a tool that allows you to jump onto an opportunity as the troubled buyer identifies themselves.

If you would like help or advice on this topic feel free to reply to this blog post. I would love to hear from you!

Does my business really need a social media strategy?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:00:00 +0000

It is simply impossible to read a marketing article these days without someone expressing an opinion about social media. I have actively avoided blogging about this phenomenon up to this point because, well, I didn't want to be part of the Twitterati (with the emphasis firmly on the "Twit" in too many cases!)

However I can resist no longer! If for no other reason that feel the urge to shout from the rooftops that social media is NOT some incredible technological breakthrough that is going to revoltuonise our word, but yet another evolution in the digitised world in which we live. What is different, and for some alarming, is the speed of adoption and scope of reach of social media.

Nonetheless, most would agree that the initial hype surrounding social media is starting to subside and the much harder work of extracting real benefit from the medium is beginning to bear fruit.

In the unforgiving world of B2B marketing, the shift towards marketing spending on social media has been turbocharged by the GFC. Marketing budgets haven't simply been subjected to tight cost control and demands for execution with greater surgical precision; rather assaulted by uncompromising, indiscriminate, axe weilding accountants from HQ cutting great swathes through marketing budgets around the world.

So, its cheap. Cheap is good.

But what conditions need to exist for it to be effective?

The network you wish to influence needs to be social media savvy, either already connected or at least open to the concept. Its no different to the advent of the 'phone. The utility of the owning the first 'phone in the world was zero. There was no one to call! As the network grows so does the utility. Is the audience you wish to communicate with at a point where they are adopting social media tools. Do they use Twitter? Do they read blogs?

Be cautious about over engineering your social media strategy. Perhaps start with a LinkedIn group first and foremost. Many business people have a LinkedIn account so it is a familiar interface and "safe" and regular place they visit.

However real effectiveness is more elusive. It is about achieving consistency and alignment with your go to market plan. Beware of simply bolting on a social media plan to your other marketing campaigns. It should be integrated thoughfully with your go to market plan.

Which of your prospects problems are you adressing with your Tweets? Your not just sending them new product launch plans or press releases I hope! What stage of the journey the buyer takes. from unaware and untroubled, to happy and loyal customer, does your LinkedIn forum address? Are you trying to build awareness of a problem or your firm, or are you creating a customer support forum? How does your social media strategy complement your email marketing campaign or your event marketing schedule?

Content is King! Don't bombard your prospects and customers with irrelevant internally focused product brochures and press releases. Believe me, they don't care! Tell them somethng that is relevant to them and adds value if they decide to allocate a few of their precious minutes to your words of wisdom.

Finally, which poor hapless individual is going to be saddled with the unenviable task of maintaining an active social media presence. You must decide what's a reasonable interval to publish, daily, weekly, fortnightly? Consider some of the exellent tools available such as ping.fm and hootsuite to automate the heavy lifting.

So is it effective? Yes...kinda.

By all means embrace social media, but please remember the discipline that is required to develop a clear go to market strategy, namely a blisteringly clear plan, well managed and clinically executed, requires that your social media strategy is integrated and aligned with the rest of your marketing tools.

Linking Inbound and Outbound marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:57:00 +0000

In my recent blog, "The role of inbound marketing in understanding your buyers", I talked about the importance of developing an inbound marketing strategy that positions you in the minds of your buyer and specifically at the places they chose to educate themselves about solutions to their business problems.

The next step on the journey is to ensure your inbound marketing strategy is linked to your outbound marketing initiatives.

With all this talk of Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogging, Facebook, SEO and SEM website strategies its easy to overlook the important and hard work of outbound marketing. This is the conscious, deliberate act of recruiting, educating and progressing leads.

Nonetheless you would be crazy to ignore or overlook interest generated from your inbound marketing efforts. The key link between these two elements is website analytics.

It is here that smart technology can identify visitors to your site and once identified can track their progress to different parts of your site.
By identifying "hot spots" on your website, say your pricing page, or a case study download, you can trigger "lead alerts" to your sales teams.

Similarly, once identified, visitors to your website can be directed into various marketing campaigns suited to their specific area of interest. This ability to harness the power of your inbound and outbound tactics in one aligned process is highly effective and efficient.

I work with Strategy Mix to build the explicit tactics that facilitate this alignment.

Website analytics allow us to get the best of both worlds, drive traffic to your business and then track and progress that lead on their buying journey with us.

I would love to hear your comments on how to link inbound and outbound marketing tactics.

The role of inbound marketing in understanding your buyers

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:55:00 +0000

A recent Marketing Sherpa survey found that, when in purchasing mode, 80% of customers felt they had found their supplier rather than their supplier finding them.

Wow! 80%! That seems incredible! But lets just stop for a second. There is a phrase in this sentence that is key. "Customers felt they had found their supplier".

From the customer's perspective feeling like you have done your own research and selected a number of companies to talk to, makes you feel in control of the purchasing decision and process.

Therefore the task of the inbound marketer is to ensure that your company is highly visible in the places where buyers carry out their research. As it turns out these places are shifting and in some cases they are shifting rapidly.

Inbound marketing is, in this sense, "PR 2.0". The difference is that inbound marketing is multimedia and multi channel, thus there are a multitude of mediums the inbound marketer needs to master.

There is one tactic that is non negotiable. Your website MUST be search engine optimised, its compulsory. Its that simple,end of story. You must strive mightily to be on page one of any search a prospect might perform.

How one proceeds after that is more complex and depends greatly on your market sector, your own size, resources and budget. A social media strategy of some form is becoming increasingly important. Whether this means establishing a LinkedIn Forum for your area of specialistion or a multifaceted strategy incorporating RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and so on, will vary greatly.

But how do I know where my customer's go to do their purchasing research? Ask them! Good, old fashioned, research. The good news is that this research is increaingly affordable. In fact many new media formats such as blogging and LinkedIn Forums provide excellent ways of creating communuties of interest around common issues. Participating in these discussions is an excellent way to keep your finger on the pulse of the market.

I would love to hear your experiences. Do you believe there is a shift in power towards the buyer?

Aligning with your buyer: How to "supersize" your sales and marketing results!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:07:00 +0000

Selling and marketing teams in the B2B world, (or business to government world) need to acknowledge some fundamental truths about the way the B2B buyer buys.

B2B products and services are usually complex. There are likely to be multiple influencers in the decision making cycle, it may be a protracted discussion and your value proposition is likely to be complex. Pricing of products is rarely simple there may be a range of options. Purchasers do a great deal of research before they buy often on their own and without reference to you.

In addition to this B2B buyers take a journey through a series of sequential "decision gates" to go from a state of intertia and a lack of awareness to the eventual purchase decision.

It looks something like this.

Buyers start off blissfully unaware they even have a problem however something occurs in their organisation and that state changes; they start becoming aware they do indeed have a problem. They show interest in fixing this problem, they define a specific need and they start looking for suppliers who can solve this problem. Eventually they select your firm's product or service and become your customer.

This is a deliberate cognitive process.

Buyers can start their buying journey at different times and progress at different rates, but above all buyers don't skip steps in this journey. Of course some times these steps may occur rapidly, perhaps even within one meeting, but buyers consciously move from stage to stage and state to state.

So what implications does this have for sales and marketing organisations?
1) Sales and marketing teams need to be aligned around the one same buyers journey.
2) Sales and marketing teams need to know where their buyer is on this journey if they are to market and sell to them effectively.
3) The tools and tactics you develop to engage with buyers and move them through the stages of the buying cycle need to be specific to that stage. Clearly your buyer has different needs at the "shown interest " stage than the "may purchase" stage.

What rewards will those organisations receive if they tackle these questions effectively? In other words, is this a problem worth fixing?

Well research from a global study of 1800 firms around this topic of sales and marketing alignment, produced by Math Marketing and Eloqua, concluded that firms who were aligned:

1) Had 5.4 percentage points more of growth than the industry
2) Closed 38% more deals
3) Turned over 36% less clients

Find a piece of scrap paper and just work out what that would do to YOUR sales figures if you could achieve those numbers! The opportunity for your firm if you get this right is huge.

Let me know your thoughts on this article and the concept of alignment and the buyer's journey!

Do you have explicit recycling tactics in your marketing campaigns?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:27:00 +0000

A question. What should you do with prospects who have leaked from your sales funnel? That is, those folks who have expressed and interest in your products or services and yet, for one reason or another, have chosen not to proceed.

Its an uncomfortable converstaion for many organisations and especially for the sales team. We are conditioned to not want to discuss areas where we have not suceeded. Why not focus on why we have have won, not why we have lost? Right?

Wrong. Its simple arithmetic. In the journey from first contact as an unqualified lead to customer, typically 90%+ of leads will "leak" from our sales funnel.

Typically initial mail outs may see a 2-5% response rate, of those respondents you would be fortunate to have 50% proceed to a sales meeting and 50% to proposal stage and possibly you might win one third of all deals on which you propose.

So what should you do with all of those prospects who didn't complete the buying journey with you? Simply forget about them? Ignore them? Sure some of them will never be customers, but by the same token many of them may well have a business problem that you are in the business of solving, but for some reason the current timing was not right. Perhaps it was out of budget cycle, perhaps other projects took priority, perhaps they were undergoing a reorganisation. Why waste all that investment you have already made in that lead? Imagine if you were able to re engage with just 20% of them. Your sales would increase substantially, and best of all, you are leveraging existing campaigns and existing resources.

But how? The answer is to create systematic, rythmic, RECYCLING TACTICS. Marketing campaigns frequently ignore specific recycling tactics to stay in touch with leaked buyers.

Having structured recycling tactics also unclogs your sales funnel and gets sales people focusing on current prospects with business problems that need solving now.

So what might a recycling tactic look like and how do I know when to re-engage with my prospect.

The secret is to send regular communications to your leaked buyers that they value, refrain from product pitches and solution flogs, its deeply boring and irrelevant to buyers without a defined need!

Relevant content is king. Write to them about problems that their type of businesses face. Write short white papers and articles, express your opinions about these problems. Short case studies of examples where their business problem has been solved is another excellent way to communicate in a relevant way.

Webinars and breakfast briefings with some thought leadership is a more advanced (and expensive) recycling tactic, so should be reserved for those prospects who look like they are ready to re engage.

"But how do I know when they are ready to re engage?" Well ask them! Use a smart marketing system such as Strategy Mix to profile respondents before they download content.

"But I haven't got time to write all these white papers and case studies!" Consider outsourcing the production of them to a smart marketing services firm who understand your business.

Let me khow what you think about the concept of recycling, I want to hear your thoughts!

Is your buyer in pain?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:37:00 +0000

So has your buyer really got a problem? More importantly do they know they have a problem? If the answer to either of these questions is "No", then you should be thinking VERY carefully about whether you should be wasting precious sales resources on meeting the prospect.

"But they said they want to meet me! This is an opportunity" cries the salesperson. Is this really true? Perhaps the prospect has expressed an appreciation for your solution, has even decided that their organisation needs one of your solutions. So what!? Until they have a real problem and they have acknowledged that problem they aren't going to buy, its that simple.

Of course there are many ways your organisation can assist in triggering that realisation, perhaps a case study of a successful implementation in a competitor of theirs. Perhaps a seminar, or a white paper, that starts them thinking; that troubles them.

Sales people's time is precious, sales meetings are expensive, guard them jealously! Use some of the top class technology that is available these days to qualify your prospects before your sales team calls on them. We work a lot with a company called StrategyMix, who have some very cool technology that does an excellent job or providing really well qualified leads to your sales team consistently.

So tell me about your experiences. Are your sales people constantly spending time with tyre kickers? Do those "hot leads" too often turn out to be duds?

Aligning your sales and marketing team around "The Buyer"

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Fell) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:47:00 +0000

Much has been written about the importance of your go-to-market team (sales and marketing) understanding the mind of your client, the buyer, to market and sell successfully. Its all the more important in long and complex sales situations. We all know this to be true.

But there is more to this than meets the eye.

First, not only do you need to understand your buyer, you need to know that they are on a buying journey and if you are to be successful you must match that journey with your own sellers journey and adapt your understanding and subsequent messaging accordingly.

For example, if you are a client at the very beginning of your buying journey you may not even know you have a problem, or you may not have appreciated the impact of that problem on your business. As a seller of solutions to that problem your initial communications would be wildly different from a client who has acknowledged their problem has asked for tenders and is undertaking a formal evaluation of your offer versus your competitors.

"But wait a minute" says your salesperson, "Are you telling me I need to understand my prospect before they even know they have a problem, that's lead generation surely? That's marketing's job!"

Similarly, marketing complains, "We produce thousands of leads to the sales team every year from our campaigns, surely that's our job done, its sales' job to turn them into clients."

Is this all starting to sound horribly familiar? Well the truth of the matter is that many organisations fail to appreciate that to be really effective at lead generation, BOTH the sales and marketing teams need to be fully aligned around the buyers journey right from the beginning of the journey to the end. Both sales and marketing need to be singing off the same song sheet.

Achieving alignment around the buyers journey requires some smart thinking, planning and technology. Send me a comment if you want to chat more.