SEO: Don’t bet your future on it

Here is a popular recipe for launching a successful B2B software startup:

1. Build a great product that solves a real problem
2. Put together an awesome website
3. Invest in SEO (organic search) and/or PPC (paid search)
4. Capture tons of leads from your website and close lots of deals
5. Live happily ever after…

Pretty easy, isn’t it?

If you are lucky enough to have it work that way, power to you! For most of us, reality is a bit more challenging.

#1 goes without saying. I have yet to see a software startup that doesn’t have a great product, at least in the eyes of the founders and funders. That’s a topic for another post, so let’s assume for now it is taken care of.

#2 is obvious. You need a website so people can see how great your product is and how it will make their lives so much better. Some sites are better than others, but most companies can check this point and move on.

#3 and #4 is where things get murky.

But SEO is great, you say, so what could the problem be?

The problem is that SEO is extremely important and valuable when you are fulfilling demand, but has limited value when you are trying to create demand.

Most potential buyers are content with business as usual. They are not searching for solutions. Your challenge is to make them realize the price they are paying for sticking with the status quo and the opportunity they have to improve on business as usual and the associated outcomes.

For that reason, I know very few B2B startups that can fill up their pipeline with enough prospects relying on inbound leads only (be it SEO, PPC, or social media).

Even if you are one of these lucky few, acquiring a new lead is just the beginning. No matter how you get your leads, most of them are not ready to buy today (the statistics say only 5-15% are). The bottom line is that for most startups, SEO alone will not do it.

So what should you do?

Step One: Build a target prospect database

To being with, put together a list of the companies that fit your target buyer profile based on industries, geographies, company size, etc. Knowing these companies by name is the first (and relatively easy) step, but too many companies don’t even do that.

Finding the right contacts within each company would take a more substantial effort. You can do it through content syndication, rental lists, telemarketing, or research tools such as LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Data.com, and the nifty new LeadSpace. If you get SEO leads, you can add the ones that fit your target profile to your database. 

Any way you do it, acquiring these contact names and their email addresses is an investment. To maximize your ROI, use offers with a broad appeal to capture as many prospects as you can. Surveys and industry benchmarks are great examples of content that generates exceptionally high response rates for lead acquisition.

Step Two: Engage buyers by offering content that delivers value

Once you have the contacts and their email addresses in your database, your next challenge is to establish a dialog and keep prospects engaged until they are ready for a sales conversation.

Think of it as a dating process. It requires patience and perseverance. Trying to rush things will only backfire -- especially beware of the killer demo!

Reach out to your prospects with content that highlights the problems you can help them solve and the opportunities you help them capitalize on (notice I didn’t say product or solution). Case studies and best practices surveys and tips make for good lead nurturing offers.

At the same time, don’t be shy about reaching out to your prospects. As long as you deliver value, more is better!

=> Get practical “how to” tips: Download the eBook

Step Three: Follow up!

We live in a busy world. Even the prospects that are interested in your value proposition are too easily distracted by the day-to-day demands of their jobs. It’s up to you to keep your issue at the top of their agenda.

Too many good lead generation efforts go to waste due to poor follow-up. Some research claims that left to sales, up to 90% of the leads would never be followed up. A hot lead that is not followed up in a timely manner will cool down very quickly. Your ability to reach the prospect can diminish by 50% if you wait just 48 hours, and as much as 90% if you wait a whole week.

One company has seen a dramatic improvement in follow-up success rates by aiming to reach every new lead within 45 minutes. Sounds aggressive, but it works!

You can use tools such as LeadLander or most marketing automation systems to alert your reps when a known prospect is visiting your website, so they can catch these prospects when they are most likely to pick up the phone.

Last but not least, the success of your lead conversion requires complete alignment between marketing and sales. You can read more about it here.

Back to SEO.

No matter how many SEO leads you can get, a solid lead nurturing strategy is a must if you want to create a healthy pipeline that translates to predictable sales growth.

Companies that do it successfully typically follow this 3-step process by actively targeting buyers, engaging them in a dialog, and diligently following up to qualify and convert them into sales opportunities. 

Can you double your sales this year?

I bet most of you can.

It’s simply physics. You don’t put enough leads at the top of the funnel, you don’t get enough sales at the bottom.

Yes, I am sure you can plug some of the holes in your leaky funnel and improve your conversion rates. But as long as your conversion rate is greater than zero, more leads at the top mean more sales at the bottom.

As a matter of fact, the more leads you pour at the top of the funnel the higher your conversion rate should be. When salespeople have too few prospects to work on, you see the kind of wishful thinking that results in chasing low-probability opportunities and overoptimistic forecasts.

When salespeople have plenty of leads, they can be more selective and focus their time on the higher-probability / higher-value opportunities, which should increase closing rate and average deal size.

So what are some quick ways to generate more leads at the top of the funnel?

First, do more.

If you currently run one campaign a month, do two instead. That will double the number of leads you have. If you do two, make it three. That’s 50% more leads. You get the idea. Don’t be afraid to do more. 

As we have shown before, as long as you deliver value to your audience, touching your contact list more often will actually increase your response rate and decrease the opt-out rate.

Make a schedule and stick to it.

If your plan calls for one campaign a month and you let each campaign slip by just one week, by the time the year is over you have 20% fewer leads.  Ouch!  

Don’t confuse lead generation with selling.

The purpose of lead generation is to create a conversation, not to sell. The most successful lead generation campaigns I have been involved in had little (or nothing) to do with the product we were trying to sell. But they had interesting content that delivered value to our audience and helped our salespeople start a conversation.

Focus on results.

We marketers are often guilty of focusing on making things pretty, clever, “creative.” The cold reality shows us that in most cases these make little to no impact on the results that really matter – number of qualified leads.

Whatever you put in front of your customers and prospects has to be of value to them. But it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to bring value. So when you get to these last tweaks that may push you past the deadline, let it go.

Done is better than perfect.

You can do it on a budget.

Let’s make it clear. You will have to spend money in order to generate leads. You are probably spending money already, so can you generate more leads with the same budget? In many cases the answer is yes.

For example, repackaging an existing piece of content and sending a simple email to promote it will cost you just a fraction compared to a fancy webinar with an industry analyst, yet can generate just as many leads.

I’d be happy to share many more ideas for generating more leads and helping you double your sales. I would be even happier to hear some of your ideas. Just drop me a note or reply with a comment!

Additional lessons learned (or re-learned) in 2010

Here are a few additional lessons learned from our recent work and conversations with some very smart marketers (see previous post).

1. Nail it before you scale it

This age-old phrase is one of those things that we all need to be reminded of from time to time. Since we have already invested blood, sweat, and our egos in our idea, there is a great temptation to just run with it, especially if we just raised some money. So here are the key questions we should ask very early on:

• Do we know who will buy our product?
• Are these people jumping up and down when they hear about it?
• More importantly, how much will they be willing to pay for it?

The answers have to come from real buyers, not our own “make wish” personas. If the answer to any of the above is unclear, we need to go back to the drawing board before we spend any additional time or money on product development, marketing, or sales.

Elementary, but so hard to do…

For more about it, read Early Stage Marketing.


2. Get sales and marketing on the same page (literally)

Salespeople love to complain about the leads they get from marketing. Just as much, marketing people love to complain that sales don’t follow up on the leads they pass to them. The problem is they are both right.

Panaya is addressing the problem head-on with a written contract between marketing and sales that defines what constitutes a qualified lead. The contract is revisited each quarter to ensure that everybody is still on the same page.

There are three functions that help make it work:

• Lead qualification criteria and rules that reflect the contract are built into the company’s salesforce.com system
• Automated lead scoring (using Marketo) is helping everybody focus on the more qualified leads
• But not everything can be automated. Most important in my mind is the sales development function, which identifies real decision makers and opportunities, then passes them to sales.

See here for more ideas on marketing and sales alignment.


3. Use content to fuel the marketing machine

All the companies we know that are doing a great job generating a consistent stream of sales leads have one thing in common: they all invest in generating quality content.

The content is used to engage potential buyers and keep the conversation with them alive, through both outbound and inbound marketing. It doesn’t have to be related to the solution; but it does have to provide value to the reader.

The concept is simple: offer high-quality, broad-interest content to attract new leads and re-engage existing contacts, then feed these inquiries into the “lead machine” described above (lead scoring + a lead development team) to qualify and convert into sales opportunities.

According to SAManage CEO Doron Gordon, the importance of having lots of content is evident from the path visitors take on the company’s website. Visitors usually start with the blog and can visit as many as ten different pages before they register for a free trial or another offer (SAManage provides SaaS-based IT Service and Asset Management).

Some good content offer examples:

• Smart Questions For Your SaaS Vendor offered by SAManage
• SAP Salary Survey offered by Panaya
• Real Estate Investment Operational Challenges Survey by Resolve Technology

Any lessons you can share? Feel free to comment or send me a note.

Lessons learned from our clients: When is it time to change your demand generation strategy?

Panaya is a great success story. The company’s SaaS solutions help SAP customers automate their ERP upgrades and save thousands of hours in the process.

When Panaya first started marketing its solution, the challenge was to get the word out as quickly as possible, says Chief Marketing Officer Amit Bendov.

Amit and his team orchestrated an aggressive direct marketing program, using rental email lists that targeted SAP directors. A highly qualified phone sales team was hired to follow up on the leads generated.

Panaya’s value proposition is extremely compelling. Not less important, it is really easy to prove, and the solution requires near-zero implementation effort. With these assets in place, the number of deals closed kept growing at a double-digit pace quarter after quarter.

By the beginning of 2010, the company had several hundreds of customers. Despite these impressive results, Amit knew that sustaining this growth would require a different approach.

Realizing that going after the low hanging fruit could not support Panaya’s growth targets forever, Amit has refocused his team on a new strategy. With a well-defined target of SAP customers, the Panaya team has reoriented itself to methodically reach the 30,000 companies that make up this universe.

Instead of working on Leads, the Panaya sales development people now work on Accounts and Contacts. Within each account, contacts are classified into three categories—decision makers, influencers, and irrelevant.

“We had so many leads we couldn’t see the forest from the trees,” says Amit. “Once the list was reorganized into accounts and contacts, we could see which accounts we were missing or where we didn’t have the right level contacts.” A research team is now focused on identifying the missing accounts and contacts so they could be added to the house list and targeted by the sales team.

“With this systematic process in place, we can clearly see how many accounts we are touching each week and what is our level of engagement at each account,” says Amit. “We have much better visibility into our entire sales and marketing funnel from the very early stages. We can have 20 different leads from one account, and each one on its own may not be qualified enough. Now we can see that 20 people from the same company are showing interest, so we can take action on that.”

What Panaya is doing makes a lot of sense. They are not the first company to employ an account-based strategy. What I find notable is that they didn’t wait for things to get bad. They had the insight to recognize that their success had brought them to a new growth stage that required a different approach, and they acted on it. Way to go!

Related article: Reverse Engineer Your Marketing

Marketing in a Downturn

The first thing that comes to mind when you think about marketing during an economic downturn is why bother. Nobody buys anyways, so why do we need any marketing?

On a second thought, is this really the case?

We now know that the US has been in a recession since the end of 2007. Does it mean that nobody bought anything? Not really. From the small sample of software companies I am aware of, most have done pretty well. Even now that the recession word is out, companies are still closing a good amount of 2008 business. And this holds even in market segments that are making headlines littered with words such as “crisis”, “losses”, “slumping”, and their synonyms.

So while I agree that we all have to be cautious with our spending as we plan for 2009, we also have to be careful not to bring about our own demise by shutting down our marketing presence.

So what should a software marketer do?

First order of business is to use this opportunity to become more efficient and effective in your marketing operations. Marketing is one area where you don’t necessarily get what you pay for. You can pay a lot of money for things that don’t get you much, and you can do many things that cost very little yet have a huge impact.

For years, advertising and tradeshows have been my two poster children for ineffective marketing. Guess what? They still are, because companies are still spending too much money on them.

Take tradeshows for example. The cost of exhibiting in a tradeshow keeps going up, especially when you consider the travel costs involved. All this while the returns keep going down, as buyers are cutting back on their own travel expenses.

At the same time, there are many more inexpensive ways to reach buyers at our disposal today than ever before.

There are many things you can do to make sure you get the most out of your marketing budget, but if I had to pick my top three “getting ready for 2009” initiatives, they would be the following:

1. Fine-tune your website

Your website is the key to marketing effectiveness. You want to make sure that your message is not only crystal clear but also tuned to the concerns of your buyers given the current economic climate (although you don’t want to overreact to it).

Speaking of your website, you can spend a lot of money on fancy search engine optimization (SEO), but you can do some pretty amazing things with a low cost SEO effort that will drive more relevant traffic to your website.


2. Communicate often

Use your e-mail list to continue communicating with your market. Make sure you deliver value in your messages. This is something that is always true, but even more important when many are not necessarily in the mood for buying right now. Use (and reuse) educational material to keep the conversation alive and maintain top-of-mind awareness so buyers turn to you when budgets free up (and they will!)


3. Use “old” and “new” media to spread the word

PR is no longer about reaching the press. It is also no longer reserved just for “big news.” You can use your PR to bypass the traditional media and reach your buyers directly, and you can do it with very high frequency at extremely low cost (see a good example). In addition, you can use “old” media like blogs and “new” ones like twitter to reach your buyers through multiple opt-in vehicles and communicate your messages even more frequently.

But so far we only discussed defense. Now let’s move to offense.

How about taking advantage of this downturn to gain ground on your competition? If you can maintain or even increase your market presence, you may be able to move ahead of competitors that are cutting back and are not as effective as you are with their marketing spend. This may be a good time for competitive upgrades and other offers directed at the competition’s soft belly. And remember: they can do the same to you if you cut back too much or if you don’t make the most out of your marketing budget.

Post a comment and let me know how you are handling your 2009 marketing budget. And check out our no-risk offer to help you fine-tune your 2009 marketing budget.

Selling to the Middle?

Much has been written about selling to the top. Here is one more evidence why you should. A recent McKinsey research finds that middle managers often have difficulty balancing new ideas with current priorities and therefore have negative attitudes towards innovation. If you are selling an innovative solution or one that requires the buying organizations to change the way they do business, middle managers will often be your opposition. Even if you find a middle manager who does support innovation, you would need the support of top management to overcome potential resistance from your supporter's peers.

 

The killer demo: why demos are killing your sales

We’ve all heard about the killer demo. The team comes back from a sales meeting and reports how great the demo went and how impressed the viewers were: “They really loved it! They were floored… they just cannot wait to get their hands on it!”

A month later, the sale seems nothing but dead. Your salesperson is shaking his head: “I don’t really know what happened; they loved the demo but they are not returning my calls.”

The demo indeed was a killer; it killed your sale.

There are four main reasons a demo can be such a sale killer:

1. You talk instead of asking questions and letting the customer talk

There are probably hundreds of books that have been written on this subject, so I won’t waste your time stating the obvious.


2. The people interested in the demo are usually not the people that can buy

While getting buy-in from the intended user is important, the key to making the sale is reaching the decision makers. Most decision makers are not interested in the details. They want to know how you’re going to solve their business problems, not how your screens look like. Many of them wouldn’t even know what to look for in the demo. If the person you are dealing with is asking to see a demo that’s a clear red flag.


3. You are showing them something that you don’t know they need

There is no doubt that before you close the sale you will have to show a demo of the software. The question is when. If you didn’t spend enough time understanding the customer’s issues, the demo you are showing could be a great solution to the wrong problem.


4. If they don’t like the demo they will walk away

By showing the demo too early, you could lose the line of communication with the prospect before you had a chance to reach the decision makers, understand their needs, and explain how your solution could help them. The lower-level people you have been communicating with now think they have seen it all; they are now moving on to the next demo or the next problem they are trying to solve. Sooner or later they stop returning your calls.

So what can you do?

It’s actually quite simple. All you have to do is institute the three rules of the game:

• There is no demo until there is a clear understanding of the needs


• There is no demo until there is a clear identification of the decision makers


• There is no demo until there is a clear agreement on the decision process

If your salespeople are having a hard time making the adjustment, give them some role playing training and some lines to work with, such as:

“We’d be happy to show you our software. It may take us many hours/days to show you everything the software can do, so before I spend your valuable time I would like to make sure that what we show you is relevant to the business issues you are trying to address.”

There are always exceptions to the rules. If you sell low-cost software that is really simple and easy to work with, showing the software could be the best way to sell it. If that’s the case, you should bypass the demo altogether and provide a free trial. That’s a topic for another post, though.

Why is all this important to you, the marketer?

By the end of the day, if the leads you generate don’t translate to sales, your marketing effort was a waste. Every campaign you embark on should have a clear plan for how sales will follow-up on the responses. Make sure the follow-up leads to a meaningful conversation to identify needs, decision makers, and the decision process--not a killer demo!

The Buyer's Journey through the Leaky Funnel

The Leaky Funnel is a book by Hugh MacFarlane that should be added to the “must read” list of every sales and marketing executive. The premise of the book is “how to earn more customers by aligning sales & marketing to the way businesses buy.” I like the extension of marketing and sales alignment to the way customers buy. Rather than just advising sales and marketing to work better together, it gives both organizations a guiding post to align with – the customer.

The two concepts the book is focusing on – the leaky funnel and the buyer’s journey – are tightly related to each other. Many potential buyers start on a journey that could lead them to your solution, yet only a few finish there. Most will get distracted on the way; some will get lured by more promising value propositions; others might give up if the journey looks too challenging, or simply get bored with what you have to offer.

Here are some basic things you can do to keep buyers on track and reduce the funnel’s leakage:

• Clarity: buyers are looking for guidance. If your offer is easy to understand, more buyers will follow your path. Keep your value proposition clear and simple.
• Uniqueness: if your value proposition looks like many others, it is easy for buyers to get confused and hop on a different trail. Make sure your offer is differentiated enough so buyers can evaluate it against the rest of the field.
• Ease: buyers today are busier than ever. In our multitasking world, they embark on many journeys simultaneously. If finding the information they need in order to take the next step is not easy enough, they may choose an easier path. Make it easy for them to find the information they need.
• Frequency: there are many bumps on the road to your solution. If buyers get stuck on one of them for too long, it may be tough to get them back on track. Don’t wait until they ask for more information; offer it to them early and often.
  

Keeping the frequency of information flow to buyers is a challenge. Many companies spend a lot of money on marketing campaigns that generate buyer interest, but fail to keep buyers on track with timely and relevant follow-up. There are three common reasons for this failure:

1. Ownership: passing all the leads to sales is a sure recipe for a huge funnel leakage. As much as 70-90% of the leads that are passed to sales are never followed up since sales believe they are not worth the time.
2. Timeliness: being late is almost as bad as not following up at all. Some research shows that the likelihood of reaching a prospect on a follow-on call goes down by 90% within one week from the initial inquiry.
3. Relevance: I don’t have statistics on this one, but this is what happens when a salesperson calls someone that downloaded a white paper and asks if they have an active project and approved budget. If the follow-up call is too aggressive, it fails to match the next logical step in the buyer’s journey. The results can be disastrous, as buyers will not only get lost on their journey but may also tune out any future communication.
   

How can you avoid such failures and ensure effective follow-up? Here are some things you can do:

1. Plan the follow-up as part of each campaign
2. Match your follow-up communication to the buyer’s journey
3. Dedicate specific resources to do the initial follow-up and screening of leads before they are passed to sales
4. Be clear on which leads should be passed to sales
5. If you don’t have the bandwidth to follow-up in a timely manner, get outside help

Let me know what you think or if you need help with any of the above.

Bridging the Sales and Marketing Divide

I recently spoke at a webinar on the topic of sales and marketing collaboration with Gil Rapaport, EVP Marketing and Strategy at XOsoft. Gil has been the mastermind behind XOsoft’s implementation of a state-of-the-art marketing and sales process that has helped the company post 30% quarter over quarter growth for the past 3 years. A recording of this webinar presentation is now availble.

UPDATE: On July 11, 2006, less than a month after the webinar I held with Gil, XOsoft was acquired by Computer Associates. In an interview with Globes, Gil talks about the acquisition and the XOsoft “marketing machine.”

Reverse Engineer Your Marketing: A Blueprint for Marketing & Sales Success

This article was recently published (with some minor modifications) in MarketingProfs.com.
Reverse engineering is the process of back-working a solution from the end result. In the era of result-oriented marketing (how did we ever afford to do it differently?!), reverse engineering can help marketers refocus their efforts and resources to ensure marketing delivers results that are on-target with business goals.

Let’s take a simple scenario.

It’s time for your quarterly board meeting. This time, you’re going in with a spring in your step. Last quarter you really nailed it with your marketing programs. You did a webinar, a white paper promotion, and you had your biggest tradeshow of the year. Altogether, these programs generated over 1,000 leads for your sales force. You did your job. Now it’s up to sales to follow up on these leads and convert them into real opportunities.

You present your numbers and sit down with a winning smile on your face. Next is the VP of Sales. You haven’t seen her in weeks, she’s been busy closing deals on the road. After presenting last quarter’s results (they didn’t quite make the numbers, but “it was a good quarter”), she talks about next quarter. The pipeline is dry, she says. There are not enough marketing leads. You hold yourself not to bolt out of your seat, but you politely ask what about the 1,000+ leads you just passed to sales. These are 1,000 names, she says, but they are not good leads…

You’ve heard this before. Who is right?

The biggest problem is that nobody knows (so nobody can get fired, although the VP Sales is usually the first to go, with the VP Marketing not far behind…)

The conventional process of sifting through thousands of leads and trying to figure out which are the good ones is time consuming, expensive, and in most cases is not followed through. Much of your marketing effort goes to waste, but you don’t know why.

Here is how you can do it differently with reverse-engineered marketing:

Stage One: Figure Out WHO Sales Wants to Talk to
And it cannot be "the person who has a check ready for me"... Jokes aside, before you spend a single dollar on outbound marketing, sit down with sales and clearly define who they are trying to reach.

Agree on the Target
Define the industries, company size, and any other characteristics that describe the companies your sales people are calling on. For them, these will be the only leads worth following on. Then get down to the individuals. Who are the decision makers, influencers, and gatekeepers they want to speak with? Write down these definitions and hang them on your office wall. From here on, everything you do will be focused on these targets.

Get the Names of these Companies
Most enterprise software companies have several thousands companies in their target market (how many companies are in the Global 2000?), so getting the names of these companies is a manageable task. Still, most companies don’t bother doing it. If the task seems too daunting to begin with, break it down into smaller chunks – by vertical, geography, solution – whatever makes sense.

Analyze your Target Market CoverageRun your contact database against the list you have created. What percentage of the target market is currently there? How many more do you need to reach? Do the Same for Individuals. Do you have the type of contacts your sales people are looking for?

Establish Metrics
The end result of this analysis should be a measurement of coverage: “we have contacts at X% of the companies we are after, and Y% of them are at positions of interest to us.”

From this point on, marketing has two goals:

1. Move the dial on these numbers to increase target market coverage.
2. Generate repeat responses from target individuals at the target companies to create multiple opportunities for sales dialogue.

This is not a one-time analysis. These are numbers that you need to always have on your dashboard. Many executives are now adding demand generation metrics to their dashboards, so having agreed upon metrics is critical to establishing a common language for the boardroom conversation.
Stage Two: Figure Out HOW to Reach Them

Now that you know who you’re after, you need to figure out how to contact them and how to get them to respond to your message.

Get Additional Contact InformationThere is no easy or cheap way to add new target contacts to your list. However, if you have to spend the money, at least you’re better off now that you know exactly what you’re looking for. You can buy lists of names that will match the specific companies and titles you are after. One way or another, you’ll need to put someone on the phone to use your existing contacts within an organization to get these additional contacts you need to reach.

Look at Past ResultsGo back to your database and see what the people that fit your target profile responded to. What marketing vehicles seem to generate better response from your target prospects? Do certain messages seem to resonate better for specific segments?

Ask Them What They Care About
At times, we get so engrossed in analyzing our campaign data that we forget there is another way to find out how to get across to the people we are trying to reach: just ask them. Put together a short survey; ask them what their burning issues are and how they prefer to learn more about them. Have someone outside the company call them up; you’d be surprised how many people will give you a piece of their mind if you ask for it in a non-sales situation.


Stage Three: Execute and Measure

Get Started!With all this information in hand, you are ready to start creating the content, messages, and campaigns that are targeted at your desired audience. I know I make it sound simpler than it is. You can have a good starting point, but don’t expect to have all the answers upfront. You cannot wait for that. Just start executing to the best of your knowledge, then continue to test what works best and experiment with different ways to reach your target audience.

Measure Against Your GoalsAs you start generating leads, make sure you measure against the goals you have defined upfront:

1. Target market response: how many TARGET MARKET responses have been generated?
2. Target market coverage: how many NEW TARGET MARKET leads have responded?

As long as you keep hitting these goals, you are generating opportunities for your sales force to start a dialogue with the people they want to talk to and helping them move forward the dialogues that are already in place. And as long as you keep doing this, chances are your next board meeting is going to unfold better.

Some Additional Practical Details
As leads come in, you will need to figure out whether they fit your target market profile. The following chart describes a process you can use for that purpose.

Expecting sales to be responsible for the process is risky. I strongly recommend that you make this process part of marketing’s role in generating leads BEFORE they are passed to sales.


So put your gear in reverse, and get your engine going!

Webinar Helps Close the Deal

Working with a new client is always fun. There is an inevitable apprehension about newly launched marketing plans. Once the results are in, seeing the skepticism giving way to sheer excitement is a very satisfying moment.

A couple of weeks ago I helped a client put together their first ever webinar. They were concerned whether their audience would tune in to this media. The results exceeded their expectation on every metric – from invitation open rate (over 40%) to the number of registration and attendance rate (over 55%). Moreover, Over 30% of the registrations were highly qualified NEW prospects.

It gets even more exciting.

The webinar took place Tuesday. On Friday morning we sent each person who registered to the webinar a follow up e-mail from the salesperson in charge of their account. By Friday afternoon I got a call from a salesperson telling me that he received five responses to the e-mail, all of them interested in learning more about the software.
Can it get even more exciting? You bet!

One of the e-mails was from a prospect he has been working with for a couple of months and was trying to close as a Q1 deal, but the guy has not been returning e-mails or calls in the past few weeks (I’m sure you’ve been there…). The e-mail said “come over and get a check for a 1/2 of the cost, we’ll pay the rest next quarter.” The date: Friday, March 31st.

This doesn’t happen very often, so the point of the story is not to create the impression that webinars are good deal closers.

The point is that you need multiple touches to move a prospect through the sales cycle. A salesperson can use marketing help in creating these touches by providing information that is of value to the customer. In many cases, these will generate better response than a sales call. And once in a while, it can even help seal the deal.

That’s fun!

What’s Your Pickup Line?

This is one of the best marketing posts I’ve ever seen. It shatters the value/word meter.

The Spark This blog entry hit my e-mail box as I was listening to a client presenting to a prospect and thinking to myself “why do they talk so much about themselves - who cares?!”

Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Just check out how many website homepages are about the company, its vision, its founders, its offices, etc, just not what it does for the customers!

Marketers beware - marketing myopia starts here…

The Sales Imperative

Maybe the problem is in how we call them. Salespeople. Good salespeople put the “people” first, then the “sales”. Here is another reminder on the topic from the Revenue Journal’s authority Kristin Zhivago. If you don’t have time to read the article in its entirety, read at least the four points at the bottom.

Can you sell? Can they buy? You don’t know until you ask the right questions!

I often wonder to what degree we can blame our fast-paced lifestyle for the difficulties so many software companies have meeting their sales goals.

I have recently been involved in a number of interesting exercises with several software companies that are trying to improve their marketing and sales processes. It has been interesting, and at the same time disappointing, to see how difficult it is for salespeople, marketing managers, and company executives to come up with a clear definition, not to mention a unified one, of what constitutes a qualified lead.

Now, I’m not talking about the terminology. Granted, “qualified lead” could mean different things to different people (read about The Fallacy of Qualified Leads). I am talking about salespeople not being able to come up with a clear set of questions that could tell them whether a company is a good fit for their solution.

So what do salespeople do when they don’t know these questions? They ask the easy question: “Are you looking to buy?” “Do you have an active project?”

That’s an order-taker question, not a salesperson’s! A salesperson is looking for a problem to solve, a goal to help a buyer fulfill, a pain to be relieved.

That’s where our hasty culture and go-getter attitude trip us. We are all in a constant race to do more and faster, that we don’t put the time to think through and come up with a solid, customer-centric selling process. Rather than take the time to understand the customer’s issues, we rush to tell him how great our product is.

The skill pool of solution selling is dwindling, and as a result, companies are missing their sales targets, while new salespeople and managers keep coming and going every 12 to 18 months through the endless motion of the company’s revolving doors.

How do we put an end to it? How do we get our salespeople to stop chasing and pushing and start engaging and cultivating?

I don’t have the answer, but I believe we first have to take the time to evaluate what we do. Going through these exercises, the companies I mentioned are taking first steps in this direction. I just hope they have the patience to see it through.

The Fallacy of Qualified Leads

"We don't get enough qualified leads!" How many times have you heard your VP of Sales make this statement? The common answer from marketing is "we have generated lots of leads, but sales doesn't follow up on them." "But these leads are not qualified", would be the familiar rebuttal from the sales trenches.

The reason this is such a frequent scene in the enterprise software world is rather obvious: what sales considers a Lead is not what marketing calls one. Marketing is looking for interest; salespeople look for budget, authority, and decision timeframe.

I know it may sound counterintuitive, but here is my take: the most probable way to guarantee that your lead generation efforts miss what sales calls "qualified leads" is to aim for those that are late in the buying cycle.

Let me explain. Buyers that are actively looking usually make an effort to find and evaluate potential solutions. If such a buyer is not talking to you, it could be for a number of reasons:

• She never heard of you.
• He doesn't think you have a viable solution.
• They have already narrowed down the field.

All of these reasons are best addressed by finding qualified buyers early in the buying cycle, or even before a cycle has actually begun. To those of you that are aware of Michael Bosworth's Solution Selling and Seth Godin's Permission Marketing, this should all sound very familiar.

What is the Role of Marketing in Solution Selling?

The Solution Selling approach advocates farming rather than hunting. Hunting might work when large herds of buyers keep running in front of you, like we had in the high-tech boom days. But hunting is very difficult and extremely unpredictable when buyers are scarce.

The approach we propose may take longer to develop, but it is the only way that guarantees results, if you stick to it.

1. Find a Real Problem

All too often I see dismal sales and lead generation results blamed on insufficient budgets or lack of marketing pizzazz, when the real reason is lack of a compelling offer to begin with. Since all buyers have limited budgets and time, only the very few top priority problems get addressed at any given time. I frequently hear the statement "our biggest competition is no decision". That's a clear sign that you haven't made it to the top of your buyers' priority list, which is usually an indication that they don't feel enough pain related to your solution.

The problem you solve doesn't have to be painful to a lot of people, but it has to be painful enough to some people to make it to the top of their priority list. Narrowing down your target market will usually help finding such a problem. Geoffrey Moore offers a simple methodology for identifying such "must have" problems through use case scenarios in Crossing the Chasm. It is a good exercise to examine how painful the problem you solve really is.

Once you find a problem, talk about it. Don't rush to the solution. Then get your customers to talk about it. While you may solve a real problem, your target audience may still not be aware of the extent of its implications. They are also influenced by peer pressure when it comes to prioritizing the problems.

2. Know Your Target Market (by name, including all decision makers)

This theme is so fundamental that I find myself going back to it in ever discussion about successful B2B marketing. There is no point in talking about your solution to someone who doesn't suffer from the problem you can solve. Your marketing efforts should target only the companies that could feel this pain, whether they are aware of it yet or not.

Targeting the right people within these companies is just as important. As Bosworth says in Solution Selling, you cannot make a sale until a decision maker has recognized the problem and the solution. As you build your target market database, use your initial contact within a company to reach additional contacts at relevant power positions.

3. Develop Credibility and Gain Increasing Levels of Permission

Another reason for the "no decision" syndrome is that buyers don't see your solution as viable. It may be deemed too expensive or technologically immature. Your marketing dialogues should aim to gain increasing level of permission to study the specific nuances of their problem and demonstrate the viability of your solution.

Too many lead generation efforts focus on the question "are you ready to buy?" In Permission Marketing, Seth Godin compares marketing to dating. This would be like trying to get a first date by popping the "will you marry me?" question. Developing confidence and trust with your buyers takes time and requires multiple proof points.

Bosworth emphasizes the importance of the reference story to develop credibility and get the buyer's attention. Marketing has a primary role in identifying these stories, articulating them, and planting them in multiple points of interaction with potential buyers, such as your website, webinars, and other direct marketing efforts.

As you can see, Solution Selling and Permission Marketing offer a very similar approach to enterprise selling and marketing:

• Looking for people who are "ready to buy" is a fallacy: all potential buyers are qualified leads.
• Engage with them early and develop trust and ongoing dialogue.
• The role of marketing is to gain increasing levels of permission to help the buyer learn more, first about the problem and then about your solution.

Can your marketing and sales organizations agree on such common approach? When should sales get involved with a buyer?