(sales x marketing) to the power of technology = extraordinary results

Software that supports branding standards

A friend of mine sent me the link to the site for Make My Logo Bigger Cream and after I stopped laughing (the laughter of recognition) I decided I’d better pass it on as a cautionary tale about branding standards. One of the necessary ingredients of integrated sales and marketing software is the ability to enforce and support branding for a company.

Often companies don’t realize what an impact it makes to have unified branding, until some enterprising sales or marketing person takes it upon themselves to create a landing page, or a niche site that in no way resembles the branding standards that have been established for the company. I’ve seen this happen at companies that spent tens of thousands of dollars on the look and feel of their website only to have a few rogue employees directing prospects to an awful site on the side, or sending out email campaigns to landing pages that don’t implement those standards.

More and more software is coming onto the market that allows companies to create landing pages and micro-sites. This software makes it easy for Marketing personnel to create sites as needed for marketing campaigns while ensuring that they support and implement your branding standards. Let’s save the sparkles and kittens for the Holiday cards.

Understanding and nurturing are the key to the B2B sales process

As Michael Webb mentions in his Nov. 28 post, and we’ve been talking about a lot with our customers, nurturing is the key ingredient in having people move through the sales pipeline. As much as Sales wants to figure out as straight a path as possible to get folks through the sales pipeline, in a longer sales cycle, it doesn’t work that way. In reality, leads wander their way through the process as they learn, get educated, understand your offerings, and figure out what will work best within their organization to help them reach their goals.

It’s critical in this meandering nurturing process to continue marketing to your leads and building awareness of your offerings in ways that show them its value and how it will solve their pain.

There are great tools on the market today to keep Sales and Marketing aligned so that the lead passes to Sales at the right time in the process (or is pulled in by Sales). The more intelligence your tools offer, the faster you can locate the leads that are ready to move further down the pipeline. Rich lead information also allows Marketing to provide value propositions for personal follow-ups from the Sales person, which builds a deeper relationship as you show your understanding of the lead’s problems.

Repetition works! Webb points this out and we’ve seen it in our marketing efforts as well. It’s terrific to have a great landing page article, but in reality only a small percentage of visitors will click through and read it. That means the content of the article can be changed, nuanced and used again with different email messaging. You don’t need completely new content every time you do an email campaign. People have different interests and attention at different times. As with good presentation skills: tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them.

I recommend Michael Webb’s article Nurturing: The secret to doubling your sales conversation rate.

Prepare for the Unexpected

I don’t know how last week was for you, but for most of the people I know, it was less than ideal. This reminded me of a funny piece of fortune cookie advice a friend of mine received recently: “prepare for the unexpected.”

It’s good advice in a way, especially since our increased use of technology means that we’re confronted by the unexpected more often than ever before. Whether it’s a software issues, Internet connectivity glitch, server problem or even (as at the apex of my week) a garage door opener malfunction—technology sure can throw a curve ball.

So how can one prepare for the unexpected? It is by its nature not what we see coming, not something we had in mind, and not in the plan.

Two ways come to my mind. The first is to build as much resilience in our existing system as possible. Not just backups and backup plans in technology, but making sure that our human systems are resting adequately and taking care of ourselves. When a situation starts to go wrong often the first thing we do is neglect ourselves, which leaves us unprepared for the next crisis.

Secondly, and perhaps even more crucial, is to pay attention to who we’re being in response to the unexpected. You can even do this before anything happens. Imagine that you walk into your office tomorrow and something has happened that’s beyond anything you prepared for. What happens to your mind? Now, what do you want to happen in your mind? Sometimes when a situation spirals out of control we forget that we have the most say over our own reactions.