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

The New Marketing Resolutions...

By Kim Albee

Welcome to 2009, and as is the case with most sea changes, paradigm shifts, or whatever you'd like to call them, it takes something dramatic to cause changes to take effect beyond the early adopters, and 2008 delivered on that front!  The gas prices did a lot to push home the notion that we need to get independence from our oil addicted ways, and the economic situation has driven a lot of companies to streamline and be even more watchful of their budget and expenses.

Marketing must start to examine ways to get more done with less -- and it's completely possible when companies start to truly embrace online marketing and look at how to participate in the internet-savvy world where our customers and prospects are active.

Here are 5 "Resolutions" for Marketing as you move into 2009:

1.  Get Yourself Found!  Does your organization come up in the first page of search results for the terms that are used by your target market segment(s)?  If not, you better start paying attention to getting your organization dominant for those terms -- through natural and paid search strategies.  Get control of your websites, and the SEO.  Free yourself from dependence on IT (if they've got the control).

2.  Capture Lead Interest.  Does the information you provide help your target segments better think about the issues that your products solve?  Does it kindle their interest in learning more from you?  Build your reputation as a company that can help?  If not, then pay attention to the content you're distributing and how you are adding value -- a good question to ask yourself is, "So What?" as you read your content and see if there is a compelling "something" getting said that matters to your target audiences.

3.  Nurture Lead Interest.  Getting a lead to sign up for something is one thing.  Nurturing their interest with relevant messages, based on their activity and responses, can keep you top-of-mind with your leads, so when they are ready to buy, you're in the game.

4.  Focus on Delivering Value.  Not only with your products, but with every interaction you have with leads and customers.

5.  Get along with Sales (and Sales, get along with Marketing) -- you work for the same side!  Start behaving that way, and stop pointing the finger at each other (I know, easier said than done).  This one isn't trivial, but the rivalry and finger pointing takes a toll, and the companies that resolve this will be ahead of the game.  Technology can help bridge the gap, but nothing beats communication and teamwork - put all three together, and you could transform what it's like to work at your organization (if you're in one of those departments).

Employing these resolutions will take dedication and focus.  But it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg.

Welcome to 2009.  May this year be the breakthrough year for Online Marketing, Demand Generation, and Lead Nurturing!   

Helping Sales Sell

Too often the bond between Sales and Marketing is rife with bickering and finger-pointing. I’ve heard Marketing people say they can’t be blamed for Sales’ failure to sell. It’s more accurate to say that no one should be blamed. However, Marketing always has the opportunity to take responsibility for their organization’s ability to sell and in many great organizations this is exactly what happens.

There’s another bottleneck, however, in addition to historical enmity between the two departments, and this bottleneck is entirely due to technology or the lack of it. Too often some crucial percentage of Marketing’s good work does not make it to the Sales side of the organization in time or at the right time for Sales to use it.

Marketing is creating valuable information, based in market research and expertise, that can help move prospects along the pipeline. But in some organizations this information is only used to attract a prospect at the start of the relationship at which point that prospect is tossed over the wall to Sales.

This only works for the very best sales people who have capacity to take a prospect from introduction to close on their own. There are many more mid-level sales people in every organization who need and want help, but may not know it’s available. Similarly, there are plenty of marketing people who would like to see their messages used more often (what marketing person doesn’t want to see their messages used!) but don’t have a good way to send them to Sales.

A CRM for Marketing system handles that internal divide by creating a pool of marketing messages and value propositions. Allowing Sales easy access to them, along with a lead’s activity profile and other information can make the difference in creating valuable, meaningful conversations.

For mid-level sales people, useful and timely marketing messages can make the difference in upping their performance. That will go directly to the bottom line!

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.

Who qualifies leads: Sales or Marketing?

Most people say that lead qualification is Marketing's job. And in B2B organizations, it has been. But as a matter of practice in the organizations I speak and work with, the resources in Marketing who deal with sourcing leads and pushing them to Sales are pretty slim.

In reality, Sales is doing a bunch of the lead qualification work including jobs that are clearly better served by Marketing. And without support or training, they're not doing them very well. For example, I know companies in which sales people are still drafting form letters and then copying and pasting them to their lead list.

On the other hand, in cases where Marketing has the bandwidth to nurture leads at least a little, the pattern tends to go like this: Marketing goes to a trade show, gets a bunch of leads, sends them a few emails and then dumps them on Sales. If you're lucky, Sales follows up and records some information about each lead's personal preferences and eventually makes a sale, but that means that Sales is really qualifying the lead.

Since Sales is already qualifying leads, and since they're the best prepared to understand when a lead is ready to become a customer, why not set them up with the best information possible and let them do that task?

Sales should have access to a system in which they could open an interest profile for a lead and see all the information that lead received or researched on your website. They should be able to sort these leads to see who's hottest and decide when and how to contact that lead.

Marketing, meanwhile, could focus on its strengths to create and maintain a 12-month email campaign, rather than recreating the wheel with each new group of leads. As leads are added to the system, they'd begin to receive monthly emails and Sales could pull them from the lead nurturing program as they become customers.

Let Marketing nurture and Sales qualify, but provide a common view into the pool of leads for both organizations. Good CRM for Marketing software will automate the updating of this pool so that neither group is saddled with that task or blame if it fails to happen.

Give Sales actionable intelligence to build the relationship with the lead and let them qualify that opportunity.

Leveraging profitable channels for B2B Marketing intelligence

According to a recent Aberdeen Group research report, “Demand Generation: Kick-start your business," the four most profitable marketing channels for B2B companies are (in order):

1. Website
2. Email
3. Telemarketing
4. Trade Shows

As I wrote in my September 25th post,  – the top challenges faced by marketing are: measuring marketing results and lead generation, followed closely by lead nurturing and lead qualification. 

Combine these lists and you can see that you need a website you can manage and change easily, that can be optimized for search engines, and that provides value to your target audience. Your website builds your reputation with them and captures or qualifies lead information where possible.

Email is the preferred method of interaction within the B2B space today.  It is trackable, and it is interactive.  Many B2B marketing executives I know tell me they don’t even consider direct mail any longer.  They focus primarily on the email channel to get messages out to their prospects and leads.

Telemarketing is a secondary channel that validates and verifies lead interest and is part of and combined with email campaigns, and can be very effective when used intelligently to provide further value for each lead contacted.

Trade shows can be a good way to get into a specific industry and start to get recognized, or to drive marketing and sales conversations from the leads that can be gathered in those venues.  While there might be a few sales that occur directly from a trade show,  mostly trade shows are about demand generation – building awareness in your target market and getting more leads started in the nurturing process.

Simple enough, but when you start tying it all together it gets complex. What are you doing to power each of those capabilities, and can that technology deliver the intelligence needed to drive a continuously improving and effective lead nurturing process that will improve the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)?

The Aberdeen report also points out that “Best-In-Class [companies] demonstrate heavy adoption of email marketing applications 87%, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 77%, customer survey tools 64%, and content/knowledge management tools 63%.”  It’s not enough to implement these tools. Effective companies are seeking to integrate them in ways that yield actionable intelligence.

Marketing and Sales alignment requires more than point solutions

According to a recent study conducted by Aberdeen Group, the top two marketing pains are: measuring marketing results and lead generation, followed closely by lead nurturing and lead qualification.

Given the plethora of B2B lead generation channels, such as webcasts, seminars, event marketing, public relations, whitepapers, email marketing, and web-based marketing, and all of the technologies available to manage each of them, why are those still the pain points? 

Because point solutions don't deliver intelligence.  Point solutions offer capabilities.  And there is a big difference.  Qualified leads need to be moved through the sales pipeline as efficiently as possible.  Savvy best-in-class companies know and understand that delivering flat data to sales from business cards collected at a trade show, or names and emails of webinar registrants, is no longer acceptable.  That mode of behavior has created a chasm of trust between Sales and Marketing that lengthens sales cycles, and results in duplicate work being done by Sales because they don't trust Marketing to deliver the goods.

Integration and automation are an essential component of marketing intelligence.  Sales has tools like Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to help manage the selling process.  What Marketing needs is CRM for Marketing.  Integrated tools that help to tailor messaging specific to leads, that can be automated to deliver messages relevant to a leads' interest based on their activity in the lead nurturing process, and the ability to trigger those leads over to the Sales CRM system when they are ready for a sales conversation (including the rich set of ever-expanding Interest Profiles so Sales can pick up right where Marketing and the prospect are).  Include the ability for sales to pass them right back if the opportunity is outside the current sales focus, and Sales and Marketing have tools that will help achieve meaningful alignment.

Marketing needs a solution that will allow them to manage the messaging, value propositions, and lead generation and nurturing activities so that Sales can leverage it rather than reinventing it. 

It's time to get Sales and Marketing rowing the boat in the same direction - leveraging the expertise and capabilities they both bring to the table - in service of the overall organizational revenue and growth goals.

Point solutions for email, webinar registration, surveys, content management, you name it, just don't provide the sort of intelligence that's needed to keep up in today's world.

Start propelling your company forward -- empower your marketing activities with CRM for Marketing.

Sales without Marketing is like an email without content

When Sales and Marketing don't get along, the cost to the organizations is immense.  This hit home for me a few days ago when a sales person sent me a follow up email that actually made me angry.

I’d attended a webinar, which was well-prepared. Clearly the company hosting it invested a fair amount of time and money promoting it and getting people to sign up. After the event, we attendees received a follow up email with the webinar materials included. That part was great.

Then I got another email. This should have been the personal follow up that brought me into a closer relationship with the company.
Have a look at this and tell me how welcomed you feel:

Subject:  Hi Kim, , thought you may find this interesting.

Email Text:
Hi Kim,

Good morning – and I hope you’re well.

I came across the attached and thought you may find it interesting.

Have a great week.

My best,
[sales rep name - removed to protect the guilty]

Attached was a PDF that was clearly not just something he 'ran across' while he had my needs top of mind – It was a marketing piece about his company's technology.

It pissed me off that I'm that unimportant as to receive a “personalized” email with nothing of value in it.

This is why Sales needs Marketing. If this organization had the tools inside the email construction process to connect appropriate marketing messages with rich customer data about me, the email creation might have gone like this:
• The sales person calls up my Interest Profile: resources I've read, visits to their website I've made, webinars I've attended or at least registered for
• Sales also has access to information about what my company does
• That information is connected to value propositions created by Marketing for the industry we’re associated with – so the sales person has easy access to targeted messaging

If I’d received a thoughtfully constructed email that addressed my real concerns (and that’s not hard – as a business owner I have a lot of real concerns), that would have been the start of a good connection.

Without the tools to measure my interests and access relevant messages, sales people are left stranded and isolated, trying to come up with something to say. They figure something is better than nothing and so they spam the lead list, hoping they’ll make a hit or at least can show that people opened their email, even if it had a negative impact. To top it off, with a personal email, there's no way to unsubscribe and hence no possibility for them to receive negative feedback. 

Even though the sales person took an action – what did it produce? To really increase an organization’s revenue, Sales and Marketing need to partner to create communications that add value to those of us who receive them.