B2B Lead Generation and Conversion

Have you ever stood in a booth at a tradeshow peddling your wares? Did you know you can apply inbound sales techniques easily at a tradeshow and come away with lots of new opportunities?

First, some background…

Trish Bertuzzi and I had a quick discussion at The Customer Collective around Cold Calling 2.0 where we sparred a bit about the effectiveness of inbound versus outbound sales. Trish has built a good business and adds a lot of value for her clients using proven inside sales methods. My point was that smart inbound sales techniques can help augment those inside sales efforts.

Defining “inbound” sales is a bit tricky; it means different things to different people. My contention is that inbound marketing/sales is creating an environment where prospects can self-qualify by taking a specific action when presented an offer.

You can use inbound sales techniques manually, even at a tradeshow. Here’s an example:

When I was carrying a $5M quota for data center backup systems, I used to attend on-site table top shows at various 3 letter Fed Govt agencies (FBI, NSA, etc.). For security reasons, they were generally set up in a room adjacent to the campus cafeteria.

Agency employees would finish their lunch and then enter the “gauntlet”. We called it that because it was basically a group of technical analysts walking through a barrage of sharply dressed sales people holding shiny brochures all repeating the same tired line “Hi, how are you today? Can I show you our X24 encryption engine?” Completely intimidated, most attendees would not even make eye contact and would only hesitate briefly in front of your table to see if you had a free giveaway.

I liken this to the outbound world we sell in today; an increasingly indifferent prospect is bombarded with more and more information.

Here’s where inbound sales comes in at a tradeshow.

After realizing that I would never be able to talk with every attendee, I started to think of a way to have prospects self-qualify. That night, I printed a batch of small, 4×6 inch square handouts that had a simple question on it “Do you still use tapes for backups? … Discover a Better Way …” along with a funny graphic of a caveman holding a computer tape (I was selling disk based backup systems that replaced tape).

The next day, instead of trying to engage each person, I simply handed the paper to each and every person saying “here’s something small to throw away”.

Everyone read it. Several circled back.

I found at least 5 golden leads that day and one was a director responsible for 800 servers. He was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt; I would have never picked him out of a crowd. Furthermore, guys like that are not on the grid in any public way. After several months of decision criteria crafting and committee briefings we locked in a $7M deal over 2 years.

The next time you have a trade show to attend, think about a way to lightly engage each passing prospect with a self-qualifying piece of collateral. Don’t use a whitepaper or brochure…that’s about YOU, not your prospect!

Tags: B2B Marketing // Add Comment »

The Jim Logan RevenueNow! program is in full swing and I must say that so far I like what I see. Without giving away too many specifics, let’s just say that within a couple of days I feel like we finally got our message right and are now building on it.

We originally built EchoQuote™ to directly help the sales team engage more prospects but somewhere along the line we lost sight of that goal. We drifted toward a message that EchoQuote™ was for Marketers only because our process depends on the marketing team in an organization to add EchoQuote™ to the corporate website. We now realize that we need to focus on the sales management side and also show how it works in conjunction with a comprehensive marketing program.

Core Messaging Change

Our original core message was “Find B2B Qualified Leads First” which we figured appealed more to the marketing folks. This was a reasonable tag line since our process really does accomplish that but what we were missing was the “why”. The why turns out to be that you want to find serious prospects first so your sales team can have a conversation and make a sale.

The Complex Sale Starts With a Conversation

Our clients do not sell commodities and in every instance a sales person must be engaged (think complex sale), thus a “conversation” with a prospect is required. As a B2B sales person myself, this makes perfect sense. Sales people in an enterprise sales environment don’t want, or expect, marketing to deliver leads that are “ready to buy”, they simply want serious prospects they can engage that may buy in the future. In fact, if a serious prospect is not handed off to sales in a timely fashion, the customer may spec in your competitors solution before your sales team even has a chance to talk with them. Given the choice, sales people usually want to find out about serious projects early so they can talk with the prospect and lay the ground work for a positive decision.

Our new message is simply “More Conversations. More Sales.” Jim nailed it. Now when you visit our website you will see that message being used at the core. We still have lots to do but we have already come a long way. Thanks Jim!

Tags: B2B Marketing // 1 Comment »

Have you ever heard this from a B2B Sales or Marketing Manager?

Never, ever, ever give the customer pricing until you’ve CREATED VALUE!

I have and it’s wrong.

What if I told you I can prove it?

We’ll get to the proof in a minute but let’s examine the myth first. I began my IT sales career in the early 90s and we were involved in the “complex” sales process I keep hearing so much about. At that time, marketing did things like trade shows and advertising to generate inbound interest for our products. We as sales people attended those events, gathered leads (pocketed the good ones), and did our share of outbound calling. The message to customers was tightly controlled by both marketing and sales to the point that the customer depended on us for information. The world was in order.

The internet changed all that.

Starting in the late 90s the tempo of information exchange increased. As a busy sales person, I was happy to inform my customer that he could “just go to our website” for that brochure on the new product, I didn’t have to mail him one. Wonderful. “You need product specifications?”, I asked. “It’s on our website!”

Little did we know we were conditioning our customers to bypass us and we were giving all the power to marketing; they owned the website. Our competitor’s marketing groups were also busy on their websites adding more and more sales information. The more the customer ignored marketing, the more marketing published. It became a vicious circle of trying to use an ever increasing amount of content to engage an increasingly indifferent pool of potential customers.

By 2005 it got to the point that there was almost no reason to directly contact any sales person to find product information. Just Google it.

The issue was no longer about a customer finding product or solution information, but rather deciding which solutions they would research themselves. They were empowered with self-service information and had the ability to be selective. When business customers are looking at potential solutions early in the sales cycle they are considering a variety of criteria including features and benefits, but one in particular leads the pack - budget fit.

Budget fit? Yes, Budget fit.

Ask yourself this: Would you spend an hour listening to a sales presentation for something you know you couldn’t afford? Probably not. So why do you expect a customer to sign up for an online webinar, or worse, download your “Free Trial” if they don’t understand what it will cost them if the decide they DO want it?

Budget fit helps the prospect understand the nature of your offer so they can determine if they want to invest the time to research it.

So back to my original statement about violating the cardinal sales rule of “Never give pricing until you’ve established value”. In most B2B cases today you will not have the opportunity to present your value proposition until your potential customer understands the budget implications, i.e. rough cost, of your solution. The ironic part of this story is that your customer will use Google to find your pricing somewhere and in many cases will get the wrong information. Good luck winning that deal if you even find out about it.

If you want to prove this to yourself try this. Ask your marketing department to create a special landing page called “Pricing” on your corporate website. Model it after your standard Contact Us page so visitors will not be upset if they really can’t get pricing. Put a direct link to it at the top of every page. Ensure that you have the ability to measure the number of times website visitors click on that page. Compare the page count for the Pricing page against the Contact Us page and if you are getting more than a 2 to 1 ratio then you are missing a lot of sales opportunities.

If you want live proof from us just check out this Results page.

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Conversion, Lead Generation // 1 Comment »

I’ve been kicking around this concept while preparing for an upcoming Social Media presentation. I often hear Social Media described as an “office water cooler” where the free exchange of information benefits all those involved. As a frequent participant I have personally gained from lively exchanges with others and am a big supporter of Social Media outlets. Those whose make their living on the success of Social Media tout its ability, if not necessity, to reach new B2B customers, but does it?

Most businesses would rather have a “lemonade stand” where potential B2B customers can visit, talk AND engage the vendor. Somebody has to pay for the refreshments. What I have not seen discussed much by the Social Media folks is the business case for using these methods. The Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) seems to default back to the same tired metrics of “112 new twitter followers, 45 whitepaper downloads, etc.” I have yet to see Social Media map to business revenue in a meaningful way.

Social Media seems to be falling into the Branding form of media; something we need but is very hard to measure. Any REAL ROI cases out there that show Social Media as a B2B Lead Generation tool versus being just a “free water cooler” with a stack of twitter followers?

Tags: B2B Marketing // 2 Comments »

I am about to begin Jim Logan’s (B2B Rainmaker) 6 week RevenueNow! program to flush out our marketing and sales strategy for the near future. Our B2B Lead Generation service is getting good results for our clients but we are having a difficult time finding the “right” person in target organizations to engage. We’re looking to Jim for help and will report back on our results. Stay tuned.

Tags: B2B Marketing, Jim Logan, Lead Generation // 1 Comment »

Want to find and close more business customers?

Of course, but how? More outbound emails? More Cold Calling?

The key may lie in empowering your customers to engage you instead of the other way around. In this current selling climate it seems that a new selling tool is announced almost daily that will revolutionize how sales people find new customers. Unfortunately, the vast number of them are inward facing toward the sales team and completely ignore the customer that is searching for your products or services.

Think about how you research and purchase new business services. Do you respond to the barrage of interruption based emails you receive? Probably not. If you are like me you have identified an area of your business that needs improving and you begin researching it. For example, I was interested in having our Corporate website optimized for Search Engines. As a Hubspot follower I immediately went to their site and ran their website grader; a basic but eye opening tool.

This same methodology can be applied to your own b2b lead generation efforts. Think about tools that YOUR customers would find useful and supply them. Your customers will benefit and you may end up with not only a new customer but a viral marketing spread of your products and services.

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Geoffrey James has a new blog post Do You Like Cold Calling? over on BNET’s Sales Machine. I like Geoffrey’s work because many times he includes a poll with his provocative posts…this one included. I voted “NO, I truly and thoroughly dislike cold calling”. No one voted for “YES, I like cold calling”. Biiiiig surprise.

Can we finally put a nail in the cold calling coffin? We’ve had a good 15 years to propagate information on the internet and you can basically find any information you want whenever you want. There are also some good referral techniques that top notch sales folks have written about lately to avoid having to cold call. Referrals - good, interruptions - bad.

See you on the Self-Service side of the world!

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I’ve always really liked the team over at FindandConvert, which offers first-class internet marketing services like SEO, PPC and Social Media development. The CEO, Bernie Borges publishes an excellent blog, “Web Marketing Strategies, SEO, Social Media Marketing and Podcasting”.

Bernie just published a podcast with me discussing B2B conversion strategies.

Here’s a summary of the podcast from Bernie’s point of view:

When a visitor comes to your website due to your well planned SEO or SEM strategy he or she is not necessarily ready to convert into a buyer, or to fill out a form, or ready to talk to a salesperson. This is especially prominent in B2B websites.

Buyers have many options when they do their research on the web and therefore, they are harder to engage. Many marketers struggle with how to engage a website visitor.

Marketers must look at their website from the customer’s point of view. Visit your website as a prospective customer. Ask yourself if your website content and calls to action are engaging for visitors at different stages of their buying cycle.

Most marketers have not done a good job of engaging visitors based on where the visitor is in their buying process. Some of the calls to actions marketers have offered such as white papers, are not very compelling or they are sometimes freely available. They often don’t address needs of the buyer at the current stage when they visit the website.

EchoQuote is a group of IT sales people. They came up with a method to provide a website conversion through self service budgetary pricing without displaying pricing on the website. By offering the website visitor the promise of budgetary pricing without having to contact the company or talking to a salesperson, many visitors are willing to engage.

Often a website visitor wants to know the general price range of your products or services. By offering the ability to provide budgetary pricing the request rates can be very high. But, just because someone requests pricing information doesn’t make them a qualified sales prospect.

When someone asks for pricing info using a link from your website to EchoQuote, the first detail captured is an email address. Therefore, this email address can be nurtured for future sales potential. This method is a good way to build your email list.

Once someone requests pricing they are a “suspect” and it’s a good idea to have a sales person contact the visitor to explore their criteria in order to avoid a situation where they scope your products or services without your input.

EchoQuote is a patented system whose clients are businesses interested in B2B lead generation. Most of them sell a complex product or service with a direct sales force or a knowledgeable channel partner.

EchoQuote client example: a 20 year old company who traditionally does a lot of email marketing. They had noticed a drop in leads from the contact form. When they implemented the EchoQuote self service pricing their lead form conversions picked up by 30%. The client attributed it to giving visitors the ability to receive budgetary pricing in a self service model.

Dale summarizes the podcast interview by pointing out that all situations are different but suggests that all marketers visit their website with your customer’s perspective and assess if you’re providing compelling calls to action relevant to different stages of the buying cycle.

Listen to the podcast for the full interview between me and Bernie.

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Stefan Tornquist, Research Director for MarketingSherpa, recently discussed the need for pricing by prospective B2B customers. He said “Pricing is the #1 item of interest prospects are looking for, but can’t find, when they are researching new solutions. If you don’t provide it, someone else will.”

Think about it. Have you ever made a decision to purchase an expensive item without considering early in the process the initial cost? Most organizations have a formal budget process that must be followed before large capital purchases can be made. Serious end-users need to have an idea if what you are selling will fit into their organizations budget before they decide to research it. If they know they have a $100K limit and they can easily find out your solution is only $75K, then you have a strong opportunity with that prospect.

This is important because in the current business climate many companies are only budgeting, not buying. They are planning for the future when business picks up. When it does, they will have well thought out plans and their associated costs available to begin executing. As marketers, we are always looking for what the customer needs, and right now he needs budgetary pricing in addition to all the whiz bang features your product or service offers. Figure out a way to use the need for budgetary pricing to engage your prospective customers. If you don’t, they will simply do their own research on the web and find a rough price for your products themselves.

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Conversion, Lead Generation // Add Comment »

What do CEOs want? According to David Mattson and Anthony Parinello (”Five Minutes with VITO”), CEOs look for Big Ideas that pass their “whole brain” balanced gain test. In other words, CEOs are responsible for everything in their organization so they must make decisions based on the total affect of a new idea. It is not enough to have a new, whiz-bang marketing angle, many of which we have been hearing about in the “2.0″ craze lately. There must be an offset in revenue that covers the expense plus additional margin.

As B2B marketers, we are always looking for new ways to increase brand awareness and drive new potential business for our sales team but we sometimes lose sight of the overall goal of the organization; to make a profit. Will a new marketing program like social media cause an increase in website traffic? Everyone thinks so, but the CEO knows that traffic alone is not enough. It is as frustrating for a CEO to hear a marketing idea that cannot be tied to revenue as it is for a marketing person to plan a new campaign and then get shot down because there is no balance. Want to get your ideas approved? Start thinking like a CEO.

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