April 2010 Archives

I was hoping it wasn't going to have to come to this. But marketers - we need to have some words. From an earlier post:

ZoomInfo points us to a recent study by the SLMA that says 65% of B2B companies surveyed don't track ROI from their marketing programs. 65% of you are making decisions on where to spend your marketing dollars without solid numbers on what your return on investment is? Really?

This isn't a fluke statistic: there are other studies that show similar results. I have one question: What's wrong with you? Let's look at some reasons you might not track ROI on marketing programs - and take them apart.

Is it because you can't or don't know how?
There are more ROI calculators and guides out there than you'd ever need. Here are the basics of calculating ROI (big tip: it's based on profit, not gross revenue) and 5 steps to tracking your marketing ROI.

More specifically, there are loads of ROI calculators online that you can simply plug your numbers into. Here are ROI calculators for mobile marketing, for yellow page ads, for direct mail and email, and for online marketing and social media activities. There are many more as a quick search will show.

Ignorance of the rules is no excuse: if you're smart enough to run your business, you can figure out the ROI of your marketing programs. And that can help you find the big opportunities you're missing.

No, this isn't a post about navigating the Internet safely. It's about taking advantage of free advertising afforded to your business in places you might not think about. Aside from things you control - like paid search ads, TV ads, and emails - there are tons of places where you company appears online that you might not be taking advantage of.

Keeping track of your online persona, your online brand, or, in basic terms - your online profile - is an easy way to ensure that you're attracting potential leads to your business, even in places where you least expect it. From directories, to databases, to social networking sites and even your local Better Business Bureau - details of your company probably already exist. Make sure you take charge of these listings by claiming them and updating them on an ongoing basis.

Some places to start:

• LinkedIn: add a company
• Trip Advisor: manage your listing
• Manta: claim your company profile
• Yelp: unlock your business
• BuyerZone's Local Directory: add your listing
• Facebook - add a company page

Have additional suggestions for keeping your online profile up to date? Add them in the comments section below.

And, finally - our own Jeremy Sacco previously posted an article about understanding and maintaining your local listing in search engines  - check it out.

Business readers are content-driven, pressed for time and interested in solutions for their business issues. Show your readers that you respect their time by writing effective, concise emails. Put yourself in their shoes and reflect that in your writing: "I know you're busy, so I'll get right to the point."

Keeping this in mind, here are five tips for writing effective business communications:

1. Get to the point - Beginning with the first sentence, your reader is asking, "Why am I reading this?" Answer the question right away. You aren't writing a suspense novel; you're writing for business readers. It's not only okay, but it's essential to give away the ending. Readers decide in the first few sentences whether or not to continue reading.

2. Use simple language - Skip grandiose language and business lingo. No matter how sophisticated your potential customers may be, weighing down your writing with buzzwords, acronyms, or jargon can be confusing. Use simple, everyday words to communicate clearly with your readers. Make sure each word makes sense and clearly contributes to the message.

3. Be concise - Keep in mind that your readers are time-pressed, and get your point across with efficient, hardworking sentences. Shorter sentences maintain interest and give your points more impact. Don't let your message get buried in long sentences or paragraphs of text. Edit and rewrite long, complex sentences into shorter, digestible chunks.

4. Use the active voice - Using the active voice will help you write concise and powerful sentences. Here's an example of passive versus active voice:

The flexible, easy to implement lead generation programs offered by BuyerZone make it a leading choice among growing companies.

Written in the active voice, the sentence is clear and easy to read:

BuyerZone is the leading choice among growing companies, offering flexible, easy to implement lead generation programs.  

This sentence is shorter, to the point and the reader is less likely lose interest halfway through. Using the active voice brings clarity to your writing.

5. Include a clear call to action - Clearly identify the next step the reader should take with a strong call to action. Don't be vague. Use active voice and command your reader to act: "Click here to sign up for our email newsletter."

Bonus tip: Make it easy to read quickly - As you proofread and finalize the lay out, make sure your communication is easy to read quickly. Use headlines, small paragraphs and bullets so readers can find a particular point or piece of information quickly and easily.

All businesses, large or small, need effective marketing messages to capture the attention of potential customers and create sales. Following these tips will help you write clear, concise and compelling business communications. If you're already an experienced business writer, please share your tips below.

Some great reading for sales and marketing folks in this Friday blog roundup.


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If you're planning the growth of your sales organization, it might be time to think about adding specialists who help manage and clean your leads and customer information. Nice post at Zoom Info about how to create great sales organizations.

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Tired of people telling you social media is important without hard numbers to back it up? Take a look at this post over at HubSpot. They've created a cart that shows exactly how many inbound  leads they've created through their social media efforts, and the numbers are impressive.

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Don't let the word "social" fool you -- this next post is not really about social media, it's about social selling: using the idea that people buy from people, not from companies, to improve your sales results. Read Social Selling, It Works at Better Closer.

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BuyerZone President Mie-Yun Lee points us to a great post on using video for lead generation. Key nugget is that after about 2 minutes, you lose most of your audience for a video -- unless it's a step-by-step how-to vid.

By the way, you can follow Mie-Yun on Twitter @myl. She's been doing B2B lead generation since founding BuyerZone in 1992, and we'd be following her even if she wasn't the boss.  We had a little scare last week when she got stuck in London due to Ashtastrophe 2010, but she's back and sharing her unique views on Twitter once again.

Guest post by Pat Meehan

As a lead management software provider, Leads360 has the unique opportunity to analyze a massive sample of leads. We understand the extreme value of having such a powerful tool in front of us, and therefore have a team dedicated to hypothesizing, proving, and/or disproving our theories about the complex nature of leads. Recently, we put our theory of the importance of "speed-to-call" in the sales process to test, and wow -- were we amazed.

Businesses that rely on leads hear the emphasis on speed every single day. It's told to them by their lead providers, by their lead management solution, and by their CRM provider. In fact, it seems that everyone wants your company to be as quick and efficient as possible.

But why is speed so important?

After analyzing several million leads we found that speed-to-call was the single largest driver of lead conversion in the first 2 minutes after the lead was generated. Companies who were responding to their leads within one minute of receipt were able to achieve 391% improvement! Now of course achieving this extremely quick contact rate on a consistent basis could be a daunting task if not equipped with the right tools, but even if you miss the critical "2 minute window," your chances of conversion increase by an average of 62% if called within 30 minutes, and 36% if called within the first hour.

As you can see from the above findings, contacting leads quickly should be a necessity, not a luxury. The most popular analogy that we use with our clients is that leads are not bottles of fine wine that get better with age: they are gallons of milk left out of the fridge. Leads are perishable entitles that go from valuable to valueless in a matter of minutes, and therefore require immediate attention.

Now you may be thinking these findings only apply to leads that are looking for a product or service immediately, but that is 100% false. Calling leads instantly is still extremely valuable even for buyers looking to purchase down the road. By calling instantly, chances are you become the first to contact the lead. Additional research shows that the first person to make contact with a lead is more easily able to establish a sense of loyalty and rapport, which in turn can actually override competing offers.

There you have it: speed-to-call in the sales process has a dramatic role in determining lead conversion rates and should be taken seriously by companies who rely on leads. If your company is purchasing or generating leads that are not being contacted instantly, you're wasting money and not capitalizing on potential gains.

Download detailed study results here.

So remember, listen to your lead provider and lead management solution when they tell you to call quickly, and good luck!

Pat Meehan is the Marketing Coordinator at Leads360 and Editor of Coffeforclosers.org.

Lead generation is expensive, and part of marketing's job, especially in this tough economy, is to maximize return on marketing spend. With that goal in mind, lead nurturing continues to be a hot topic.

I came across two informative posts about lead nurturing this week that I thought were worth sharing. Both have helpful tips for getting started with lead nurturing and taking your existing lead nurturing program to the next level.

The first, Lead nurturing: What is it? And why should I care?, by Barbra Gago, Inbound & Social Marketing Manager at Genuis.com, reviews what lead nurturing is and why you should nurture leads, and provides tips and tools to get started.

The second, Lead Nurturing Checklist for Marketing Automation, by LeadSloth's Jep Castelein, gets right to the heart of how to get started with an easy to follow checklist. Jeb suggests starting by addressing the following questions:

• Do you want to nurture new leads, existing leads or both?
• How do you to segment your audience?
• Do you want a linear drip campaign, or rule-driven dynamic campaign (flow chart)
• Which content is available for nurturing?
• What frequency of emails and duration of campaign do you prefer?
• When do you send leads to sales?
• Do you need to improve the quality of your lead data?

The entries complement each other nicely and reinforce the lead nurturing tips in my previous post, The basics of lead nurturing. Work with your sales team to define your ideal lead, put together valuable content and start nurturing your prospects!

Apple's recently released gadget is the talk of the Internet - and has been for some time. Can Apple do for tablet computing what they did for the MP3 player? Time will tell, of course.

Aside from web surfing, music, movies and games - can the iPad have practical uses for business? Specifically, can it actually be used as a marketing and sales tool? I think so.

Obvious potential uses:

- Presentations and demos to prospects
- Trade shows: display marketing messaging and use to collect names (i.e. leads)
- Apps: ROI calculators (build your own?), CRM (Salesforce mobile app), heck - you can even accept credit cards via the iPad

This list is obviously just a start - here are a few additional resources that cover this topic more in-depth. If you have other ideas, please share in the comments section below.

11 ways the iPad can be used for B2B marketing
5 ways Apple's iPad will impact B2B marketing

And lastly, with Apple's announcement last week about their new mobile advertising platform - dubbed iAd - to be launched on iPhones, iPod Touches and yes - iPads, later this year, yet another method for generating leads for your business has been introduced. With more and more users moving to mobile platforms, could traditional lead generation channels be changing yet again? Stay tuned.

Above image courtesy of Apple.

Collecting a few things we noticed recently that you might find useful.

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Brian Carroll gives a good introduction to lead scoring and explains how it's misperceived: 

Lead scoring is not a substitute for human touch. Rather, it prioritizes where you need invest the human touch.

This is a great point and one worth keeping in mind if your sales managers object to lead scoring because "our sales people know which leads are valuable." That's probably true -- but automatic lead scoring can help prioritize which leads they should evaluate first.

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If you can't get leads to talk to you, you might want to take a look at this free report from Product180 and Jigsaw: It's Not Just About Leads: Sell More by Speaking Your Customer's Language.

You'll have to register to download the 4 page report, so you'll probably become a lead yourself. But the paper centers on speaking the customers' language can help you get your foot in the door, and it includes a helpful outline on how to create a story through research and customer interviews.

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This one leaves us scratching our heads. ZoomInfo points us to a recent study by the
SLMA that says 65% of B2B companies surveyed don't track ROI from their marketing programs.

65% of you are making decisions on where to spend your marketing dollars without solid numbers on what your return on investment is? Really? Yes, it's hard to measure marketing ROI compared to the ROI on other types of purchases, but there are plenty of helpful and informative resources out there to help. We'll be coming back to this in future posts.

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Finally, eMarketer pulled together forecasts from several research firms to conclude that there's optimism for the US online ad spend.  Interesting to see numbers expected to rise across the board in 2010 -- including 7% for online lead generation -- but fall back a bit in 2011.

The 1.5% loss in US advertising spending in 2009 looks positively rosey next to the 14% decline in TV, 16% decline in radio, and 18% decline in newspaper advertising. No surprise there: the value per dollar spent online is obviously higher for many advertisers.



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You followed up with a lead and they're interested in meeting with you. Way to go! Your suit is pressed, the meeting agenda is printed, but are you sure you're fully prepared?

One important part of selling that is often overlooked is creating a value proposition - the reasons why a prospect should choose you over the competition. In many cases, your employees, even your sales team, find it difficult to articulate exactly what your company does and how it translates into value for your customers and prospects.

Strong value propositions can open doors. Think of it as the headline of an article - if it's compelling and targeted to the reader's interests, they'll be hooked. If not, they will move on to the next.

Here are two common mistakes to look out for: 

1. Canned Elevator Speech - It's easy to fall back on your canned elevator speech - "My company is the best in the industry" or "Our solution is groundbreaking". But how effective is it? What does it mean to your prospect?

Remember: Your value proposition should be customized, focused on your prospect's needs and it should differentiate your company from the competition. Take the time to personalize your value proposition based on your prospect's business issues and interests.

2. Your content is all about you - We are the leading company in our industry. We can help you reach your goals. We have a great team of experts. You get the point! One of my college professors would circle these statements when he was correcting papers and write "French" in the margin. "We We We" - get it?! Cheesy, but memorable.

Remember: Put yourself in your prospect's shoes when you're thinking about your value proposition. Focus on the benefits you can provide for the prospect, not a description of the features of your product or service. Continue asking "So what?" until you get to the tangible results you can offer to your prospect.

I find the best way to write a value proposition is to go through three steps:

1. Identify the business issue
2. Articulate your company's customized solution or service
3. Define the benefits to the prospect

After going through these three steps, you'll probably have a great deal of text. Pare it down in stages, 100 words, then 50 words, until you have a concise, impactful statement.

Finally, do a one more check to make sure you have a strong value proposition. Ask the following questions:

• Is it clear?
• Is it relevant?
• Are you providing value for the prospect?
• Does it differentiate your company from the competition?
• Can you deliver?

If you can answer yes to all five questions, you're ready to go!

What does your value proposition look like?  What are your tips and tricks to get beyond the "what" and "how" to convey the real value of your products or services?

The title is a quote from a great podcast, the third in a series titled "Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus" put together by Buzz Marketing and Marketo. (The first two episodes are available here.) It's about 17 minutes long and worth a listen.

In it, Bill Binch, VP of Sales at Marketo, talks about the misalignment of sales and marketing departments - and how to solve the problem. It's an interesting problem: while "lead generation" is a marketing function, closing those leads is sales' problem: and if the two organizations work smoothly and efficiently towards the same goals, your overall results are going to suffer.

How does your company handle this situation? Are sales and marketing perfect partners, barely speaking to each other, or something in between? Let us know in the comments.

Side question -- how do you feel about podcasts? I find them easy to listen to while I'm doing something else, which is a blessing and a curse: I'm getting something out of it but not giving it my full attention.

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