B2B Marketing Blog

ActiveConversion will be hosting an information packed live seminar on March 3^rd, 2011 in Calgary for all those looking to get first hand experience in learning how to sell more globally without significantly increasing corresponding marketing costs.  As an audience member, you’ll learn how you can combine and leverage traditional and online marketing techniques to sell globally in the most efficient way possible.

Register for seminar here

Often B2B companies end up spending substantially on marketing in addition to their own time – be it at the trade shows, conferences or events. This face to face interaction is intended to meet directly with potential new customers and create relationships. But often, these expensive endeavors remain fruitless due to the disconnect between marketing events and actual sales activities.

This seminar is presented by Yves Matson, Marketing Director from United Safety Solutions, who will walk through his own experiences. Yves is familiar with traditional marketing techniques, and he will demonstrate how the effective use of online methods and existing marketing such as trade shows to gain more customers. The highlight of this seminar will be how to make the best use of online marketing and marketing automation tools to accelerate your sales.

Register today for this informational and value packed seminar, and learn strategies on how to build stronger relationships with your prospects and get better sales results when you combine traditional & online marketing techniques. Also learn about how to effectively use marketing automation tools to your advantage to take your marketing efforts to the next level.

In many B2B companies, management hears its fill of “the internet will change your industry this way” or “the internet is changing your industry that way”, and as often as not (especially in engineering oriented companies, or those that sell to a finite list of possible customers) these pieces of advice are roundly dismissed with a “that’s not how we do it in our industry, we relationship sell in this industry”.  And I’ll agree with that emphatically; in B2B, people buy from people, not a website.

What those companies are missing are some key emerging points;

1. Google is making most of the new introductions; you can’t relationship sell if you’ve never met them, ‘who meets who’ is decided by Google many times.

2. Companies do due diligence with Google because it’s just so easy; “I always buy from Joe at XYZ co, but I need to have two more quotes”.  Even if the intent was to gather some quotes, I’d rather start there than with a cold list.  At least I know they have budget, and are customers for my product/service. Even I don’t win this time, I may in the future.

3. Most of the time, nobody wants to build that relationship with your sales rep’s phone calls.  Executive days are so busy that a sales rep with a “you buying any time soon?” question is just annoying.  What they will make time for is a very pertinent case study or webinar that speaks to their business problem because it helps them answer a question, it doesn’t take much time, and they can read/watch it when they have time.

4. New technology, like marketing automation, helps tell your reps who really does want to talk now; instead of talking to everyone as often as possible, get sales developing relationships with prospects or customers who are showing real interest.

So instead of dismissing the internet, B2B companies that rely on relationship selling should see it as a tool for relationship selling:

1. Get more relationships started via Google, get Google introducing you to more companies that need your services.

2. Leverage digital intellectual property (ie a case study or whitepaper) to do some relationship building with many more of your contacts.

3. Use tools such as ActiveConversion to show you who is actually interested in talking to you.

Online marketing coupled with tools like marketing automation software will make marketers and salespeople more effective and efficient at relationship selling.

There are many great sales methodologies out there, SPIN, Miller Heiman, EDGE framework and others. No matter which dogma you choose, they all have one common weakness, as good as they look on the page, they all need to be executed to matter.

There is no getting away from the fact that the biggest reason for a lack of sales is a lack of execution. The sad truth is that sales people know what they have to do, they just don’t do it. You can train them, but can’t make them.  It’s the age old “doer and the thinker”, in sales the doer executes and wins.  There are many great plans gathering dust on shelves, but the winning plans are the ones actually executed.

Join Tibor Shanto, a top sales expert and the co-author of “Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers”, and Yves Matson, senior account executive at ActiveConversion as they discuss strategies around sales methodologies and how to properly execute them.

In 45 minutes followed by a 15 min Q&A you will learn:

• How to successfully execute sales methodology?
• Why CRM systems do not get adopted?
• Why there is lack of execution?
• What are the four cornerstones of execution?

Click here to access the recorded webinar.  Also, get a copy of the presentation from Slideshare.

Business blogging is regarded as the domain of experts, experts willing to spend lots of time each day telling the world about an industry or a sector.  We’ll call this “hard blogging”.  The benefits of hard blogging are many, but the time commitment of hard blogging is usually a huge deterrent so most SMBs balk at it because they feel that a) they don’t have the time to think up analysis or insight that anyone would read, and b) there’s nothing to blog about my business that my customers would be interested in reading (e.g. after I buy a granite countertop for my kitchen, I’m probably not interested in following the granite countertop industry).

An alternate form of blogging that brings it’s own basket of  benefits is what I’ll call “soft blogging”; not blogging analysis but rather easier, once a week, announcement-like content.  Here are five examples:

1. Customer testimonials; getting testimonials from happy customers is an obvious best practice, and when you do, a blog is the perfect venue for maximizing the return on that testimonial.  Include a small description of the service or product rendered to get the testimonial.
2. Portfolio of projects; this is for companies with fewer clients but bigger projects – this is a case study in effect.  Nothing makes you real like a list of real projects you’ve completed, far more so than all the “motherhood” statements on your website.
3. News and Press releases; all companies should put out press releases, submitted to an online wire service like PR web, once a quarter. They are like little golden micro-sites devoted to your company that deliver visitors for years.  Examples of what to put in them include a new management hire, a major client landed or project completed, a new service you now offer, or a new product line you’ve begun carrying (here’s a bigger list).  Publish to your blog as well.
4. Job postings; hiring people says your company is growing and the job description is a wonderful grab bag of what your company does well.  Blogging a job posting is one of the only ways a small business can attract attention to a job posting on its own without relying on a 3rd party website.  Once you hire someone, change the post to a hire announcement and re-publish.
5. Marketing and Sales collateral; you have brochures, and you have digital versions of them. Do a paragraph summary of what they contain and post them online.  Instead of emailing a PDF to a prospect, your sales person can now email them a link to where it resides on your web page, and if they do come to investigate it, they may partake more of your messaging on your website/blog.

A key element of this strategy is that the blog must be sub-domained to your website; the search engines will then see it as part of your website.  This is a bit technical, but here’s a company that will do it for you.  This approach is search engine ‘gold’.  You are adding new content to your website on an ongoing basis (I’d suggest once a week) and you are educating search engines (i.e. Google) about what you do.

In some ways for many companies “soft blogging” is more beneficial than “hard blogging”. Testimonials and /or a portfolio of projects is often a more powerful aid in getting new business than stating your opinion on topics many of your prospects will likely not have the time or inclination to read.  Getting new business is the acid test after all; will this activity bring you more business?  The answer is yes.  This approach will bring more visitors to your website, and you will convince more of them you are a real company that has happy customers.  More visitors will identify themselves and ask questions and request quotes.  Go “soft blogging”!

While a well designed and well promoted website can create leads for a company, it goes without saying that most companies will not rely on it entirely.  They will also supplement inbound marketing with outbound targeted calling; they will take a look at who their customer base is and why, develop a list of other companies that are similar, and start calling.

Success at this point will usually sound like “…interesting, send me an email with your info in it and I’ll get back to you”.  The big question is did they say it to be nice,  to get you off the phone?  Or are they genuinely interested? If they are not interested, you may have just set yourself up for a waste of time following up with them.  What you really want is insight into who on the “send me an email” list really is interested, who is actually engaged with your message.

One path to this insight is through a combination of a content-rich website, and marketing automation like ActiveConversion.  When they ask for the “more information email”, the email itself contains links that lead to the information/content.  With the ActiveConversion Outlook plugin installed, if they click on any of those links, you’ll see if they clicked through and what they looked at.

If they said they were interested, but didn’t click through on any of the informational links, well, not as qualified.  However if they clicked through and looked at multiple pages, and even more significantly, if they returned later for a second look at your website, notch them up as having passed qualifying test #1.

Keep in mind this same approach is useful when re-engaging with customers and old prospects.  Even deep into a relationship sell, being able to gauge how interested and engaged a prospect is with the new message you’re delivering is invaluable.

If trade shows are an important part of your marketing strategy then you understand that they are one of the best ways to do both lead generation and face-to-face networking with a large group of qualified prospects. After a trade show, companies struggle with following up on a long list of inquiries with attendees, most of whom are not sales ready, and get neglected by the sales team who focus on ‘hotter’ leads.

Yves Matson, Senior Account Executive at ActiveConversion, & Nancy Nardin, President at Smart Selling Tools shared some strategies and tactics around increasing trade show ROI.

Attendees learned how equipping their company with simple and easy to use marketing automation software drives several benefits that increase trade show ROI:

Other topics covered were:

• Who is visiting your website right after a trade show
  - if you are “top of mind” enough for them to investigate you after a trade show, they are your best prospects!
• How to automate an email nurture campaign after a trade show
  - instead of having sales follow up with the entire list, have them focus on those that show engagement, even if that engagement is months later
• Track the effectiveness of various trade shows and compare the return on investment against each other

Download the recorded webinar from: http://www.activeconversion.com/webinar/webinar-june-2010-access.html

Download the presentation from: http://www.slideshare.net/activeconv/activeconversion-increasing-trade-show-roi

Both before and after the Global Petroleum Show, companies seriously interested in you will likely visit your website. Knowing who is interested in your product and services (and especially when), is something that you can use to increase your trade show return of investment substantially.

Finding The Needles in the Haystack
Research on trade shows have shown that serious buyers will gravitate to doing their research online and arrive at your website both before and after the trade show. But trade shows like the Global Petroleum Show can have two huge wins for exhibitors; Opt ins, and after show website visits.

Opt Ins
By virtue of the fact they are going to the GPS show, anyone visiting your booth is qualified in so far as they are in the energy industry. When one of them asks to be scanned for more information they are doing what is the holy grail of  marketing; they are “opting in”.

When someone asks for their badge to be scanned for more info, you can email nurture them  while always leading off with “you are receiving this because you visited our booth”. Then use a new breed of software to notify you as to who keeps coming back to your website, or visited the right pages on your website; it will tell you who to call, who you stand the best chance of building a relationship with.

The Bigger They Are, The Less They Call
Every exhibitor at the GPS hopes for booth visits from big, sought after accounts. But ironically the bigger the account, the less likely they are to call you after a trade show for fear of salespeople chasing them months on end. Regardless though, if these big accounts are interested in your company they will likely visit your website after the show to investigate your company further. Again, knowing who is visiting, who is interested in your company, who you should target over the weeks and months following the GPS show can be a significant competitive advantage.

eHow To Guide
Here’s a quick eHow To Guide from ActiveConversion that further explains what I’ve mentioned above. Good luck at the Global Petroleum Show 2010!

Companies know the value of their assets, things like a building they own, or intellectual property they have developed.   But assets can also include things less tangible, like the business processes they have painfully put in place, and professional sales and marketing collateral they have developed.  You really understand the value of these less tangible assets when you change jobs and go to a company that has inadequate or non-existent processes, or that has no sales and marketing collateral you’d be willing to hand out.

In this list of less tangible assets is the company’s website, usually in the same category as the brochure that it closely resembles.  But what is increasingly expected of websites is that, instead of being a static brochure, that they convey insight; captivating reasons to stay engaged with a website, maybe even follow it on social media.  The standard way a B2B website accomplishes this is with what I will call “website assets”; whitepapers or case studies (and the promise of new ones in a timely fashion), sometimes a nice video, or most effectively, a blog that is updated on a regular basis.  The problem is that developing website assets at all, let alone a consistent cyclical production, requires some not-insignificant commitment and resources to see through.  Most companies, even if they agree that website assets are good ideas, will say that they have little time or money to get these accomplished.

The Easy Path to High-Value Website Assets
So I have an alternative, something easier, something anyone who is even somewhat passionate about what they do for a living can do without breaking a sweat; a webinar.  If you can talk for 30 minutes to a customer or prospect about how you can solve one of their more pressing business problems, then you can do a webinar.  Now many people respond that they are not comfortable doing public speaking, even if you’re presenting to your computer, to them I council “then don’t host it live with an audience, host without an audience and record it”.

Instead of inviting everyone to the live webinar you’re afraid of doing, invite everyone to the recorded webinar they ‘missed’.  Put in the invite that if while watching the webinar they have any questions (answering these live is one key value of live webinars, certainly during the webinar you will answer a few canned ones) they can email them in, and you promise to answer each and everyone one of them.  And the best part is this recorded webinar is now a website asset, you can put a button on your website that engages visitors, maybe even convinces them to give you their contact info:

(this is a webinar I hosted in early May), here’s a link to our full list of recorded webinars.

So here they are, the

10 Reasons Your Company Should Do Webinars, because everyone likes lists, heck maybe you just jumped right to the list, so here it is:

1. Webinars are the easiest to achieve high-value content your company can generate; it is the easiest way to capture the expertise and experience of your senior people in a way that can be accessed over and over again by prospects visiting your website.
2. People like to hear things from people, not faceless corporations.  Webinars give you the opportunity for visitors to your website to hear your expertise and experience on specific topics that matter to them, much more so than the generic statements on the website.
3. The invitation to a webinar, and the follow up invitation to download the recorded webinar, are a valid reason to email your entire “in-house” list of contacts at least twice
4. Announcing you are having a webinar increases your credibility on the subject the webinar will focus on.  If you stick to a subject that you know well because of both successful experience and passion, you will likely build credibility.
5. This high-value content is ideal for pushing out to your social media network; the companies winning at social media are the ones contributing content that speaks to their credibility.
6. High-value content like this is very useful to your sales team; when they encounter this business problem they can refer prospects to a webinar recording on the respective subject from your guru.
7. Webinars are easier to sell to the gurus that need to host them; getting them to speak for 30-45 minutes on a subject they are an expert on and passionate about is something they do all the time, and is much more “natural act” than asking for a whitepaper.
8. You can use recorded webinars as “conversion elements” to build your list; gate them behind a form on your website and require a name and email address to access them (have a very good privacy policy very visible, and do an opt in campaign afterwards).
9. You can very effectively increase your brand credibility by co-hosting a webinar with one of your more recognized suppliers or vendors.
10. Webinars can be very nimble; if you recognize a shift in your industry, or an event that is of significance, you can quickly reach out to your audience with your insight on the topic.

I got an email from Marketing Profs for a seminar entitled “Demolish the Roadblocks on Your Website: Clearing a Path for Customer Action, Sales and Loyalty“.  I’m not here to sell this seminar, I just found the lead-in couple of paragraphs selling the seminar a great post all on its own.

Too many people create websites that look beautiful. But what we really need are websites that WORK beautifully. It’s not enough to put some content up. It’s not enough to launch and leave an application or a new website design. If you want a website that makes money you must continuously improve the completion times of your customers’ top tasks. The most important thing you need to manage on your website is your customers’ time.

This is Coolaid that we drink all day every day; it is more important to be found, answer questions, generate a lead, than it is to look the prettiest.  Of course the website can’t be a junker either, or that becomes a barrier (lack of credibility) all in itself.   Just don’t spend all your money on the design, save 75% of your budget for promoting the website and answering your customers questions with webinars (and downloads of recorded ones), case studies, and white papers.

Marketers are shifting to digital for a variety of reasons, chief among them are the results.  While social media gets all the hype, it’s two tried and true workhorses, email and search marketing, that come out on top of effectiveness.  From a post over at Marketing Profs:

Most marketing executives cite email or search marketing as their company’s top-performing advertising channel in 2009—39.4% and 23.6%, respectively—and over nine in ten (93.6%) say they plan to increase their budget allocation to digital marketing in the next five years, according to the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey from Datran Media.

Just 9.4% of marketers cited offline channels as their most effective response channel last year. Another 4.7% cited social media, while mobile marketing, still in its early stages, was cited by 0.8% of marketers.

Crucially I’d argue that all these pieces need to work together.  Search so they find you, content to convert them, email to nurture them.