There’s a very thought provoking post by Bruce Wedderburn (EVP Channel & Enablement, Huthwaite Inc.) and re-posted by Donal Daly about how rock star sales people will best perform in 2012 within the rapidly evolving online environment.

The traditional method of sales engagement (and as Donal puts it) followed these steps:

1. Diagnose the customer’s pain
2. Uncover their needs
3. Craft a targeted solution that meets the customer’s stated needs

Traditionally there was a good chance that a sales person would engage with the prospect very close to the beginning of the buying process - or ideally initiate it. This was especially the case when the customer was somewhat isolated and got a great deal of their information from trade shows and their trusted vendor sales reps. When this was the case, the conversation would start from the beginning of the investigation and the sales person could move the prospect through the process by asking really good questions and engaging.

As the business environment accelerated, and the proliferation of information on the web went through the roof, the timing of the engagement and the model for engagement has shifted tremendously. Although I couldn’t find the original report that Daly quotes, there was a study done by the Marketing Leadership Council that found that of the 1,460 respondents in their survey, vendors first contacted the prospect when they were already 57% of the way through the purchase decision making process. At this point of the engagement, the traditional sales person is in a bad position looking to explain features and essentially offer discounts.

Merging the Disciplines of Marketing and Sales

What this calls for is what we’ve already seen emerging in a number of companies and industries out there - a closer integration between marketing and sales, and a merging of the two disciplines within the sales process.

As the prospect is already gathering information and evaluating solutions on the web, marketing needs to be creating materials and making available opportunities for engagement where the customers are. This falls into two modern disciplines of Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing.

This evolution takes the marketing person beyond the role of branding, awareness creation, and lead generation, and well into the space of lead qualification and education. In effect, the marketing person is doing far more “selling” than they used to. To put it another way, the role of marketing is evolving into what has been traditionally been referred to as “inside sales”.

The Impact on Software Sales

The impact of this trend on software sales is profound. For those companies that still organize their marketing efforts around tradeshows and press releases and only dabble in social media, a huge hole in the sales process opens up. Fewer leads are generated and the sales person is constantly in “discount” mode as they try to “sell” a prospect that’s highly educated and has not been engaged until late in the process.

Counter intuitively, a trend that was prolific in the first decade of the century could also be having a detrimental effect on the process - the free evaluation download.

Once thought to be a great lead generator, this vehicle has not been the silver bullet everyone had hoped.

• IT departments of customers often don’t allow downloads
• Large applications take literally hours to download
• Self-guided installation and setup is rife with problems damaging the prospect of a sale
• After the download, the software vendor has zero visibility into how the prospect is using the software or if they’re using it at all
• The use of dummy email addresses and phone numbers with automatic downloads leaves the vendor with no visibility and no lead to follow up on

In the best case scenario, the prospect has downloaded the software, tried it out and formed an opinion before the sales rep even calls on them and engages in a discussion.

The Cloud as an Engagement Platform

By enabling prospects to securely access and use software installed on the cloud in a self-serve fashion the marketing team will have the engagement platform to efficiently perform the enhanced role of inside sales.

Marketing people will have a self-serve environment where newly created content can be placed alongside the latest version of their software.  They will have a single destination to which they can drive prospects as they engage with them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogs.  As prospects take themselves through the education (sales!) process, the newly minted Inside Marketeer/Sales Person will have visibility into how the prospect uses the software, analytics by which to qualify them, and communication tools by which to engage them in realtime.

Key attributes of the cloud platform are:

• No downloads, so IT’s happy and so is your customer
• No installation, so your customer has a good experience crafted by you
• Detailed analytics and automated analysis of activity and software use to automate the inside sales process
• Configurable degrees of screening to ensure every lead is validated against a list of prospects

(Not by coincidence, these are primary features of the Xuropa Software Sales Platform with integrated Intelligent Sales Engine™.)

How have you seen your customer engagement model evolve? How has this impacted your organization and your hiring practices? There’s a lot to consider in this very real trend in the evolution of sales.

Posted under CRM, Sales Automation, Social Media Marketing, cloud, software

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Leo Reynolds.

Lead generation is one of the primary roles of your marketing organization and the greatest demand of your sales force. As markets become more globalized your marketing team needs to make greater use of the web in generating leads for your sales team to follow up on and close.

Here’s a list of 10 key steps to take in generating those leads.

1. Identify Your Prospects

List the key characteristics of your target customers in order to find where they are on the web, what they are interested in, and what is likely to make them take time out of their day to visit your site and provide their contact information. This last point should tie back to your value proposition.

2. Give to Get

While many sales professionals refer to the first stage of the sales process as “Lead Generation” we’re really talking about “Contact Generation”. We want our prospects to visit our website and then provide their contact information in exchange for something of value. So we have to create something that would be interesting or useful to our prospects. Such as a Case Study, Tutorial, Whitepaper, or maybe you have the budget for an iPad giveaway. Whatever you determine to give your prospects make it available on your website with a simple sign-up form.

3. Write a Blog Post

You or someone in your company should already be contributing to a blog, so write a blog post that talks to the subject of your giveaway. The less it is about your product and more about your customers the better. Your blog post helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but also gives you an additional link to be used for subsequent steps.

4. Tweet

Very little about marketing is discussed without “Tweet” or “Twitter” being mentioned. Unless you have a very targeted audience (targeted using hashtags or your carefully nurtured list of followers) this may not be an immediately rewarding channel. However, post a comment with a link to your giveaway or blog post in order to build up that marketing channel at the least.  These links will drive your targeted prospects to your sign-up page.

5. Post to LinkedIn Group

Especially if your business is B2B, you should be using LinkedIn as a way to find and engage your target audience.  Search LinkedIn’s groups, join them (if you haven’t already), and start a discussion or join one.  Then, in a non-spammy way, post a link to your giveaway.

6. Post to Facebook

While the value of Facebook to B2B companies is still patchy, it is an essential channel for B2C businesses.  Search for groups that focus on your customers and post a link to your giveaway here.

7. Join a Conversation

Ideally you should be participating in online discussions important to your customers.  Either way, using tools such as Technorati, BlogPulse, or Google Alerts, find blog posts or articles from publications that serve your community (market).  Engage in the conversation by making posts.  You can add a link with your comments, but again - don’t make it spammy!

8. Answer a Question

Sometimes, within LinkedIn or Quora, your customers are asking explicitly for your help.  The question could be related to your value proposition, the problem you solve, or the field you’re in.  Perform searches on these platforms, answer the question in a meaningful way and include your link as a source of additional information.  But make sure that your giveaway content is indeed related to the question and your answer.

9. Buy Contacts & Engage

You can buy contact information using services such as Jigsaw.  But if you do, a best practice would be to enable your customers to opt-in to your marketing program.  Use an email marketing tool like ConstantContact of Mail Chimp to reach out to your new contacts with a “value rich” email and link to your giveway.  The same could be done with a purchased or rented email list.

Here’s an interesting perspective on evaluating the quality of your list.

10. Advertise

Last but not least, if your budget allows, purchase adwords from Google and include a link to your content and sign-up sheet.  It sounds pretty straight forward, but this alone is an art and a science.

Posted under CRM, Sales Automation, Social Media Marketing

As you’ll have seen dear reader, I hit a bit of a dry spell for a while there.  As I’m getting back into the swing of things, I decided to take a step back and consider the bigger picture - why blog?  The medium has been around for a very long time now, so why do it?

Looking around I was inspired by a post by Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic.  Well worth a read.

A recent post over at the Blog Traffic Exchange says “Why not!?”.  It’s a great way to easily publish your thoughts for easy consumption by your target audience.  It’s also a great way for you to raise your profile and credibility within that audience.  The latter being depending upon the audience resonating with your posts.

What is it?

The embodiment of who you are and how you think about a particular subject?  More of the latter than the former more likely.

A publication of how can you help on a particular subject?  This is definitely preferable over a sales pitch for your product or service.

How do you start?

Commenting.  This gets you to understand the looks and feel feel of a blog.  It will help you find your voice.  It will also get you to better understand what you want to blog about (although your business objectives should really drive that on the whole.)
Interestingly, commenting may get you writing your first blog post!  As you get your teeth into a good comment that got your passionate and creative juices flowing, you’ll suddenly realize that you need more space….and a picture would really help get your point across…and then there’s that video…So, be succinct, add to the conversation, and then point to your newly created blog post.

This will also get you engaged with other thought leaders in the space.  You will get a sense of who is already respected as a commentator in your space (and so someone you should get to know and build a relationship with.)  You could also start to be recognized as a contributor within the readership of the blog. It will also get you to appreciate one of the key adages of Social Media - give more than you take.

So You’ve Written a post - Now What?

Your blog should act as the central point of your social media marketing strategy.  This is where prospects get to really know you.  But it’s only the epicenter or the nexus of everything else that you should be doing.

Write a blog post, then:
- post it to Twitter
- find similar topics on the web and comment, leaving a link back to your post.
— linkedIn groups
— yahoo groups
— forums
— Facebook

In this way you’ll be able to build pathways back to your central conversation (your particular post) while contributing to the greater and broader conversation on a topic.

How does a blog fit into the sales cycle?

The question on most peoples lips.

1. Contact generation.

Every word you add to your blog increases your SEO ranking.  This alone does not get you a lead, but it puts you on the map.  (And every comment link and forum post you put elsewhere leading to your blog increases your SEO even further.)

To get a contact you need to give more.  You need to do something that’s going to prompt them to give you their name and email address (at a minimum).  This is done when someone leaves a comment (you can set your blog up to only allow registered users to comment).  But registration may put people off, and as a percentage so few people leave comments at all.  So you need to give more.  You need to give something of value and have it accessible right next to your blog posts.  It could be a white paper, a case study, an industry report…it doesn’t have to be an iPad, but that wouldn’t hurt either

Remember though, this only gives you a Contact.  It does not give you a lead because there’s been no qualification yet.

2.  Lead Qualification

The contact could qualify themselves into a lead by leaving a particularly relevant comment.  This could put them onto your list (or into your funnel), but until you know more about them you don’t really know who they are.
Third party qualification: this is when you turn to other tools to help you.  LinkedIn would be the main source, but try out a couple of social networks to help you triangulate.
Ask them!  This could be a more comprehensive form for hem to fill in to get the giveaway (although you need to be careful that too many questions doesn’t decrease your conversion rate too much.). You could also ask them directly in a separate offline email.  But you need to be careful and considerate about this.

Remember, this person did not comment on a blog or fill out a form with the express intension of becoming a target for you.  The main reason for your blog at this stage of the process is not to explicitly generate leads and contacts.  It’s to start conversations/relationships.  These relationships can blossom into a lead, or the relationship could turn the individual into a strong advocate and evangelist.

It’s tempting to jump on a contact and engage them right out of the shoot, but this will most likely scare them off, and could potentially lower the credibility of your blog and the engagement entirely.

So, in turning a contact into a lead, find a way for the user to volunteer or better yet move themselves down the sales funnel.  This could be through the giveaway previously mentioned, or it could be via a link on your blog page that leads to your products and services.

3. Prospect education.

Your blog can be used to educate a prospect, but probably not in the way you imagine.  Remember this is not a channel for you to just take your marketing collateral and essentially copy and paste product descriptions into posts.  Constantly saying “hey, look at this interesting aspect of our product!” can get equally annoying also.  (Although, “How to…” videos or tutorials are agreed to be acceptable forms of marketing collateral for the blog medium and audience.)

The best way to leverage a blog to educate your target audience is to focus on the generic subject within which your product sits.  Educate your audience about the subject in general, and the idea is that you’ll be subliminally educating them about your products or your expertise (which should be related right!?) at the same time.  (Importantly, you’ll be establishing credibility - so that will at least put you in mind when your contact decides to turn themselves into a lead or prospect.)

What if you don’t have a blog, or don’t update it that frequently?

Well, your company may be perceived as unapproachable, or aloof - something that is frowned upon in many industries, especially consumer facing ones.  You’re also leaving it up to your competition to frame the discussion.  Not a good thing.

What if you’re not reading blogs?  Does it really matter what these people think?

First of all, if you’re not reading blogs about your industry or products, you’re not even at the water cooler!  You cannot participate to your advantage, or worse to your disadvantage.  While many bloggers have not been publicly ordained as “industry experts”, they may be thought of by your market and customers as “one of us”.  And bloggers with this level of credibility and resonance with their audience can make or break your company.  You have to be aware of who is discussing your market, your products, and your brand.  And you have to engage.

Bottom-line - Participate, contribute, and find ways to reasonably lead people to your “thought and opinion repository” - your blog.

Posted under Social Media Marketing