Archive for the ‘Lead Generation’ Category

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Value Propositions – what you do, why it’s important, how you do it

Monday, July 26th, 2010

What are you good at? What can you do better than your competitors? Why should I buy something from you? Many companies think they know the answers to these questions but often they don’t or cannot communicate them clearly. Technology companies in particular often emphasise a list of unique product features without clearly tying these back to a business problem they solve for their customers. According to the Forrester Research paper “Six essential elements of an effective technology marketing pitch”, only 34% of business professionals indicate that their best IT providers are able to articulate the business value of their solutions.
Another common problem is lack of a single definition within a company – if you ask two different sales people you get two different answers as to what they do and why they’re the best. Is this a big problem? Well, yes if you want to sell anything.
From the outside, a lot of companies look the same to their potential customers. The more complex the product or service, the harder it is for buyers to understand how to differentiate between the available options. You have make it easy for buyers to quickly understand how you can help them and why you are better than your competitors. You do this by defining a clear and compelling Value Proposition.
Your Value Proposition describes what you do differently, and how this helps your customers achieve a business goal or overcome a business problem. To quote Jill Konrath, author of “Selling to big companies”:
“A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. It’s outcome focussed and stresses the business value of what you have to offer”
To develop your value proposition you first have to clarify what’s unique about what you offer. You must then connect this to a real need of your intended audience. Finally, you have to quantify the value you provide in concrete terms.
So, starting with the first part, can you define what is unique about what you can do, what makes you better than anyone else? Next, make sure this unique capability is useful to your intended customers – what value can you deliver to them because of this unique capability? Is it something they are going to care about? Will it make a big impact in their business? Don’t position your company or product on a unique feature that is irrelevant to most of your customers (this may seem to be stating the obvious, but it happens). One good way to assess the value you deliver is to ask your existing customers. Why did they choose you and why do they continue to work with you?
Finally, try to quantify the value you can deliver – put a number on it and make it tangible. Can you provide concrete examples from recent case studies? Does your unique capability help customers to increase revenue, reduce costs, shorten time-to-market, increase profit? By how much? Can you be specific? Do you have evidence you can show to a prospect? As Mike Schultz notes in his white paper ‘Making lead generation work for professional services’,
“the value a client eventually realizes from your firm’s services might well be your “efficient and effective solutions that helped them grow their revenue and strengthen their business.” However, before they work with you, most buyers don’t have the first idea of what that means, or how it applies to them.”
The Forrester paper makes much the same point:
“Marketers frequently make broad claims of improved efficiencies, faster time-to-market, lower cost-of-ownership, and other catch-all value metrics without reference to what’s really being measured and who in the user organization owns those metrics.”
There’s an interesting Harvard Business Review article on the importance of value propositions, ‘Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets’ (HBR March 2006). They describe how South Carolina based packaging supplier Sonoco requires that each of its product value propositions must be:
• Distinctive – it must be superior to those of the competition
• Measurable – all value propositions should be based on tangible points of difference that can be quantified in monetary terms
• Sustainable – the company must be able to execute this value proposition for a significant period of time

As you try to develop your value proposition you’ll see that it isn’t easy, but it gets better with each iteration. You are trying to create a statement that clarifies “what you want to be famous for” – what you want your prospects to remember about you, the “mental shorthand” you want them to associate with your company. The eventual goal is a simple statement that’s easy for anyone in your company to deliver each time – what you do, why it’s important, and how you do it.

So keep asking these dumb questions until you get to a satisfactory answer. What exactly are we trying to sell? Who is this for? Who will want to buy it? Why will they want to buy it? Why won’t they continue to use whatever they currently use? Why won’t they use a competing or alternative solution?

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The future of sales and marketing?

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Marketing will become more technical, sales teams won’t be on the road so much, and there’s going to be more overlap and, hopefully, alignment.

The web, online advertising and online marketing are having a big impact on how Business-to-business (B2B) companies sell.  But in some ways this just reflects the fact that B2B buyers now buy things differently too. Ten years ago, buyers started their selection process by talking to vendor sales people, often at industry tradeshows. And there were fewer people involved in the buying decision on the customer’s side.  Today buyers do much more initial research online, so they know much more about a vendor before that vendor becomes aware of them and before direct contact is made.  Who initiates the research and who participates in the buying decision is more complex, with more people involved even for deals in the $5k to $50k range. 

This means that to be successful, companies need to meet the research and information needs of prospective customers at as early a stage in the buying process as possible.  They need to be easily found online by the various people who contribute to a customer buying decision, and when they are found they need to provide compelling information that addresses the specific questions of each type of buyer or  influencer.

The change in B2B buyer behaviour also means sales teams are going to change.  Sales staff are being involved at a much later stage of the customer’s evaluation of a product. The earlier stages will be managed either by marketing or by a reconstituted sales team.   Many B2B marketing units are starting to do some of the work sales teams traditionally did, from lead generation and qualification through to providing pre-recorded online demos, technical briefings,  business cases and ROI calculations.  Marketers can now use online video, animated product tours, webinars and other interactive and dynamic content to provide a ‘virtual sales demonstration’. While you cannot fully recreate  face-to-face meetings online, you can get pretty close through the use of web conferencing software, video and the telephone. This enables you to provide product demonstrations and presentations over the web that traditionally would have been provided ‘on site’ at a customer’s premises by sales and pre-sales staff. 

Another change to the roles of sales and marketing is that companies are automating the acquisition of potential customer contact details  through registrations on web-pages and blogs.  They will spend more time trying to profile prospective customers that they attract online so that they don’t pursue people who are uninterested and so they can quickly pinpoint those prospects that have the greatest likelihood of purchasing within a defined time period.  For example, today if someone registers to download a document from my website they have to supply me with their name and email address.  From this download registration I can see if they have been on the website in the past, I can look up their IP address and their broad geographic location, and I could pull further information from networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook.  These techniques enable companies to build a more detailed profile of their visitors which helps them determine whether they are more or less likely to buy their product now or in the future.  For instance, if the same person has repeatedly visited your website in the past 5 weeks and downloaded every document or case study you have then this indicates some level of interest.  If in addition you find that 4 of his colleagues have also visited your site and downloaded documents, you might want to consider having one of your sales guys give them a call.  This kind of profiling can be automated, and can lead to more rapid generation of high quality sales leads that can then be passed more efficiently to sales teams to close and generate increased revenue.

So going back to the original question, I think Marketing departments will become more technically oriented, more process oriented and more fully automated.  Their contribution to demand generation will be more visible and more easily measurable.  I think Sales will share some of the online promotional tasks and lead qualification tasks with Marketing, and I think there’s going to be a significant drop in on-site sales visits.  Miller Heimann will still be used to analyse and handle large corporate sales opportunities that have been fully qualified as real prospects, but this will be the tip of the sales and marketing spear that began with the initial acquisition of a contact or lead from online activities.

What do you think?

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What is Lead Management?

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

If you increase automation in Marketing, you can generate more sales leads, make more sales and earn more money.  You can achieve scale.  In this post I look at Marketing Automation, and at one specific example of automation known as Lead Management.

Lead Management and sales funnel

Lead Management and sales funnel

Marketing units in business-to-business companies spend a lot of their time trying to identify and obtain the contact details of people who might be interested in their products or services – this is ‘lead generation’.  They pass these contacts to Sales who pursue them and try to convert them to customers.

But the way Marketing units generate and handover contacts is often badly automated and inefficient, and these contacts are often not processed effectively.  Business-to-business Marketing Automation is a broad term referring to the use of technology to improve the generation of demand for products and services and the subsequent management of that demand to increase sales and revenue.  Lead Management refers to the specific processes around generating leads and managing them as effectively as possible to drive sales.  (Other areas in Marketing Automation include Campaign Management, Marketing Resource Management and Customer Analytics).

But how can you automate marketing?  Isn’t it all golf umbrellas, brochures, t-shirts, and tradeshows?  Well, there is a creative and branding element, but a lot of business-to-business marketing can be made more structured.  For example, to generate a contact, you can use traditional methods like tradeshows and telemarketing, but now we also have contacts coming in over company web-sites, through Google pay-per-click ads and from email marketing campaigns. 

Once these contacts have been captured, you can automate a lot of what happens next:

  • Qualification, which means figuring out how likely the contact is to become a buyer based on information about her company, her location, how often she’s come to our web-site, other online behaviours we can observe etc.
  • Routing to sales: you can apply sensible rules about which sales guy should get what lead, you can specify how quickly a lead should be acted upon, and you can provide your sales staff with much richer background information on the contact.
  • Monitoring: you can see which sources tend to generate high quality leads, and what kind of leads are more likely to convert to customers; this helps you learn how to spend your marketing money with greatest effect.

Using this kind of automation will help you:

  • Generate more leads, faster
  • Pass better quality leads to Sales, so they don’t waste time chasing someone who has no real interest in your products
  • Cut down wasteful spend

There’s a clear return on investment from automating lead management.  A CMO Council Survey estimated that 80% of leads are either lost, ignored or discarded.  MarketingSherpa also estimated that around 75% of leads generated by most companies are not followed up if they’re not a short-term opportunity (i.e. going to close in this quarter).  With the average lead costing about $100 to generate, that can quickly add up to a lot of money.  Or to put it another way – calculate the proportion of your marketing budget you spend on lead generation; how much is 80% of that?

So, if you want to scale up your sales, you’ll have to scale up demand generation and that in turn means you should to start looking at marketing automation technologies.  Luckily, there are a lot of technologies becoming available, most of them delivered as software-as-a-service, with low entry costs and no installation or desktop deployments necessary.

 

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Posted in Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Pay-per-click | 1 Comment »

Global time spent on social networks rises 82%

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

A news item from MarketingCharts today reports an 82% rise in time spent on social networks, based on research from the Nielsen Company comparing December 2009 with December 2008.  Global consumers spent an average of 5 hours 35 minutes in December 2009, compared with 3 hours 3 minutes a year previously, and unique audience figures rose 27% from 242 million in December 08 to 307.4 million in December 09.

Facebook had an almost 100% increase in unique visitors from December to December, while Twitter recorded 579% growth from 2.7 million visitors to 18.1 million.

The MarketingChart piece also cites a recent survey by Prompt Communications of 300 consumers in Boston. This showed that 96% of them used Facebook to communicate with friends and family on a regular basis, which trails the phone (at 99%) but beats text messaging (93%) and email (91%).  We saw something similar during a recent client engagement. As part of the assignment we helped create some ‘buyer personas’ for digital music consumers and validated some of these personas on a college campus in Ireland.  The 10 students we interviewed rarely used email, and stayed ‘within’ Facebook for the majority of the time they were online each day,  using it almost exclusively to interact with classmates, friends and family, partly driven by their wish to keep their mobile phone bills as low as possible. 

I’m note sure what the takeaways for B2B marketers and sales teams are just yet – this will depend on the social media usage of decision makers and influencers at your target customer organisations.  But based on this research you can assume a lot if not all of your target buyers are active on the social networks. Combined with a predicted surge in smart phone sales (which means more people accessing Facebook and Twitter using these devices while on the road) there are obviously implications for your 2010 promotional plans if you want to be noticed by your prospective customers. One big long term impact could be on email marketing strategy – will email begin to decline in importance as a promotional tool over the next 5 years, replaced by intra-social network messaging?

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Creating content that generates awareness and demand

Monday, January 25th, 2010

People don’t buy things they way they did 10 or 15 years ago.  Whether it’s a hotel room, a house or a $200k software system, their search begins online. This means that your prospective customers need to find you online, and when they find you there needs to be enough compelling information (a.k.a. “content”) for them to choose you over a competitor. Creating demand for your products and services depends on creating the right kind of content for your potential customers, meeting their information needs as they move from being aware of a potential problem they want to solve through to selecting a particular solution and vendor.  You put that content online on your website, on your blog and on third party sites and then take steps to ensure it’s easily found by your prospective customers.  As your prospects access that information you interact with them, establishing your relevance and persuading them to choose you as their preferred solution provider.

In the last post I highlighted advice from the MarketingSherpa B2B Lead Generation Handbook on the ‘information need’ phases through which buyers move as they begin to consider a product purchase (from Awareness, through Consideration and then to Risk Avoidance/Decision).  (We will come back to the question of modelling buyer behaviour in later posts, using a technique called Buyer Persona Analysis).

Once you understand the ‘information needs’ of your buyers at different stages in the buying cycle, you can start to match that up with corresponding types of content.  The output will be a table or matrix that lists

  • each of the buyer types who are involved in a typical purchase of your product or service,
  • the phases they go through during the purchase cycle, and
  • the specific types of content you should offer them at each point in that cycle.

 

Here’s a selection of some of the types of content MarketingSherpa suggests you should consider for your marketing programs:

  • Research – people like to know what’s going on in their industry and specialisation.  You can meet this need by publishing research and survey results  – there are a host of online survey tools that can help, you can run in-person surveys at conferences, or you can commission an academic or research firm to carry out the research for you. 
  • Education – this means providing tutorials on specific topics, using multiple media ranging from .pdfs through webinars and online videos. The key here is not to make them overtly product-promotional i.e. provide information that is generally useful to a broad audience, rather than a spruced up user manual for your own product.
  • Tours and overviews – an animated or video tour of your product or service could be the most effective way to communicate its differentiators and benefits.  It also appeals to prospects who can’t make the time to read a white paper or product brochure.
  • News – try to generate news that will be of genuine interest or value to prospective buyers.  This could be a round-up of online blogs on a particular subject, or updates on recent industry analysis.
  • Thought leadership – this is the creation of content that helps you develop a reputation as someone with real knowledge and insight in your particular sector.  Developing thought leadership isn’t easy – there’s no easy way to fake it. You have to work at it yourself or else buy-in the insight.  If you have clear views on your industry or speciality based on experience and reflection then it is worthwhile recording and sharing these .  Alternatively you can hire someone to prepare a paper for you or else pay to re-use a paper from a research firm such as Gartner or Forrester
  • Case studies and success stories – case studies help explain the application of your product or service clearly to your prospective buyers and they build your credibility as someone who can deliver a successful solution.  With low cost web-video cameras it is worthwhile seeing if you can get customer to provide a video case study in addition to or in place of a written case study, as a ‘direct-to-camera’ interview is generally more compelling.
  • Q&As – an easy type of content to create once you have someone willing to respond.  Send an expert a list of your questions and publish the answers
  • Company and product information – this is the kind of information needed when a prospect is seriously evaluating your product or service, and they want lots of it.  Provide as much information as you can about the company and its products, including press releases, product fact sheets, technical implementation, buyers guide and competitor comparisons.
  • How-to tips – short articles illustrating how to overcome a problem or achieve a particular result, illustrated with graphics or charts and augmented by video or audio where possible.

Over the coming months I’ll come back to the topic of how to plan the creation of content as part of your overall marketing and sales plans.  I also want to look at how you can develop a better understanding of your target buyers and how to reflect that understanding in your online presence, through your web-site and blog and through the kind of content you make available to your audiences.  And I’d also like to look at how you can reduce the effort in producing content – what are the easiest ways to generate content, to re-use it in different ways, to make the most use of what you have? You want to spread your content over the web, having it proliferate in as many places as possible to achieve maximum impact, so we’ll look at the tools that can help you do that, from Twitter to Slideshare.

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