Managing the Sales Prevention Department

Recently I was having a conversation with Margaret Johnson of Oakwood Systems Group about the importance of removing roadblocks from the customers’ purchasing journey. She alluded to a term I really liked; she said every time we ignore removing all the roadblocks from our customers’ overall experience with our firm we essentially assign them to the Sales Prevention Department.

How true! There is such a ghostly abyss as the Sales Prevention Department. We send our customers there without even knowing unless they have the enough mojo to raise their voices and tell us what went wrong. They simply disappear into “thanks, but no thanks” land.

So what can we do to abolish this Sales Prevention Department? One simple and clear strategy is to ensure sales and marketing work in alignment. Easier said than done, right? But here is a perspective that can help us all understand each other. Sales is a transactional function so they are looking at everything in terms of numbers and quantifiable items. Marketing on the other hand is a world of perceptions, compelling messages and persuasion. I look at it as gas and motor. You can have the most sophisticated motor (sales) but without gas (marketing) it will just sit there.

As my friend Margaret pointed out mapping out the purchasing journey is not enough. We should be focused on the entire engagement process. This way each inquiry, each conversation, each download, every web visit or blog comment has a value. Perhaps not in terms of dollars and cents but in terms of business results. After all we are not working to achieve only this quarter’s sales objectives but rather for the achievement of overall business results.

Everything I have to say about demand generation fades to the background in comparison to the suffering people are currently experiencing in Haiti.

So this is my only blog entry this week:

"Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief."

Note: Image borrowed from MoBlog

Who is afraid of negative blog comments?

There is a justifiable fear out there in the B2B Professional Services space that once we allow people to comment on our blog or become a member of our LinkedIn group we will open the backdoor to negative comments circulating online “in perpetuity”. Professional service brands are built on reputation of the company, its executives and the quality of the service they provide. It is natural to want to keep weaknesses or shortcomings close to vest. Who among us has never received a complaint email from a disgruntled client? It might not even be related to the service we provide. The client might just be having a bad day. We don’t want those emails displayed on our home page. Home page is a place for shinny happy testimonials strategically placed to be found by those friendly search engine robots.

But here is another perspective to consider. Contemporary marketing strategies such as demand generation and customer engagement practices have relationship building at their core. And relationships are built around interactions. So in that sense every interaction is an opportunity to build a relationship. We have to change our thinking and start looking at negative comments as opportunities and welcome them to reside on our website, blog or fan page instead of circulating out there in cyberspace without even our knowledge.

With blogs, Facebook groups, LinkedIn discussions, YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare and many other social media outlets companies have to embrace the fact that there will be instances where the content we put out there might rub someone, somewhere the wrong way. Social media platforms give us an opportunity humanize our brand and clearly demonstrate how committed we are to solving our customers’ problems.

As we gear up for demand generation efforts it is important to get comfortable with possibility of negative comments or reactions to the content. Instead have a clear roadmap as to how the company will respond, who will be in charge of tracking and answering, what incentive to offer as a follow up and how to measure. Having a strategy is the solution, instead of last minute scrambling to respond or hiding in case we get negative feedback.

Predictions or wishful thinking...take your pick!

I am not very good at predicting trends. That is why I particularly enjoy reading other experts’ end of year blogs. Throughout December each year I basically get a crash course on what worked last year and what experts predict upcoming year.

I was totally wrong last year in my prediction that mobile is finally going to make a much needed entrance to the B2B space in the US. I wonder if 2010 will be the year businesses see the potential in using mobile technology. B2B sales and lead nurturing relies heavily on relationship building so to me it makes perfect sense to include mobile as a customer retention tool especially considering advances in GSM technology. For instance, a customer might find it perfectly acceptable to share her cell phone number with a firm if she is getting location based additional perks such as opportunity to network with other executives while attending a tradeshow or access premium services through smart phone applications. Cell phone is an intimate medium and I see it as an opportunity for relationship building. We just have to orient our thinking in terms of added value to the customer rather than another outlet to “sell, sell, sell”.

The biggest dot in everyone’s radar this year is social media. Basically the sky is the limit in terms of how B2B lead generation can use social media. Blog after blog I read is stating that social media is all about conversation and great content. The major hurdle I see is to convince people who hold the purse strings to resist temptation to jump the gun and start pushing sales messages down people’s throats instead of using social outlets to listen to what people are talking about and figure out how to bring in value to the conversation related to their business.

I think the shiniest toy this year is going to be video. Video on corporate home pages, video in transit media, video in mobile, video in lead gen and video in CRM……I used to be a practitioner of multimedia when way back when we had a hard time even explaining to our parents what it is that we did at work. I am now glad to see digital technology has caught up with possibilities video represents.

I see video, email and search doing the heavy lifting in demand generation this year…..well, see I could not resist and slipped in my own prediction. I hope I am right! It will be an adventurous year for marketers.

Kick-start 2010 with demand generation best practices

As this year is winding down to an end, the industry experts have started to post their year-end reviews and predictions one by one. There is a ton of great advice out there and companies are listening to these demand generation experts. Businesses large and small have become more open to strategizing and implementing nurturing and engagement programs.

This year companies have become more open to aligning their functional structures and capabilities to support demand generation programs. They devote more resources to lead generation and retention marketing strategies. This is good news for us demand generation practitioners. This means the ground work is underway and executive buy-in is easier to achieve.

According to Aberdeen Group, there are four common traits in firms that successfully deploy demand generation and nurturing programs:
1. They implement initiatives to monitor and improve lead to sales conversion
2. They instill an organizational focus on lead generation and measurement
3. They adopt technologies to automate lead generation and lead management
4. They segment and target specific geographies and demographics

An effective demand generation and lead nurturing program tracks everything from number of inquiries generated, website traffic, lead to conversion ratio, page view duration, lead to close ratios and lead to close time frame. All of these indicators are measurable therefore subject to improvement.

The direct effect of the proliferation of demand generation and nurturing practices is that sales and marketing functions move closer and closer to each other. Sales and marketing will never overlap but I look forward to the day turf wars become a non-issue. That day is closer than ever in my view.

End of the High School Football Season, the Thanksgiving turkey, inbound marketing and the rhythm of life.

As I sit here in front of my computer, my son is getting ready for the last football game of his sophomore high school football season, our Thanksgiving turkey is happily thawing out on kitchen counter and I am in a very Zen mood, thinking about rhythm of life, changes in the marketing industry and how all this change reflects on the way I make my living.

This time of the year always puts me in a reflective mood. This week there were few blogs I read that sort of tied it all together for me. The first blog I want to mention is this week’s Marketo blog. Jon Miller offers a very succinct and poignant summary of how marketing evolved in the last three decades…from mass communication to internet search dominance to contemporary social media brand building. He suggests that marketers are now focusing on social media, search and content marketing to build brands. Jon states:
…”More and more information is available off the official corporate website and on social media sites ranging from LinkedIn and Twitter to YouTube and SlideShare. As buyers tire of “marketing speak” and over-aggressive marketing tactics, they search social sites as part of their research, and interact with other prospects to get and share word of mouth recommendations”.

The next blog that I want to note is posted by Shannon Sweetser to Inbound Marketer’s Blog. Shannon states:
…creating meaningful content such as whitepapers, webinars, and blog posts that “concretely describe solutions to problems” is a much more effective way to get found by your customers than sending an unsolicited sales message via email.”

Finally, one of my very favorite blogs, the Digital Buzz Blog posted a fantastic slide presentation by Aden Hepburn that talk about the Basics of Social Media ROI. The presentation is written in CEO-speak; smart, funny, interesting and very informative. Social media is not a transactional sales tactic that translates into immediate sales increases the same reporting period that you start implementing the strategy. That is like inviting people over to your house for drinks and whipping out the Tupperware catalog while people are engulfed in a conversation. Instead, what it will do is gradually enhance non-financial indicators like increased website visitors, WOM, social mentions, impressions, positive press, blog comments as well as an upsurge in click-throughs and perhaps more visitors to your brick & mortar sales floor. We just have to make sure we using the right tool and the appropriate time span to measure its effectiveness.

As I said, I am in a very reflective mood. I see the changes in our industry and I am excited for the possibilities ahead. Being a marketer and staying true to my principles as a human being sounds simplistic. But I firmly believe this is the authenticity era in marketing and I am happy to be part of it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Demand generation and multicultural audiences.

This week I want to talk about practical tips to consider when marketing to multicultural audiences. First I have to mention that I’ve always had trouble with the term “multicultural marketing.” What does that really mean? When is marketing not “multicultural?” Different cultural dynamics are prevalent even within an organization in any complex sales environment. Logistics people speak a different language than that of procurement. As marketers we have to be aware of variances in every segment we are addressing to and ensure clear communication as well as preempt any potential issues or concerns.

But let me get back to the subject in hand without attempting to boil the ocean with my ramblings. Organizations that sell to multi-language audiences encounter added challenges in successfully strategizing their marketing outreach. One of my pet peeves has always been the fact that marketing materials often get translated into different languages as an afterthought like; right before it all goes to print. And the translation might even be done by the CEO’s high school senior son’s Spanish teacher. The result is often disjointed literal translation, inappropriate visuals and stop-and-go flow in material being presented to the multicultural audiences.

Here are some practical tips to consider in designing demand generation programs for multicultural audiences:

SEO is your friend. SEO is one of the most important components of any demand generation program. When it comes to multicultural audiences search optimization even becomes more of a focal point. It is imperative that you consider working with “in country” resources when it comes to determining and maintaining keywords. Language is a living thing and every country has their own contemporary terms reflecting the local current issues, trends and consumption patterns. Your audience might use a term pertaining to a current local political regulation that your US based translator might not know about.

Cultural variations matter. Decision makers and influencers can vary dramatically from one country to the other. For instance if you are marketing to French Canada vs. EU French audience, you might need to consider different dynamics in purchasing journey of your buyers vis-à-vis the influencers. In some cultures influencers can have much more power in purchasing decisions than we might assume. It is a good idea to carefully research who the influencers are in each market and how they affect the purchase before designing your demand generation program. Lead nurturing can become treacherous if you overlook to include a particular segment of the audience.

Social media might be the secret ingredient. Many cultures are much more open to social media outreach and they might be more willing to engage in a conversation with a brand online. On the other hand, especially in EU countries privacy concerns can be an even bigger issue. Social media is definitely more forgiving medium in terms of budgeting concerns than that of traditional print/media. Because it is much cheaper to tweak the messaging as you move along. But tread gently and test, test, test before you broadcast your message out into the world. And remember to have someone who understands multicultural dynamics at the helm of your social media communications.

We live in a world of one-to-one communications and cultural sensitivity is more important than ever. No one understands this better than someone who has experience with multicultural communications. It is a very exciting time to be in the marketing field, indeed.