Making B2B marketing personalization personal

I have often written about the top-line needs that should be addressed in messaging when marketing to the buyers of B2B products and services.

Terri Rylander’s post “My 3 Wishes from the Marketing Genie” goes deeper into the minds of buyers and explores what they want, not just from a solution, but from the provider of that solution. She clearly explains some of the ways buyers will determine whether a company can deliver on these three wishes.

1. I want a real relationship with you.
2. I want you to help me be successful.
3. I want to be able to find you when I need you.

Terri talks about the value of social media and educational content to project a personal image for a company, and it’s solid advice. But how does relationship-building fit for the many B2B marketers who are using email systems such as Eloqua, Silverpop, and Marketo to automate their marketing communications to their pipeline of sales leads?

Fortunately all of these systems and services are built to do just that. They give marketers extensive options for personalizing, from the salutation all the way into tracking the behavior of prospects and selecting specific messaging to be sent to them based on their behaviors.

The magic words for marketers to make a personal connection with their prospects are “data” and “versioning.”

By creating multiple versions of email communications, B2B marketers can make sure that every email addresses each prospective buyer’s area of interest. Marketers first set up business rules that outline specifically which message and content offer should be sent based on a previous behavior.

If a prospect downloads ABC White Paper, the system looks at the marketer’s business rules and send the prospect the next appropriate offer message:

Dear James,
Hope you enjoyed ABC White Paper, you may also want to read XYZ Case Study and learn more about how one of your peers . . .

Terri nicely presents the wishes of today’s buyers. What they want is a real connection with the companies they do business with. To make that connection, it’s time for B2B marketers to make their personalization personal.

My 5 favorite B2B marketing numbers.

Everyone, except perhaps the creative folks in advertising agencies, knows that marketing is a numbers game. Numbers such as click-thrus, cost-per-lead, cost-per-sale and ROI dominate the landscape of marketing discussions.

I like numbers. They measure the real market success (or failure) of B2B marketing campaigns, they support the argument for following best marketing practices, and they give marketers real insight into the cost and potential value of various marketing approaches.

So, it makes sense to share my 5 favorite numbers to help other marketers experience the confidence and the joy that numbers bring to the strategic process. I didn’t devise these numbers. But after years of knowing them, I cannot honestly remember whose testing and research discovered them in the first place. They are:

1. The value of following up with leads immediately: 88% of people are happy to hear from the B2B vendor within 24 hours of downloading informational content. Waiting 96 hours drops that percentage to the 40s.
2. The reason nurturing leads is critical in maximizing sales: 45% of new leads generated will buy from someone in the industry category within 12 months.
3. One big argument for integrated outbound marketing: Qualified B2B direct mail lists consistently provide 60% more records, business profiles and demographics than email marketing lists.
4. Making sure the results of marketing tests are statistically valid: When testing one list or channel against another, the results of the test can be considered minimally statistically valid only if the response to each individual test cell is 85 responses or higher.
5. Where to focus efforts in B2B marketing campaigns: Out of 100%, the elements that affect the outcome of a B2B marketing campaign carry the following weights List/Media/Data = 40%, Offer = 30%, Design = 15% and Copy = 15%.

Marketers building strategies and plans for the remainder of the year and beyond should let the numbers be their guide.

How marketers can help prevent lost sales.

It’s true that one’s own beliefs are built from personal experiences. When it comes to sales, these are mine:

• I spent eight years selling radio advertising. It was my responsibility to find the lead, pitch the lead, close the lead, handle the client and then sell it again. It was not a complex sale, so there was no marketing department involved, no support sales team, no automated nurturing, no scoring, and no free content offers.
• As a direct marketing consultant and copywriter, my experience with the sales departments at a few of my client companies has been that sales doesn’t want anything to do with a lead until the lead is ready to buy. I know this is not universal, but it’s the situation I have experienced.

On one hand, I think sales should do it all. On the other, I think they are too lazy to do anything except close sales. Obviously, when it comes to sales, I’m a bit confused.

That’s why it was so enlightening for me to read the insightful post and thread “Are Marketers Becoming Enablers?” passed along to me by a colleague.

The discussion began between Trish Bertuzzi, founder of The Bridge Group, and Linda Duchin of PowerSteering Software after attending Silverpop’s B2B University in Boston.

They point out that, if marketing takes too much responsibility in the sales nurturing process — and if sales doesn’t have access to the leads until they are sales ready — bad things can happen. Here are just three of them:

1. More aggressive competition may move a prospect ahead in the sales process and win the sale while you are still simply nurturing a prospect .
2. Sales could get lazy and feel they are no longer required to conduct any outbound prospecting.
3. Sales might have time to make more calls, but no access to leads because marketing has not yet deemed them ‘sales ready.’

Not only were their concerns very revealing, but they were followed by comments that shared what I see as very valuable advice. Here are just two things I learned:

Kathy Tito, of Call Center Services, Inc., very nicely removes the fear of going too far in the other direction when she states, “I have seen instances of companies that allow sales leads to become stale by not transitioning them to sales quickly enough to develop interest on the next level. If you have to err on one side or the other, keep in mind that the ‘premature’ hand-off can be managed to have little to no downside. If the lead is not ready, they can always be cycled back into nurture mode.”

Dan McDade of PointClear proposes filling the gap between marketing and sales by adding a layer in between that qualifies, nurtures, and reheats leads to make sure they are being handled by the right area. Many of my clients have in-house tele-sales teams that do just that. Automated nurturing campaigns are great, but, without some human interaction, leads that have progressed further in the buying cycle could be missed.

I propose that marketers consider using the more advanced lead scoring methodology proposed by Bill Herr of Unica and written about by Russell Kern of The Kern Organization for Target Marketing Magazine in “Time to Re-Think BANT.” As you know, BANT (budget, authority, need and timeframe) is the traditional lead scoring method. Bill Herr suggests one that is much more revealing of the lead’s qualification and readiness. He recommends this APNRP approach:

Attributes
Does the prospect company’s size, annual revenue, number of employees, and industry fit the targeted market?

Position
Do the title and job function of the individuals making the evaluation, recommendation or purchase decision match the customer profile?

Need
Has the target expressed any interest in — or taken any action toward — learning how to solve the problem the selling company’s product can solve?

Readiness
Has the lead expressed any interest in learning more about the product or service being sold?

Preferences
Has the lead answered the question of how they want to be contacted in the future?

‘Sales-ready’ is NOT ‘purchase-ready.’ The BANT questions are the ones that should be asked by sales, not marketing; however, this scoring approach helps ensure that leads are passed along to sales before it’s too late.

Thanks to Trish and Linda for bringing up this critical issue, helping us think more about how marketing can help prevent lost sales.

Smart B2B marketing calls to action for 2010.

This morning, reviewing dozens of marketing blogs, I was overwhelmed with post after post about social media. I became worried that marketers were forgetting the channels that got us where we are today.

That’s why I was delighted to see Bill Gadless of B2B Web Strategy pass along advice from Jim Logan in “Try adding a call to action to the end of your white papers.”

Business buyers who are purchasing products and services do not want to be “sold” by high-pressure messages. That’s why social media is working. It’s also why today’s most consistently effective lead generation messaging identifies a challenge that prospects may be facing and offers a free white paper, checklist, guide, case study or other content that allows them to learn about ways to meet their challenge. But as soft as this approach may appear, once a lead is generated, every additional contact made should be followed by a new offer and a new call to action.

The suggestion in Bill’s blog is that the call to action could involve inviting leads to pass the content along to an associate or colleague, asking them to register for a newsletter or other subscription or inviting the reader to contact the business for a discussion.

These are all good suggestions. But to apply these calls to action randomly is not a good strategy. The fact is, there are specific stages in the buying cycle of a complex sale and the call to action or offer made should match the prospect’s place in the cycle.

As covered in Russell Kern’s guide “Direct Marketing’s Five Biggest Hurdles (And How to Get Over Them),” there are four stages in the buying cycle: Interest, Consideration, Evaluation, and Purchase.

As you can see, Mr. Kern’s examples — taken straight from his guide — involve matching the correct content offer to the prospect’s stage in the buying cycle. This approach is critical to enhancing the relationship with prospects and moving them forward to a purchase. Making mismatched call-to-action offers leads to email opt-outs.

There’s one thing that social media cannot do well and that is to “predictably” fill the sales pipeline and then — in a controlled manner — nurture leads until they are ready to be handed off to sales. Adding a call to action to every contact is a proven and effective marketing nurturing approach and businesses selling complex products can rarely succeed without it.

Are your sales people being naughty or nice?

Although this blog is about providing insight into B2B marketing best practices, it’s Santa time — so I thought it would be only fair to spread the giving into the sales department. Earlier in my career, I spent eight years in B2B advertising sales, so I do know something about it.

That’s why I am constantly astonished at how often I see sales people making the same big mistake. Sunday was a perfect example. It started off with a mailing we received inviting us to visit a BMW dealership nearby and take a test drive. In exchange for the test drive we would get a $50 pre-paid gas card. Since there is a strong interest in automobiles in my household, we registered online and, within minutes, the dealership called to set our appointment for 1:30.

When we arrived, the dealership was very quiet — meaning no other customers were in the show room. A sales person approached and asked if he could help. We explained about the appointment and that we were there to take a test drive for the gift.

He did not know anything about the promotion (I will be speaking to “marketing” about that later), but when he discovered the purpose of our visit, he very reluctantly — and very quickly — got the test drive over as fast as he could. He didn’t spend one minute “selling” the car. Didn’t tell us anything about it, didn’t offer to show us the features, nothing. He didn’t even offer us his business card.

We made it clear that we were not buying that day. But if he had been nice and friendly and helpful and interested and given us his card, the next time we were in the market for a car, we might have gone back to see him again.

It makes perfect sense that sales people want to spend time and energy on sales they can make quickly. But every time a sales person blows off a prospect, he or she may be losing a future sale.

In the B2B world (especially for high-ticket products and services) it’s marketing’s job to acquire and nurture qualified leads and not turn them over to sales until they are in the decision-making stage of the buy-cycle. But marketing doesn’t always do its job perfectly. That’s why it’s critical to the company and the sales person’s wallet to treat every contact as a potential buyer.

A sales person never knows at what point a certain process or function within a company will get painful enough for its management to start looking for a solution. Attention given today can pay back in a sale six, eight, or even 18 months from now. It makes sense that sales people cannot spend all their time paying attention to soft prospects. But to ignore them or blow them off completely is a big mistake.

Being naughty not only affects this holiday, but all of those to come.