Want to be a B2B business-development pro? Start here.

This morning I read an excellent question in a B2B marketing group on LinkedIn. “If you had 30, 60 and 90 days to prove yourself as an effective business development professional…which of the following lead generation techniques would you implement and what percentage of your time would be dedicated towards each?”

• Phone Outreach
• Email Outreach
• Social Media
• Referrals
• Direct Marketing
• Events (Webinars, conferences, etc.)
• Other

If you’re a member of the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable on LinkedIn you can read the answers that follow. Of course I didn’t directly answer the question because I was so disappointed to see “Direct Marketing” on the list as if it were a channel.

As a B2B direct marketing advocate (read fanatic), I guess it’s pretty easy to set me off. But I suspect the person asking the question, Philip Reid of Winning Business Inc., meant to say Direct Mail Marketing, which is indeed a channel.

His oversight, however, got me thinking about how important it is for marketers to understand and use direct marketing if they intend to be effective B2B business-development professionals. I’m not Merriam-Webster, but here’s my definition of direct marketing:

Direct marketing is the marketing approach that is designed to change behavior. Unlike advertising, which is designed to change attitude, direct marketing must be created with the full intention of having the prospect “do something.”

If the primary intent of the communication is not to get a prospect to take a specified action, then the communication is not direct marketing, or as it’s also called — direct response marketing.

I can already hear protests such as “but what about PR and branding?” Those approaches are essential in providing the exposure, positioning and buzz necessary to bring attention and credibility to the company doing the marketing. But they do not directly generate leads in a planned, controlled manner. Social media can do both, but it qualifies as direct marketing only when it’s used to ask recipients to take a specific action.

So I recommend that marketers take a quick review of all their marketing efforts and see which ones fit the description and which ones do not. It’s the fastest path to being a successful business-development pro.

The best place to start all B2B marketing efforts.

There’s a very important place marketers have to be when conducting B2B marketing or selling B2B products or services. It’s not in the office. It’s not at a trade show. It’s not at a networking event, and it’s not even on the golf course. It’s inside a prospect’s mind.

Whenever I write marketing copy I imagine the prospective buyer and try to understand where he or she might be sitting when reading what I am writing. I envision the person on the job, interacting with others, agonizing over problems or barriers that my client’s product or service can solve. With this in mind, I can formulate copy that, I hope, will capture their attention and make them feel the message is personal to them.

It’s not enough to know which benefits and features will solve the challenges faced by prospective customers. B2B marketers must also know how and why human beings make buying decisions.

Amy Africa of Eight-by-Eight, in her recent QLOG “Do You Remember Your First Kiss?” begins a series addressing just that. Her focus is ecommerce Web sites, but her insight also has value for B2B marketers selling high-end, complex products or services.

Then last week a marketing organization of which I am a member gave a presentation covering this same point. It explained how the context of what you say about your product or service must fit with the way the human brain needs to receive the information.

It’s all about getting into the minds of your prospects by understanding not only what they need but also how their minds work. So here are 4 basic human-thinking practices I’ve learned over the years that marketers might want to keep in mind before communicating with prospects about their products or services:

1. Minds resist change and like the familiar – B2B marketing conversations should begin from where the prospect’s mind is now, not where you want it to be. A very obvious example is matching the case studies you provide to the prospect company’s industry and size. Another area in which this point works well is in formulating SEM ads. Those ads should speak to the solution the prospect is using now and not the solution you’re trying to sell them.
2. Minds need clear-cut distinctions — The best way to show the size of a very small product is to show a picture of the item next to something everyone knows and uses. Product competitive advantages should be instantly understood.
3. Minds need to be told what to do –”Click Here Now,” “Call Now,” “Start Your FREE Trial Now,” “Download Now” may seem boring and obvious. But B2B marketers cannot expect prospects to think or to guess. A clear, strong call-to-action in marketing materials always produces a higher response.
4. Minds selectively retain information — Following up a B2B lead-generation email, direct mail or other communication with a phone call is a strong interactive-marketing approach. But the call must be made in 5 days or less. After that, most of today’s overworked prospects will have no recollection of the previous communication.

Focusing your marketing approaches and sales pitches on how the human mind works and how it responds to new information is the key to gaining attention, being heard and closing sales. So before marketers start, they need to take a little trip inside their prospect’s minds.

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.

A sure recipe for B2B marketing success.

It’s 4:00, time to start thinking about what to fix for dinner. I have a closetful of recipe books to assure me that, if I follow them faithfully, I can create dishes that do what they are supposed to do — taste delicious and satisfy those at my dining table. Unlike gourmet cooks or professional chefs, I don’t have time to experiment with recipes and risk failure.

B2B marketing is a lot like cooking. Most B2B marketers don’t have the time, the budget or a large enough universe of prospects to test new marketing ideas.

Testing is, of course, the most essential element in direct marketing — that is, marketing that’s designed to generate a response.

Offline marketers can test such things as offers, packages, mailing lists or print media. However, the typical B2B prospect universe is small, often under 10,000 companies. This small universe makes it difficult to get the response quantities large enough for statistically valid response rates.

Online testing is much easier to do. As Bob Frady of DM Central nicely explains in “Why Aren’t You Testing?” it’s critical and easier in today’s digital marketing to test such things as subject lines, landing pages, SEM ad messages and more.

Big companies with large budgets can test fresh, new marketing approaches for the opportunity to achieve breakthrough results. That’s where marketing innovation comes from. Most B2B marketers, however, are not big. They don’t have huge budgets or the time to test everything they do.

What should they do? Follow the recipe. All B2B marketers have to do is to learn what’s working by reading case studies, white papers, industry surveys, even blogs like this one. Best practices are based on measured results from marketing approaches that have been tested by the big guys and proven to work time and time again.

Following B2B marketing best practices is the most assured and least risky path to success. After all, people care only how the food tastes, not whether it was cooked by following a recipe.