Marketing Interactions

Take 3 Steps Before Creating a Nurturing Program

I'm getting a lot of questions about how to get started with a nurturing program. Bravo to those marketers who are actively reaching out to get started!

I thought it might be useful to present 3 steps for evaluation that will help you create a baseline for building an effective nurturing program. 

First - About your customers:

• Who buys from us?
• Why do they buy from us?
• What do they need to know to make a purchase decision?
• Who influences our buyers?
• What could stop them from choosing to buy?
• Is one kind of customer more ideal than another? Why?
• What's your best foot-in-the-door sale?

Second - Evaluate your prospect database:

• Who's in it?
• Did THEY opt in or did YOU opt them in?
• How do the prospects in your database match up with what you know about your customers?
• How are you getting more prospects to opt in?
• When's the last time your database heard from you?
• What topics have they responded to?
• What's your opt out rate?

Third - Audit Your Website:

See my recent blog post about how to audit your web pages.

• How much information on your website matches the answers to the questions in the About Your Customers step above?
• What can be improved?

In case you're wondering, the reasons for auditing your website are to ensure that the messaging you're already sharing is in alignment with prospect needs. You also want to make sure that your nurturing programs are reinforced by your website content, not in conflict with it.

Nurturing programs are about so much more than just a continuous touchpoint program for prospects. They're about creating a consistency in brand and content and inviting interactions that reinforce and strengthen the choice of your prospects to continue to engage with you. Not to mention that a holistic presence will enhance your prospects' perceptions of your company's credibility and expertise for solving the problem at hand.

Deal or No Deal - Sales Mistakes to Avoid

Rain Today issued a new eBook last week the reflects the results of a survey they conducted to learn about the problems buyers experience when engaged in the purchase of professional services. What's frightening is that 80% of buyers say they encounter at least one major problem during their buying process.

What I like about this report is that it doesn't just tell us where sales messes up and loses deals, it actually shows how much more successful they can be if they correct the mistakes that turn buyers off.

The Top 3 Faux Pas of Salespeople:

38% of buyers say the salesperson didn't LISTEN to them.

96% of those buyers say they'd be somewhat to much more likely to buy from a salesperson who listened.

30% of buyers say the salesperson didn't understand their NEEDS.

100% of them said they'd be somewhat to much more likely to buy from a salesperson who crafted a compelling solution that met their needs. Go figure!

30% of buyers say the salesperson did not RESPOND to them in a timely manner.

94% of them said they'd be somewhat to much more likely to buy from a timely salesperson.

In an age of selling where the buyers control how they buy, we'd better get our skills in order. Just imagine how much money is being left on the table. Oh yes, and even though this survey was conducted for professional services selling, my instinct tells me it's not too far off from other industries.

Go download the report and see all the other issues buyers are experiencing. Can sellers really afford not to be top notch?

Dreamforce 09 Day 1 - Lots of Chatter

The first thing I have to say about Dreamforce is WHOA! 19,000 people registered this year, from 60 countries. So many were in attendance that they had to have an overflow room for about 3,000 to watch Marc Benioff's keynote from afar.

Salesforce.com clearly wants to see everything in the cloud...their cloud.

What's not to like? A multi-tennant, pay-as-you-go, elastic platform that allows your company to expand or contract as needed is pretty compelling. And according to IDC, it's 5X faster and about half the cost to build apps in the cloud. IDC found that companies were able to reduce TCO by 54%. Even better, it's accessible for small to midsize to enterprise companies.

The theme that emerged was all about social media, collaboration and conversations in the enterprise. In fact, Marc Benioff said that CRM could be redefined as "Collaboration Relationship Management." Which didn't resonate with me. How can you take the customer out of the equation?

Benioff talked about how contact centers were disconnected from the conversation. Where companies are  invested in Oracle, SAP, Amdocs, Siebel and Microsoft, customers are over on Google, Facebook, Twitter and Community Sites.

Which brings us to the 4th cloud announcement of Chatter - "the magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to the enterprise." Essentially, Chatter is the integration of content, apps and people in a real-time model. (The other 3 clouds are Sales, Service and Custom)

Benioff's assertion is that through the personal use of social media, we know strangers better than we know our own employees or what's happening with our companies and our customers. That we're at a disadvantage because we don't know the status of deals and executives.  He asserts that we can transform how we work with the ability to "follow" content, apps and people, so we're always on the latest "page" of what's happening.

I have to say there are some compelling opportunities with Chatter, but I believe companies will need to be careful to create context and value when they start streaming social media into enterprise applications. I was waiting for clarity around how Chatter will help us do business faster and better, but it seemed a lot like adding more "chatter" to an already information intensive work environment.

However, at lunch I learned that Chatter access is controlled by roles so that should provide some control over who is deluged with what. But I'm still wanting more context around work flow.

The intention that conversations are captured into the knowledge base for reuse and enabling better access to the latest information (both within and from outside the company) is compelling and similar to the Tribal Knowledge process evangelized and empowered by SAVO Group. That idea has merit I can get behind.

But, I still wonder what will happen if an employee chooses to follow one exec and not another...hmm.

[As an aside, I could've lived without the wind-up chattering teeth.]

As a preview to my next post, I was impressed with Sales Cloud 2...

Manticore Technology VII is All About Marketers

I've known the folks at Manticore Technology for quite a while. I've been watching their progress and I've been impressed by their interest in learning what's working and what's not for the companies who implement marketing automation.

Based on feedback from their customers, they've taken note that a one-size-fits-all mentality doesn't work for marketing, nor does it work for the technology that supports it. Bravo!

Manticore Technology's VII release has a really intuitive user interface that allows each marketer to customize their display so they have just the tools and reports they need in view. The drag and drop was so easy I wanted to wrestle the mouse away from Christopher Dolan, their VP of Marketing, when he was giving me a preview.

The other thing I like about the dashboard is that the top of the left navigation shows you all things you've recently used so you don't have to search for them.

In case you're wondering, Manticore Technology has had a really nice year. Their customer acquisition for 2009 is up 117% over 2008. Companies are obviously responding to their well-designed changes.

For example:

Program Trees: I'm not sure what they call them, but the planning tool for nurturing programs is one of my favorites. Manticore enables marketers to see the entire nurturing chain like a decision tree. You can view the whole thing instead of having to pull up different campaigns and try to visualize how they work together, or figure out where the gaps are that you overlooked.

Asset Folders: This is a very cool way to manage your marketing assets. Just like you create folders in MSFT Word, you can do so here, with hierarhy as you need it. Then you drag and drop assets into them so you can see at a glance everything being used by month, by campaign, by segment, or however you like.

The improved visibility is a boon for taking control of your marketing funnel, but the simplicity is what's really compelling. Marketers are busy. We've got so much on our plates that we certainly don't need to struggle with the technology that's supposed to be enabling - not aggravating.

I say, Good Job, Manticore! Go check it out for yourselves...there are a lot of other new things to see like the email wizard and drag and drop list building that makes segmentation a breeze!

Nurturing and Engagement - Webinars and Book Giveaways

I'm excited to share some events coming your way. I'm participating in two webinars that will help you get a handle on designing nurturing programs that drive sales and how to integrate 3 "must have" components to make it happen.

How to Design Nurturing Programs That Drive Sales

Date: November 19, 2009
Time: 11AM Pacific, 1PM Central, 2PM Eastern

Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, and the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable are sponsoring this webinar where I'll share insights to help marketers create a nurturing program that parallels how your prospects move through their buying process.

I'll discuss:

• The Nurturing Cycle - which is different than lead generation activities.
• What's changed in the buying process, and how you adapt.
• Mapping content to buying stages - it's really not so hard when you answer questions.
• How a style baseline can help to ensure relevance with every touch.
• What you can learn from the content your buyers read.
• And more!

I'm also giving away a lead nurturing guide to all attendees and several autographed books to a few randomly selected attendees. Please join us!

But hang on, there's more!

3 Must-Haves for Successful Lead Nurturing resulted from a brainstorm with Craig Rosenberg and the Focus.com folks.

Date: December 8, 2009
Time: 10AM Pacific, 12 Noon Central, 1PM Eastern

This webinar is a panel discussion moderated by Craig that brings together 3 of us who spend a lot of time in the trenches to discuss the critical components B2B companies need to incorporate to develop and execute successful lead nurturing programs.

I'm, of course, discussing content. Brian Carroll is plugging in The Human Touch that's the hinge for complex sales and Scott Mersy from Genius.com is pulling it all together with the critical role played by Marketing Automation Technology.

The three of us are focused on helping you learn best practices for:

• Incorporating the evolving opportunities the Internet empowers for building relationships that shorten time to revenue.
• Developing contextual stories that relate to your prospect’s specific situations—their challenges, issues, and opportunities.
• Creating online content and communication strategies that promote offline conversations.
• Generating levels of responsiveness that build engagement across the buying process.
• Providing information salespeople can actually use in a way that’s intuitive for them.
• How to use contagious content to facilitate prospect progression.
• How to transform handing off sales-ready prospects so our sales teams can take immediate action to follow up.

And, you'll get more chances to win my new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, and some other fun bling I'm giving away in celebration of my book release. Sign up Right Now!