Marketing Interactions

Are Shorter Sales Cycles a Wake-up Call for Marketers?

Marketing Sherpa's chart of the week shows the answer to this question.

Q. Please select the time period closest to the length of your organization's entire sales cycle, from first lead inquiry to purchase.

In the commentary, Jen Doyle states that these results showing shorter sales cycles correlate to the lower deal prices Marketing Sherpa's annual benchmark survey also discovered.

But I think there's more at stake here than lower prices. Everyone has been talking about how much time buyers spend self-educating and researching prior to identifying themselves to vendors. Buyers have even said that they may not request contact with a vendor until they have selected their short lists. Some estimates gauge the time buyers spend outside of vendor-defined sales cycles to include up to or beyond half of the buying process for a B2B complex purchase.

So, could this chart actually be reflecting that the period of time that buyers spend with a vendor is shorter, but not truly reflect the length of the actual buy cycle? I think it's very possible.

And, if so, then it validates the imperative for marketers to get their content found by the right audience, rather than waiting for them to enter their databases so they can nurture them formally. If your company's ideas and expertise aren't helping them decide how to solve the problem, then why would you think your company would make their short list when the time comes?

What do you think?

6 Tips for B2B Vendors Becoming Publishers

Judging by the amount of online noise being generated, the idea of publishing content is no longer considered to be an "edgy" proposition for many vendors. But noise isn't going to help you meet your goals.

The thing about noise is that we've all become adept at tuning it out. There's just so much of it that we've had to develop the survival skill of discernment. We've become very swift judges of what's useful and what's wasting our time. Time we have precious little of with all the social media interaction, email, meetings and job responsibilities. Our lists are long and our patience is waning.

To break through the noise and gain the attention of B2B prospects, our content must be better than good. It needs to be exceptional. And that's hard to do when you need so much of it to maintain a dialogue with your prospects until they're ready to talk to your salespeople.

Due to this shift in buying, vendors have had to become publishers or risk obscurity.

Consider how the following tips can help your company adapt more easily to publishing content that becomes sought out and a preference for your prospects.

Tip 1: Dump the Damn Style Guides!
Or at least slim them down to make them more appropriate for today's audience. Examples include:

• Spelling out the word "percent" when the "%" symbol is easier to pick out during a quick scan for relevance just makes more sense.


• Stop using trademarks, service marks and registered marks every time you mention your product, brand and services. Is it really necessary to put your company name before your product name throughout an entire article? In fact, if you have so many mentions of your product in an article that they stick out, your focus needs to shift.


• If your brand is only allowed to capitalize the first word in a headline, rethink that practice. You've got 3 seconds to get attention. Sometimes emphasizing a word or phrase can help with that.


• Use contractions. They won't bite, and reading becomes so much easier. Less effort is a good thing when trying to build engagement.

Tip 2: Quit Talking About Yourself!

• Nobody cares. Seriously, they don't. They care about themselves, not you.


• If you're sending an email with your company in the sig line, publishing a blog post or an article on your website - your company is already obvious. There's no need to mention it repeatedly like we can't see the branding it's wrapped in.


• If you think of putting "the leading provider of..." in anything, step away from the keyboard. No one believes that, yet it's surprising how many companies still think if they say it, it will matter. Well, it doesn't. It's what others say about you that matters.


• Try putting out a press release that focuses first on how your customers will benefit rather than talking about your company and products and see what happens. 

Tip 3: Sharing Valuable Expertise Will Actually Make You Money

• Some companies think that sharing expertise will cost them in services. The exact opposite is true. Prospects now require proof that you bring value they don't have or they won't escalate you to their short lists.


• Exposing expertise actually shows people how difficult it can be to do what you do, encouraging them to hire you and get that task off their list. Not to mention getting the job done right the first time.


• Helping them understand the expertise it takes to do what you do allows them to understand the value they're paying for and diminishes the "haggling over price" issue.


• If your content is valuable, more people will be drawn to it, link to it and share it, thereby increasing your reach, market awareness and credibility. Sharing useless, surface stuff without any meat won't do that.

Tip 4: Become a Resource by Sharing the Spotlight

• Showcasing others who have great content reflects back on you. Plus, you don't have all the answers. Help people connect the dots.


• Your ability to look beyond yourself and recognize greatness in others draws your audience in and may just generate conversations you wouldn't otherwise have.


• Those you promote will promote you in return. Choose wisely and build a network of experts with complimentary expertise and business will follow in the form of referrals, which are truly one of the best ways into new customer relationships. Don't forget to return the favor.

Tip 5: Get Your Staff the Appropriate Tools & Tech

• The day of putting content in a queue and waiting for IT to publish it are over.


• From blogs to websites to video and just about anything else now has easy-to-use software that business people can learn to use. Today's world moves fast. Get the tools to keep up.


• Publishing must deliver business value, so make sure you also have the tools to measure what it's doing for you. From web analytics to social monitoring to SEO, marketers need to be accountable for the outcomes of what they publish. Just putting content out there doesn't cut it.

Tip 6: Only Copycat if You Can Improve Upon The Concept

• Infographics are a great example of this tip. When they first came out, they were fascinating. Then everyone jumped on the bandwagon and started producing them because they were "cool." Many I see today don't have any story to tell.


• If you see a great concept executed, use it as inspiration, not a cookie cutter. Find some unique way of showcasing your material that has you stand out, not just show up as more of the same.


• Are you a leader or a follower?

These are only a few tips, but should get you thinking about how to adapt the old world of orchestrated corporate content to the new world of authentic expression. Posturing is out, expertise is in. You've got it, so you may as well flaunt it. Just remember that it's not about your products.

What Happens When Inbound Marketing Works?

The term "inbound marketing" is getting a lot of play these days as B2B marketers grapple with labels and learning more about how marketing practices are evolving — including the dynamics of content marketing. I'm not getting into what all that means now, but invite you to be part of The Great Marketing Conversation, on January 24th, if you'd like to delve into the nuances. With Robert Rose, Mike Volpe, and Marcus Sheridan, we're bound to stir up quite a discussion.

What I do want to talk about in this post is what happens when your inbound content marketing works. Have you thought about it beyond the idea of getting prospects to come to you? Do you have a response plan? Is your sales team on board?

The whole point of inbound marketing is getting prospects to find and interact with your company. But it's what you do once you make that happen that can determine the success or failure of your contribution to revenues.

Here's the thing:

Generating inbound prospects who are more highly qualified and sales ready is the goal. But when you change the buying experience, you need to consider how the underlying processes on your side must change as well. Not just for marketing, but for sales.

What companies haven't yet quite grasped is that by changing the buying experience, they've also changed their buyers' expectations. And you can't stop those changes at the handoff and hope to be successful if your salespeople try to continue on in the way they've always done. It just doesn't work that way. This is where sales enablement needs to be orchestrated to keep the brakes off momentum.

Consider this scenario:

• You've worked really hard to understand your buyers and develop content focused on their needs, problems, goals and aspirations. (not your products)


• A prospect is following you on Twitter, visiting your blog and following the links you share socially.


• One day he goes online to search for specific information and comes across a search result for an eBook you published six months ago that they weren't aware of. So he visits your site and fills out the form to download it. He doesn't hesitate because his experience with your company has been great thus far.


• An inside sales rep sees the activity and calls the prospect to follow-up. Unfortunately, she starts off the conversation with a monologue about your company and products and tries to push the prospect into a demo.


• Your prospect extricates himself from the call and goes dormant.

Yes, this still happens. Happened to me just the other day from a company I thought knew better. And the account exec couldn't even tell me what I'd downloaded, just that they knew I'd downloaded something.

The problem is that all the work marketers do on the front end will be wasted if they don't create a response plan and enable sales (both inside and direct) to continue the dialogue without disappointing  prospects.

Follow-up by inside sales is fine. But remember that they need to be able to have a business-relevant conversation with the prospect. Following up on a content download isn't a sales call, but a relationship building experience. The sales rep should be able to discuss the topic the prospect expressed interest in and offer additional content the person may find relevant. Along the way, the rep can subtly learn more about the buying stage the prospect is in.

Inside sales follow-up should be treated as a form of progressive profiling, unless there are buying indications that indicate it's time for escalation.

This means that marketers need to think beyond their lead generation strategy to create a response plan that coordinates with nurturing and how they'll enable sales to meet those expectations your brilliant content is setting. If you can't keep prospects engaged once they come to you, what's the point?

Things to think about include:

• The process in response to specific content downloads and lead gen offers
• What additional content offers relate to a download?
• What conversational prompts will be helpful to ensure relevant follow-up conversations?
• What questions need to be asked/answered to help you be more relevant as the relationship continues? Focus on need first, not budget.
• Should the reponse to a download be a call? Or should that download activity serve to trigger an auto reponse email to be sent with a related content offer?Or, perhaps it's indicative of which lead nurturing track the prospect will find most valuable.

The concept of inbound marketing is great. But the strategy must be planned beyond the "getting found" part to what comes next.

The Art of The Ask in Content Marketing

When working on content strategies with clients, the question about which content should be gated always comes up. Content — great content — takes a lot of time, effort and resources to produce. It just makes sense that B2B marketers want people to pay for it with their contact info. Or does it?

Regardless of how much has been said about giving to get, setting content free, and sharing without restraint, what comes up for many corporate marketers is that they're stuck in the cross hairs of corporate objectives that don't give them a lot of wiggle room. Accountability and proof of contribution to revenues also has marketers leaning toward shutting the gate, if you will.

The issue isn't the form as much as it's the attitude. Marketers feel entitled to contact information in exchange for access to their content. Unfortunately, over zealous behavior by companies in response to form submissions is still a bad practice that doesn't seem to be abating. Therefore, resistance to form completion is growing.

On the flip side, buyers expect that if you want to do business with them that you'll provide the information they need to make that decision. If accessing the content requires too much effort, they'll move on to a competitor with less hoops to jump through.

The downsides of the gate—in addition to less downloads—are that they introduce hesitation and doubt into what should be a fluid process of establishing a relationship with your buyers. We've all had the experience of trolling along through content we find interesting only to be confronted with a form. The form surfaces thoughts such as these:

How important is this going to be to me?

What are the chances that they'll call me?

Is it worth the risk?

I always wanted to be Mickey Mouse...

Maybe I can just alter one digit in my phone number...

And I can use my throw-away email that I ignore...just in case they send a link to the PDF instead of letting me download it right away.

Once this happens, trust diminishes just a bit. Or more than that. In order not to risk losing a relationship that hasn't had a chance to develop, marketers need to think a bit more about the art of the ask.

How Not to Ask:

• Gate everything. I've been on websites that gate everything - including case studies. Seriously? Why would you want to make it difficult for people to learn about how you help your customers?


• Keep Older Content Under Lock and Key. Who hasn't filled out a form for a white paper that's over 2 years old? How disappointed were you? Try setting that content free after six months to allow it to help you get more mileage out of it. Consider adding a link at the end of it to newer gated content if they want to learn more about that subject. Yes, this means you need to keep track of and update your content.


• Embrace Form Field Mania. How much information do you really need? You're not going to use my street address for anything, so why ask for it? More than 4 - 5 fields is too many and makes you seem greedy and self-interested. What's most important? Name, email and 1 other thing. What's most helpful based on your marketing strategy? Industry? Title? Company name? You don't have to get all their info at once. Progressive profiling is a good thing!

Deciding When to Ask:

Make strategic decisions about when and why you decide to gate content. One thing that helps with this is to map your content to buying stages. Anything early stage doesn't need to be gated. Use this content to build a relationship by sharing information that helps them form their thinking around the problem and why to go about solving it. Once they make progress, then offer them something worthwhile in exchange for a limited amount of contact information — only what you need to establish a dialogue.

Use the weight of the content when deciding to gate or not to gate. People generally expect to fill out a form to register for a webinar, a research report, a white paper or ebook. Anything less than that doesn't have enough heft to provide a mutual exchange of value. This being said, also evaluate the buying stage. If you write an early-stage white paper, set it free to build awareness and get that dialogue underway. Or offer an executive summary for free and gate the full version. The point is, the sooner prospects start using your ideas to think about solving problems, the better off you'll be.

Give Them a Guarantee. Consider adding a check box to have a salesperson call them and add wording that assures them that no call will happen unless that box is checked. Make sure to get buy-in from sales!

Gate to Gain Insights. What's the promise of your content? If the person takes you up on the promise and fills out the form, what will that tell you about their interests, where they are in their buying process, and what your next interaction with them should be? Doing this well means that you must know your buyers. You need to be able to think about and plan for next steps, not just this one transaction.

And, given the promise of your content, if that lead is already in your database, what one or two questions could you ask on the form to help you become even more relevant to them? Yes, this is where progressive profiling comes in.

Asking is an Art — but it's also a strategic part of marketing that must be clearly thought out to provide value beyond adding someone's contact information to your database. Asking is about getting what you need to improve their experience with your company and your content. It requires a bit of thoughtful planning.

B2B Content Marketing as Trojan Horse

I sat in on the Content Marketing for Real Marketers webinar, with Joe Chernov and Rebecca Lieb, hosted by #CMI and Joe Pulizzi.

Of course there were many great points made, but two of them stood out and prompted this blog post:

• Content draws 10X more media attention than product launches.
• Diminishing the brand representation in favor of the story enables it to spread.

If you look at the first point, it offers proof that no one cares about products, but rather what they enable — which is what great content marketing is all about.

The second points out that it's not about your company, but about the story you're sharing.

I get asked a lot how to increase engagement with content. In fact, I know many marketers pining for the ability to get their content to go viral. In my experience you can't "make" something go viral. But you can certainly up the odds with the way your content is designed. (As an aside, viral means nothing in B2B if it isn't caused by the market you're trying to engage.)

The issues I run into when it comes time to actually execute a program by publishing content include (but are not limited to):

• Corporate editors bound and determined to get every trademark, service mark, product name and company name mentioned as often as possible when just talking about the product by an agnostic or industry label makes it easier for people to engage with the material.


• Corporate editors who insist that the grammar be perfect, thereby making the content a chore to read by removing contractions, inserting "that" everywhere possible and inserting jargon because it's part of the brand style guide. (e.g. use vs. leverage)


• Companies that insist their logo, tagline and template are prominently displayed on every content asset - even though the corporate brand mafia have already done all of the above.


• Companies that insist that the calls to action must be oriented around selling something.


• The inability to respond quickly because EVERYTHING must be approved before it's published.

The title of this post was also mentioned during the webinar and I love it. The concept is a perfect representation of content marketing done to best effect.

It's really that simple. If your content provides ideas that inspire people to visualize themselves solving their problems or the path to a better tomorrow, then you're on the right track. What you really want is for them to become so engaged that they take your ideas into conversations within their companies.

Such a simple concept, but one often overlooked because of the intense focus to insert the salesperson into the dialogue. Yes, of course that must happen in a B2B sale, but consider this:

If your content is designed to help people think about, visualize and discuss the ideas you share in relation to the problems your company solves, it serves as a Trojan Horse, getting salespeople invited into conversations faster than marketers can accomplish by trying to force the issue.

During the webinar, Joe mentioned that Eloqua's logo is getting smaller by design on the content they share. Do you actually think that no one recognizes that Eloqua is providing the content? By making themselves the secondary focus, Eloqua is actually helping their brand gain prominence, as counterintuitive as that may seem. Because they are not screaming "LOOK AT ME", the company is perceived as being more helpful by placing the emphasis on the content, not its brand representation.

Think about how you read content. Do you look for something interesting before you commit to spending time with it? I bet you do. Then, after you get that light bulb moment, you want to know who provided it. How much better of an impression has been made? How much more likely are you to remember the brand favorably?

It's about using the story as stealth marketing, not clubbing people over the head with your product. Once the story is "in," your company is "in" by association.

Great webinar! If you get a chance to listen to the archive, I suggest you do. There were many other great ideas shared during the session.