Roger Warner, online PR maestro, sent us a link to this Doug Richard video.  It’s a two-minute extract from one of his start-up seminars, this one on the relationship between marketing and sales. The quote we like: “A great marketing campaign is defined by the irrelevance of the sales people who follow.”

We’ve always like the more ambitious definitions of marketing. A lot of talk abut marketing is really about marcomms. True marketing is about finding a need and filling it profitably. About dropping opportunities in the sales team’s lap so all they have to do is close.

Our favourite campaigns are always the ones that don’t just deliver leads, they deliver business.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, Lead Generation, Sales

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The buying process is long and complex in B2B tech markets. Usually, the bigger the company, the more people are involved and the longer it takes. So where can a B2B salesperson trip up in this drawn out process? We’ve worked with some of the very best B2B sales people in the business and these 5 mistakes often come up in our conversations:

1. Failing to engage all stakeholders: Typically there are a number of people involved in the buying process – those who write the specs, those who control the budget, those who influence the decision, those who actually use the product and finally the ultimate decision makers – usually the CTO or the CEO. You have to identify who these people are in your prospective client and make every effort to meet them and strike a relationship with each one of these influencers. Countless salespeople have failed because they didn’t take the time to meet the people who specified what the product needed to do or managed to engage with everyone involved in the decision. Often your main contact may not want to give you this access — your job is to earn it.

2. Failing to leverage conversations with one stakeholder when talking to other stakeholders: If you’ve learned from  the product user why he likes your product over that of the competition, you’d be foolish not to mention it when you’re talking to the buyer. It’s obvious but you’d be surprised how many people fail to leverage every conversation. The sales people we admire most are always listening, assessing and using their conversations to their advantage.

3. Failing to manage internal disagreements within the prospect: The people involved in the buying process are bound to have disagreements about which product or service to go for.. Don’t wait for things to sort themselves out; they probably won’t and you’ll lose the sale. If you’ve spent your time well in the initial phase, getting to know the people involved in the buying process, then that’s your map for managing internal conflicts. Don’t leave this to your ‘champion’.

4. Failing to keep the prospect engaged: Sales cycles are long and slow, so it’s easy to lose focus. Are you allowing too much time to pass by between phone calls or visits? Keeping the momentum even if the prospect is slow to respond to you is important especially if competition is high. Our favourite sales people have a way of keeping the energy up and sounding like it’s a new sales call even if it’s in the ninth month.

5. Failing to make the value argument: If you find yourself haggling on price, you probably haven’t been effective in making the prospect understand your product’s value. Price should be one of the last things to be discussed not the first (as it often is). Good marketing can really help in defining the value proposition and communicating it clearly and simply. Too often tech companies disconnect marketing messages form sales conversations – the fastest way to get dragged into price haggling.

Of course, there are hundreds of ways to lose a B2B sale, but these five seem to lead the pack.

-      Photo credit: Tim Green

© gesu for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, B2B selling, Sales

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Choose your B2B patients wisely

The most respected surgeons in the world have the best survival rates.  But they don’t have the best survival rates because they’re better surgeons.  They have the best survival rates because they choose their patients very, very carefully.

Great surgeons know exactly what variables in the patient’s history correlate to successful outcomes. They then avoid patients who don’t fit the profile and focus their energy on the patients most likely to survive.

To show why this is really relevant to you as a B2B marketer, I’d like to start with how it’s relevant to us as a B2B agency.

At Velocity, we apply the ‘patient screening’ idea when we’re meeting prospective clients for the first time.  Some agencies hoover up every bit of business going. They’ll say whatever they need to say and be whoever they need to be in order to win the business.

To be honest, we’ve been guilty of this in our time.  And it invariably ends in tears (the equivalent of the patient dying). We’ve been seduced by exciting projects that really didn’t play to our strengths and we’ve usually regretted it — even if the client ended up happy.

The fact is, we know exactly what we’re good at. And while it’s okay to go a bit off-piste, we have to recognise that doing so will, over time, lower our hit rate.

More to the point, the time and energy we put into these tangential projects are invested at the expense of projects that are right in our sweet spot. The ones we slam dunk every time.

So we’ve learned over the years to spot real, Velocity-shaped holes in prospect companies. And we’ve learned to spot projects that really don’t need what we do best. When we respectfully decline the latter, we spend more time on the former. So our hit rates go up. Our clients say nice things about us. And we attract more of the projects we love.

The exact same principle applies to all B2B marketing. The idea isn’t to attract every prospect who has a passing interest in what you do.  The idea is to generate sales-ready leads that hit smack in the middle of your sweet-spot; the projects that need exactly the dimensions your products excel at.

To do this, you need to know the precise size and shape of your sweet spot. You need to not only know who you are and why people should care, you need to know how you stack up against competitors and substitutes.

Only then can you isolate the dimensions that set you apart and build your marketing around them.  When you do this, you’ll be generating and nurturing contacts that lead to great sales conversations — instead of meetings where your sales people are bending over backwards to fit a brief that really isn’t suited to your business.

More ‘perfect fit’ projects means more successful projects, more happy customers, more recommendations.  Fewer perfect fits means… the opposite.

Our eBook, The Holy Trinity of Tech Marketing, talks about the three questions that will help you identify your company’s sweet spots. This is where we start when we take on new clients. Because if you get this right, the success rates rise for everything else you do.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Demand Generation, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Demand Generation, lead nurturing, Sales

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1) Identify a need
This is mostly a rational process and largely buyer-initiated. The FD knows when she needs new accounting software and she knows why.

2) Draw up a shortlist
This is usually an irrational process. People draw up a list of vendors to investigate by asking around, thinking of past experiences, following a gut feel. Google may have changed this somewhat, but it’s still largely an intuitive exercise.

3) Evaluate proposals
Mostly rational again. Buyers look at price, terms, delivery and specs. They compare competitors side-by-side. Marketing is present here, but at this point, it’s largely down to the offer (product + price).

4) Buy
Weirdly, this last step has a big irrational component. Buyers often do not choose the vendor that wins on paper. They choose the one they feel best about. The one they trust. The one they feel will get them to the goal in the least stressful way. If there’s a salesperson involved, this is their moment.

Where does marketing fit in with all this?
If you think of B2B marketing as the delivery of pure business information, its role is mainly influential during stages 1 and 3. Helping buyers identify a need and helping them evaluate options.

If you think of marketing as creating a brand, the job focuses on steps 2 and 4 — the largely irrational steps — drawing up a shortlist and making the final decision.

Let’s look at the four steps again with this in mind:

1) Identify a need
Marketing can help here by showing someone that the way they do things now is flawed (‘selling the problem’). Or by convincing them that one of their perennial problems can now be taken away. Or showing them that their competitors are jumping ahead of them in some way.

All this falls under a banner they used to call ‘creating a need’. In reality, marketing can’t create needs. It can only address them. Doing this is all about getting noticed, then making a rational case for change. The ‘business information’ side of the B2B marketing equation.

2) Draw up a shortlist
Good marketing shines here. It gets companies on shortlists by raising awareness and by associating the vendor with the critical issues that relate to the problem (positioning and thought leadership).

On the warm, fuzzy side, marketing works here by building a brand that people feel good about. Engineers tease us about this part but it may be the single most important thing we do. As our client Anil Raj likes to say, there’s no such thing as business-to-business, there’s only person-to-person.

Clearly, the salesperson is the most important element here. But a great brand works with the salesperson to tip the scales. People like working with companies they feel good about. They feel good about companies that demonstrate they understand their problems, speak frankly and intelligently about them and show conviction, confidence and passion in everything they do.

3) Evaluate proposals
The salesperson’s work is the main agent here. But the ‘business information’ side of B2B marketing can contribute enormously by providing the information the buyer needs to make the decision (and convince others); as well as by helping frame the issues in a way that tilts the decision the right way.

4) Buy
It’s down to two or three credible products and vendors. All look like they can do the job or they wouldn’t have made it this far. Now, the ‘brand’ side of B2B marketing kicks in again. Buyers will choose the company they feel best about. The one they want to spend more time with. The one they respect and trust.

A great salesperson will overcome all but the worst marketing in stages 2 and 4. But great marketing will give your company the best possible chance of walking right up the four steps, contract in hand.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, Brand, Marketing, Sales

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Other highlights include new papers on how to make your web site ultra-usable and how to make your PPC campaigns sing. Plus a roundup of our latest blogs and information on a hot new web marketing service we’re offering called ‘web motion.’

Go get it now!

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Content, Copywriting, Marketing, Newsletters, PPC, Sales, SEO, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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Think about it: if ‘do nothing’ is even an option for the prospective buyer, you’ve probably got an uphill battle… and a sales cycle that could resemble Napoleon’s march into Russia.

Overcoming inertia means selling someone a problem before you can sell them a solution. Convincing them that the way they’re doing things now is doomed to failure. But no one I know is actually in the market for problems. We’ve all got enough, thanks.

It’s like walking into someone’s office and saying, “See that rock in that corner? Well, there are little monsters under that rock and they’re going to come out and get you one day. The good news is, I’m going to turn over that rock and kill those monsters.”

To which most sane people would reply, ‘Don’t touch that rock!’

The pioneering technology faces exactly this resistance. The prospect has been happily doing nothing for a long time, despite what you claim is a serious enough problem to demand attention now. That can only be because of one of a few reasons:

• They recognise the pain but find it endurable
  Your need to show them that a pain-free life is easy to achieve

• They recognise the pain but see it as someone else’s
  You need to find that other person.

• They don’t feel it as pain at all
  You have to prove that it is pain, and that it’s a symptom of more serious risks.

• They know that all their competitors have the same pain
  Your need to show that this is no longer true: their competitors are now gaining an advantage.

• Their job depends on this pain existing and persisting
  You need to reach their boss.

Clearly, these are all difficult attitudes to overcome. In many ways, it’s easier to duke it out with a direct competitor.

Often, what the competitor-free pioneer is doing is aggregating low-level pains that attack different departments and job titles. If the pain were already in one place, there would probably be some competing solutions (direct competitors or viable substitutes) trying to solve it.

The choice is either to get those different influencers to think like a team so they can also aggregate some budget; or to find the person they all report to and show how all those little headaches are really one big headache and it’s their head.

Another strategy is to break down your solution into smaller apps suitable for the specific pain points, selling each for less but selling to one person at a time. That means faster sales cycles and more entry points to upsell the whole solution.

So inertia just might be the most formidable competitor you’ll ever meet. For market pioneers, traditional competition should be welcomed. It validates the market. It tells buyers that there really is something going on here. And it gives you something to position yourself against.

Thankfully, inertia works both ways. A body at rest may tend to stay at rest but a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Get the market moving and you could be riding a big snowball down an even bigger hill (at which point a host of new competitors will come running out to play).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, Brand, Competition, Inertia, Marketing, Sales, Technology Marketing

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The only problem is that these champions turned out to be extremely rare people. Like any early adopter (thanks Geoffrey Moore), they’re generally innovators and visionaries; they’re confident; they trust their own gut feel and are willing to work with young companies and unproven products. If these early champions didn’t exist, neither would the tech industry. But they can fatally mislead early stage tech companies.

Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is all about making the transition from these early adopter clients to a more mainstream audience who need different things and are moved by different messages. But we’ve worked with a handful of cases where the first one or two wins were the only wins in sight. In each case, the company, convinced by early success that they’ve got everything right, found it extremely hard to re-focus on the more common buyers: risk-averse people who need a lot more hand-holding and an easier-to-buy product

Also in each case, the vision itself was the problem. Not that it was wrong (usually it was simply ahead of its time) but that most buyers don’t want exciting new visions. They want specific problems solved. The early champions validated the entire vision, so that’s what the company continued to sell. They then waited forever for the next big win, getting bogged down in two-year sales cycles with prospects who look just like the early wins, but are fundamentally different.

Often, the answer is to downplay the vision a bit and break the product up into bite-sized applications. It’s painful, but it can spell the difference between getting customers to fund growth instead of needing lots of early stage investment capital (and the dilution it brings).

Early on, getting twenty $10k wins may actually be better than bagging that $200k elephant. They don’t trample your product development roadmap to suit their specific needs; the sales cycles are shorter; and the sales model is more replicable and scalable — it’s a foundation you can build a business on. One client, Sarah Haskell at Portrait Software liked to call these ‘pointy apps’ to differentiate them from the big, platform sell.

The right balance is to have a vision that underpins the smaller applications and puts them in context. And a set of apps that validate the vision.

No one would say you should turn down the big early wins. Just beware of being lured into the rocks by expecting more buyers to be just like the early ones.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, Sales, Technology

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