As many business owners are thinking about their sales and marketing plans for 2012, I looked back at a post I made at this time 2 years ago (see Do you have a sustainable model to generate new business?) and wondered whether I should just re-post it.

Back then, looking at the tough market conditions facing service companies, I asked the question "Is this just a passing phase... or is this "business as usual" for the next few years?"

Anyone who's been watching the slow-mo train wreck of the Eurozone will surely now be thinking it's the latter.

Chatting with a client yesterday who runs a consulting firm, he summed the mood up by saying that it's going to take at least another 3 years before things get better.

Well, he is an optimist after all :-)

With analysts saying that Europe's facing a lost decade of growth you could be forgiven for thinking that it's all over, but let's not confuse macroeconomics with your own business.

You see, to me, even if there's no growth at a GDP level that doesn't mean there has to be no growth for your business. In fact, revenue growth for your business really has little to do with GDP growth and more to do with how you run your own sales and marketing efforts.

Sure, the current market conditions are tough for many but, and this is my point, you'd just better get used to it.

Back in 2008 when we were all thinking it would be a short sharp recession, cutting back and putting things on hold was a sensible approach. Then when it all bounces back you can put your foot back on the pedal, right?

But, for many business owners today, there is no more room to cut back. Cut back and you don't have a business anymore. In fact, do nothing and you won't have a business anymore.

You need to stake your claim and find a way to grow.

And I mean grow... not just survive.

Of course, you need to be realistic, which is why I say you need an austerity plan for growth.

Which may sound contradictory but what I mean is you need a plan to grow your business during these times of austerity. But there is still business out there. Sure, it's tougher to win and you need to do more for less, etc. Those things haven't changed, in fact they've just become baked in.

But, let me repeat, there's still business there.

And now's the time to find a way of winning it.

Beat your competition, innovate your marketing. Be creative, because it's at this time that the strongest businesses will grow.

As a final passing thought, here's 2 books I'd recommend reading at this time:

Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and Blue Ocean Strategy

Re-thinking your business model, partnering with clients (and suppliers) in new, sustainable ways and re-shaping your proposition are all ways to see a huge potential for growth in the current crisis.

Labels: b2b marketing, business development, new business development, strategy

I was reading an interesting survey "B2B Marketing Budgets, Strategies, Tactics and Trends" (download a copy here) which looks at the changes in the marketing mix for companies.

The survey looks at tactics for both lead generation and brand awareness for B2B companies.

From a lead generation perspective, the top tactics in terms of effectiveness are:

1) Inside sales and telemarketing are considered the most effective tactic for lead generation (47.6% rated them "highly effective")

2) Trade shows and conferences are the next most effective (moving up to 2nd place from 3rd in the previous year's survey)

3) Executive breakfasts and events fell from 1st place to 3rd place in the survey.

Another thing that stood out to me is that marketers from large companies consistently rated inside sales and telemarketing as highly effective in generating leads whilst smaller companies are more likely to use lower-cost digital tactics for lead generation (search marketing, websites, podcasts) even though "these tactics are not among those they rate most effective"

Is it me or does that not make any sense?

Why use less effective tactics if they don't work as well?

Well, the more you dig into the report you realise that it's mainly an issue of budgets being squeezed and marketers trying to get more from less.

And, on top of that, it's these low-cost digital channels that are seeing the greatest increase in spend.

According to the report, the most widely used digital tactics are company websites (95.4%, which makes me wonder who are the 4.6% of B2B companies that don't have a website) and email marketing (87.7%).

Social networks and blogging continue to see increases in budget spend but also continue to rank lowly in terms of effectiveness for lead generation (they rank higher for "brand awareness")

So, how do you square those stats?

People are spending more money on marketing tactics that are less effective for lead generation compared with proven tactics that consistently deliver?

Has everyone just lost all business sense or is there a different story under the headline figures.

Crucially, it comes down to budget.

Some of the most effective marketing tactics require a larger investment. Trade shows are not cheap. Running a high-touch telemarketing campaign over several months also requires considerable investment.

Sending out 1000 emails however is very low cost. Whether it delivers the number and quality of leads needed to keep your pipeline full is a different story.

Looking at budget size the survey shows that smaller companies have smaller budgets (duh?) and that companies that only sell B2B with a direct sales model (ie: their own salespeople rather than through resellers and channel partners) have the smallest budgets of all.

Even more of a reason not to waste money on in-effective tactics, I say.

Which is why we always work with clients on fee models that are part fixed and part paid on delivering results. For our fixed fees we do things including telemarketing, email marketing, event/trade-show support, etc (basically stuff that we know "works") and then we link the balance of our fees to results, such as a % of revenue generated.

It's a model that works for our clients and, we believe, ensures that we don't waste our time (or your money) doing stuff that isn't linked to tangible revenue growth.

Labels: b2b email marketing, b2b lead generation, b2b marketing, b2b telemarketing, inside sales, sales lead generation

If you read the IDM's latest Barometer Report you've be forgiven for thinking that telemarketing had been dropped completely as a B2B marketing tactic.

Going through the 30-page report there's not one mention of telemarketing, a proven corner-stone tactic for every b2b marketing organisation.

Why the omission? Has it really been dropped completely or is this just another example of telemarketing being B2B's Dirty Little Secret.

Considering the report cites "lead generation" as the top issue (25% of respondents) for B2B client-side marketers it seems unbelievable that telemarketing isn't mentioned.

No doubt it's just been lumped in with other direct marketing tactics.

Of the agencies involved in the report a whopping 59% were either described as "integrated marketing" or "direct marketing". Hmmm, you're not telling me that they've completely chopped telemarketing out of their service mix are you?

To me, this is another example of how telemarketing just doesn't cut it with the B2B media.

Sure, it's not sexy and it doesn't win awards. But, as proven tactic to reach targeted prospects it still remains a key part of any B2B marketer's plan.

Labels: b2b lead generation, b2b marketing, b2b telemarketing

It's a great image, and one that I snatched from Velocity's excellent B2B Marketing Manifesto.

In this they assert that whilst on the "old days" the sales department saw themselves as the engine room, today's B2B marketer needs to realise that they are in fact the engine that drives sales and that sales are the tires, the "rubber hitting the road".

Their thoughts on the role of "marcom" managers equally made me smile:

"Marcom people provide a valuable service to their companies. Because that’s exactly what they provide: service & support for the sales team. When sales needs a new data sheet or case study: you’re the dude. You handle the trade show stands and e-newsletters. You own the brochures and the website. That’s a valuable function. But it’s not marketing. Not any more."

That makes me smile because, originally coming from sales not marketing, I've always believed it.

B2B marketing should be about one thing - generating qualified sales leads.

The reason that things have changed is that today's digital media now engages prospects much earlier in the sales cycle and in a way that if completely different to the old days.

Think of it like this, you don't have to go too far back to remember when B2B marketing was all about exhibitions, adverts in the trade press and postcards send by direct mail. These all generated sales leads but significantly, the leads usually went straight to the sales team and marketing were told the numbers afterwards (if they were lucky).

Roll forward to today and not only has search and social media brought more people into the funnel earlier in their decision making process (during the research phase when they were previously sat back reading an article in the trade press or wandering the halls of the NEC picking up brochures) but today it's all much more measurable and the first contact point is often now the marketing team.

And this latter point is a key one. Most of these leads are not yet-sales ready.

In the old days these "leads" would be junked by sales.

Someone wanders onto a stand, asks a few questions and the salesperson realises that they're a just a tire-kicker... do you think they filled out their little blue slip for them? Yeah, right!

If you look what's hot in the B2B marketing media it's all about lead nurturing and lead scoring.

Demand generation has basically created a new headache for marketing because it's now having to deal with "leads" which they previously never saw, either because the information was given out without collecting details (think of an article in a magazine rather than a downloaded whitepaper) or the leads never made the cut through the natural selection process of the sales team.

The reality is (which is something a lot in marketing seldom admit) that lead generation is a wasteful process. Almost regardless of the metrics you choose, the number of leads that actually convert to real sales is always a low percentage.

If you run a direct mail campaign and get a 2% pull, you're not able to see the number who opened the mail but didn't read, or maybe put the letter to one side and got distracted by more pressing issues. Obviously, you can throw in a PURL today and track response online, but you're still only able to see so much of what happens.

As soon as you start to get deeper analytics someone's got to manage them. Someone's got to tweak them, measure them and report on them.

Sure, this can be about optimising campaigns to get better results but it can also be about creating extra work that doesn't really impact sales (although, maybe it justifies the marketing spend to get more budget to do more work?)

I'll give you an example.

I was reading a blog recently that went into the intricacies of a particular B2B marketing campaign. When is came to the metrics and ROI it was all about increased traffic for keywords, numbers of downloads, back links, etc over a given period of time (in this case 6 months). Finally, we got down to where the rubber meets the road.

After all this, and a £30,000 budget, they expected to deliver 2 new prospect meetings. 2 meetings for £30,000!

Now I'm not saying that there isn't any value in the other metrics and arguably downloads are just longer term prospects that will convert with a little lead nurturing. But, equally, they could just be more tire-kickers who are draining your resources when you should be concentrating on leads that are going to convert this quarter.

Perhaps, what will eventually happen is that B2B marketers will start to think like sales people.

What started as the dream of measuring every interaction with early-stage suspects has quickly moved on to information overload.

The response? Marketing automation; score everything and automate the lead nurturing process with lots of drip messages so that the cream rises to the top.

In other words, only real sales-ready leads are passed on to sales.

Sounds a lot like my old Sales Director when he handed me my first batch on fresh hot leads: "Now your job is to make most of these go away"

Welcome to the new world of B2B marketing.

Labels: b2b lead generation, b2b marketing, lead nurturing, sales lead generation

I've been following a number of discussions recently on LinkedIn about the integration of telemarketing with email, online and direct mail campaigns.

When I compare these discussions with some recent articles I read around highly targeted DM campaigns aimed at senior decision makers and I'm starting to see a pattern emerging.

You see, all these sexy and highly creative B2B campaigns seem to rely on the rather un-loved tactic of telemarketing as part of their success.

I'm not saying that they wouldn't succeed entirely without the telemarketing element but I would say that it's a critical element seems to be hugely under-valued.

For example, in February's B2B Marketing Magazine there's an article about a highly targeted DM campaign aimed at 200 senior decision makers within a specific geographical area.

The DM piece was sent out, 3 days later an email followed up tied into the main theme of the campaign. Lots of sexy stuff about micro-sites, etc. Finally, 2 days later, an outbound telemarketing call was placed to those targets that hadn't responded.

Unfortunately, whilst the article gives an overall conversion of 20%, it doesn't give any specifics about responses at each stage of the campaign.

To me, this is typical how today's integrated campaigns are reported.

Whether it's following up a DM piece or responding to an online trigger, telemarketing is always seen as the final bit tagged on the end. All the clever work is done up front and, oh well, let's hand it over to telemarketing to wrap it all up.

Having worked on these integrated campaigns before, and followed up some very clever creative work which clearly had no impact, you'll forgive me if I'm a little cynical.

We've been involved in large integrated campaigns where it's been down to the telemarketing effort to literally pull it back from the brink. When no-one's biting suddenly it's "get on the phones and make it happen".

Because, after all the creative messaging and output is sent out you're into the rather messy world of dealing with diary clashes, PA's, firewalls and over zealous post-rooms.

I agree 100% that a smarter, more integrated approach is the way to go for all B2B marketing campaigns. But I'd suggest that telemarketing plays a larger part of the process than most marketing agencies will admit.

Perhaps it's because you don't win many awards for telemarketing :-)

Labels: b2b marketing, b2b telemarketing, integrated b2b marketing, prospect marketing

According to a recent survey in January's B2B Marketing Magazine "telemarketing remains a key part of the marketing mix for most B2B brands".

Unfortunately, the report doesn't specify the size of businesses surveyed, although I suspect most are medium and large sized companies since only 15% of the respondents relied entirely on external telemarketing agencies and "the largest portion of respondents had an internal telemarketing team"

It was interesting that the most popular reason why telemarketing was retained internally was because "the complexity of products and services makes outsourcing difficult".

The best way of thinking about this is to consider why these companies see keeping telemarketing in-house for complex sales proposition easier than outsourcing.

In my view, the primary reason why it would be seen as difficult to outsource telemarketing is the quality of the telemarketers.

Let's be honest, even the best call centres struggle retaining their people. They have one of the highest rates of employee churn than any other industry. If you have a complex sales proposition then you need to invest in training your telemarketers plus they have to be a pretty high-calibre to start with.

Therefore, when you outsource your telemarketing you run the risk of having to train and re-train telemarketers. Retention is always the biggest issue.

If you're a large company you can avoid this simply by hiring your own telemarketers and paying them above the industry average. Most good telemarketers in call centres would jump at the chance to get out.

Why do you have to be a large company to do this?

As I've blogged about previously, Outsourcing Telemarketing vs In-house, the case for in-house telemarketing just doesn't stack up for small businesses.

Simply put, it is too difficult for most small businesses to manage and retain top-class telemarketers.

So if you have a complex product or service, what are your options?

The answer is to find a telemarketing agency that retains the caliber of telemarketers you need. Almost always, this will be a small agency rather than a large call centre.

If a telemarketing agency starts talking about having 100's of employees with account managers, systems, processes, etc then you can guarantee that they're a volume body shop.

However, if they're a small outfit who can provide you with personal direct access to the telemarketers making the calls, and will invest time in training their people to understand your proposition then you're on the right track.

But then again, if you're reading this blog post then you've already found us :-)

Labels: b2b marketing, b2b telemarketing, outsourcing telemarketing

I recently found an interesting survey on marketing collateral for B2B technology vendors. "Eccolo Media 2009 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report".

There's alot of detail in here about trends, etc but a couple of key points are that white papers are still the most influential form of collateral influencing technology purchasers and that it's "highly viral" in nature.

The last point is very interesting when you consider that the survey found "nearly as many (85 percent) share case studies; 81 percent share brochures/data sheets; 80 percent podcasts; and 79 percent video"

This seems to echo our experience where we often use white-papers, case-studies and "thought-leadership" collateral as a tool to both engage and develop relationships within a prospect organisation.

Indeed, the survey makes it clear that "collateral acts as the 'front door' to the sales process.

Another interesting area is the channel preference: "A download from a direct response campaign was the second most frequently used channel for receiving a white paper, behind the corporate Web site. This implies both the frequency with which the white papers are used as direct response offers, and the respondents' preferences to receive them through this channel"

Just as this survey has seen the use of video rise in last years. I think this is one area where social media marketing will dramatically increase. At the moment it's behind direct response but I definitely see that changing.

After all, I found this piece of collateral via the Inbound Marketers group on LinkedIn.

Labels: b2b marketing, demand generation, digital marketing, marketing collateral, social media

In a recent interactive poll for B2B marketing magazine, 80% of it's readers voted "Yes" to the question "Should B2B be focusing all it's efforts on 'pull' marketing (otherwise known as 'outside-in' marketing) therefore turning its back on 'push' marketing techniques (known as 'inside-out')?"

I find that staggering!

80% of B2B marketers think they should be focusing all their efforts on 'pull' marketing.

Whilst I'm not surprised to find myself in the minority with all the buzz and hype around how on-line and social media has changed the B2B landscape, I still find it amazing that so many B2B marketers are prepared to throw out proven push marketing tactics such as DM and telemarketing.

I totally agree that the landscape has changed, and that returns on some traditional direct marketing tactics are falling, but equally, many of the stars of 'pull' marketing, such as social media, still have to deliver tangible and robust ROI.

Like many things in life, it's seldom a "either-or" choice; it's about how you choose the best of all available options to deliver the results you need.

Labels: b2b marketing, push marketing, social media

The jury's out but, with some degree on scepticism, I've decided to start a twitter account.

As I've posted on my blog before, see Is Twitter a B2B marketing channel? I'm still trying to work out where the return is (truth be told, I'm sure everyone else is too!) but I've seen a growing number of clients, associates, prospects and organisations I know join so... who knows?

If you're interested in my 140 character musings - follow me here

Labels: b2b marketing, social media, social networking sites

I've recently finished reading the excellent Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin.

In his book Seth maps out 14 trends that are shaping the business world and suggests that the winners will be the companies which align their business model with what he calls "New Marketing".

Unsurprisingly, since this book is from the guru of permission marketing, Seth says in the executive summary that Old Marketing tactics such as telemarketing and cold calling "are all in trouble"

I didn't exactly spit out my coffee at that point but it did make me sit up :-)

The thing is that Seth's talking about telemarketing as a "mass marketing" media, since he compares it with Network TV and newspapers.

And in that sense, he's absolutely right.

Mass-market telemarketing, which is typically B2C, is dead. As I've posted about previously (see Ethical Telemarketing Companies? Now I know we're in trouble!) unsolicited cold calling to consumers just doesn't work any more.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Telemarketing can still be extremely effective as a marketing tactic and, in certain situations, can deliver far better results than other, often over-hyped, digital marketing tactics.

As long as it's highly targeted and relevant then outbound telemarketing can not only be effective but it can also be well received (I posted about this a year ago Google ads show us the future of cold-calling).

My view is that telemarketing is already shifting to higher value, more complex sales propositions where it can still deliver a strong ROI.

Will telemarketing ever become extinct as a marketing tactic?

I guess that if it no longer delivers a return-on-investment then the answer's yes. Or if legislation comes out to ban it's use in business-to-business.

At the moment, though, if you need to reach senior decision makers and key influencers in business, high-targeted telemarketing can still deliver.

Labels: b2b marketing, b2b telemarketing, cold calling, social media

Maybe it was the blog title "If You're an Over 40 Marketing Professional You Must Wake up and Understand the Importance of Twitter" that caught my attention because I've pretty much managed to avoid the phenomenon of twitter so far.

I must admit, I still think of twitter as an inane stream of pointless "tweets" of a "just got my morning paper" style. Who wants to know that?

Well, 4M people apparently.

So, when Salesforce.com announce that they're integrating twitter, it makes me think again.

I can see it in a service or support function, kind of a micro-blogging user group. And for major brands it must be great.

If you're a consultant, coach, trainer or some "guru" then I guess you could use it to get potential clients to follow you. I see a lot of tele-seminar tweets flying about and, to my mind, it fits well with a personality led business.

Getting your thought leadership positioning into 140 characters may be a challenge for many though.

Like other social media platforms, no doubt an MLM element is in there as I can see it's a great medium for recruiting network marketing agents and affiliates. "Just made another Zillion dollars, you must get in on this".

Twitter has certainly got the media's attention and that, more than anything, could be behind Salesforce.com's integration plans.

But, maybe that's just an over 40's perspective :-)

Labels: b2b marketing, social media