A top struggle for sales professionals is optimizing selling time and driving lead generation.

On Thursday, June 20, at the Inside Sales Virtual Summit, I will reveal how a billion-dollar telecommunications company addressed this situation by:

• Bringing science and testing to their calling process, and
• Reducing their time to lead by more than 60%

In the process, you’ll learn the data insight you need to drive success by making the most of every moment of your selling day.

Joining me at this free event will be 62 of the world’s leading sales and marketing professionals who will share their newest and best sales practices. They include:

Best Selling Sales Authors

- Guy Kawasaki, Art of the Start

- Jeffrey Gitomer, Little Red Book of Selling

- Matt Dixon, The Challenger Sale

- Mike Bosworth, Solution Selling

- Jill Konrath, SNAP Selling

Top Experts

- Brian Frank, LinkedIn

- David Elkington, InsideSales.com

- Liz Gelb-O’Connor, ADP

- Barry Trailer, CSO Insights

- Josh James, Domo

If you want to invest time that will provide the knowledge you need to produce better results faster, I strongly encourage you to attend.

Register here

Date: Thursday, June 20, 2013

Time: 8 a.m. – 3 p.m. Pacific / 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Eastern

Related Resources:

How IntraLinks Used Social Media to Generate Twice as Many Sales-ready Leads as Any Other Channel

B2B Sales Cycle: 4 steps to avoid the wasteful ‘no decision’

Lead Generation: Phone calls turn first-time webinar into million-dollar leads

“It is absolutely necessary. Don’t base your marketing on assumptions and allow your customers to identify your success.”

– Alex Corzo, Manager of Brand Integration, Orlando Health

How important is value prop testing?

The case studies at Optimization Summit 2013 reaffirmed the importance of value proposition testing for me. For example, through testing, Jon Ciampi, Vice President Marketing, Business Development & Corporate Development, CRC Health, learned his customers craved trust, not luxury. He reinvented his lead funnel based on this insight, changing everything from his company’s landing pages to his team’s call scripts.

So, how can you discover your value proposition?

At Optimization Summit, my colleague Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, shared “How You Can Use Email to Discover the Essence of Your Value Proposition (in 5 Simple Steps).”

But email is just one channel for testing value proposition. So, in the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked…

Q: Which methods have been the most effective at testing your value proposition? Select up to three responses.

We also reached out to our audience, and asked for their value proposition testing tips. The lowest response in the chart, offline advertising (in this case, using cold calling), received the most passionate response, as you’ll see below …

Different tactics work for testing (and challenging) different aspects of your value proposition

For example, you can’t test the “secondary aspects” of your value proposition with PPC advertising because of obvious limitations, but it’s an ideal method for finding out what are the strongest motivators (“primary aspects”) of your value proposition.

It seems many people forget landing pages aren’t as objective as they might think. The traffic source affects expectations (and who comes to your page). So, one aspect of your value proposition might appear to work best, but really you only know what those visitors respond to.

For example, you sell supplements and you’re running an ad at a site focused on marathon running. You get visitors interested in extreme endurance. Your landing page should then focus on endurance. In other words, if one aspect of your value proposition is about building endurance, that’s what will appear to be the most important aspect of it. But if the traffic came from a bodybuilding site, you’d better focus on other aspects or at least frame your value proposition differently.

– Peter Sandeen, Online Conversion Specialist

Cold calling

In a business-to-business setting, I make a few hundred cold calls myself.

By the time I finish those calls, I know with a fairly high degree of confidence whether there is a need in the marketplace for what I’m offering.

Since I make those calls myself, I also have firsthand evidence of whether the value proposition resonates with prospective buyers. Only after do I allocate marketing dollars to communicating the message.

I know this method is “expensive,” but I’m a founder, so for me it’s about making the time and for that reason spending on marketing first would be more expensive.

Anyway, guess what I’ve found over and over again trying this approach in a variety of B2B situations? If the value proposition doesn’t include making them money or saving them time, it probably won’t resonate!

– David Chevalier, Co-founder, SalesBlend

And more cold calling

In my opinion, there is no substitute for David’s approach of having the founder or equivalent making enough cold calls.

Using senior execs to personally do testing is still not cheap, but really talking to that many prospects is not only priceless but an incredible kickstart to building pipeline for the sales that follow the test.

– Chris Beall, Chief Product Officer, ConnectAndSell

Related Resources:

Digital Marketing: B2B marketers can get fresh, new ideas from B2C

Digital Marketing: How to craft a value proposition in 5 simple steps

To Call or Email? That is the Question

If you think Facebook is no place for B2B marketers, think again. And, consider the experience of Motorola Solutions.

“Facebook was one of the first places we started engaging on social media,” Belinda Hudmon, Senior Director, Global Digital Strategy and Operations, Motorola Solutions, said.

Why? Because that’s the site the company’s government customers were using.

“Our strategy has always been, ‘Go where the audience is,’” she explained. “Firefighters, policeman and other public-safety personnel were engaging on Facebook. They weren’t only talking about their personal lives, they were talking about their jobs.”

The company followed the conversations of its Facebook audience and developed a Motorola Solutions Facebook business page, which features links to relevant content – such as a whitepaper on next generation public safety – that served as a response to the ongoing conversation.

However, they didn’t create content specifically for Facebook.  Instead, Facebook worked as an extension of Motorola’s publishing arm, which consists of a global editorial team that manages 16 websites in 11 languages. Hudmon’s team introduces their content to their target audience on Facebook by addressing audience questions and concerns. She indicated it is beneficial when the team does the following:

• Use photos. Hudmon said images drive a 20% higher response.
• Ask questions related to the content and create conversation around it.

“We’ll pose a question that talks a little bit about what our point of view is, but the goal is really to get that dialogue started,” Hudmon explained.

• Promote the company’s Facebook presence. Hudmon noted the Facebook page sees the most traffic around events such as tradeshows and conferences. This is why the team ensures the page is integrated into all company online and offline channels. After all, if the marketplace doesn’t know it’s there, they won’t come.
• Don’t approach Facebook like an advertising channel.

“When you say, ‘Here is this new thing you should buy and here is the offer,’ that will really turn people off,” Hudmon said. “Instead, we position new services and products in thought-leadership content that discusses them in the context of industry issues.”

While Hudmon can’t reveal exactly how many leads her team receives from Facebook, she said it generates more sales, support and general inquiries about Motorola Solutions’ offerings than any other social media channel.

“We’re not measuring return on investment at this point, but we are starting to put mechanisms in place to do so” she said. “We just know this is where our audience is and we need to be there, too. It’s like the Internet a decade or so ago, we knew we had to have a presence and we had to make sure we were driving the most effectiveness from it, but we didn’t fully understand its value yet.”

In the future, Hudmon would like to test advertising on Facebook. She said Facebook collects much more personal data than most other social media sites. That makes it easier to target advertising based on what prospects like, their interests or their connections, in addition to demographics and geography.

“While we’ve always looked at Facebook as an engagement channel, it has granular-level marketplace information that is tough to find anywhere else,” Hudmon said. “We would like to start testing this as an advertising channel [by placing our information on news streams] to see if we can get the right mix of targeting and content that will attract more people to engage with us.”

Related Resources:

Gamification: How Siemens got 23,000 engineers to learn about its brand

B2B Social Media Marketing: Focus on leads, not likes

Lessons from a B2B Summit Coach: 5 steps to cut through the noise, turn off the hype and create a B2B social media program that works

Social Media Marketing: Which type of content is appropriate for different platforms?

This week, I’ve joined marketers from around the world in Athens Americana – Boston, Mass. for MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013. After a short (and rather scenic) water taxi ride from the airport, I’ve settled into one of the Value Proposition Development Course sessions being led by Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, as he teaches marketers how to craft and express value propositions.

“I want to take the theory that we have put in place so far, and bring it down to a ground floor level of application,” Austin said.

So, today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog will highlight that ground floor application from Austin’s  session by showing you how you can craft a value proposition in five simple steps. Our goal is to give marketers a frameworkthey can use to identify and express a value proposition using the MECLABS value proposition worksheet.

However, before we get started, take moment to download this worksheet to aid your value proposition efforts and let’s get clear on what a value proposition is exactly …

What is a value proposition?

According to Austin, there’s a fundamental question every customer wants answered that directly impacts your ability to capture and convert – “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

“Your value proposition is the ultimate reason why your prospects should do business with you,” Austin explained.

To put this further into perspective, take a moment to ask yourself, “Can I clearly and succinctly state the core value proposition of the product or service that I am marketing?” and write down you answer.

If what you wrote down resembles any of these …

• “We empower your software decisions.”
• “I don’t sell products and services; I sell results — my guarantee.”
• “We help companies find their passion and purpose.”
• “We are the leading [insert your service here] provider.”
• “We give XX% off for new clients.”
• “This site has the solution your company is looking for.”

Then it’s very likely your marketing campaigns are underperforming from poorly-crafted value propositions that are also likely leaving some serious leads and revenue on the table.

Step #1: Identify the value proposition question

Austin explained the first step in crafting a value proposition is to identify the type of value proposition you need to answer.

“Once you have identified the value proposition question you want to answer, you have already won half of the battle,” Austin said.

And so, you first have to choose which question you want to answer; be it the primary question of “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?” or a derivative value proposition that has a much more granular focus on your products or process.

Step #2: Identify potential claims of value

The next step is to list some potential claims of value that answer the primary value proposition question we identified in step one.

To illustrate this, I created a hypothetical email service provider and listed some potential claims of value.

Step #3: Rate the appeal and exclusivity for each claim

After you’ve listed some possible claims, rank them from one through five according to their appeal and exclusivity, of which:

Appeal – “How much is this offer desired by the market?”

Exclusivity – “Is this offer available anywhere else in the market?”

In keeping with our example, let’s take a deeper look at appeal and exclusivity of our highest-ranking example claim.

“We can integrate into any social media platform”

• Appeal: 4.5 – The ability to conduct multichannel marketing with you emails is going to have a reasonably high amount of appeal to our hypothetical ideal prospect.
• Exclusivity: 5.0 – While there may be other players in our market; our business intelligence has determined that we are the only ESP currently capable of integration into every social media platform.

Step #4: Identify evidentials for your highest-ranked claims

Evidentials are the backbone of your potential claim because they make your claim quantifiable, or as Austin explained,  “Once you understand your appeal and exclusivity, you want to begin building supporting credibility with your evidentials.”

To help intensify the credibility of potential claims, Austin shared three key principles for selecting evidentials:

1. Specification – Substitute general descriptions with specific facts.
2. Quantification – Quantify your claims.
3. Verification – Let someone else do your bragging.

Step #5: Combine the highest-ranked claims with supporting evidentials

This is where you bring it all together – by taking your highest-ranked claims and their supporting evidentials and turning them into what Austin described as the “the ultimate conclusion as to why prospects should buy from you.”

Related Resources:

Value Proposition: Congress has a value exchange problem … do your marketing offers?

Value Prop: Is there true value in your marketing proposition?

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Regardless of whether you’re selling to people who are purchasing something for their workplace or themselves, you’re still selling to people – especially when it comes to digital marketing. Consider the words of Shawn Burns, Global Vice President of Digital Marketing, SAP:

“The B2B space has the same opportunities as the B2C space when it comes to digital marketing. We’re dealing with people, and all people behave the same. They use search, they use social and they visit websites when they’re considering a purchase. This means everything that works for consumer marketers online can also work to optimize business purchases.”

Burns will be presenting at the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013, May 20-23, in Boston, which looks at the many ways organizations can leverage A/B testing to squeeze the highest amount of leads and revenue out of marketing efforts.

“Testing is about mindset,” Burns said. “A small marketing department can drive more business from the current Web traffic by looking at clickthrough reports, understanding the content that is getting traction and doing more of that.”

Furniture company website sparks idea, nets 400% increase in leads

It’s why Joy Gendusa, Founder and CEO, PostcardMania, a direct-mail company, builds her marketing around A/B testing. What she has learned in the process reflects Burns’ observation: B2C digital marketing techniques she and her team discovered during their off hours work very well in B2B.

For instance, one evening she was doing some online shopping. A Google search led Gendusa to a home-furnishing company’s Web page. A pop-up form appeared asking her to join their mailing list. It was her untypical response that gave Gendusa pause.

“I instantly felt comfortable and willing to give my contact information,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, I’m always getting asked to give my contact information. What made me respond so quickly now?’”

She determined it was the design of the pop-up form: It looked like it was drawn by hand.

It motivated her to test a standard pop-up form against one that looked hand-drawn on PostcardMania’s home page. Within two weeks, the team noted a 400% increase in people who filled it out. This didn’t surprise Gendusa, considering her initial reaction to the home furnishings company’s form.

“Whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, you’re still trying to change people’s minds, convince them to like your product more and move forward on the buying cycle,” Gendusa said. “It’s universal for all marketers and any product or service.”

Have you produced great results from testing a B2C marketing technique with your B2B marketplace? I’d love to hear about them. Feel free to share in the comments below.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit, May 20-23, Boston

Testing and Optimization: SAP’s Test Lab increases digital leads 27%, leads to 20% budget savings [Part I]

Testing and Optimization: SAP’s Test Lab increases digital leads 27%, leads to 20% budget savings [Part II]

B2B vs. B2C: What Does It Really Mean?

Call for Speakers: Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco – We’re looking for both B2B and B2C lead generation speakers

Five years ago, Dell had little presence on social media. That changed when the computer company realized 4,000 conversations about the brand were happening online every single day and the company was not present.

Since then, Dell has invested millions of dollars’ worth of time and resources to join those conversations. In fact, one in 12 of Dell’s more than 105,000 employees have attended its Social Media & Community University, which encompasses up to 12 hours of training on how to best represent Dell online.

In addition, Social Outreach Services, a team representing 14 languages, actively monitors and participates in social media.

A lot has changed since 2006 and these changes have paid off handsomely for Dell – especially for its B2B business, says Richard Margetic, Director of Global Social Media, Dell.

“Social media has made more of an impact, significantly on B2B than B2C,” he said.

“For us, B2B is about relationships, and social media is all about relationships,” he added.

While Margetic cannot share specific numbers, he says B2B social media initiatives drive “a significant chunk of their B2B business.”

Here’s where he can provide specifics:

Every week, Dell’s Social Outreach Services team addresses approximately 3,000 issues. All but 3% of those issues come to some kind of resolution, and 40 to 50% – about 1,200 – of the people who initiated them end up speaking positively about Dell online.

Conceivably, by participating in social media, Dell transforms approximately 62,000 brand detractors into fans every year.

Margetic said your business can achieve similar results – just start paying attention to what is being said online about your business and industry.  By doing so, in addition to having a chance to recruit some brand converts, you’ll acquire what you need to develop a core marketing strategy:

• You’ll identify who is talking about you – the influencers.
• You’ll find out what they’re talking about and how they’re saying it. This will give you the key words, messaging points and pain points from which you can build marketing materials.
• You’ll find out what social media platforms they’re using and, consequently, identify where to focus your marketing budget.

Here are the free tools Margetic advised using immediately to hear the social media conversations impacting your business:

Google Alerts: Whenever your company or your industry is mentioned online, Google will notify you. You can have these delivered daily, weekly or as they happen.

Twitter search: Type in your company name, keywords or industry to find out what people are saying in real time.

“You’ll quickly get insight into who your marketplace influencers are,” Margetic explained.

LinkedIn: Type your business name, industry or keyword into the search box to identify where you are being mentioned on LinkedIn. You can look at your first- and second-level connections and beyond to hear what they have to say about any topic you want, and filter conversations by geography, company size, industry and more.

“This is a phenomenal tool, especially when you consider that more than 85% of the visits to LinkedIn have nothing to do with job hunting. Instead, people are sharing information and driving relationships,” Margetic said.

Pinterest: Find out if your content is being repinned by going to “http://pinterest.com/source/your company’s URL.” For example:  http://pinterest.com/source/marketingsherpa.com.

You can invest in a social media monitoring tool, as well. Dell has designed its own platform to monitor conversations, but Margetic noted there are plenty of other solutions for businesses wanting to do more than manually search social media sites. These platforms allow you to manage and search multiple sites simultaneously, and see results in real time.

Margetic believed monitoring social media should be considered a key lead generation activity.

“It’s just fundamentally sound business practice,” he insisted. “Paying attention to what is being said [about you and your industry] online will tell you which people are talking, what they’re saying and where they’re saying it, which will help focus your lead-generation efforts.

“If you’re not involved in these conversations, you need to reconsider your priorities,” Margetic concluded.

Related Resources:

Becoming a Social Business – Dell SlideShare

Lead Generation: 5 tips to generate leads faster on LinkedIn

Social Media Marketing: 6 tips for running a valuable LinkedIn group that attracts prospects

B2B Social Media Marketing: Focus on leads, not likes

Webinar Replay: How to Integrate Social Media/SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

30-Minute Marketer: How to Take an ROI-Based Approach to Social Marketing

Prospects that come to your organization because of peer recommendations are two and a half times more responsive than any other marketing channel, according to a study by the American Marketing Association.

A member of our B2B Lead Roundtable Group underscored this statistic when she noted recommendations are how one of her clients earns most of its customers. It’s no wonder she wanted to find the best way to formalize her client’s referral process.

I brought her question to three referral marketing experts:

• Angela Bandlow, Vice President of Marketing, Extole, an advocacy management platform
• Gal Borenstein, CEO and Chief Strategy Officer, the Borenstein Group, a branding, marketing and public relations consultancy
• Richard Beedon, Founder and CEO, Amplifinity, a brand advocate management platform

All agreed the most powerful referral programs aren’t campaigns or tactics, but rather executed as long-term strategies that build new marketing channels.

Here’s some of their advice on how to make this happen:

1. Identify your audience

Be warned – this may not be the person who signed the contract, or whose name is in your database. That person could be the chief financial officer instead of who you really want – the person who works with your product every day.

“You could offer someone a flight to the moon, but it will only be relevant if the person getting the message is actually interested in your product,” Borenstein said.

2. Know precisely why they chose your product

Borenstein related this illustration:

“Let’s say your customers bought a piece of electronic equipment. Your marketing and sales department could insist that customers bought the equipment because they loved the product. In reality, they purchased it because the price was right or the shipping was convenient,” he said. “If your messaging is misaligned with their motivations for buying from you, it won’t be believable and they won’t respond.”

Make sure internal perceptions align with external reality by going to customers directly, through surveys and interviews, to identify the top three to five reasons why they buy from you. Never assume you already know.

3. Identify when they’re most excited about working with you

“The best time to ask for a referral is when customers are happiest and most engaged with your company,” Bandlow said. “There’s no one set formula to determine this. It’s going to change with the types of products and services you’re selling.”

4. Know what motivates your audience and know their regulations

Bandlow shared a story of a client who sold very technical products. They sampled multiple incentives to identify what their audience would like best. While most of what was sampled fell flat, one item succeeded against expectations – a t-shirt featuring the words “data nerd.”

Here’s what happened when they expanded the program to their entire marketplace:

• They identified more than 400 brand advocates
• Advocates shared across Facebook, Twitter, PURLs and email
• They drove 156 sign-ups for their services
• Their average order value was 28% higher than leads from other sources

However, some organizations have strict rules around gifts.  Bandlow points out you can get around that by offering:

• A contribution to a favorite nonprofit in their name
• Discounts on services
• A free pass to an annual industry conference

5. Make it personal by using your sales people

“It’s not all online and digital,” Beedon said. “The best way to acquire referrals is face to face. Furthermore, calling it an Ambassador or VIP Program as opposed to just a Referral Program can make it more appealing and personally rewarding.”

“Make the prospect feel special through a personal, face-to-face invitation by their account representative,” he continued. “Design a mobile app so that it’s easy for your sales professionals to enroll people anytime, anywhere.”

6. Remember referral sources aren’t just customers

“Employees and third-party affiliates can recommend you to as many people as your customers – sometimes more,” Beedon said.

7. Promote your program across all marketing channels

“Place your referral program on banner ads, in newsletters, on the front of your website – anywhere you’re touching your customer, employee and partner audiences,” Beedon advised.

8. Have reasonable expectations

“If customers don’t buy in the winter, don’t launch a program on January 1 with the hope of increasing your numbers. Make sure your expectations are aligned with what the market will bear,” Borenstein said. “Furthermore, don’t focus on the leads you’re going to get that quarter, consider lifetime value. A handful of customer referrals for a $100,000 piece of equipment, for instance, can result in millions of dollars in business over time.”

Related Resources:

Should lead generation ignore current customers?

Lead Generation via Industry Experts

8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities

On Lead Nurturing: Looking for a “hot” date?

Email marketing is a mature marketing tactic, yet I don’t believe B2B organizations are capitalizing on its potential to generate leads.

I realized this when I read MarketingSherpa’s just-released 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. They surveyed 594 B2B and B2G marketers, of which just about half send out 10,000 to 10 million emails every month. The top priority for the entire group is to deliver highly relevant emails – it ranks above even driving website traffic and revenue.

This makes sense, considering highly relevant email will achieve the other two goals.

But, I wonder how easily they can create highly relevant emails when only 15% reported they have dedicated resources to produce content for each stage of the buying process, as you can see in the below chart, Chart 3.32 – Tactics utilized to improve email relevance and engagement:

Q: Which of the following tactics is your organization using to improve the relevance and engagement of email content delivered to subscribers?

This makes me wonder what is being sent in those 10,000-plus emails each month:

• Do they know what information their prospects want at each stage of the buying cycle?
• Do they know how they want to consume that information?
• Do they have the means to provide that information through their emails?

If they can’t confidently answer “yes” to these questions, how do they expect to achieve their goal of producing emails that are relevant to their marketplace?

I discussed this with my colleague Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, and he agreed with my concern and related a conversation he had with one of our company’s Research Partners. They, too, wanted to send emails that were relevant and didn’t know where to begin. Typically, as a matter of rote, they blasted out an email every week about one of their products. The marketing team knew it wasn’t the optimal approach, but didn’t have the time to think it through – the emails had become merely another part of their weekly list of activities.

Daniel advised them to ask these questions before any email send:

• What is the goal they’re trying to achieve? What is the pain they’re trying to ease? Essentially, know your audience. (I know this is Marketing 101, but when the vast majority of B2B organizations aren’t dedicating the resources to respond to these issues in emails, I thought it needed to be pointed out.)
• Is this a content-focused or promotional email? If it’s content-focused, then what content do you have that’s going to help them ease their pain or achieve their goals? And remember, good content doesn’t sell – it provides information to help prospects regardless of whether they buy from you.  (Promotional emails may teeter way too much on the brink of spam unless they can directly relieve a prospects’ pain point or help them achieve a goal.)
• Why should they open your email? Does the subject line clearly and concisely convey why it’s worth it for them to use their precious time to read it? Are you making a promise you can deliver on?
• Why should they want to engage with you further after reading the email? If you’re directing your audience to a landing page, what in the email should compel them to click through to read it? What’s in it for them if they do? Does that landing page deliver the promised value? Is it crystal clear what their next step should be? Again, what’s in it for them if they take that next step?

Taking Daniel’s advice will put marketers well on their way to achieving their goal of email relevancy, and all of the benefits that come with it.

Related Resources:

Email Marketing: How to maintain low opt-out rates

Email Marketing: Only 21% of marketers integrating mobile with email

Email Deliverability: Only 39% of marketers maintain an opt-in only subscriber list

Email Marketing: 3 overlooked aspects of automated messages

Traditional marketing practice presumes the more you invest in driving leads through the top of the sales funnel, the more revenue will come out the other side. But, when Certif-A-Gift Company, a sales incentive company, reversed this presumption, it ended up increasing sales by 14% and moving prospects through the sales cycle 23% faster.

The company had previously invested most of its time and resources at the very top of the funnel by building awareness among its channel partners. Certif-A-Gift Company developed features-and-benefits content, went to trade shows and made office visits.

“We wanted to get them on track to call us first if an opportunity did arise,” said Mark Repkin, Vice President, Certif-A-Gift Company. However, only 10% of its channel partners have a need for a sales-incentive program in any given year.

“Spending all that time and energy on an ‘if-come’ [basis] was very expensive,” Repkin admitted. “Then one day, our marketing team had this crazy idea, ‘How ‘bout we ask our partner representatives what they need from us to help them get more sales?’”

The team brought in a marketing strategy firm to help with this process. For six weeks, the firm interviewed enough Certif-A-Gift channel partners to see consistency in the answers. [Editor’s Note: Repkin did not want to share exact numbers for competitive reasons.]

“It was obvious that our channel partners wanted more leads from us, but a trend emerged amongst all of the top sales people. They were asking for more tools to use when they were in front of the customer,” Repkin explained.

The company found these top channel partners …

• Needed to give influencers a document to convince others in the buying process to use sales incentives from Certif-A-Gift. Repkin explained relationships are often built at a lower level, but when it was time to advance the relationship, the lower-level contact wanted to introduce the idea to management without the channel partner.

• Had many of the same types of questions on how to sell and execute a sales incentive program.

In response, over the next year, Certif-A-Gift would take its focus from top-of-funnel awareness to end-of-funnel closing materials. This included:

• Creating a straightforward, concise executive overview document that is …
  • Used to help influencers secure a meeting between the channel partner and the decision maker
  • Free from traditional discussion about features and benefits and focuses entirely on the business case for running an incentive program

• Developing a free 60-page e-book, SalesContestology. It outlines the principles of designing an incentive program. When channel partners or customers download this e-book, they:
  • Receive an email every two weeks that outlines a chapter in the book. “I call it spoon-feeding,” Repkin said. “If you don’t spoon-feed, the e-book is going to reside on their desktop and they’re never going to read it.”
  • Must answer this question to download the book: “What is your single most important question about sales contests or motivating your team?” The language used in the responses is repeated in the executive overview document and other sales content.

• Creating short videos, fewer than four minutes, which answer common questions channel partners have at the later stages of the sales process. Certif-A-Gift’s inside sales team directs partners to these videos, and invites them to call back if they had more questions.

“Channel partners can use these videos to educate themselves at their own pace, in their own time, and go back and revisit them if needed,” Repkin said. “This gives the inside sales team more time to coach and mentor instead of explaining the same information over and over.”

Ironically, by focusing on the end of the funnel, Certif-A-Gift’s top-of-funnel activity expanded. As channel partners actively used Certif-A-Gift’s end-of-funnel content, they offered recommendations to make it better, which informed top-of-funnel efforts.

“You can only brag so much about yourself before you get to the point where no one is paying attention,” Repkin said. “Focusing on helping our channel partners close deals gave us more empathy to their needs, and therefore, we were able to create lead gen content that became more relatable and more effective.”

Related Resources:

B2B Sales Cycle: 4 steps to avoid the wasteful ‘no decision’

Webinar Replay: Six Funnel Focal Points to Finish 2011 Strong – Part I

Webinar Replay: Six Funnel Focal Points to Finish 2011 Strong – Part 2

Fresh Ideas to Reignite Stalled Leads and Accelerate the Sales Funnel

We’ve all heard about how the digital age has been brutal for print media, and I fully expected direct mail to be taking a hit as well.

After all, who pays attention to print anymore?

It turns out your prospects are.

That’s the word from Joy Gendusa, Founder and CEO, Postcardmania, and Ken Pikulik, Director of Process and Strategy, ResponsePoint. And, they have the numbers to prove it.

Pikulik pointed to three recent campaigns with multiple B2B corporate clients.

“We’ve seen a 12% lift in response rates by incorporating the use of letters and other mailers to supplement email communication,” he said.

One organization in particular received 50 leads for a service package priced well over $100,000.

Gendusa explained the success of her own client base of smaller businesses:

• A bookkeeping service attains five new clients each month and nets more than $60,000 over the lifetime of each customer.
• A $10,000 campaign of 12,000 brochures, including postage, has an estimated lifetime return on investment of $1,250,000 for a national credit card processing company.
• A report-writing software generates $12,000 in weekly revenues from a direct mail investment of $1,930.

These direct-response campaigns did not achieve success with old-school batch-and-blast direct mail approaches, however. Gendusa and Pikulik are expertly combining the best of old techniques with new technology. They offer these tips to help you do the same.

1. Pinpoint your audience and painstakingly segment it.

Know the issues that will be most compelling to them, and use their jargon in your direct mail pieces.

“We do a lot of segmentation,” Pikulik said. “In the healthcare field, for instance, we segment based on practice knowing that different specialties will respond to different incentives. Doing simple things, like using the terminology of their specialty, will grab their attention. Keywords aren’t just for the Internet.”

2. Make them want to read it.

“If you have space available to put a marketing message on an envelope, do it,” Pikulik said. “Grab their attention from the outside.”

3. Drive them to the Internet.

“Give them something that will make them want to engage with you,” he said. “This could be a whitepaper, a discount, a video – something that they will value regardless of whether they buy from you.”

Pikulik cited the client who got 50 leads for the $100,000-plus solution: They offered prospects a template for an RFP – essentially, they gave their prospects everything they needed to know to evaluate their solution.

“The client knew that their prospects would evaluate five or six competitors with that proposal template,” he noted. “But, they included questions that would demonstrate their product’s superiority over the competition.”

4. Make sure your website looks like your direct mail.

“The postcard will pique their interest, but when the prospects go online, they will likely look at you and your competitors,” Gendusa said. “It’s critical that when they see your site they can instantly connect it to your postcard. Make sure your marketing channels are in sync.”

She advised using Google Remarketing, which she considers remarkably inexpensive, with your direct mail campaign. After visitors come to your site, ads for your product will show up wherever they’re searching online.

“It adds tremendous credibility when their prospect sees the business everywhere they go online,” Gendusa said.

5. Measure and track.

Pikulik is a proponent of using PURLs (personalized URLs) to see how many people are responding and what they’re looking at online.

Gendusa advised using a phone number specific to the direct mail to make it easier to track response. She also advised recording those phone calls. State laws may require you to notify callers that they are being recorded, so we recommend receiving legal advice before doing so.

6. Follow up.

Gendusa and Pikulik insisted direct mail is not the once-and-done deal it was two decades ago. In fact, it’s a powerful kick-off to lead nurturing.

“Not everybody is searching for what they need. In fact, sometimes they don’t know what they need until direct mail puts it in front of them,” Gendusa said.
Once they do realize what they need, they go online to learn more, and that’s where effective follow-up happens.

“You can include them in an email campaign, you can make a phone call. You can invest marketing money strategically by focusing on people who have expressed specific interest in your product,” Pikulik said.

Related Resources:

How to Build a Quality List and Make Data Drive Leads

Lead Nurturing: 3-part funnel campaign creates 70% increase in inbound calls to sales reps

The New Marketing World: Conversations not Campaigns