How To Drive Your Competition Crazy by Guy Kawasaki- ReachForce Book Club
Friday, June 13th, 2008In this chapter Guy Kawasaki uses some of his own great experiences (as well as other well known marketing moves made by companies we all know) to outline 11 ideas for driving your competition crazy. I’ve highlighted a few here for you.
1. First Things First: Know Thyself – Ask yourself these questions:
- What business are we really in?
- Where do you see your business in 5, 10, 20 and 50 years?
- If prospects don’t buy from you, from whom do they buy?
It’s important to keep these things in mind as we are building our strategies to drive our competitors crazy. Remember not to lose focus by trying to be everything to everyone.
2. Next Step: Know Thy Customer – A couple of more good questions to ask yourself:
- Who is using your product?
- How are products in your category used by customers?
- Are regulations or societal pressures changing your marketplace?
There are also some recommendations on how to go about getting to know your customers on page 152, check them out.
3. Know Thy Enemy – Ways to Get to Know Them (only sharing a few here, check out the rest on page 153 and 154):
- Become a customer – if possible, this is a great idea. This way you get exposure to how they treat their customers as well as any new product/service information.
- Talk to your competitor’s customers - This can do nothing but help you figure out ways to drive your competitor crazy. When talking to your competitors’ customers always remember you are representing your own company too.
- Attend trade shows and meetings – companies use events to announce new strategic direction, new products and customer wins.
4. Focus on Customers – “The best way to drive your competition crazy is to make your customers happy.” Enough said.
5. Concentrate on a Decisive Point – Find a Niche or Provide Alternatives
More great examples here on pages 156 and 157.
6. Turn Customers in Evangelists –
- Create a cause – Evangelists need something to believe in.
- Find the Right People – Go to the end users of your products not executive management, they’ll help spread your word much faster!
- Don’t Forget Employees – All employees should be Evangelists.
Don’t stop here, go back to your book and check out the remainder of the list. This one was a quick read, great ideas we should all consider when building out our lead generation programs.
Any of Kawasaki’s other ideas stand out for you?
Be sure to check out Kawasaki’s latest project, Alltop. And don’t forget to look for The B2B Lead on marketing.alltop.com!
12 Ways to Turn 300 Webinar Attendees Into 3,000+ Part I - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #105
Thursday, June 12th, 2008A Roadmap for Webinars in a Web 2.0 World
This week’s Marketing Profs B2B Forum has been an enlightening experience. Not only have I picked up a few great social media ideas and techniques (thank you Erickson Barnett), but I’ve started to shift the way I think about the role of traditional Marketing techniques in our Web 2.0 world. In this case, I’m referring to Webinars–that old staple of lead generation for B2B Marketers.
So, as I prepared for my presentation on Webinars in a Web 2.0 world, I came up with a list of tips for producing and promoting webinars or really any form of educational content. Thought I’d share them with you in a 2 part post. Here are the first 6 tips. Feel free to chime in with any others that I missed.
- Start by getting into the right mindset to make the most of your webinar. It is important to realize that webinars are just another part of “the conversation” you are having with your customers and the community as a whole. So stop thinking about marketing them like an event. Think about using them as a way to keep the relationship alive, build a community of followers, to spark group discussions or change the way people think about an issue.
- Next, package the webinar to make promoting it more successful. You might consider breaking it into a series of webinars to be held every 6 weeks to keep your followers interested in what you have to say. Produce complimentary content such as white papers, assessments, tools, etc. that you can email to registrants.
- When you draft the promotional copy, remember to write for your target personae. Use simple, but compelling language. Drive home the WIIFM (What’s In It for Me) message. NOTE: You should also use the right words in your copy. Use Google Trends to see which terms your audience is using to search. For example: the word “webcast” is searched for far more often than the word “webinar.”
- Here’s another important tip for packaging your webinar. Post your slides prior to the day of the webinar so people will have a good idea of the content you will cover. Several years ago, I engaged in a survey with Webtorials to assess the effectiveness of podcasts vs. webinars and understand why – for my company—customers responded better to webinars. The key: the slides. Funny, how people love to hate PowerPoint, but when it came down to it, they really needed the slides for comprehension to assess whether they wanted to spend a precious 30 to 45 minutes listening in.
- Use social media to trigger viral distribution of your invitation. Identify a list influencers, reach out and ask them to help you spread the word about your webinar. Use Twitter to tap the influencers with a large following and “direct message” them. Post to Facebook groups interested in the topic. And, share with your LinkedIn network. After all, you are offering a service to these folks – the opportunity for free education on a topic of interest.
- Post your slides using slide sharing sites to get your content in front of people who are actively seeking content/education. If your slides are crafted well, you will trigger what the authors of Made to Stick call the “pain of knowledge gaps” which should entice the viewer to tune in to your webinar.
And, speaking of knowledge gaps, there’s more to come in the next post with 6 clever ways to get additional mileage out of the actual content you produce.
Easy to Take Lead Scoring Surveys Help Drive High Response Rates - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #104
Monday, June 9th, 2008Written by Cody Young, ReachForce Customer Success Manager
When developing lead scoring survey questions that effectively determine need, interest, timing and budget, remember these things:
- Don’t over use industry jargon and acronyms when crafting the questions
- Use simple and direct language
- Avoid use of passive messaging and sales pitches
- Offer as many multiple choice questions as possible
- Randomize presentation of multiple choices to avoid bias
- Design questions to maximize meaningful cross tab analysis
- Use as few questions as possible
For more info on lead scoring surveys check out my last post, Using Surveys for Lead Scoring.
In Pursuit of the Unexpected - Get Inspired Hunting for Cool - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #103
Friday, June 6th, 2008I often write about the inspiration I take from Chip and Dan Heath’s business book Made to Stick. The book presents very compelling reasons why some ideas thrive while others die. According to the authors, there are six principles of sticky ideas – ideas that are easily remembered and passed along virally.
The book and its valuable lessons have been top of mind for me lately as I raced to prepare my company and its products for relaunch. Most importantly, the principle of unexpectedness or unexpectedness in the service of core principles. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. We can use surprise — an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus — to grab people’s attention. We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge — and then filling those gaps.
I’ll be tackling the pain of knowledge gaps in a future post on SEO and link baiting. But today, I wanted to share a great tool for seeking inspiration by hunting for cool (it just sounds so uncool saying that): TrendHunter unlocking cool is the world’s largest community dedicated to trend spotting and cool hunting. It is chock full of surprising, unexpected and “cool” ideas and products that you’ve probably never heard about. It strikes me that this must be the source of many of the “breaking news” posts on popular blogs today. Might even provide a good blog post or two for you.
Got any other great ideas for seeking ways to surprise your customers?
10 Signs You Picked the Wrong Web Design Agency - Marketing WTF?
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008I’ve just emerged from a very difficult web site redesign project with a local agency that hasn’t yet moved into the Web 2.0 world. After living through the ordeal, I thought I would share some of the lessons I learned during the process to help others avoid the same nightmare. (I’m also hoping the process is somewhat cathartic for me too.) Fortunately, most of these signs are easily identifiable during the review stages. If I’ve missed any, please share your ideas.
- When you ask about multi-browser testing, you’re told “Well I have a Mac and so and so has a PC, so I’m sure we have it covered.” Sadly, there is no one browser standard and today’s websites must look great in the top browsers-Firefox, IE, and Safari, at the very least. That requires a systematic plan for multi-browser testing and attention to detail.
- There is no upfront information discovery session to determine your goals and objectives for the site. No one asks about the personae of your target audience or your sales process. It is absolutely vital to start your website design with careful consideration of your target audience and how you engage with them. It’s also wise to map your conversion strategy prior to design.
- When you mention in the first meeting that the site design needs to support your SEO efforts, the instant response is “Oh we don’t do SEO.” Designing a website without considering your future SEO efforts is extremely dangerous. Hard coded H1 tags, too many graphics, failing to redirect valuable inbound links, and a difficult to update site will hamper your efforts.
- Your agency’s idea of a project plan is a list of dates for a design template, copy drafts and a go-live date. Marketers really need to approach a website design or redesign like a software development process with a solid project plan that takes into consideration the need to iterate and fully test.
- After several attempts to come up with a design, you have to supply “inspiration” sites to get them on track. Well, this one really should go without saying but sadly it still happens. If you find yourself stuck with an agency that can’t figure out how to design to your satisfaction despite being given brand guidelines, target personae, a site architecture, etc. you can pull the project out of the ditch by giving them some other sites that you like to help them get on track. If the right work has been done upfront to understand your business, however, you shouldn’t have to do this.
- You realize that when the home page design is reviewed on a normal size monitor, the flash movie takes up the entire monitor screen pushing your core content below the fold. Just like multi-browser testing, monitor size is critical. It is vital that you look at the site on different monitors to ensure visitors can get to the content they need.
- Once the home page is designed no further design goes into the layout and graphics elements of the subpages. This is like walking into a gorgeous store with a beautiful façade and stepping into a bare warehouse. Put the same care and attention that went into the home page into the subpages to make sure you provide content and next steps for your visitors.
- There are no status checks or project meetings. In fact, it is extremely difficult to get a return phone call from your project manager. Designing a website is a team effort requiring lots of different team members to contribute. And, that requires coordination and conversation. Make sure your agency schedules frequent project update meetings and discussions to make sure you are on track.
- You are ready to go live with the new site, your project manager is nowhere to be found leaving you to work with a developer. This is a biggie. Always make sure you have a plan for go-live, a backup plan in case something goes wrong. And, go live in the middle of the night or over the weekend, just in case there are problems no one will see them.
- You must conform to the agency’s process of logging in all processes, errors, changes and questions to an Extranet with no training on it. You find that you still must post those changes multiple times before resolution. OK, you got me on that one, it was just a rant.
Today’s B2B Marketers need to have a well thought out site architecture, succinct and compelling messages for their target audiences, engaging designs, and an error-free site that supports search engine optimization. And marketers should select their agencies carefully, building in strict contractual demands for things like multi-browser testing, and SEO-friendly structure, clean and well-designed page layout, and tight security lockdowns. Pick your web designer like you would pick a software development shop.
Wow, I feel so much better now.
CMO Council finds 80% of marketing and sales organizations are NOT aligned - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #102
Monday, June 2nd, 2008As I read this all I can say is I DON’T get this at all. Then who are these marketers aligned with? “Intermittent relations and interactions” – sounds like a dysfunctional relationship. Should we start “couples counseling” for sales and marketing teams? I am not saying that they should hold hands and sing kum-ba-yah just be aligned on the “ground attack marketing” that is being done specifically like – events, demand/lead generation, SEM, etc. Isn’t sales (or any other revenue generation organization) in their business the customer of these marketers? Most B2B companies spend 70% or more of their budgets on those initiatives.
How aligned are you with sales? Do you share more than 50% of the goals each quarter/year? Are your bonuses tied to new customer wins? Up-sold dollars to current customers? I am very curious (or just hopeful that is 80% non-alignment is way off).
Here is the article from BtoB:
CMO Council study finds companies lag in aligning marketing and sales
Story posted: May 28, 2008 - 1:17 pm EDT
Palo Alto, Calif.—The majority of marketers lag in their ability to closely align sales and marketing, according to a new study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council.
According to an online survey of 506 sales and marketing professionals, 55% of respondents said their companies have not yet implemented formal programs, systems or processes for unifying sales and marketing functions.
Fewer than 20% of respondents said their sales and marketing organizations are extremely collaborative, while more than half said the two groups had intermittent relations and interactions.
Also, about half of respondents said they had trouble finding customer account data, did not have enough information or had none at all.
The survey was conducted by the CMO Council and the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE).
—Kate Maddox
Don’t Forget About Customer Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #101
Thursday, May 29th, 2008B2B Marketers spend lots of time and money on trying to acquire new customers. After all, you have sales guys breathing down your backs for new leads all the time and quotas to meet for bookings and new customers acquired. As the drum beat on the recession gets louder, there’s more and more buzz about holding on to what you have, that means current customers. Why is it that in a downturn we worry about keeping our customers happy and not in growth cycles? Have you and your executive team ever taken a step back to see how much of your revenue actually comes from current customers? Or how many customers use you for a year and then choose not to renew because they have been ignored all year? Adding a current customer program has the potential to dramatically increase revenue.
Implementing a current customer program involves much more than just a nice holiday card/gift once a year. You should have programs throughout the year to keep them engaged. Just as in lead generation, current customer programs should be segmented. This can be based on your own parameters: by products purchased, by size, by revenue contribution, by role within the company, etc. Once segmented you will be able to prioritize and focus on their needs with relevance. Also remember that cross-selling a current customer is more than blasting the new message to a current database – ask yourself, is the person (role) of the person in my database the right one for this value proposition/message? Do I need to find the right decision maker for that role?
Here are some ideas to building and maintaining an ongoing relationship with your customers:
- Start a newsletter – be sure to tell them information that they care about not just the latest award you have won
- Ask them for feedback and input; consider asking them “The Ultimate Question” www.theultimatequestion.com
- Create a customer community – you can develop your own or start small with a Facebook or LinkedIn group; the social web has enabled us to keep the conversations going all of the time.
- Send thought leadership – this could be whitepapers or books that are exclusively available to customers, do a survey and share the results, share best practices
- Host a user group conference – this is the most expensive but it is a great opportunity for you to connect with your customers and for them to connect with each other
This year we are making customer retention programs a priority. We’re sharing best practices via The B2B Lead, we’ve started a ReachForce Book Club and included our customers as honorary members and that’s just the beginning….
What percentage (%) of your marketing spend do you focus (or should) on current customer marketing? It’s never too late to get started driving more out of what you already have.
Lead Generation Using Email Marketing- B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #100
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008Since this is our 100th tip I thought I would blog about something I feel like I have been asked about 100 times. I have been a lead generation marketer since before lead generation was cool and even though we are changing what we call it (demand generation) my job is still to deliver more high quality leads to sales. At ReachForce, 70% of new customers come through marketing, so I guess we’re doing something right.
Here’s what we’re doing to drive lead generation. This isn’t rocket science, just targeting the right role-based buyers in the right kinds of companies. It’s what we talk about all the time here so we have to be practicing it too, right? There’s no one blueprint that works for every business. There are basic principles we all subscribe to but different audiences like to be communicated with in different ways. I will preface by saying that lead generation is all about testing and tweaking, so while this is our basic program today, we’re already in the process of adding new tools and tactics to roll out next quarter. All with one goal in mind – Will the real leads please stand up (or out)?!
For us the obvious starting point is the data. We “eat our own dog food” here at ReachForce so I am able to consistently feed programs with fresh role-based contacts that are in our target market sweet spot. And while the data is very important, content is key. Because I know I’m targeting the right buyers, this enables me to laser focus relevant messages that resonate with my specific audiences. Contacts start in a program based on their department role (in our case either being in sales or marketing) and by decision making role (decision maker, influencer or end user). Each program has tailored messaging highlighting pain points these recipients typically experience. All contacts start in a three touch email marketing program that looks like this:
- Email 1 – Education about the pain points RF solves – since this is the first time they will receive a message from us, we want to educate them about what problem we solve and how/why we are different from the competition
- Email 2 – Education about our space – this is an opportunity to reinforce pain points that they might be feeling (and that we solve). A whitepaper or webcast setting up the current ‘state of the union’ is a good offer here.
- Email 3 – Offer – Now that we’ve educated them about the current market and our solutions, we offer a chance for them to see for themselves via a trial or demo.
Between each email touch, our Sales team follows up with all of the responders, those that open but didn’t respond (to offer the best practice piece from the marketing email), and those that click through but didn’t download or fill out the form. I’m not sure having Sales involved so early makes sense for all companies but our business is relatively transactional and a lot of times it just takes 1 hook to get them engaged.
After the email touch cycle, the non responders then move into a non-behavioral lead scoring survey, a few more good leads fall out of this program. We’re about to launch the next piece of this tangled web next month. We’ll keep you posted on what happens next.
For more email marketing call–to-actions check out Tip #56.
Networking with the Affluent - ReachForce Book Club
Friday, May 23rd, 2008While this chapter is obviously more applicable to B2C sales, I think it does have a few tricks that translate to B2B Marketing. One of Thomas Stanley’s forms of networking is called Give Information; Get Clients. Stanley lists 4 steps in this process:
- Focus: For B2B Marketers, this means narrow your targets. Know the industries you are trying to target and the types of companies within those industries. Also, focus on the revenue range, employee size and geographies that are in your sweet spot.
- Enhance your credibility within an industry: Make sure you are in the same places that your prospects go for information and thought leadership. These days that includes more than just industry publications. Be sure you are also commenting on the right blogs (and hopefully have your own), monitoring user communities and posting on Facebook.
- Target the leaders of the affluent group: I would translate this to targeting the leaders in the industry. And you don’t have to create an association like Stanley suggests. Find out who has the hottest blog in the industry or latest book out and try to connect with them. Just be sure that this is a mutually beneficial relationship and not a one way street.
- Recruit top professionals as speakers and network contacts: This doesn’t have to be limited to individuals. Work with your partners as well to create joint webinars or have a top executive from a partner be a guest blogger.
I believe that the more ways you can position yourself/your company as an industry thought leader, the more credibility you will have in the market and ultimately more customers.
Be sure to check in next week when we will be covering chapters 6 and 7.
Another Reason to Hate Trade Shows? - Marketing WTF?
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008The Wall Street Journal is reporting an outbreak of the flu at recent tech conferences. According to the report here.
“The San Francisco Department of Public Heath this week warned of an outbreak of the Norovirus at the Moscone Center, where Sun Microsystems is currently hosting the JavaOne conference. The Norovirus is a highly contagious flu-like virus that causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and some stomach cramping. A spokesman for the city tells the Business Technology Blog that the warning came after the public-health department received several complaints from attendees at Sun’s conference.”
Seems like there have been quite a few other events afflicted by the outbreaks including the recent RSA Security Conference I attended which was focused on a far different type of virus.
