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Earlier this week I saw a report from Computer Economics (IT Spending Forecast for 2009-2010) predicting that spending on IT equipment and software will recover faster from this recession than it did after the 2000 technology meltdown. Furthermore, the recovery will begin in early 2010.

This started me thinking. What should marketers and business owners be doing now to prepare for next year’s recovery?

Here’s my list.

1. Use the IT spending report as an excuse to talk to your customers and prospects, and ask about their plans.

When do they see recovery coming? If recovery is going to begin in 2010, does that mean the actual buying will begin or that the buying process will begin? This information will let you know how much time you really have before you’d better have your act together.

2. Clean up your lists and database(s).

Chances are good that right now you’re not worrying about an aggressive attack from one of your competitors. Maybe you should be, but that’s a different story.

Right now you’ve got a little breathing room to do some housekeeping. Prospect lists and marketing / sales databases are notoriously hard to keep clean. (Mainly because it’s boring). But a dirty list or database makes you inefficient at best and ineffective or annoying to your prospects and customers at worst.

So, clean them up. Update contact info. Get rid of the dead ones. Combine various lists (newsletter subscribers, people who downloaded a whitepaper, webinar or trade show attendees) and put them in a single place.

And by the way, people tend to come and go (mostly go) during a recession, so it’s especially important to know who contact when things heat up again.

3. Fix your website.

Eric Gerds recently wrote a great article on Conducting a Website Review. Follow his advice to get rid of old and outdated content, find and fix broken links, and add new content to keep visitors coming back to your site.

More than that, you should take a look at how well your website is contributing to your overall business effort. Is it attracting and keeping the right prospects? The numbers may be lower than in better years, but the quality of the visitor should still be there. Are they spending enough time and visiting the right pages? Are you converting them to contacts?

Now could be a really good time to take a look at your website strategy.

4. Maintain your visibility.

Stay in touch with your clients and active prospects. When they’re ready to buy again you don’t want to be wasting time reminding them of who you are.

Choose your contact style to match whomever you’re trying to reach. At Tatum Marketing, we find some clients prefer email and others like a quick phone call. It pays to know which is which, and use that method for contacting them. (I don’t personally know anyone who prefers a letter these days but you might.)

Prospects may be less likely to take your phone call and email tends to work better for them.

No matter how you contact them, keep your communication relevant and helpful. Most people are overworked, uncomfortable and a little anxious. Anything you can do to help make their jobs easier or spark new ideas will be welcome.

5. Review and overhaul your marketing process.

Most marketing processes are rife with holes – especially where marketing meets sales. If you’re well positioned when the economy picks up, it’ll be too late to find and fill the holes. You’ll be scrambling to turn visitors into leads and leads into customers with a faulty system.

This is a topic I’ll address in more detail in a future article, but here’s a list of places that could likely use a tune-up.

• Target audience. As businesses have evolved to meet new demands and ways of doing business, your ideal prospect may have changed.
• Prospect profiling and ranking. Not all prospects are alike. They’re in different stages of the buying process; they have different needs according to their positions; and some are just plain better than others. Companies that excel at marketing know this and account for it.
• Hand-off to sales. The surest way to kill a perfectly good prospect is to hand it off to sales too early – and with no method for returning prospects to marketing when appropriate.
• Lead development system. 80% or more of the people who show interest in your product or service won’t be ready to buy immediately. Suffice it to say you need a really good program for nurturing these prospects until they’re ready to talk to a sales person.

I hope you’re maintaining some level of visibility and customer / prospect contact even in these tough times. The more visibility and contact, the better. We know from the past that along with recessions come real opportunities to gain market share now or early in the recovery.

Be ready.

Technorati Tags: recession, recovery, marketing, website, strategy, database, prospects

By now you’ve probably read one or more of the jillion articles being published on the subject of how and why you should market in a recession. But, let’s face it. Marketing in a recession is not right for all companies.

How do you know if it’s right for you?

Here are nine triggers that should make you think seriously about expanding your marketing efforts now.

1. You have some cash. If you’ve got the resources, it’s rarely ever a bad idea to increase marketing. In 25+ years of marketing, I’ve never run across a company that had perfected its marketing efforts to the point where nothing more was needed. In a bad economy, extra cash invested in marketing can pay off many, many times over.
2. You’re a risk taker. It goes without saying that trigger #1 is pretty much a requirement. But you also need to be comfortable operating outside of the norm. Most businesses will cut back on marketing during a recession. It’s a very common, knee-jerk reaction. You’ve got to be able to sleep at night while you’re moving against the crowd. Most successful entrepreneurs are pretty good at this.
3. Your competitors are hiding. As I mentioned above, the most common reaction to a recession includes whacking the marketing spend. When your competitors do this, they create a great opportunity for you to jump in and fill the void. If you’re clever, it might not even cost you any extra money.
4. Your marketing has succeeded and you have market share to protect. This is the reverse of trigger #3. If you pass the test in trigger #1, don’t become one of those companies in hiding. Some smart competitor will pull a #3 on you.
5. You need to sell to people who don’t know you personally. Trust and integrity are very big in a recession – especially this one where so many problems have been caused by people who were supposed to know what they were doing. Marketing – especially in the form of client testimonials, case studies, education, word of mouth and thought leadership programs – can help you gain your prospects’ trust.
6. Your sales people are cold calling instead of chasing warm leads. This is a classic sign that you need marketing to find and develop leads for your sales team. Cold calling is a struggle in the best of times, and your most talented closers are never the most successful at it.
7. Your customers love you. You must be doing something right. Now’s a great time to get the word out to other people.
8. You believe in marketing. A recession is probably not the best time to test a shaky belief in marketing. Marketing is a process and people are taking longer to make buying decisions now. You’ll most likely get too nervous and quit too soon. Then you’ll have a difficult time ever learning to benefit from marketing. If you question the value of marketing, maybe you should wait.
9. You like to win. If stealing market share from your competitors, growing your business while others are just hoping to survive, and coming out of the recession on top motivate you, now is a great time to act. Buyers need you. There’s less competition. You may find some good deals on marketing costs. What more could you want?

Next time we’ll look at where to begin.

Technorati Tags: recession, marketing, lead generation, prospects

In previous articles on the topic of lead nurturing, I’ve looked at developing a universal lead definition, installing a marketing database, and understanding your prospects’ buying process. These are all key parts of an effective lead nurturing system.

Now we get to the good part – the program itself.

Objectives

There’s a good choice of tactics you can use to nurture and develop leads. And there are several different goals to meet with these tactics. As you design your program, keep these in mind:

• Your lead nurturing program acts as a subtle reminder to your prospects that you exist. Some people call it a Stay-in-Touch program or a Drip Marketing system. Whatever you want to call it, be sure to create a slow, steady, consistent pace.
• Your lead nurturing program should provide helpful information that moves the prospect along the buying process toward the sale.
• Your lead nurturing program is a great way of creating a relationship of trust and credibility, and removing some of the risk and doubt inherent in a business technology purchase.

Tactics

In business technology marketing, email is consistently the best overall channel of communication – especially because it can be easily automated.

Telemarketing can be useful as the prospect moves deeper into the buying process. It also plays a big role in increasing attendance at webinars and other events. Some companies add direct mail to the mix with good results.

Information continues to be the best offer during the nurturing process. Your prospects are trying to solve a problem and the more you can do to help them, the better your chances of being selected.

Technology marketers commonly use these tactics to help nurture their prospects:

• Webinars
• Offline events
• Papers and reports; tip sheets
• Case studies and success stories

Multiple Paths

Lead nurturing can get complicated because of the complexity of the buying process and the different types of “buyers” involved. Eventually you’ll want to establish different paths for different types of buyers and buyers in different stages of the process. For example, a C-level executive is probably looking for different information than an IT manager or the person who is likely to actually use your product.

But one path is much better than none. If you haven’t been doing any kind of formal lead nurturing, you’ll find that the addition of a single program will increase the number of leads the marketing delivers to the sales team.

Frequency

What’s the best frequency for contact? That depends on what a) you’re selling, b) the length of the normal buying process and c) which buying stage the prospect is in.

Early in the buying process, once a month may be plenty. Once a month is also good as a slow-drip system for prospects who aren’t responding to your messages.

As the prospect moves closer to a buying decision things begin to heat up and you may find that weekly or even daily communications are needed.

A few reminders

Include a call to action in every communication – and give the prospect a good reason to take that action.

When you’re using an automated response system, be sure to move your prospects out of the current nurturing program if/when they contact you. In other words, if the prospect decides he or she is ready to speak with a sales person, it’s time to stop the automated messages.

Be ready and able to move the prospect back into the nurturing program if the sales communication doesn’t pan out.

And finally, remember that 80% or more of your best prospects won’t be ready to buy when they first come into contact with you. Research – and experience – shows us that most of this 80% will eventually buy. But they won’t buy from you if you don’t stay in touch with them.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, lead nurturing, lead development, email, webinar,

Since I’ve been on a streak of writing about designing a great lead nurturing system, I was especially interested in Laura Ramos’ recent interview in BtoB’s 2008 Lead Generation Guide. Laura is a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Here’s what she has to say:

• Whitepapers and webinars still play an important role in educating prospects, but they should be used as part of an integrated marketing program – not as a standalone lead generation campaign.
• Email is good for continuing conversations with a prospect or communicating with customers. It is not as effective for new customer acquisition or for building awareness.
• B-to-B marketers worry too much about generating higher lead volume and not enough about building quality demand.
• Marketers need to nurture buyers and engage a broader number of principals in the purchase process.
• The biggest obstacles she sees to successful lead generation are: failure to constantly score or qualify leads, under-investing in technology and process, and lack of focus on the right kinds of measuring and monitoring.

If you have time, read the complete interview.

At Tatum Marketing we work hard to help our clients and our blog readers put together marketing programs and systems that do exactly what Laura is suggesting. If you want some one-on-one help, don’t hesitate to contact us. At minimum, keep reading our blog!

[tags]technology marketing, marketing system, lead generation, whitepapers, webinars, email marketing [\tags]

This is the third in a series of articles about designing a great lead nurturing system. So far I’ve talked about coming up with a universal definition for the word “lead” and the marketing database you need to house your prospects’ contact information and communication history.

Now let’s look at the importance of understanding how your buyers buy. Anyone who has been marketing or selling in the business technology world lately doesn’t need me to tell them that it’s tough out there. More people than ever are now involved in your prospects’ purchase decisions. Selling cycles are getting longer. Response rates to most types of lead generation programs are going down. And buyers don’t want to talk to sales people until much later in the game.

It’s the buyers that I want to talk about in this article because they are firmly in the driver’s seat. They control what information is required, when it’s required, and how it’s going to be accessed. They can find out nearly anything they want to know about you, your products, and their options without your help.

This is very different from the sales and marketing world that many of us are used to, and it takes a different approach. Since the buyer is in charge here, the best move on your part is to clearly understand the entire buying process and carefully map your marketing and sales efforts to meet the buyers’ needs. In other words, you can become the equivalent of a buyer’s GPS – providing the exact information the driver needs to move toward his or her destination.

Mapping the Trip

This exercise calls for active participation by your best sales and marketing people. Other customer-facing departments such as client support are good to include too.
You can chart your customers’ buying process by following these steps:

1. First, talk to your customers and – if you can – talk to some prospects to find out what they went through when deciding to buy your solution. Seems obvious that you’d start with the customers, doesn’t it? But a startling number of marketing programs are based on input from everyone except the customers.
2. Next, gather your sales and marketing experts, draw a spreadsheet on a whiteboard and list each of your buyer’s decision points (one per column) across the top of a chart.In a typical multi-stage buying process you’re likely to have decision points such as: establish need, research options, create a preliminary (long) list, cut to a short list, select and negotiate, and delivery or deployment. Remember, these are the steps in the buyer’s process – not the steps in your selling process.
3. Down the left-hand side, give one row to each of the following:
   1. Who is involved in the decision at this point?
   2. What are their business issues and obstacles?
   3. What questions do they usually ask?
   4. What answers will move them to the next stage?
   5. Where do they go for this information?
   6. What marketing and sales tools do you need?
4. Now fill in the boxes, answering each question for each decision point.

I first ran across this process in a book called Rivers of Revenue by Kristin Zhivago. It works.

Bonus Benefits

This exercise gives you a picture of your prospects’ decision-making process that will help accelerate just about any marketing or sales program. And it also creates a new level of understanding between your sales and marketing people. By charting the buying process you will have taken a big step toward aligning your marketing and sales team – an accomplishment with such great benefits, I can’t begin to do the subject justice here.

Once you’ve mapped the process and identified marketing and sales needs, you have a great tool to select the best marketing tactics, develop the most effective messaging, and get rid of any waste. If you’re spending money on marketing efforts that don’t meet a requirement of the map, stop. Eliminate them and focus your resources on efforts that support the map.

We are highly unlikely to return to a time when companies control the selling process, so you might as well get used to letting the buyer drive. However, by understanding the process and providing the right answers at the right time you can make sure you’re in the car – and not underneath it.

This article was originally written in 2005.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, buying process, lead nurturing

If you’re going to consistently develop prospects into sales-ready leads or customers, you’ll need a good marketing database. Even if you have a relatively small number of prospects, the cost of an online system to manage data and communications is so low (as in “free”) you’d have a hard time convincing me it isn’t worth it.

Why do you need a database? Organization really. A marketing database lets you:

• Segment and customize correspondence. In a complex buying situation – which business technology usually is – your prospects are not all on the same page. You need to know where each one is. With a marketing database, you can track where each prospect is in the buying process.
• Store and easily access records of previous communication. This can keep you from a) looking like an idiot because you can’t remember the last correspondence you had with the prospect or b) annoying the prospect with too much communication. (Newsletters; emails; phone calls. All in the same day. Jeez.)
• Avoid dropping prospects into a black hole. Make it clear who “owns” a lead at any point in time. Is it marketing’s or sales’ responsibility to follow up?
• Reduce administrative costs. Once it’s set up properly, a marketing database is simply a faster and more efficient way to organize your prospects than an admin and an Excel spreadsheet.
• Create visibility into the lead nurturing process. Nothing like the boss looking into the pipeline to keep marketing people focused.

Ideally, your marketing database and your sales database are shared. All of the correspondence notes on a contact are in one place. This contact history helps both marketing and sales people select the next communication tactic.

Unfortunately, most salesforce automation software (CRMs) are very lite on marketing management capabilities – although they are improving. Still, a CRM is a good place to start. I’ll take a look at marketing automation software in a future article.

What information goes in the marketing database?

This requires some thought. You’ll want your database to contain the attributes that are specific to your ideal prospect. The perfect database contains all the data you’ll actually use and nothing more.

Conveniently, much of what you’d put in a marketing database is the same as what you may already have in a sales database. You’ll definitely want to include the following general information:

• Company name
• Contacts & titles
• Address
• Telephone & fax numbers
• Email address
• Phone number
• Website URL
• You’ll also want specific demographic information such as:

o Company revenue
o Number of employees
o Industry
o Type of business
o Any other factors that help determine the prospect’s specific needs relative to what you’re selling.

Other helpful marketing information:

• Status – where is the lead in the marketing/ buying process? Status includes what actions the prospect has taken (accessed a whitepaper, attended a webinar, downloaded a product trial). It might also include lead ranking criteria (also a subject for another article).
• Activity history – what communication and contact has taken place with this prospect
• Lead source – how did this prospect find you?

Making it work

Our clients universally struggle with keeping a clean, up-to-date database. It’s boring and tedious. But business people tend to move around a lot. They change jobs and a new person comes in. They get a promotion. The company gets acquired and everyone’s email address changes.

You can avoid wasting time and money trying to communicate with prospects who have moved on by keeping your database up to date. Depending on how many prospects you have, you might be able to assign database maintenance as a part time responsibility or you may need to hire someone full time for it.

You’ll may also have to require that marketing and sales people use the database. Sales people in particular often resist this. I believe that’s because most CRMs are set up to make “management” easier and necessarily to make “selling” any easier. You can avoid this by including both sales and marketing teams in the development of the database as well as the entire marketing system.

This article got a little longer than usual so let me summarize. The important points of this article are:

1. You need a marketing database.
2. Everyone must use it.
3. Someone must be in charge of updating and maintaining it or the information will soon become junk.

Did you miss the first article in this series about Designing a Lead Nurturing System? If so, you can read it here: Designing a Lead Nurturing System: Part 1.

Technorati Tags: marketing system, technology marketing, lead nurturing, lead development, marketing database

What’s the best way to get the most mileage out of your traffic or lead generation dollars? Convert those leads to customers! Lead nurturing plays a big role here, and you need a solid system – if for no other reason than to make sure it happens.

If you need reminding why lead nurturing is so important, you’ll get a good overview by reading There’s Gold in the Middle of the Funnel.

By “lead nurturing system” I mean the component of your marketing system that focuses on those 75% to 80% of your prospects who aren’t ready to buy when you first meet them.

Lead nurturing systems can range from relatively simple website based conversion point optimization to complex multimodal, multi-year programs. (I know that sentence is racked with marketing jargon, but I can’t help myself). The point is that sometimes lead nurturing occurs entirely on a website – as in the case of a pure ecommerce site. More often than not, there are other communication channels involved.

Setting up a lead nurturing system involves several steps:

1. Reaching universal definition of a lead.
2. Establishing or cleaning up your marketing database
3. Devising a system for ranking or scoring leads
4. Understanding your customer’s buying process
5. Deciding what lead nurturing tactics and activities you will use.
6. Establishing a sales hand-off, feedback and closed loop process

Let’s start with step #1 – reaching a universal definition of a lead.

You’d think that everyone involved in marketing and selling your products or services would share the same definition of a lead. And you’d be wrong.

Unless you’ve gone through the process of developing a company-wide lead definition, you’re likely to find that sales and marketing people have very different ideas about what is a lead and what is junk.

So, sit them down together – figuratively if not literally – and talk about the following:

• Who is our target audience and what makes a good lead? What are their titles? What kinds of companies do they work for? Where are they located? Include all the industry, job responsibility, revenue, number of employees, type of ownership information, and any other specifics that help make a good lead good.
• What makes a lead ready for the sales team? You can call this a qualified lead or a sales-ready lead or whatever you want. The point is to agree on a checklist of qualities that a lead must possess before it’s time to involve the sales people. This checklist might include things like:

• There is an open project
• With a timeframe
• A budget
• And an executive sponsor.

Once you’ve got agreement on a universal definition of a lead, you’re ready to take a look at your database. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have examples of good lead definitions, share them here.

Technorati Tags: lead nurturing, lead development, conversion, sales ready, marketing and sales alignment

Last week I wrote about the five fundamentals of successful technology marketing in an overview of how a complete marketing program fits together. This week I want to give you a more tactical approach to designing a solid marketing system or improving the one you have.

Sometimes new clients approach us knowing exactly what they want to work on. But often, especially with marketing coaching clients, the big question is what to do first.

If you’re just beginning to market your technology product or service, there’s a certain order in which to address things:

1. Get a good website.
2. Generate traffic or leads.
3. Optimize your conversion rates.
4. Increase your customer value.

If you already have a marketing program in place, you’ll want to identify your weakest link and work on it first. (Hint: It’s probably not #4 in the above list).

Whether your marketing program is all new or in update mode, there’s a logical reason for starting with your website and working your way up to customer value.

Your website is – or will be – your marketing hub. Virtually every sale you make will involve someone visiting your website. If it sucks – as many do – you’re wasting money if you focus on sending traffic there.

One of the easiest ways to figure out whether or not your website is doing its job is to look at your bounce rate.  Any web analytics program will give you this info. If you’re still not using web analytics, I can almost guarantee your website is ineffective – or you’re just incredibly lucky. Go ahead and add Google Analytics to your site NOW.

If your bounce rate (not counting traffic from paid search advertising) is higher than 50%, don’t spend another dollar on marketing until you fix that problem. I’m being generous with the 50% cut off. Google analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has said, “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

Once you’ve got your bounce rate under control it doesn’t mean you can stop worrying about your website, but you’ll have some comfort in knowing that you’re not alienating everyone who comes to your site.

Next up is generating traffic or leads. Take a look at the results from your current marketing programs to find out if they’re driving enough traffic to your website site or generating enough inbound inquiries. How do you know that?

You need two numbers: 1) the number of leads or amount of traffic you need to generate and 2) the current level of inbound inquiries or traffic. In How Many Leads Do You Need, I provided a formula for determining the first number. If you’re measuring website traffic your analytics program will provide the second number. (Yet another reason to get analytics on your site!) If you’re tracking inquiries from a number of sources, finding the second number will be a little more time consuming but definitely worth it.

So, what if you’re generating plenty of traffic? Take a look at your conversion rate. What percentage of website visitors actually buy your product. Or, what percentage of inbound inquiries become a sales-ready lead? Is this number what you think it should be? Probably not.

A word of caution here. Start assessing your conversion rates before you spend too much time and money driving traffic or generating leads. More than a few technology marketers have wasted big bucks sending leads into a system that can’t turn them into opportunities.

The three factors of website, traffic/lead generation and conversion rates are more integrated than this article might make it sound. There aren’t really hard stops between working on traffic/lead generation and improving conversion rates. And, improving conversion rates often means working on your website.

I guess that’s what makes it a system.

Tomorrow we’ll look at lead nurturing.

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, marketing system, website effectiveness, traffic generation, lead generation, conversion rate

I’m having a battle with one of our clients over email marketing. He wants to buy a list of 50,000 business people and I think he’s nuts.

Actually, Steven (not his real name) isn’t nuts at all. He’s a very bright software company owner who has a real knack for sales and marketing. But on this issue, he’s wrong.

Steven sees this email list as an opportunity to inexpensively reach out to a significant number of potential new customers. I see it as a nightmare.

First – and probably foremost – there’s the issue of permission. Steven’s list broker has positioned this as a permission-based email list. But upon further questioning the broker admits that the list is not permission-based specifically for Steven’s company and he (the broker) suggests an up-sell service where the list company sends an introductory email and asks permission for Steven’s company to email them. Steven isn’t interested because of the cost.

What Steven doesn’t see – or chooses to ignore – is the potential cost to his company’s reputation and his future ability to communicate via email with prospects and even his existing clients.

Using a bulk email list like the one Steven is considering is almost certain to result in spam reports, blocked email at the corporate level and even getting blacklisted. (Email Marketing Reports has a good article on this titled Email address lists: buy, rent or leave alone?)

At best, Steven’s email is likely to be ignored and produce a really low response. Maybe the 50,000 business people did at some point give their permission to be sent 3rd party email. How many do you think remember that? How many of the 50,000 are actually interested in Steven’s application based solely on their job title? How many other vendors have sent irrelevant messages to this same list?

And if the dual threats of being labeled a spammer or being totally ignored aren’t enough, there’s a second reason this is a bad move for Steven. By focusing his attention on an outbound email campaign, he’s reducing focus on the tactics that will actually bring him more leads.

In software marketing, visibility is paramount. 80% of business technology buyers say they found the vendor – the vendor did not find them. And most searches begin online.

Given the limited resources of a smallish software company, Stevens should be focusing on increasing his online visibility, driving more traffic to his site, and improving the conversion of those visitors to sales-ready leads.

By many measures, open and click-through rates on business-to-business email campaigns are going steadily down. Yet technology companies continue to purchase bulk email lists.

It just doesn’t make any sense. The danger is too high; the potential pay-off is too low.

At Steven’s request we’re going to send a test email to a 30-person sample provided by the list company. I’m not sure what – if anything – this test will accurately tell us. Maybe it will buy me enough time to come up with a more effective argument against buying the list.

If not, I’ll let you know what happens. One thing I know for sure, our company won’t be involved.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, permission, traffic, technology marketing

Do you post your prices on your website? The wisdom and/or necessity of this in some ways depends on whether you are marketing SaaS, enterprise software, support or consulting services or other kinds of products.

Anne Holland at MarketingSherpa makes some very good points in favor of posting pricing in her recent blog post Should You Reveal Pricing Online? Overcoming Fear & Loathing. She bases her support of online pricing on several 2007 studies showing that executives, engineers and other technology buyers want to see pricing on websites, and her opinion that:

1. your competition already knows what you’re charging and
2. your prospect will find pricing information even without your help.

Certainly the growing popularity of the SaaS is driving many vendors toward revealing prices, but I’m not ready to agree that ALL technology products & services providers should be jumping to do the same. This is especially true of customized products and value-added services.

What’s your opinion?

Technorati Tags: technology marketing, sales, pricing, website