Smashmouth B2B Blog: Sales & Marketing Demand Gen

Be a B2B Tweeter, Not a B2B Twit

Sometimes I think George Lucas just didn’t “get it” when he made the Star Wars prequels.  You know, the “other” Star Wars movies?  He had made the greatest trilogy in the world in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  For years, with fans clamoring for more movies, Lucas said that either he wasn’t ready to make them or the technology in cinematography just wasn’t ready.  Then stars aligned and he was ready to make the rest of his story; three movies to be set before Episode IV (1977), to tell the story of how things led up to where they did.  To fans of the original trilogy, Lucas fell woefully short with Episodes I-III.  He didn’t get that what made the original movies was story, not special effects.  Sure, the newer movies had better effects, but the end result was miserable.

If you’ve spent any amount of time on Twitter, specifically in the B2B Sales and Marketing arena, you’re sure to see some people on there that deliver fantastic information.  This is information that I’m very thankful for, as are my colleagues in the industry.  However, with all of the good, there are still some on Twitter who just don’t “get it.”  I’d like to share with you some ideas on how you can “get it” and keep yourself from becoming a Demand Gen Twit:

1. Remember, it’s not always about you -- If there’s one thing that burns me up about Twitter, it's the people who are shameless self-promoters.  SHAMELESS.  Twitter is a great self-promotion tool, however, it’s an even better word-of-mouth tool.  It’s one thing to tweet about something you’ve done or your most recent blog entry, but it’s another if someone else does it for you.  What does that mean for you?  It means you’ve got to be writing great content.  Keep in mind what Chris Brogan says:  “[promote] the heck out of others”
   
   
2. Start the conversation -- One of the best parts about Twitter is the ability to have long-running conversations with a bunch of people.  That’s a great way to share new ideas (and get some, too) while keeping in mind my first point. Get involved and get people talking.  A number of people do this well; and for a great example, check out Mack Collier’s blog chat (#blogchat) that occurs most Sunday nights.
   
   
3. Learn -- If there’s one thing that I love about Twitter, it’s that for the most part the folks that “get it” share a wealth of new information -- new information that is relevant to you because others finding and sharing it have similar interests to you.  The opportunity to have great content and data at my fingertips, throughout any part of my day, is exciting for me.  The more you read, the more you’ll be able to share, and the more you share, the more you’ll keep yourself from becoming another Twit.

There are a lot of ways to be a better B2B tweeter, and these ideas are for me as much as they are for you (maybe even more so).  So, help me keep the conversation going, and share with the rest us some other ways we can keep from being a Twit.

Photo Credit:  PhotoJonny via Flickr

3 Great B2B Demand Gen Articles from Last Week

It's amazing that there's so much great content out there surrounding demand generation and B2B sales and marketing! Here are a few that stand out to the Smashmouth crowd from last week:

Are Your Inside Sales Reps Good Detectives? A guest post on AG Salesworks' Sales Prospecting Perspectives blog provided an interesting comparison to inside sales reps and detectives.  The author likens his approach to that of  Columbo and collects as much detail from his prospects as he can.

"I find that people are willing to share one more thing with me in order to get me off the phone.  This one thing may turn into a longer conversation that could bring out more pains and needs from the prospect and in time, turning this ‘not interested’ person into an opportunity for our clients."

Whatever You Do, Don't Do This During a Sales Meeting. Jill Konrath, sales strategist and author of SNAP Selling, has an article on ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom blog about limiting the amount of time you speak during a sales call and keeping quiet during that most critical meeting -- replacing your competitor!

"Top sellers realize that replacing an incumbent is a slow, deliberate process. They understand it takes time to demonstrate value and develop strong relationships. Knowing this, they put together a one-step-at-a-time account-entry strategy that advances the sales process much faster than if they tried to do everything in a single call."

7 Fluff-Free Reasons Your Online Content Isn't Spreading. David Siteman Garland, author and entrepreneur from The Rise to the Top website, wrote a guest post over at inbound marketing evangelist HubSpot's blog.  Garland shares some great thoughts as to why your content may not be as aflame as you'd like it to be.

"Normally there isn’t just one answer and it isn’t black-and-white. Some things directly matter and others go a little bit deeper with more abstract, yet equally important ideas like trust and authority. But, everything adds up."

Like I said, there's a lot of great information out there; what would you have added from the week?

Photo Credit:  steve.wilde via Flickr

B2B Demand Gen Week in Review July 12..16

There were some great B2B Demand Gen articles posted this week, and here are the handful that stood out for the Smashmouth crowd:

Old Spice: The Man Your Content Could Smell Like - The big news this week was the Old Spice Man answering people's questions and Twitter updates with personalized responses. The originality of this type of content marketing is refreshing.

"Not too long ago Old Spice was a brand that was largely forgotten or something that was worn by your father. This weekend, watching the latest commercial (embedded below), my boyfriend asked me if he should switch over to Old Spice. The momentum Old Spice is creating goes beyond just 'silly Web videos'. They’re using remarkable content to capture brand awareness, eyes, and in the end, sales."

To read more about this, check out SEO/Blogging/Twitter guru Lisa Barone of internet marketing company Outspoken Media.

Create Your Own Content Category - Joe Pulizzi, marketing strategist over at Junta42, has a great article on his site about owning your own "keywords."

"If you are talking about the same concepts and content as your competitors, what value are you adding to the conversation? Are you truly providing anything that will differentiate you from your competitors, over the thousands of other messages out there your customers are possibly engaging with?"

For Those About to Rock...Show Up First - Paul Castain, sales trainer and sales blogger at Paul Castain's Sales Playbook, wrote a great article that shares 13 tips on how effective sales people can "show up" and get found, all while weaving Slash and George Lopez into the mix.

"People like Slash understand that they need to be seen. They also understand that you can’t be seen if you don’t show up."

There were a lot of great blog articles this week surrounding B2B sales and marketing - which one got you thinking? What did we miss?

*Photo Credit: suttonhoo via Flickr

Content Marketing: Accuracy, First Impressions and Demand Gen

Guest post by Paul Simon, Sharper Content, @paulcontentman

We all form instant impressions when meeting someone new. Guess what? The same thing happens when we read something from someone we don't know - and the proliferation of social media puts an awful of "new" people in front of us.

As Michael Damphousse says, "Good content creates value. Value creates trust. And, yes, trust creates leads."

On the Internet, it's all about content, whether you have a product to sell, service to offer or leads to pursue. The best content is clear, concise and compelling, creating a bond and a relationship with the reader. Can poor writing, misspellings and grammatical errors interfere? You betcha.

A few days ago someone in a sales group on LinkedIn posed this question: "Love reading and participating in this group, but I could not help noticing all the blatant spelling errors in our posts. Do you think it reflects negatively on our attention to detail and professionalism not to re-read our posts before we hit the send button? "

Intriguing responses followed, some dismissing an occasional error in a group comment as inconsequential and others characterizing them as a general lack of professionalism. Here are a few of my favorite comments:

"Numerous mistakes indicate a lack of attention to detail. If I am thinking of hiring someone to take care of my business, I want someone who is brilliant in their field AND cares about the details..."

"If one person, someone who is important to you, forms a negative image of you because of something you've written, doesn't it make sense to be more mindful? I would hate to think that I was shut out of an opportunity because I failed to take a few extra minutes to ensure that my spelling and grammar were up to snuff."

As someone who makes a living writing and editing other people's copy, I've often wondered about the same thing when I see a lot of errors. I've made my share of typos in rushing out an email here and there, but it does seem that a business communication rife with errors really gets you off on the wrong foot.

Can you afford to take a chance? Are your content marketing efforts going to impact demand gen? You owe it to yourself to pay attention.

5 Thoughts About Sales 2.0 Conference Opening Remarks

This morning's Sales 2.0 Conference lead off speaker was Polly Sumner of Salesforce.com.  Although she spoke about Tools, her real message wasn't about tools as much as it was about use, and ways of working.

It Gerhard Gschwandtner, the conference host,captures it with a question to Polly, "so it's about a mindset?" 

• Explore tools with an eye for how your team will adapt to it.  How they will use it. How it will change the way they work
• Challenge yourself to identify where efficiencies can be gained. Can you gain time?  Knowledge? Trigger events?
• Don't get caught up in the hype.  Look through demos and presentations, does the tool change the way you will get your job done?
• The best Sales 2.0 apps are adopted without being forced on users. Quote from a beta tester of Salesforce Chatter two weeks ago at CloudForce Boston "We just turned on Chatter, a week later we had 700 active users."
• "Failure is OK," says Polly. Don't be afraid to take risks, it's risks that can introduce change into your organization.

From our experience with Sales 2.0 tools at Green Leads, we had an immediate impact by making an extremely risky decision 18 months ago.  Instead of hiring new people and adding headcount to our appointment setting team, we took a major risk by implementing ConnectAndSell.  It allowed us to double the weekly production of our best people for about half the cost of a new hire. We didn't push it, we let our team adopt it at their own pace. It organically became a part of their daily routine.

What risks have you taken related to Sales 2.0?  Has it changed the way you work?

Jive Talkin for B2B Marketing & Sales Demand Gen Experts

Today at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, Jive Software is rolling out a new agenda for social business that is worth a close look.

 We all wake up on Mondays to a mountain of data, feeds, and emails.  It's great to know that our best buddies "like" your latest blog article and left a comment that they miss you while they are surfing or mountain biking through your facebook fan page, or that the company we are following on LinkedIn just hired a VP of Demand Gen (nice lead for me), and that Chris Brogan just launched ManOnTheGo.com, which a colleague in sales recommends by retweeting a link from @chrisbrogan. That said, you still have hundreds of Google Reader articles to scan, a few new sales enablement presentations to review before publishing them to Slideshare, and two meetings to approve in the Appointment Setting queue...

I can go on, but you get the picture.  In the enterprise, we are flooded with internal and external data -- nuggets of information that we find valuable or our colleagues find valuable and that we need to know in order to do a stellar job.  Roll all these feeds, files, emails, tweets, micro-blogs, discussions, and public buzz into a cockpit-like environment and you have Jive What Matters, an enterprise class portal into this sea of social information that keeps us operating in real time.

My domain expertise is B2B Marketing and Sales, especially Demand Gen.  Here are some use case scenarios I see for the b2b executive:

• Competition - Aggregate feeds from multiple buzz sources. Follow keywords and specific phrases that can point you to competitive intelligence.
• Opportunities - Work sales opportunities in a team mode. Follow everything about that opportunity.  "Like" the feeds from the key account manager, feed in key words from the opportunity such as company name or project name, follow the status and feed updates from key decision makers in the social sphere.
• Sales Enablement - Monitor sales and marketing asset libraries.  Know when files change, are upgraded, or need collaboration.  Create/follow discussions focused on use case scenarios or sales tips.
• Reporting - Create feeds from certain reports that trigger when large opportunites change status, or when a company KPI changes.
• Follow Colleagues - That applications engineer from Calgary that you met last year with all the great opinions on how to demo software, follow that guy -- he's a wealth of knowledge.  
• Data - Most data sources (Jigsaw, LinkedIn, etc.) allow you to create RSS feeds on specific searches. Set some up for your best prospect titles, when a new record is created with "demand gen" or "marketing operations", and funnel that feed to your data analyst for addition to your nurturing/lead queue.
• Industry Leaders - Stay abreast of the emerging thoughts and trends in the industry.  Subscribe to the best in Lead Nurturing, Lead Generation, and B2B Marketing.
• Your Team - What better way to follow the activity of your team and key contributors.  Follow their feeds and know what they are up to, or what makes them tick.  Do the same for the execs above you.
• Buzz - Follow industry trends, keywords of interest.  Take advantage of Jives Chatter Filter [play on words?] and Jive Genius.  The two help filter and recommend only the best and relevant data for your needs.
• Social Graph - Visually see how your prospects are connected in the social network. Stunning representations.  Make that first call a warm call by knowing who they know.
• What Matters - The Chatter Filter and Jive Genius look like promising tools that can reduce the amount of non-relevant noise coming in.

What other B2B Marketing and Sales Demand Gen use case thoughts can you find?   I'm off to their launch event in Boston for some great Jive Talkin.

 

B2B Marketing and Sales Books: What's On Your Summer Reading List?

If there's one thing those books have in common for me, it's that they were part of my high school summer reading lists. Remember those? You'd receive a list of books before the end of your school year that you'd have to read in preparation for the next school year.

Maybe you were excited by all of that reading; maybe you weren't. Maybe you cleared your list well before summer's end, or maybe you were running to the local bookstore to find the Cliffs Notes versions of the books on your list (not that I know anything about that). Since we're so close to the beginning of summer, I thought I'd share with you what should be on every good B2B marketing and sales careerist's list this summer. It's a bit more geared to the marketer, but every good sales professional is their own marketer too.

If you're reading this and you've just graduated from college hoping to find yourself in sales and marketing, take heed! This list is the tip of the iceberg for you. If you're like me and you've read these books, take heed and read them again; they're just that good. Note that all of the links are to Amazon, should you choose to purchase them.

	The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 2nd Edition - David Meerman Scott's book on completely changing the way marketing and PR is handled effectively today. David's book is worth reading time and again to be reminded of how the Internet and social media can radically improve your business. This book is a Marketing 401 class in 320 pages.
	Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs - Written by the founders of HubSpot, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, Inbound Marketing delivers on its promise to get your organization found. Brian and Dharmesh talk about just what "inbound marketing" is, how you can get found by the prospects you want to do business with, and how to convert those prospects into customers.
	SNAP Selling - Jill Konrath's latest book is a must-read. This new book teaches its readers how to better handle prospects who, today, have shrinking budgets and more "to-do's" on their plates than they've ever had before. Oh yeah, and she teaches you how to close them, too. Jill is a master saleswoman, and she artfully delivers a message to improve the sales processes of her readers.
	Ogilvy on Advertising - David Ogilvy's book, now celebrating its 25th year in print, is a classic and one that I revisit time and again. Ogilvy teaches that advertisement is salesmanship, and he couldn't be more right. His lessons on buyer personas (though not necessarily called that) are just as relevant today as they've ever been. In fact, he calls out the lazy marketers who do not go about this process and warns about "skidding about on what my brother Francis called 'the slippery slope of irrelevant brilliance.'"
	eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale - Ardath Albee's book on eMarketing is a great book that teaches its readers how to differentiate themselves from every other organization in their space. Ardath sets a great tone throughout the book, and the lessons in the book aren't just things marketers should be doing but rather things they must be doing. Ardath spends a considerable amount of time discussing what she calls "Contagious Content," and with good reason - she understands the importance of content that spurs the prospect to move from reading to engaging.
	Digital Body Language - Steven Woods' book explores how today's marketers can market better to their target audiences, taking into consideration all of the intricacies of 21st century sales and sales processes. Woods' idea that marketers and sales folks can now "read" a prospect's digital body language (i.e. their web  behavior) is on point and is sure to help shape readers' effectiveness in their chosen professions. Pick this one up.

Obviously there are more books that I could place on the B2B Sales and Marketing summer reading list, but these are my "must reads." What about you? What would you add to the list?

Inside Sales Trends: Then and Now...What's Your Big Idea?

This week I presented at the AA-ISP Leadership Summit in Minneapolis.  It kicked off two days of great sessions, discussion and networking.  Thanks to everyone who attended and supported the effort.  It was great to meet everyone and share our Big Ideas.

Special thanks to Bob Perkins, Larry Reeves and others at AA-ISP for having me.

The other piece I enjoyed was meeting folks from a competing company.  Being one of just a few By Appointment Only competitors is always a challenge.  Linda and I got our demand gen start at BAO, and they are a class act with good people -- competing with them on a daily basis keeps us honest.  Henry Glickel, BAO's top recruiter, presented on best practices for Inside Sales Recruiting.  Hiring and creating good talent was a common theme during the event, and Henry's take on it ensures steady and talented inside sales professionals.

There were also the guys from Vorsight. Having read their Sales Tips Blog for quite some time, it was very informative to listen to co-founder Steve Richard present his tips on how to become a power cold calling machine.

Nothing like Co-Opetition.

Below is my keynote address: Inside Sales Trends, Then and Now...What's Your Big Idea?

 

 

 

Lead Gen Experts Should Take "Campaign" Out of Their Vocabulary

Last week, I was out with the team at Focus.com and enjoying "bourbon and proteins" with Craig Rosenberg (The Funnelholic)  when the subject of campaigns came up from his point in a recent post to "forget campaigns, build a factory."  We agreed completely that marketers that think in the world of "campaigns" are shortchanging their results.

Marketing programs need

• Consistency
• Momentum
• Staying power
• Adjustment

It may be that campaigns seem normal because our needs change, strategies are modified or budgets are handed out piecemeal, but the most successful clients both Craig and I work with all treat marketing programs as ongoing efforts.

• Budget for ongoing activity - Treat it like headcount. Would you hire good talent and then shut them off 60 days later?
• Remain committed to the effort - Most common example here is when a marketer gets gung-ho to start blogging to boost inbound marketing and then stops publishing regularly.
• Results take time - In the world of B2B, sales cycles can be long. Don't try to measure pipeline results in just months. Give it time and commitment.
• Measure what you can measure - If you can't wait a year to measure revenue impact, measure tangible results: Did the introductory meeting result in a second meeting? Did the email sent result in a clickthrough?
• React - Make that adjustment -- but adjust, don't start and stop.  If you see something that needs a tweak, stay productive while you are tweaking or have your vendor/team work on something complementary to the project while you make that quick adjustment.
• Conserve Costs - Lastly, consider the cost impact of starting, stopping and switching gears.  There always are considerable startup and adjustment efforts and ramp-up costs.  Optimize your budget by creating programs with power. 
  

@chrisbrogan's New Marketing Experience, aka Inbound Marketing Summit: 5 Tips

Next week I'll be speaking at Chris Brogan's New Marketing Experience in San Francisco.  In a recent post, @chrisbrogan talks about the event:

"One thing that’s different with my events than with other events: Every sponsor and exhibitor and speaker is someone we think has something to offer you .... We appreciate their voice in our experiences. Thus, time spent with them is also time spent learning new marketing the way we see it ... it’s a 1-day event. There’s no fluff. It’s packed with info. We can hang out."

My highlight of the week is the Hang Out part.  That's all the discussion, debate, learning and putting faces to all the "social" B2B marketing community faces I've met online -- as well as meeting new ones.

Some recommendations to those of you attending, and even to those that aren't, on how to get the most out of a live event:

• Announce that you are attending.  Post it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and any other place your status resides.
• Live tweet or live blog from the event and include the Hashtag in all posts.  Share your take-aways.
• Mingle, mix, get to know some new tweeps.  Don't spend the breaks in the lobby on your cell phone.
  
• Collect business cards.  If you get one without a Twitter address on it, ask for it and write it down.  When you get home, or during quiet time at the event, send LinkedIn invites.
• Don't cluster.  You already know the people you know.  Unless you are using the connection to get an introduction to someone new, move on.  Meet new people.
  

Bonus:

• Be there virtually.  If you aren't at the event, follow it on Twitter and the live blogs (links will be on Twitter).  Follow the hashtag.  Or better yet, make a last minute decision and REGISTER HERE with a 50% Discount Code GREEN50.

@damphoux: So a shout out to all the attendees next week -- find my icon in the crowd and come say "hello".

 

Speakers List on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#/list/damphoux/ims-speakers