“What’s more important - hammer or screw driver? In most organizations, there always exists an inherent push and pull between marketing and sales. To be successful, you don’t have to be either marketing-driven or sales-driven, instead you have to be market driven. What gets you to be market driven is what you should focus on, be it marketing or sales or a mix of both.”

This means that you need to understand what your customer needs and what their pains are.

• Social media is ‘not free’
• Content still remains the king
• Social Media Vs. SEM - can co-exist together

Social Media for Marketing and Corporate Communication

Some of the slides in the deck may not be self-explanatory.  Write to me at saba@djargon.com in case you need any additional information.

Few things to look at:

1. Only 25% of the b2b leads buy in the first six months; 25% buy between the 7th and 12th month; 25% buy between 13th and 18th month and the remaining after 18 months

2. Sales focus is only on immediate revenues and they do not have the patience to follow up leads for 18 months, and it is agreeable

3. As it is, generating leads is a difficult task and letting 75% drop from it, is equivalent to committing suicide

In many small and medium sized-organizations, sales typically does the nurturing as the organization wants to keep the sales force busy and occupied and also the fact that they wouldn’t have the marketing bandwidth. Eventually, neither the sales nurture the leads effectively nor do they pass it back to marketing and they fall off from the target database itself, which is a lot of money and efforts down the drain.

Marketing can keep nurturing these leads that aren’t interested in buying today but at a later date through a mix of messaging, thought leadership and other touchpoints and be visible in the buyer’s radar. As an when they decide to initiate their buying process, you are available to take that forward and this is where it again gets passed to sales as a sales-ready opportunity.

This communication cycle will ensure that no efforts are spared in converting a lead into a customer. Primarily, you are controlling what you can control.

We brainstormed around this for sometime and arrived at a set of simple things to be addressed during the training:

1. What is all the buzz about Video Conferencing and inter-operability?

2. Major applications and opportunities available in the market

3. Value proposition in terms of business results as opposed to just cost savings

4. Selling beyond the telecom department

5. Selling packaged applications and professional services

6. Technology elements in conferencing solution

7. Understanding the solution elements - technology, systems integration and change management

8. Buying cycle of the customers - how will customers make their decisions and choose their suppliers

9. Understanding the enterprise value chain and finding opportunities within that - targeted discovery, solution description, ROI and metrics

10. Top ten pressing business problems and business functions where this can be applied

11. Vertical and horizontal focus - primarily high-tech, healthcare, export houses, manufacturing and distribution

This I believe would do the trick in getting their sales force up and approaching their target customers with lot more reasons to sell.

Should you look at expanding your market or should you look at displacing the incumbent?

You have to be creative here, and you should understand your competitor’s strategy over and above your product differentiator. Few pointers that would help you in choosing the strategy that would be appropriate for you:

1. If your product is not demonstratably superior to the incumbents, don’t look at displacing them.

2. When you are trying to displace your competition, the business case is already established. It is only the real benefits and cost savings that would get your foot in, and not just perceived benefits. Besides, there are costs associated with switching products for your customer and add to that user training, application downtime and the likes.

3. With better features than your competition, it should be fairly easier to address fresh markets or unserverd/under-served markets.

4. Ensure that you add customers from fresh markets. Use these success stories as references before addressing the incumbent market.

• An IT Services company that understands the difference between Marketing and Sales, where marketing does the lead generation and sales does the prospecting
• Their marketing has expertise in outbound activities and not so much on the inbound activities. Their focus is so much towards outbound that the marketing organization does not have the bandwidth to optimize or improve on their  inbound lead generation activities
• Sales tells marketing that for every 30 leads that are passed to them, they are able to manage 1 closure. This is primarily based on the historical data. Management likes the math and they need 40 new customers for the financial year and simple multiplication makes it 1200 leads to achieve new customer targets.
• In this situation, you are talking about 100 leads per month and close to 5 leads per day through outbound marketing activities, and here marketing can only focus on lead quantity and not on lead quality. This effectively would stretch the 30 to 1 ratio to probably 50 to 1 ratio over a period of time. This definitely is the challenge for the company to handle. 

How does this company remove this challenge?

First and foremost, change the marketing orientation from outbound activities towards inbound activities. It is pretty difficult, for there have been successes based on outbound activities, hence it needs a nice balance and a definite period of time for the transition to happen. Inbound works best when your website is optimized to interact with your visitors and capture the leads.

Optimize your website for search engines, be present in industry forums, direct all your thought leadership activities with the usage of appropriate landing pages, test and experiment often with your landing page copy, landing page layout and registration forms, improve conversations with your target market through blogs and social media avenues, and measure the results thoroughly for different combinations.

Most suggested changes above, would work well even for your outbound activities and will improve the quality of the leads received and will certainly reduce the 30 to 1 ratio to something like 15 to 1.

In this post, I have only uncovered what needs to be done and I hope to cover the details on the suggestions in my upcoming posts.

You need to plan well and you need to ensure that all the basic are done - getting your demo up and running, allocating space for doing the demo, keeping your brochures and pamphlets ready, getting your press releases done upfront, being seen on the show catalogue, writing in advance to potential visitors, making it known in your website about your booth number and a few more things….

You have taken care of all of these things and so has 500 other companies that are going to have booth space in the same event. Apart from doing these basics, how do you essentially differentiate yourself from the crowd?

I’ll give you two examples, one I have been involved in and the other I have heard from a good friend of mine:

1. There is this networking company which took up 30 sq. m space in a major event. They had four table tennis tables on four sides of their booth space with experts on one side of the table. Any visitor who gets to score five points against the expert gets the company’s modem free and anyone who scores at least 1 point gets a t-shirt free. They also had a lounge set up in the middle where the visitors were entertained by the booth representatives. Needless to say, their booth was the most visited in the full event.

2. Me and Satish were involved in helping the onsite sales folks of my former employer set up a booth for an event organized by OpSource. Apart from doing all the normal things like designing the back-drop, doing collaterals, and demos, satish picked up some nice traditional Indian gifts that were to be used as take-aways for the visitors and it was branded nicely just with stickers, considering the fact that we had very less time. This booth had the maximum traffic in the event and the gifts were really appreciated. Even the organizers complimented out team at the booth on the take-aways and ofcourse, our team also picked up a number of valuable leads and connections.

Essentially, one needs to look for differentiation to make the most out of the investment on booth space

They have been working on this for quite sometime and they haven’t been able to get the traffic transformed into leads. I suggested a few things that they can start implementing quickly and they were:

1. Figure out the reasons why your existing customers came to you in the first place. Have them included as part of your content mix in your website

2. Figure out the reasons why they still continue to be your customers and have those as well included as part of your content mix in your website

3. Collate all the queries that your prospects ask during the sales cycle and have them addressed in your website

4. Get all your credibility stories up there where your visitors can see them easily

5. Enhance your call to action and make them simple for your visitors to interact with you

These should provide visible results in the form of traffic getting transformed into sales and might reduce the sales cycle as well.

He was also giving the examples of SAP and Microsoft, which routes their sales through their channel. When you sell a specialized offering, channel sales may not be a great option to start with, as the efforts needed to getting the channel up and running will be really high.

Some of the scenarios where the channel sales will make sense would be:

• Quick geographic and revenue expansion
• More feet on the street
• Leveraging established relationships
• When you are selling a commodity or a low-priced product

Enlisting channels does not absolve the organization of its business development efforts; rather it would take more efforts to make your channel successful.

You will have to help the channel in lead generation, lead follow-up, communications, pre-sales support, product training and product support. Additionally, you also need to work with them on opportunity tracking, channel incentive program and resolving channel conflicts.

Essentially, selling through a channel takes a lot of efforts and has to be done in a way that ensures the mind share of the channel. Also you need to ensure that the revenues generated by the channel are as good as what you make.

These challenges exist in more companies than you can imagine. In this scenario, it woud be advisable to do marketing to establish a conversation with customers and prospects in a B2B scenario than doing prospecting, for the cycle is longer and far more complex. This will attract the complete target segment of yours, without the song and dance associated in ensuring that there is insight on the target segments data. Additionally, your reach will be at a higher plane where you create a buying environment with marketing as opposed to a selling environment with prospecting.

I am certainly not advising that insight on the data is not important as it plays a very key role when it comes to both strategic and tactical activities, more so on the tactical front. I am only stating that we should control what is controllable and for everything else, turn to marketing.