Recently the Insiders at Find New Customers had the opportunity to watch Paul Dunay (FaceBook for Dummies and Buzz Marketing for Technology) present “Avaya Goes Social” – how Avaya embraced social networks for remarkable business results. I cannot thank Paul enough.
Paul’s a super-smart and innovative marketer. Just check the many, many awards Paul has won by clicking the awards tab on Buzz Marketing.
You can wa
tch Paul’s terrific presentation by clicking
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There is no question in my mind. Inbound marketing is the wave of the future. Gentle touches mapped to buyer personas and other variables.
But there’s a fundamental problem. Most businesses are not ready to embrace it.
HubSpot has a great blog article about the differences between outbound and inbound marketing. I suggest you read it for more background on this important marketing direction.
Two excellent books also provide insights – I highly recommend both.
The idea of inbound marketing can be summed up with a simple image. Turn your online presence into a watering hole.
Do watering holes need Super Bowl ads? No. [Love the talking babies, eTrade, but that $$$$ could be spent in other ways.] Print ads, billboards, etc. No, no, no. Do they need to advertise how cool and refreshing the water tastes? NO.
Animals find it because it offers them something THEY need. It’s a virtual magnet to attract thirsty animals. That, in a nutshell, is the essense of inbound marketing.
There is a fundamental problem here. And I had a great conversation about it with the President of Avitage, Jim Burns (Jim is @salesvpi on Twitter, if you wish to connect.) Jim is one of the sharpest and savviest sales and marketing experts I know. Jim impressed upon me the idea that these concepts espoused by people like Ardath, Brian and Dharmesh are new and very different for most businesses. CEOs are struggling to deal with this new direction.
Unfortunately, I experienced this firsthand. I joined as marketing head a firm in south Florida that produces SaaS ERP and CRM software. They have great software, delighted customers and a great staff of friendly and very smart people. But, they also had challenges.
This looked like an exciting opportunity for me. We could transform this company into a great firm like HubSpot or Marketo. I was pumped. To ensure we were on the same page, I gave the CEO a copy of eMarketing for the Complex Sale. But reality slapped me in the face. Hard!
I learned the hard way how hard it is to teach an old dog new tricks, no matter how much that dog wishes to learn. Every time I tried to move us forward, we seemed to drag.
Our watering hole content got panned by not stressing our water quality. And since I was not focusing on water quality, I was accussed of not really understanding the water industry. They decided to promote their watering hole, they need to hire someone who’s advertised watering holes in the past. They told me “Unfortunately, we weren’t ready to embrace the high touch marketing approach you espouse.” (What other kind of marketing is there?)
Don’t get me wrong. Great people and superb products, but not ready for inbound marketing.
The lesson for me was profound. Even if the leadership professes its desire to move to inbound marketing, the vast majority are not yet ready. In fact, sometimes the CEO faces a difficult Board of Directors. Even if he or she embraces inbound marketing, the board ties his hands. So enter into relationships with healthy skepticism and ask tough questions.
I should have done so. Shame on me.
No longer head of marketing for this software firm, Jeff returned to Find New Customers, his business that specializes in simple lead generation – demand generation using inbound marketing. Interestingly, while Jeff was distracted with that software firm, his personal “watering hole” continued to perform, as businesses continued to flock and consume content, especially the highly acclaimed white paper, How to Find New Customers.
Jeff can be reached at jogden at findnewcustomers.net.
We also welcome your comments and input. We respond quickly to every one. Thank you.
Today Find New Customers hosted a webinar today featuring Jon Miller, VP, Marketing at Marketo. Jon shared his “secret sauce” for lead generation.
It was an excellent webinar for all of our Insiders at Find New Customers.
One of the key principals he shared was the process of mapping content to the way your customers buy. Here’s an excellent ebook from www.junta42.com
clickpredictions2010[1] by Click Documents, sponsored by Marketo.
One of the things I did at Aplicor was develop buyer personas, map the buying process, industry, and other factors. This enabled us to create a grid. Over that grid we wrote down the questions and concerns that particular buyer, in that particular stage of the buying process, etc. would have. Once we understand their specific concerns, we can start creating or finding content to fit the specific need of the buyer at that stage.
You can see a copy of the campaign matrix below at below left.
Two key points raised by Jon in this webinar:
Unfortunately, I was not given a chance to finish the project at Aplicor, but this is the right approach to demand generation that more and more companies should be using.
Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers and author of the highly acclaimed white paper, How to Find New Customers, as well as numerous eBooks, webinars, podcasts, case studies and more. (Go into iTunes, go to the store and search on “demand generation”)
Note: The ideas and thoughts here are mine and in no way reflect my employer, Aplicor.
Content marketing is growing by leaps and bounds, with good reason. Prospects are looking for information and not interruption. For more information, go visit the experts over at Junta42.
But if you are a marketing starting to publish content, you’re undoubtedly thinking about capturing prospect information. After all, you cannot start lead nurturing without prospect information. However, you must be careful. Here’s an example of what not to do. This is an actual registration form for a white paper from Oracle Corporation. Shame on you, Oracle.
Please note that I once started to complete this form (and there’s even more here than in this image) but I abandoned it halfway through. Very few people will fill out a form like this today.
To paint a picture, let’s say you are traveling and at dinner you meet a very attractive person of the opposite sex. Regardless of your intentions, you’ll like to talk to this person. But she does not know you. How do you start a relationship? If you ask her dozens of prying questions, you’ll be labeled a jerk. That’s exactly the mistake in this form. We look like jerks.
So what is a marketer to do? I recommend you capture the bare minimum and let the “progressive profiling” in marketing automation systems build the rest over time.
I suggest you collect just three fields:
That’s all you need to start building a relationship. Good marketing automation like Marketo, HubSpot, or Eloqua all support progressive profiling. What is Progressive Profiling? Let’s use the definition from the experts over at MarketBright:
“In a nutshell, Progressive Profiling allows you to set up display rules for surveying and generating registrations based on the presence or absence of particular prospect details. It automatically changes the questions on forms as a customer answers them. For example, if your prospect visited your Web site last week and filled in a form to get access to a white paper, providing only their name and company to do so, the next time they visit they would be asked for a job title or area of industry instead. Each new interaction with your Web site allows you to glean more information from the prospect and build their profile, without bombarding them with onerous account registrations.”
Don’t drive away your prospects. Gently gather information and rely on progessive profiling to capture the rest.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is Director of Marketing for Aplicor. Prior to this, he was the President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple.” He’s also the author of the highly acclaimed white paper, How to Find New Customers. Lastly, he’s featured in the book by Jill Konrath “Get Back to Work Faster“
The thoughts and ideas contained herein are mine and in no way reflect my employer, Aplicor.
Recently, Marketo — a marketing automation company with an extremely popular blog contacted me and invited me to share my expertise in B2B demand generation with their readers. While this article will soon post to their blog, I’m delighted to also be able to share these insights with my readers.
Here are the questions Marketo asked, along with my answers:
How did you first get started with online B2B Marketing and what do you like best about it?
In very early 2009, I observed what happening in the world of B2B sales and decided to get involved.
Recently I asked my good friend Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies what happened. Her tongue in cheek answer was “Al Gore invented the internet.”
It was clear salespeople were struggling mightily to fill their pipelines. Having read Brian Carroll’s book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale cover to cover several times, I decided I wanted to focus on this key business challenge. I decided to pen the white paper, How to Find New Customers, which Marketo generously sponsored.
What I like best about b2b marketing is this: It is the art of developing trust with strangers. Very few people and a tiny number of businesses excel at that.
In your white paper, How to Find New Customers, you discussed the ever-changing buying process. What are some of your forecasts concerning the future buyer? Can you give some advice on how to stay ahead of the curve?
Today, buying cycles are growing longer and decision making processes are growing more complex. With empowerment of buyers, companies are facing increasing demands to empower their people to have relevant and provocative conversations with prospective buyers. It is getting harder and hard for businesses to differentiate themselves.
Jill gave me a great example of how someone might differentiate themselves.
Printers are everywhere and their presses all do about the same thing. If those printers talk about customer service and speedy delivery, they all sound alike. However, if they focus on restaurant menus and help the restaurant design menus that engage the diner and increase the average ticket, they can truly differentiate their offerings.
Not only do they need to differentiate themselves but they also need to earn buyer credibility. More and more buyers look for sellers to be experts in their business. It is incumbent on B2B sellers to ensure their marketers and sellers demonstrate that expertise. It’s no longer good enough just to know your product.
With all the various social media channels, what are your recommendations for B2B marketers looking to generate leads, find customers and create brand awareness?
I believe it is more important than ever for businesses to develop deep buyer personas and really get inside the minds of their prospective buyers. Only with deep understanding can they determine where best to invest their marketing funds in social media challenges.
While they do the research, they will also likely find their prospective clients more fragmented than ever. This is why most businesses need to use multiple social media channels. I believe every B2B company today should have a really well done FaceBook Fan page. They need to be very active on Twitter – especially listening and responding. They need to have a very active blog and be reading blogs by other industry leaders.
In terms of increasing brand awareness, they need a deep and simple idea of what they stand for, and keep reinforcing it. For instance, I have a slide share presentation on Linkedin entitled “What is a fearless competitor?” Everything you do and everything you say needs to reinforce that message.
In your blog, Fearless Competitor, you have discussed lead nurturing in detail. What are your top three tips for companies looking to get started with lead nurturing?
What are some techniques and innovative strategies thatB2B marketers should use to help better align their efforts with the sales team?
Watch your language. More than ever, both marketing and sales need provocative and customer focused language to engage prospective buyers. They need a clear understanding of business problems to articulate their value in terms that the buyer uses. And they need to equip both marketing and sales with the tools for success, including good Customer Relationship Management software, trigger events like InsideView, and marketing automation like Marketo. Empathy is the goal – one must develop and demonstrate it.
They need to develop good customer attraction strategies to offer real value and nurture prospective buyers regardless of their timing to buy.
If you are interested, you can download the free white paper, How to Find New Customers.
It was one year ago this month, January 27th, 2009, when How to Find New Customers was born. And what a first year it was!
It was on that date that Jon Miller, co-founder and VP of Marketing at Marketo took a chance on an unknown. And a superb writer, Jill 
Konrath of Selling to Big Companies
, stepped up to lend a hand. I simply cannot thank those two enough.
The birthing process was long and hard, but in March 2009, How to Find New Customers was released. What a ride it’s been.
It started winning great reviews, like the one from the Funnelholic, Craig Rosenberg. The B2B Marketing Zone linked to it and Focus.com posted the entire white paper. It has been downloaded hundreds and hundreds of times from all over the world. Even giant companies like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco are reading it, as well as hundreds of great smaller companies. But we’re not done. We hope to make it available in many languages soon.
I could not be more proud of this baby and the many businesses who have improved their business results from the ideas and concepts it contains. Thanks.
Have you read it? If not, download it right away. After all, it’s free.
Jeff Ogden, President of Find New Customers is now Director of Marketing for Aplicor. The ideas in this blog come from the Fearless Competitor, Jeff Ogden, and in no way represent Aplicor.
Please note that the views and opinions in this blog represent the ideas of Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor and in no way represent the view and opinions of my employer, Aplicor.
I was asked that question by my new manager, Chuck Schaeffer, CEO of Aplicor — the software as a service provider of award-winning CRM and ERP software. It was a great question and undoubtedly a question a lot of marketers face. I thought it would be helpful to share some best practices with my readers. I hope you find it helpful.
Let’s say a senior sales executive at a large software firm downloads your white paper. Then later, she downloads an eBook. Would you change the lead nurturing process she is on? Probably not.
(Here’s an a key point about sharing your content – make it easy and simple. Don’t do what Oracle did. I wanted to get a sales challenge white paper from Oracle, but I found the process and form so cumbersome and intrusive, I abandoned it. Ironically, do a Google search and you can access the white paper directly. Shame on you, Oracle. Really bad job by a very large software firm.)
While you would not change your lead nurturing program for a simple action, there are situations where you would. A good example is a change of buying stage.
Let’s say after downloading your content, multiple people start searching for pricing in Google and using the built in search on your website. That probably indicates that this company is no longer in the Awareness phase but it rather in a late buying stage. So you want to adapt your lead nuturing process to the stage this prospect is in.
You might want to share a third party analyst report on your company’s position or an award your company has won. (Please note that Aplicor’s won more awards than anyone.)
If you wish to learn more about demand generation, I invite you to download the highly acclaimed white paper, How to Find New Customers. For a great book on these issues, check out Ardath Albee’s e-Marketing for the Complex Sale.
If your company is facing a major ERP upgrade or major sales challenges, I hope you’ll consider Aplicor.
If you saw me mentioned by Tory Johnson on Good Morning America, (You can watch it here, in case you missed it) you learned a success story of a 50 year and older professional in a tough job climate — how Jeff Ogden became a Director of Marketing without a resume or job application. Not to mention the fact that I beat out well over 100 well-qualified candidates.
Despite what Tory said, I was not a desperate job-seeker blasting out resume after resume, as I was President of Find New Customers, “Lead Generation Made Simple.” Business was okay, but it was getting better and better. The future was very bright before this company found me.
You’re here undoubtedly here to learn more about how you can duplicate the approach I used.
For even more detailed information on these approaches, please visit Get Back to Work Faster. This site and the book of the same name is a project I did with Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies.
Before we share our keys, let’s first talk about how the world of job search has changed. Job searching and sales have a lot in common. Job search is just sales where you are the product. So job seekers need to study the world of sales.
Sales has been revolutionized by the advent of high speed internet. Buyer self-education has changed everything. In fact, MarketingSherpa found that 8 out of 10 deals occur when the buyer finds the seller. In the employment field, it’s when the hiring company finds the employee. Employers look for great candidates online today.
So the real key today is to make sure you are exceptional and findable online. This is how I won this top marketing role.
Here are 4 tips on making yourself compelling online.
Establish a strong online presence
What does that mean? I became very active and established myself on Twitter, Linkedin and FaceBook. I also wrote a blog that grew quite popular called Fearless Competitor. And I created a website to showcase my expertise, Find New Customers. How popular did I become? I just learned that I’m much more popular online than an NFL player with an identical name. Beat the NFL? You can do it.
Focus and demonstrate expertise
What are you expert in? Or what can you become expert in? Remember, if you don’t have a strong expertise, blogs and books can bring you up to speed quickly. My area of expertise was demand generation — the approaches businesses use to find and acquire new customers. Refine and hone your expertise.
Become a publisher of great content
For me, that meant writing a white paper called How to Find New Customers. I first had to find a sponsor and a mentor, so it’s not easy. But you can do it. I interviewed experts for podcast and created eBooks like Prospect Driven Marketing. If you don’t know what a white paper, eBook or podcast is, start researching it online. Look at the content on Find New Customers for samples.
Spread yourself everywhere
You don’t know where employers will look, so you need to be everywhere. The big sites are Twitter, Linkedin and FaceBook — if you are not active and present on all three, you are selling yourself short. Linkedin in particular is a place employers search. (It’s where my new employer found me.) If you’re not familar with these, research them online. But don’t just sign up. Be active online. Search for information about a topic or company in Twitter, for instance. If you find an article about your area of expertise, share it on Twitter. Jason Alba of JibberJobber has an excellent DVD entitled Linkedin for JobSeekers.
Finally find yourself a great mentor. Mine was the remarkable Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies (remember the similarities between sales and job search?). Jill and I collaborated on the book Get Back to Work Faster.
For more information on how to use these techniques, please visit Get Back to Work Faster. And I’m happy to answer any of your questions via email. Just send them to jefflogden at gmail.com (use the @ sign). You can also connect to me on Twitter @fearlesscomp.
“White papers remain the most effective piece of marketing collateral, with 80% of respondents finding them moderately to highly influential in the purchasing decision.” (Eccolo Media)
But in this world of hundreds of TV channels, YouTube, Twitter, et al, readers are swimming in information. How does a powerful lead generation tool like a white paper engage the busy and overloaded executive of today?
This is where the book Crafting White Paper 2.0 comes in. Jonathan Kantor of The Appum Group “The White Paper Company” and he also writes the White Paper Pundit blog.
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jonathan about his new book recently.
You can listen to my interview with this expert by visiting my podcast blog or my B2B Demand Generation iTunes channel (It’s free). In fact, if you subscribe to our iTunes channel, you can sync your iPod, Blackberry or other 
smartphone and listen while you work out, mow the yard, shovel snow, etc.
I hope you’ll subscribe to this and our many other podcasts on b2b demand generation best practices.
Happy New Year!
Jeff Ogden is the President of Find New Customers and the author of the highly acclaimed white paper, How to Find New Customers. More recently, he’s accepted a position as global head of marketing for Aplicor.
In a short time, the holidays will end and we’ll all be back at work looking to crank up revenues to make 2010 a great year. If you’re like most other businesses that sell to businesses, you’ll be looking for more sales-ready leads.
So what can you do to ensure the new year gets off to a great start?
My recommendation is that you talk to customers and prospective customers and learn absolutely everything you can about them:
Kadient, a software firm in the Boston area, took this to new heights, using cardboard cutouts and developing complete personalities of target customers. Let’s call this “customer intimacy.”
Why talk and collect this information? Jon Miller, VP, Marketing and Co-Founder at Marketo says that one of the principles of lead nurturing is that it must be valuable to them, and not just you. But how can you know if your content is really valuable? You simply cannot know unless you have a deep understanding of prospective buyers — true customer intimacy.
If you think about it, customer intimacy will help you in all aspects of the business. As you create content to engage buyers, you can make it very compelling with customer intimacy:
Avitage, a partner of Find New Customers, recently hosted a webinar with Steve Rankel from Product180, who advocated companies go talk to customers. He also said that in all his years of working with CEOs, precisely ZERO companies correctly predicted what customers would say. So first thing in the new year, go survey your customers and target accounts.
For a good company to help you with this research, please visit Communication Strategy Group.
Happy Holidays from the Fearless Competitor
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