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Archive for July, 2009

My home page workover

Published July 31, 2009 Demand Generation Leave a Comment

It’s taken many tries, but finally the home page of Find New Customers is what I want it to be: Clear, Compelling and Brief.

Most consider me a marketing expert, but writing a home page is very, very hard. And I have to give a huge thank-you to my good friend and advisor, Jill Konrath. Her patience was boundless and her advice spot-on.

The first edition was all about me. I wish I could go back to it and show you want it looked like. It talked about me and my expertise. Jill panned it. ”Get rid of everything about you, Jeff. No one cares.”

I did that, and really started focusing on customer problems. Then I used data from CSO Insights to show how bad sales is today:

Quotas are up
Win rates are down
Marketing budgets are shrunk

Finally, I had an epiphany. There is but one person reading my website. I have to talk directly to him or her. Feel her pain. The current version of Find New Customers uses this approach.

Jill hammered me one last time. ”It’s too long.” So I took a knife and cut out 70%. The result really feels good.

The key point is that even a marketing expert can struggle with website content. So don’t feel bad.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go. CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

Cut out the TLA’s

Published July 28, 2009 Fearless Competitor , inbound marketing Leave a Comment

Rebel Brown called them four letter words, but I like to call them TLA’s.

What’s a TLA? It an acronym like SOA, CRM, ERP, BPM, etc. Three Letter Acronyms. Duh!

It’s meaningless technobable. No one buys TLA’s.

They look for solutions to business problems. People ask questions using English. Business people look for answers using English. They want to see the answers to their business problems on your website.

So if you talk in TLA’s, knock it off.

Need To Optimize Mobile Deliverability Heightens As Smartphones Expand

Published July 27, 2009 Email Marketing , lead generation , marketing campaigns Leave a Comment

Written by Amanda Ferrante for the DemandGen Report

With the growth of smartphones and mobile Web usage exploding, email marketers are tasked with the challenge of delivering relevant, rich content to customers that can be read and interpreted over the mobile phone. Industry experts say the design of emails is critical, as the mobile phone offers a different experience that may not be cohesive to the intended message.

The market for smartphones is expected to reach one billion units and grow 1,600% in the next three years, according to research from The Yankee Group. 52% of smartphone users access the same email account through mobile and computer, while 48% maintain a unique mobile email address. “When talking about mobile email, it is important to keep in mind that 96% of consumers access the same accounts on their mobile devices as they are already accessing at work or home on a regular computer,” says Morgan Stewart, Director of Research & Strategy, ExactTarget.
“A few short years ago, email to mobile devices was very clunky and in most cases a hit and miss or panic situation for marketers. The reason being is that many devices did not have the capability like what we see with the iPhone today to display HTML or images on the screen. Today [the email] game has changed,” says Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer, Eloqua. “We are seeing a tremendous growth in the mobile arena and the expectations by consumers of mobile devices to read their email while on the road.”

Dayman says this shift requires marketers to ensure their email is recognized by either the from or subject lines. The design of emails can be as important as the content, as marketers should have several important factors for mobile email in mind.

“One of the larger concerns today is we just don’t know who’s reading emails on the mobile device,” says Michele Eichner, COO & Vice President of Client Development, Pivotal Veracity, a leading independent email delivery auditing and optimization company for large enterprises. “Even if you were to design emails specifically for mobile customers, you actually don’t really know who today is reading on a mobile phone. And part two of that is which mobile phone…That’s probably our number one challenge at this point.”

Stewart says a big concern is how what gets delivered to the inbox appears to the user due to a lack of recognized standards for how email design. “Email has become a feature benefit for smartphone manufacturers, each attempting to create an experience better than the competition, developing and adhering to standards are not a priority,” he says. “Worse still, consumers (and business users alike) use a variety of smartphones, they change or upgrade their phones frequently, and it is difficult to predict if the user will first view your email on their mobile phone or their traditional computer.”

Eichner says there are several best practices that can help email marketers to optimize emails and make sure they render well on various devices.

Pivotal Veracity’s Tips for Improving Cross Platform Email Performance:

1.    Rendering differs by email client:
•    Use short, concise URLs that work across all operating systems
•    Test what your email will look like and render to see what the customer experience might be.
2.    Images off is the new norm:
•    Emails heavy with images are not likely to be seen. Expect images to be off and pitch your message by clearly identifying who it is from.
•    Maximize your subject line and have your call to action in the top lines of the email to draw immediate attention.
3.    Size does matter:
•    There are different ways of looking at an email message on various operating systems and devices. This is why it’s important to test your message to take into consideration how the message will be received.

4.    URLs- quick mobile makeovers:
•    How you code URLs matters, to ensure that they click through across various mobile operating systems
•    Add a very short link (TinyURL) to the top of the email message to offer a mobile version of the message on a Web page.

“Too many marketers use the same URL generation systems for other links, images, etc. to develop their mobile version links which causes issues,” says Eloqua’s Dayman. “Make your landing pages smart! If you can get really fancy with your content and web designers, they can code the web systems to understand what version of a mobile device browsing software the device is using to visit the landing page and serve up an optimized webpage for viewing for that particular device.”

Pivotal Veracity’s Eichner says more operating systems and mobile devices are now supporting HTML and images, which is a positive trend for marketers. “It’s going to make it easier for consumers to want to read an email on the mobile device, which is nice,” she says. “It’s going to take some times for the population to buy these smartphones that have these capabilities, but it’s a trend we’re seeing. It’s going to be more user-friendly to do so, which is the biggest advantage from a marketer’s perspective.”

Eloqua’s Dayman says one of the most important things for marketers is to make sure the entire email is NOT an image. “Similar to regular email clients that tend to suppress images, you should ensure the mobile version doesn’t lead or take up most of the message restate space with an image,” he says. “You should use ALT tagging which will place useful identity text where images and logos are blocked or not rendered. Again, ensure the important message/words are at the top of the subject line and body of the message in HTML/text. This is typically the call to action or offer line.”

If the message is primarily a marketing message, ExactTarget’s Stewart advise marketers to continue to focus on optimizing the message for reading in traditional email clients, while making a few simple adjustments that benefit the mobile reader while improving the traditional experience at the same time:

Use a pre-header to communicate the key value or call to action in the message. This should go above “View as a webpage” or “View as mobile” links in order to ensure the key benefit is shown on the mobile screen.
Keep messages short, sweet, and too the point. This is especially important in mobile environments, but it’s a good practice in email anyway.
Use ALT tags for any and all images.
Continue to send emails as multi-part messages, paying attention to the text version.
Create a separate mobile email version that is the destination page behind your “View as mobile” link.
Think through the call to action. If consumers must go to your website to take action on your message, then consider if the landing pages have been optimized for the mobile environment or not. Your audience will dictate if it makes sense to create a separate mobile experience.

For companies looking for marketing campaigns in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go. CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads through great marketing campaigns and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create marketing campaigns for their lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

The big and almost free marketing initiative almost no one is doing today

Published July 25, 2009 Demand Generation , Lead Nurturing Leave a Comment

What marketing initiative costs very little, delivers a 20% increase in sales and is currently being used by less than one out of ten business to business sellers today?

It’s lead nurturing, and a study by DemandGen Report (who recently published an article from this blog) did a study in late 2008 and found that only 8% of respondents currently have an automated lead nurturing strategies and processes in place. The remaining 92% have failed to establish a process for longer term leads and are leaving money on the table but allowing prospects to leak and buy from competitors.

“We’ve become better at improving the percentage of prospects that are moving successfully though the pipeline and we need fewer prospects to satisfy our sales targets.” says John Watton, VP of Marketing at ShipServ. ”The result is a massive 225% increase in the volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities, a massive validation of the effectiveness of greater collaboration between marketing and sales.”

In order to achieve maximum results from lead nurturing, it needs to be combined with a lead scoring system. This ensures that only the best propects enter the lead nurturing funnel. BANT (Budget, Access to Power, Needs and Timeframe) combined with other factors lets you personalize the lead nurturing content used.

For a great write-up on this, I invite you to download this white paper from my partner, Marketo.

RealROIofLeadNurturing

Let your customers do the selling

Published July 21, 2009 Demand Generation , Fearless Competitor , Management best practices , lead generation Leave a Comment

Whom do buyers trust? They trust credible people, like customers and partners.

On your website, you should have video clips of your customers talking about the results they got from your products or services. Put it front and center. Short, direct and the the point. Check out Avitage to see a great example of how one company puts the people up front.

Salespeople should be armed with customers stories in slides and other marketing content.

In all of this content, customers should describe the solution from their point of view — the problem that was fixed, what resulted, how long it took, how it improved their competitive position.

Let others do the talking for your business and watch the results pour in.

Website Makeovers: 3 Things Buyers Want on Your Website

Published July 15, 2009 Fearless Competitor , Marketing , lead generation 2 Comments

Found this excellent post by Vickie Sullivan at RainToday, and I share it below. Always trying to bring my readers the best articles and ideas, whether I write them or not. Your website is the front window of your buiness today and the single most important thing you must focus on if you are to do demand generation, lead generation or find new customers.

By Vickie Sullivan, Contributing Editor, RainToday

Recessions beget reinvention. And reinvention begets a boom in new and improved websites. But website overhauls shouldn’t be taken lightly. They take time and money—in most cases, more than you initially expect. Before you leap into that huge investment, stop and look at your website plans from the buyers’ perspective. What are they looking for and what makes them reach out and contact you? What needs to be on the site so that you can get more qualified leads? Before deciding on the bells and whistles, compare your changes to what buyers want on your site.

Generally speaking, buyers are on the Internet because they are looking for something. There is an agenda; no one has time to explore aimlessly. While different buyers want different things, here are three things all prospects want to find on websites:

1. Hold Up a Mirror

Use Your Website to Attract Buyers

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The first thing buyers look for on a website: themselves. Anyone with a healthy self-esteem believes he is unique. It’s natural to look for help from those who “get” us. If your buyers are small businesses, they will skip over a site that focuses on the Fortune 500. If your buyers are affluent retirees, they will leave any site that looks like a teenager designed it. Buyers look for sites that speak directly to them about their situation and their goals. It’s a safety factor. The last thing anyone wants is to cram a square peg into a round hole.

Because everything moves faster on the Internet, buyers’ decisions are made in a nanosecond, without a lot of thinking. The determining factors: direct language and descriptions of their world.

There are three ways your website can hold up a mirror:

Name your buyers. I love the “we specialize” language. Example: “We specialize in mid-sized companies that need the best talent to keep growing.” It’s clear; it’s to the point.
Describe their goals or problems. Ever see a headline on a home page that is a series of questions? That’s an effective strategy borrowed from direct sales. Those questions help visitors say to themselves, “Hey! That’s exactly where I am right now.”
Seduce with an idealized future. Capture their imagination with a solution. Everyone wants a magic bullet. Authors do this best. One of my favorites is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Who doesn’t want their idea to catch fire?

Additionally, you can’t identify with the buyer only once. You must do it over and over again. Small things reinforce the recognition. List speeches you give in their industry to show that you’re popular with their community. Choose your white paper/article topics carefully. Relevance is everything.

2. You vs. Them: How Do You Compare?

Do you want to pay for advice that you already know? No. When hiring professional service firms, decision makers look for someone who knows more than them. They want advice or products from someone who knows something they don’t. When they go to your website they compare themselves to you and look for things that show that your area of expertise is one or two levels ahead of them.

If buyers perceive you as a peer in your game, they believe they know just as much as you. If they perceive you as a solution for “beginners” (and they are “advanced”), then the assumption is that your solution is too basic. It gets worse: if you are too advanced for them, then the reaction becomes, “Gee, I don’t know if I’m ready for this. I’ll work with you later.”

To make this comparison, buyers look for two things on your website: prominence and unique content. Website design shows prominence, as does media coverage and speech calendars. All the cool projects you participate in and any awards you receive are great prominence-builders. As for content, the focus is narrow, the thinking is intelligent, and the language is simple. My motto: go an inch wide and a mile deep. Your content proves to buyers that you bring something to the party but are also easy to understand and work with. The balance is between being knowledgeable and providing value.

3. Clear and Easy Navigation

Once you’ve proven yourself as a worthy consideration, buyers then look for how you can help them. They want to check out what you offer and figure out the best way to work with you. To save time, they want to have an idea in mind before contacting you. If they see an option that’s “just perfect,” you have a much warmer prospect than a general inquiry.

When buyers are interested, they use the next benchmark to determine this clarity: how easily can they find your services? No one wants to spend a lot of time hunting on your site. That’s why navigation is so important. Have a services button on every page and a link to the services section of your website in every PDF file. You also want to be careful not to make your service section too big. Have no more than four or five items in your drop-down menu. When it comes to web surfing, everyone has the attention span of a gnat. If it’s more than two clicks away, visitors will give up and move on.

Another thing buyers love to do in the spirit of clarity: self select. Again, they are looking for a mirror. They want to find that elusive “just perfect” option. That’s why I have two sections on all my service descriptions. The first is titled, “This option is perfect for you if…” In it I list the challenges this project solves. The next section goes to the dark side. I list all the scenarios that my option won’t fix. I then link those problems to my other products and services. Result: over 90% of my prospects are not only excited about working with me, but they want to explore something specific. Even if we figure out that they need something different, their enthusiasm makes our conversations easier.

Once buyers determine they are interested in your services, they want to know what to do next. That’s why every page needs a call to action—one of those boxes that says, “If you’re interested, do this now.” Be sure to customize those buttons—nothing looks more canned than the standard “call us now” link. Put your “contact us” button on every page. It sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how many times I’ve had to hunt for an email to ask a question before placing my order. Again, buyers not only need clarity on what to do next but also easy access to information.

Reach Out and Connect

You don’t sell widgets; you sell solutions. Your services have price tags beyond impulse purchases. Therefore, your websites are built to do one thing: get buyers to reach out and connect with you. So the next time you gear up for a website makeover, ask yourself this: “How does this change what I’m about to invest in to help my buyers see themselves, see my unique talents, and determine what works for them?” Use these three benchmarks as your north star, and your new website will be worth all the effort you put into it.

Vickie Sullivan, President of Sullivan Speaker Services, Inc., is nationally recognized as the top market strategist for experts on the professional speaking circuit. Since 1987, she has worked with thousands of experts in a wide variety of industries to launch their big-fee speaking, professional service, and book/product empires in highly lucrative markets. Contact Vickie by emailing info@sullivanspeaker.com.

The best lead generation blogs – all in one place

Published July 11, 2009 Demand Generation , Fearless Competitor , inbound marketing , lead generation , marketing campaigns 1 Comment

One of the things that marketers find difficult is finding fresh and innovative ideas in marketing campaigns, lead generation, demand generation, or as I like to say, find new customers.

There’s a new website that brings you the best of all the lead generation blogs. The B2B Marketing Zone. The B2B Marketing Zone is a marketing community site that was launched as collaborative effort between Tom Pick and Tony Karrer.

I’m honored that this blog is included in the B2B Marketing “Rock Stars” list, along with such luminaries as Brian Carroll, Ardath Albee’ MarketingInteractions, Paul Dunay’s Buzz Marketing for Technology; Jon Miller’s Modern B2B Marketing and the like.

If you are looking for experts in B2B marketing, I recommend you check out the B2B Marketing Zone.

How to Find New Customers

Published July 2, 2009 Demand Generation , Lead Nurturing , Management best practices , lead generation Leave a Comment

“Don’t know how I connected w Jeff Ogden, but he’s author of hot white paper “How to Find New Customers.”

Liked it a lot. So much written re: demand gen, but most is too complex.

Ogden makes it simple, so it’s a ‘Must Read” and him a ‘Must Interview.’

Craig Rosenberg, the Funnelholic, in an interview with Mr. Ogden.

“I think Jeff Ogden’s whitepaper is excellent and this interview is as well.”

Jeff Gaus, CEO, Prolifiq Software

Click here to read the entire interview

The 2 Biggest Mistakes of B2B Sellers

Published July 1, 2009 Demand Generation , Lead Nurturing , Management best practices , Marketing , lead generation , sales leadership Leave a Comment

The bottom line: Companies need to find and acquire new customers. But most don’t do it very well.

Companies suffer from being overly dependent in two critical areas:

Revenue from existing customers:Executives tell me they get as much as 75% or even 85% of revenue from existing customers and very little from new customers.That’s not healthy. New customers grow market share and bring in future maintenance and upgrade streams. Worse, leaving them to be won by your competitor is a recipe for disaster.At least 50% of your revenue should come from net new customers.
Leads from salespeople:
In 2008, over 1/2 of all company leads are self generated by salespeople, according to CSO Insights. That’s up from 40% in 2006. That number is heading in the wrong direction.If your salespeople are pounding the phones, emails, etc. to find leads — they’re not selling.

At least 1/2 of all deals closed in a year should originate in Marketing.