B2B Lead Generation: We all work so hard, but whom do we really work for?

What the real reason we work so hard?

Regardless of the name on our paychecks, the fact is that we work for our families. We want to be a good provider.

I love my wife and kids – and I want to take care of them. I’m sure you feel the same way about your family too.

Think Outside-In

Let’s also share an important point today about how to think about your business – and the need to think outside in rather than inside out. This means you work from the point of view of your customers back to you, rather than from your company’s products and services to your customers. Most companies work inside out today.

I shared the following story with Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage and Jim told me “Jeff, you and I have been thinking this way for so long, that it’s a no-brainer for us. But for most companies, it is a revolutionary idea.” I agree, Jim.

I was with the owner of an insurance agency – a new client. He said to me “I sell insurance, Jeff. That’s what I do.”

I said “No offense, Ray, but you’re wrong. Here’s what your company really does:”

You help people take risk out of their lives and protect the people and things they love.

Isn’t that what insurance is all about? He said “Wow! I LOVE how you put that! You really opened my eyes.”

I’m glad I was able to open his eyes to a service mindset – which is imperative in business today.

How about you? Do you focus on what you sell or the way you serve? Try focusing on the latter. It works.

Have a great weekend and thanks for your support of the B2B lead generation consultancy Find New Customers.

How to Find New Customers

P.S. We calculated our grades yesterday using Hubspot’s Grader.com. (I suggest you do the same on your domains too.) Not bad scores, especially considering our domains (findnewcustomers dot net and fearlesscompetitor dot com) were stolen last Fall…and these scores are for our new domains.

• Find New Customers, the b2b lead generation consultancy company site, scores 98.3 out of 100
• Fearless Competitor, our B2B lead generation and marketing blog(which publishes about 12-15 times a week), (this blog) gets 95 out of 100
• @fearlesscomp, our Twitter id, gets 100 out of 100

In honor of April Fool’s Day, we share the top historic hoax. There was no Trojan Horse.

http://polls.linkedin.com/vote/126893/zuqur

Let’s have some fun. Please vote on which of these shows you like best.

Is it Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or one of the others? Please share your thoughts in this Linkedin poll.

Misc ramblings on a Sunday morning

We’re turning our great new cheat sheet on B2B lead nurturing, 7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing into a series.

Here’s what it’s going to look like:

• 7 Keys to Successful Lead Scoring
• 7 Keys to Successful Social Media Marketing
• 7 Keys to Successful Buyer Personas
• 7 Keys to Successful…… and so forth

Each one will look alike and publish every 60 days. The first is done. The next comes out next month. Then June, August, October, December, etc.

Why? Repetition and consistency are critical in marketing. Common themes reinforce messages.

Reading “Poke the Box” by Seth Godin. The message is simple.

Start something. Take initiative.

We started Find New Customers. Playing hoops this morning I spoke to a man working for an IT firm. He wanted to start a business, but never started anything. Why not? Fear of failure. As Seth says, we are programmed in our lizard brain to fear failure. Keep trying and keep failing. If you fail enough times, you become a big success.

We also did a review for an upcoming book on sales. That was fun. But it does not publish till April 19, so I’m sworn to secrecy.

Hiring mistakes

Don’t know how many times I’ve seen this, but it is a problem even with senior executive hires (VP and above)

We look for industry knowledge, leadership experience, impressive results – the resume looks great and he aces the interviews and yet he’s a bust. Happens all the time. (It’s even happened to me. I’ve hired busts off resumes too.) I actually wrote a blog article on a certain football coach (at my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame), who, on paper, looked perfect. BleacherReport.com just named him the second worst college football coach of all-time.

What’s wrong here? Why do we all make so many hiring errors? Not just corporate hiring, but the NFL draft, college recruiting, etc. (e. g. Ryan Leaf was the second player drafted in 1998 and played in only 25 games. Joe Montana was the 82nd player drafted in 1979 and is in the NFL Hall of Fame.)

To examine why experience (resumes, etc) is such a poor predictor of the future, look at the factors which make the best executives successful.

Here’s how Expert Magazine sums up a great leader:

• Ethical: Just, Upright, Honest, Open, Straight Forward, Honorable
• Credible: Forward Looking, Inspiring, Visionary
• Politically Astute: Knowing how to build coalitions and make compromises so that groups with disparate goals will work together toward a common goal
• Competent: Combining education, experience and skills that tell followers that this person knows what they are doing.
• Concerned for Organization vs. Concerned for Self

But do those characteristics that define great leaders show up on resumes? No they don’t.

To gain deeper insights, I suggest you look at recommendations on Linkedin, content they’ve created – like blog articles, eBooks, white papers, YouTube videos, etc. You should also run their websites, blogs and social media profiles through the free tools from Hubspot at www.grader.com.  For instance, TwitterGrader will calculate their reach and credibility and assign a score of 1-100, with 100 being the best. (Try it on mine, @fearlesscomp, if you wish.)

Resumes are so unreliable that I strongly encourage businesses to throw in a couple of interesting candidates to the list of usual subjects for interviews. It may cost a bit more and take a bit longer, but you’ll also find some real gems.

For another view, please read Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude)

My Fighting Irish defeated Akron in March Madness on Friday. Cool! They play Florida State late tonight. Fingers crossed. My Irish made the Final Four in 1979, my freshman year – the ND high water mark.

Here’s a video I created about our awesome and free white paper on B2B lead generation, How to Find New Customers.

Have a great weekend – at least the last hours of it.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, and the President of Find New Customers is a B2B lead generation and social media expert. He’s also a father and husband.

When assessing candidates for senior roles, how important is industry and position experience?

When designing hiring specs, how important is industry and position experience? Case in point, I just spoke to a large software company looking for a senior marketing executive. They wanted someone in a senior marketing role from a similar company. Why hire a similar background and experience? In their opinion, it lowered the potential risk (of a mistake). At face value, it makes perfect sense. Or does it?

But is this the best approach?

In my opinion, you need to be open-minded. The reality is that simple facts like where they worked and their title is a 2 dimensional view of a 3 dimensional human being. Let’s look at an example:

He did the very same job for another company similar to ours. In fact, he comes from a highly respected company that commands the same kind of respect we get. He’s proved himself in a tough environment. On paper, he looks like the perfect candidate.

That person is Tyrone Willingham, who was hired by my alma mater, The University of Notre Dame.

As most of you know, things did not work out. After one good season (10-3), ND had two very poor ones (5-7 and 6-6). Bad recruiting caused ND to dismiss Coach Willingham after only three years. He went to Washington and after four losing seasons, he was let go. He is now officially “retired,” though he’s only 56 years old.

Coach is fine man but poor coach. Bleacher Report named the all time worst college football coaches - Coach Willingham was #2.

What’s my point? On paper, Coach Willingham was perfect. Great academic school. Some nice successes. The low risk choice.

Here’s one other example. A large business intelligence software firm had three reps handling GE. One did vastly better than the other two.

1. The existing GE rep for our company
2. A new rep with no GE experience
3. The GE rep from our top competitor

On paper, we choose 1 or 3. In reality, 2 clobbered 1 and 3. It was not even close. Why did 2 do so well, when 1 and 3 did not?

2 was a very different kind of person. Prepared, creative and diligent – GE loved his ability to solve their problems. 2 was me.

If predicting the future is really that hard, what should we do instead?

I believe you should start with the key success factors that make people want to follow a leader – compassion, caring, trust, honesty, loyalty.

Then look much deeper. How does she interact with others? How passionate is she? How innovative is she? How articulate is she?

When you are ready to cull your list, I suggest you pick some logical choices, but also take a look at a couple of very different candidates. Find 2 or 3 candidates who look really interesting, but don’t have the requisite experience.  Take a close look at a range of choices. It may take a bit longer and cost a bit more, but there is a good chance you might surprise yourself.

What do you think? What do you think about hiring practices today? Love your comments.

Jeff Ogden is President of the B2B lead generation company Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 150 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers. Use the form below to send me a personal note or Leave a Reply to post a permanent comment on this article.

Brain-dead marketers are everywhere

Sorry, kids but I need to vent a little. Looking for instant results in B2b lead generation? It ain’t there.

I’m shocked at the number of companies who expect instant results. Run a few email blasts and watch the leads pour in?

It ain’t happening. B2B marketing is hard and takes time.  It’s not about campaigns anymore. It’s not about throwing so-called sales leads to salespeople. It’s not about software and tools.

It’s about deep understanding of buyers and their process. It’s about thinking “outside in” instead of “inside out.” – from customers back to us rather than us out to customers. It is about differentiating your company and creating remarkable content. (So people start remarking to each other.)

It’s sad how badly American businesses are run today.

Check out our new lead nurturing cheat sheet in this video clip.

One other thought. I turned the B2BSalesLounge.com over to the company three weeks ago. It was rocking – great posts for the next three weeks lined up to post. Super images in each one too. What happened over the last three weeks?

Nothing. They did not touch the blog. The last post ran Friday. For the first time in months, there is no post running tomorrow – it aways ran Monday to Friday in the past. Way to go, guys. I’ve lost all respect for them.

By the way. the publishing is paying off. Find New Customers is in the top 5 in Google for almost all our keywords.

What do you think?

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 150 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generationexperts at Find New Customers. Use the form below to send me a personal note or Leave a Reply to post a permanent comment on this article.