MarketSense

My Sales 2.0 Vendor Marketing Scorecard

A little less than a month ago I attended the Sales 2.0 conference. All attendees registering for the conference provided their contact information including their email and phone numbers. Being a marketer, I expected that all of the sponsors of the conference would be given the attendee list to perform their own lead follow-up. This was Sales 2.0 after all.

I had high expectations from these vendors who should be using the latest and greatest marketing techniques. But the real life experiences were so dreadful that I thought I would share some of them with you. I have used a grade-style rating system for each vendor featured here. The vendor names are not provided to protect the guilty.

Vendor #1

The first email I got from this vendor made catchy use of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday to offer me a discount. Points for cuteness. But the email itself looked amateurish and sloppy. It highlighted some old and new features but did not provide any URLs to their web site to allow me to investigate further. The only call to action was to call a sales person. Not likely for an introvert like myself. I rate my first impression a “C”.

I received the second email from this vendor a week later. What a difference a week makes. This email was obviously researched and sent by a real person. In fact, the person not only said that they researched my company but included details that showed me that they researched my company. Big points here. But once again, the email itself contained key features, all nicely underlined. But none of those underlined features were links to content on the web site. This second response rated a “B” with me. I did reply and mention that I wasn’t interested. I even got a thank you for my reply. Now let’s see whether their automated system continues to bug me.

Vendor #2

Vendor #2 first contacted me about three weeks after the conference. The email they sent was a generic email to register for an IDC white paper. It was not signed by a person and included no links to their web site or to contact them. It was register or nothing. I was curious enough about the IDC value that I read the first sentence. But it was so long and convoluted, that I quickly deleted the email. First contact rating, a “D”.

One day later, I got an email signed by a person. It started with the sentence, “I wanted to follow up and thank you for attending Sales 2.0 and speaking with vendor name here”. Very bad news for this vendor. I did not speak with them at the conference. I didn’t even hand any representative of the company a business card at the conference. That said, the email did have a direct link to a demo on their web site. Bad news, the link showed the ugliness of the URL rather than a good hyperlink. O.k. Some training of their account reps is needed. But then there were these weird links to two other demos (these were actually formed better) that kind of trailed the signature. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get over the opening line of the email and sent the poor account rep a note pointing out the approach flaws. I did not get a reply from him. Second contact rating, an “F”. This interaction so turned me off that I quickly decided never to buy from them.

Six days later, this vendor's auto-generation machine is working fine. I got another generic email to register for a different white paper. Time to unsubscribe. (By the way, how did I get subscribed in the first place? I never "opted in" to anything. Isn't this spam?)

Vendor #3

Sometime before Vendor #2 sent me the personalized email, Vendor #3 sensitized me to the wrong opening approach. At the end of my work day (5:00 pm PDT), I got a phone call from an account rep at Vendor #3. They started by mentioning my visit to their booth at the Sales 2.0 conference. You can see where this is going. I politely indicated that I hadn’t done so. The rep recovered nicely (you can do that on the phone) and used the opportunity to give me a one line description of what her company did. This was helpful. Then, as I indicated I wasn’t interested, she asked me if I wanted to be removed from their call list. A verbal unsubscribe! Bless her heart. I said “yes”. This won Vendor #3 big points (and probably is helping keep their database clean too). I rate Vendor #3 an “A”.

Tune in to my next blog entry to get my list of dos and don’ts for email marketing.

Are You Sending Your Prospects to Your Competitor’s Web Site?

This sounds like an absurd question. You would have to be pretty foolish to have links from your web site to your competitor’s site. It would have to be a significant oversight if you named your competitor(s) in any web copy. But just because you don’t have a direct link to your competitor’s web site doesn’t mean you aren’t sending your prospects there.

In this day and age of Google search, your prospects don’t even have to be that savvy to identify your competitor(s). If your competition’s marketing team is any good, both of you are showing up in the top 10 Google results list. But that isn’t what I am talking about here.

When a prospect arrives at your web site, you have the ability to both reduce the time a prospect spends on a competitive web site as well as to stop them from going there altogether. What would it be worth for you to be able to stop your prospects dead in their tracks on your site?

Marketers are always looking for the mechanism that will make their web site sticky. Often we turn to the use of gimmicks in the attempt to keep the attention of prospects and customers. Home pages are full of moving flash animations, “what’s new” company news sections, flashing corporate headlines, offers, deals, and advertisements. We can be so busy creating these mechanisms that we are missing the single, most effective sticky attraction.

That attraction is comprehensive, well-organized, effectively presented information.

Prospects arrive at your web site looking for information. Depending upon the prospect, he/she may start with very little or a lot of knowledge about your product, technology, and services. The job of your web site should be to help them discover what they don’t know but need to know. Your web site should be the one stop shop for all information regarding your solution, its technology, its value, and its applicability. And this information should be organized in such a way that it is easy for your prospect to locate, consume, and return to resume their exploration where they left off.

I know marketers and sales managers who want to keep information close to their chest. I used to be one of them. We may do this because we fear disclosing too much information to our competition via the public forum the web presents. (This begs the question of how weak is the competitive advantage our product and organization offers.) In other cases, we want to “force” their prospects to come directly to us (call a sales rep) so that we can feed the prospect our valuable information and control the conversation.

Either way, when a prospect’s information needs aren’t answered via information on your web site, you are inviting them to visit a competitor’s web site.

That is how you drive your prospects to a competitor’s web site.

But you say, if they are interested and their questions aren’t answered, the prospect will contact us and start that conversation. Think again. For most prospects, it is much easier and a lot less threatening to continue the search for their answers via the Internet (after all that is how they found you) than to call you and start a conversation.

How to get Marketing Involved in Sales 2.0

I am here at the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Between the sessions, our host interposed a question that was asked in the conference coverage on Twitter (got to love it). The question was,

"How do we get marketing involved in Sales 2.0.”

There was silence in the room. That silence speaks volumes.

I believe that there are 2 ways that companies can use Sales 2.0 to foster a collaborative environment between sales and marketing.

1. Cooperate in the development of buyer personas.


In his introduction to panel participation, Brett Wallace from Forrester Research talked about how they created buyer personas for their different audiences. They had even gone so far as to create life-size blow-ups of "people" who represented their different buyer personas and positioned them throughout the office. This keeps those personas at the top of everyone's mind.

A buyer persona is a profile of a type of prospect. It describes the attributes that help you understand:




• who they are


• what their role is


• what their need is


• what their motivation is


• what their behavior looks like



Both marketing and sales have unique insight into these archetypes. That is why this is a perfect mechanism to use to bring the teams together under the Sales 2.0 umbrella. Both organizations will benefit from the unified perspectives the buyer persona offers.
2. Collaborate in understanding and aligning with the prospect’s buying process.

There has been a lot of talk about the buying process here at the conference. There is universal agreement that supporting and sustaining the prospect’s buying process is a fundamental component of Sales 2.0.

Once again, both marketing and sales co-own support of the prospect’s buying process. Marketing activities including promotion and education (think corporate web site) are critical to ushering the prospect into the buying process and building persuasive momentum. At some point, sales takes over and hopefully builds the momentum to a close.

In order to ensure persuasive momentum through the prospect’s buying process, marketing and sales must both understand, collaborate, and coordinate their activities. At any point where the persuasive momentum breaks down, everyone loses regardless of who is holding the prospect at that point.

At the conference, a lot of the talk about getting marketing and sales to align has been around metrics, speaking the same language, etc. However, I think the faster, more effective way to align them is to create a collaborative environment by developing buyer personas and the buying process together.

Success in a Sales 2.0 World - the Buying Process

In my blog entry Success in a Sales 2.0 World - a Marketing Viewpoint, I talked about how critical it is for marketing and sales to cooperate together to support the prospect’s buying process. Together, they must craft a seamless buying experience that builds the prospect’s persuasive momentum. I’ll talk more about persuasive momentum in future posts. Today I want to focus on a new tool that helps gets marketing and sales talking about the buying process.

Traditional marketing texts (Philip Kotler, et al.) discuss the typical five stage buying process as: need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post purchase behavior. This standard buying process describes deliberated purchases made by consumers. It applies less to impulse purchases. It is only a piece of the puzzle of more complex corporate purchases.

In his book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, Bryan Eisenberg takes a closer look at the buying process. In particular, he describes a couple of additional stages with the purpose of calling out important details that often get lost in the five stage process.

I have leveraged both of these sources to describe the deliberated buying process as follows:

1. Awareness of a need


2. Frame the need


3. Research the framed need


4. Define the decision criteria


5. Narrow down alternatives


6. Choose an alternative to buy


7. Make the purchase


8. Reevaluate the purchase decision

I have created a new eBook, Understanding the Buying Process, as a tool to help marketing and sales explore their roles in their prospect’s buying process. To help marketing and sales understand the process, each stage is defined and illustrated by examples. That is just the foundation. Each stage includes a section called “Define your role” that helps marketing and sales

1. Realize that the buyer is in control


2. Think like the buyer thinks


3. Uncover holes in the buying process that are not addressed by the marketing and sales processes


4. Prepare to plug those holes in the marketing and sales processes


5. Create a seamless experience that supports the buyer through every step of their buying process

It is my hope that this eBook will help open up a dialog about the buyer that encourages the participation of both the marketing and sales organizations. As you try it, please let me know about your experiences using it.