SMB Marketing Blog

Wellesley, Mass. - January 25, 2010. THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that ActiveConversion has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies as an initiative aimed at bringing greater attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of eHow To Guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging.  From the summary:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, click on the image!

ActiveConversion recently published a lead nurturing guide that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With lead nurturing B2B marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

Last week at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference, ActiveConversion was invited to be part of a panel on email marketing. The panel covered some basics on email marketing along with specific applications on campaigning within Salesforce, lead nurturing and the impact that social media has on email marketing.

An interesting observation I took away was that many B2B Marketers are not using email marketing on a regular basis.  I feel like this is something which we take for granted, because we have been using email marketing for so long.  I thought it would be valuable to cover the 5 tips for email marketing which were covered in the presentation:

1. Targeted Lists – Ensure you spend the time when building your lists to segment them.  This allows you to send out more targeted messages and offers, which will help give you a higher response rate and better return on your efforts.  Fields to segment on include: Country, City, Zip, Phone, Company size, Job title/level, past purchases, Age, Gender, etc
2. Targeted, Relevant & Fresh Content – Build messages which are relevant to those groups which you’ll be targeting in your offer. Use fresh content and offers to encourage the desired outcome of your email (ex. New whitepaper, limited time discount, new product announcement, etc)
3. Tracking and Reporting – To improve the quality of your email marketing be sure to use the built-in tools for tracking or reporting of your marketing campaigns.  Some of the metrics you may choose to measure success on include: Unique open rates, Unique click-through rates, Delivery success rate, Conversions and Unsubscribes, and Post click-through activity scoring.
4. Go Viral – Email is a great means to get your marketing messages out because they are easily forwarded and shared with others.  Make it easy for your emails to be forwarded or shared by your recipients
5. Permission is everything – Allow prospects to opt-in to receive your marketing messages and respect their privacy and requests if they choose to unsubscribe. When you are requesting information from your prospects, ensure you make it clear that their information will not be sold or rented to any third parties and it is being collected to be able to provide information on your company’s products and services

You can view the recording of this presentation and panel discussion here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eAkoptsBG0

In the “olden days”, a web site was part of an SMB’s collateral; you had one because it equaled credibility, or because everyone said you had to have one.  It was part and parcel of the main “all or nothing” goal of marketing; get them to call your phone number.  You were sceptical of anyone who came near you wanting to talk about Web Marketing because the ROI from your website was terrible.

Since the “olden days” Google has fundamentally changed the landscape.  How many of us recycle the last version of the yellow pages unopened when the new one comes out?

The study found an overwhelming number (85 percent) of business buyers go online during the purchasing process, and 83 percent found the vendor from which they eventually purchased online. Of those using the Internet, over 70 percent start with a search engine.[source]

So the new goal is to get found by Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), driving potential customers to your website.  Other tools drive traffic to your site; PPC and banner ads, email campaigns, link referrals, and drip or nurture email campaigns, are all ways to increase the number of visitors and eyeballs looking at your website.

But instead of just pushing these visitors to do what the brochure of old asked them to do (call your business phone number), a new breed of software – Marketing Automation Software -  is letting your website be much more than a brochure.  This new breed of Marketing Automation software, of which ActiveConversion is one example, uses a well designed SaaS based solution as a heart rate monitor, measuring which of your potential customers have a faster pulse.  By faster pulse I mean which ones spend a lot of time on your site and visit a lot of pages vs those that see one page and leave.  Which are so interested that they come back a second time, and execute goal clicks, calls to action, or fill out forms?  Which among your anonymous visitors exhibit the same behaviours, and are worth cold calling?

This class of SaaS based solution keeps a long-term history of the heart rate read-out for your website, they spot trends, show buy signals by showing historical click streams, and announce when a potential customer is worthy of one of your limited sales cycles, worthy of a phone call from you, instead of passively waiting for them to contact you.

Strap a heart rate monitor on your website!

Our 'burning' Lighter

I caught up with an old colleague this week that I hadn’t seen in years. We traded stories and did the ‘where are they now’ thing and talked about how we had taken the career paths we had. As diverse as those paths were and the different businesses that we’re in, we ended up on the topic of social media. Amazed at the power, yet still respectfully wrestling on how to fully capitalize. As an aficionado of great consumer electronic products, he quickly brought out his iPhone and showed me an app from Smule, the Sonic Lighter . He fired it up and I saw a very real looking natural flame flicker on the screen, that waved back and forth with movement of the iPhone and the flame even flickered when you blew on it … kind of cool, but I quickly dismissed it as a novelty at best. The big ‘so what’? Then he connected the iPhone to the network, and with a view of google earth, he said, “check it out, these are all the Sonic flames ‘burning’ in the world right now”. The world? Right now?. It was amazing to see at that global level. He navigated to north America, zoomed down to a street level view of the city, and there was ‘our’ flame flickering on the map. A couple of blocks over, another flame. I’ve been in the GPS industry and around technology for many years, so that part I got. And we all remember the hype around LBS apps and the press on ‘find the nearest Starbucks’, but the concept struggled on a number of fronts. Yet now,  there it was. A global, ubiquitous platform of iPhones which provided a medium for these colored flames – A community, so simple, yet so powerful. Most of what we’ve seen with the iPhone to-date is at the personal or consumer level and centered around entertainment, but there are B2B marketers all over the world salivating and looking to take advantage of this reach.  As a B2B Marketer, are you going to be one of the pioneers …… i-Marketing.

Boxers or Briefs?

BTW – Smule is now running global polls based on flame color. So for $0.99 download the iPhone app and take part in that long standing debate … briefs or boxers. To track the world’s preference, view the Smule Under-pants Map at http://app.smule.com/soniclighter/boxerbrief/.

BTW -As real as the flame appeared, it’ll never replace the waving back and forth of the good old bic flame at a great concert ….. now i’m just dating myself

A Complex Sale is simply defined as one where there is more than one person participating in the purchase decision. This may be a single decision-maker supported by various official and unofficial influencers or many decision-makers. With small business defined as those with fewer than 100 employees, and medium-sized business with fewer than 1000 employees, many B2B transactions will involve a complex sale.

Complex sales take longer to close and the chief risk is wasted resource expenditure on unwinnable deals.  A formalized sales process mediates risk by answering the ‘fit’ questions before the process can proceed from one stage of the sales cycle to the next.  A formal Sales Process is a form of qualification that assures and optimizes revenue generation.

You can develop your own Sales Process but I highly recommend that you adopt or customize proprietary methodologies such as Miller Heiman.  Many SFA (Sales Force Automation) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools embody the principles of these Sales Processes.

A critical component of your sales process is modeling the decision-making process of your target customer.  Often they will have a semi-formal process for purchase decisions.  In this case you have a ready-made model which the target customer will generally disclose to you.

The Sales Cycle assumes intelligence-gathering at every stage but the initial stage is probably the most important.  Your first contact into the target customer is the Entry Point.  Often individuals in organizations are tasked with vetting vendors.  In traditional businesses this individual is called a purchasing agent.  In technology companies it may be a Product Manager.  Whatever the title and function, you must identify this individual, engage that individual and persuade sufficiently to allow you to proceed to the next step.

Just as importantly, you must gather the information you need to help you decide if it is worthwhile to proceed to the next step.  To the less experienced this may be opposite of what should be done, but it is essential to a winning Sales Process.  Think of discarding cards on your way to a winning poker hand.