This morning I received an email from Steve Early (Steve Early’s Blog). He is a career sales and marketing professional from Massachusetts and like me an inbound marketing certified professional. He corrected a few mistakes I made in my English presentation on B2B inbound marketing. Additionally, he made some explanatory notes, which were very helpful. I will show, how I work them into the presentation and into the whole concept. This is what I like about the world of social media, blogs etc. Somebody who finds your information interesting just helps you to improve it. Thank you, Steve. By the way: Steve speaks some German and doesn’t do more mistakes than me in English.

But first: The updated presentation.

Let’s take a look at Steve’s first comment.

Not only is corporate decision-making more complex, but due to the economy, I believe it is getting pushed up higher into the organization. This may not be relevant to your pitch, but just as an FYI. I have spoken to sales reps who have told me that $100,000 decisions could be made at a managerial level. Now such an expenditure may need to be signed of on by a Senior VP, or even go before the Board of Directors. When decision making gets pushed up like this, the requestor had better have his/her act together (lots of research done on the investment and its impact). The expectations for ROI have also increased significantly. (Instead of payback in 1 year, it has to produce in 3-4 months or forget it.)

Steve is right and I am sure, it is important for my pitch. When the decision-making climbs up to C- or VP level, the person preparing the decision must do a much better job. Therefore, he needs to be better informed and inbound marketing should be the source of his information. Additionally, he has to translate the technical information into business advantages. Otherwise he won’t recommend himself for future tasks. The expectations for a faster ROI also mean that the numbers must be better researched. Although I think delivering the right numbers is a sales job, marketing should see this need and deliver what’s possible, e. g. a ROI calculation tool.

Holding backin information is counter productive as is asking the customer for their life history (complex sign-up process) to get valuable information. Keeping it simple is important.

This is currently discussed in a few B2B marketing blogs and forums in Germany. Don’t make it to tough for potential clients to get your information. The question is even if you need a registration before you may download the content. I think no, as long as it is general information or as long as the potential client is to early in his decision making process. If he is still – as Chris Koch names it – in the Epiphany Phase, he won’t be interested in registering and you will loose a potential prospect because he won’t even taka a look at your stuff.

The next comment refers to my following statement: “Marketing is responsible for those three steps (Find, information providing and getting contacted by prospect, nurture marketing and lead qualification). If the (pre-qualified) prospect wants concrete information on a solution, sales steps in.”

I would encourage you to position this as a possible way to do it. There is tremendous value in having sales and marketing both agree to what constitutes a Sales Ready Lead. If they fail to discuss this and agree to a common definition, then sales will always bitch that marketing supplies crappy leads, and marketing will bitch because sales never follows up on all the excellent leads they give them. Common agreement removes a BIG problem in the handling of nurtured and qualified leads. My opinion anyway —

Well, Steve is right. I wanted to be strict and concrete at that point but you can’t generally define the exact moment when marketing hands over a prospect to sales. Additionally, the common sense on a sales ready lead will ease the collaboration between marketing and sales. Therefore, I changed it.

The next comment refers to my following statement: “Prospects do not only limit their supplier search to the internet. To reduce risks they will (Enquiro Research): (…) Ask colleagues inside and outside their own company. (…)

Excellent point. Dr. Geoffrey Moore in his Crossing the Chasm book once defined “a market” as — “any group of people who will reference each other when making a buying decision.” So I think this is a very good point in your pitch.

Although I read Crossing the Chasm (Amazon partner link) at least three times, I didn’t remember. Maybe I missed this point because I read the book in English and you always loose something. Unfortunately it isn’t available in German. Steve makes me think as I do not have a “market” definition in my approach. I’m not sure if it helps to define it that narrow since the internet might make the distinction meaningless. Geoffrey Moore states the following:

If two people buy the same product for the same reason but have no way to reference each other, they are not part of the same market. If a company sells an oscilloscope for monitoring heartbeats to a doctor in Boston and the identical product for the same purpose to a doctor in Zaire, and these two doctors have no reasonable basis for communicating with each other, then the company is dealing in two different markets.

But is this still true? If somebody recommends a marketing book at Amazon I might find his suggestion appealing just because I know about the social control of the recommendation system at Amazon (okay, there is fraud, but we all believe a lot anyway). Well, I’m not sure if this view really helps anymore or under which circumstances. Maybe it’s only relevant for Moore’s case of disruptive innovations.

So, the development of the B2B inbound marketing approach continues. I’m looking forward to your comments.

Tags:

B2B-Inbound-Marketing, Decision-making, Entscheidungsfundung, Sales, Sales-ready-lead
Dieser Eintrag wurde am 24. July 2009 um 22:14 Uhr geschrieben und ist unter gelistet. Sie können alle Einträge über den RSS 2.0 Feed abbonieren. Sie können einen Kommentar posten.