Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

I agree with Jonathan Block. Organizations do not suffer from lack of content- they just don’t realize that they can use, and reuse, the same content in different ways and across many marketing channels.

Jonathan gives a great example – those whitepapers that we marketers must write and at times it seems that no one really wants to read, are chock full of useful information. In fact, a whitepaper can be used in bits and pieces for months, as material for tweets, emails and blog posts. The average whitepaper is so rich in content that each paragraph can spawn lots of shorter-style content.

It’s not that whitepapers, or longer, detailed, richer-type content, are unnecessary. These do have their place, certainly in later phases of the buying cycle when prospects are ready to dig deeper into your product or service.

But in the initial phases of the buying cycle, most prospects will be very interested in receiving short, concise messages about your product and will not be terribly into reading ten pages of technical information. Remember – they are just skimming at this stage, looking for an overview. Giving them what they want is easy, if you remember that you already have it – you just need to re-wrap the content and present it a little differently, tailoring it to the specific channel you’re using (email, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn) and to the specific prospect.

Sure, if you have more than a handful of customers or prospects, this is easier said than done – it won’t be easy to manage the distribution of content across many channels to many prospect if you want to stay personal with each of them. This is where marketing automation and sales enablement tools become useful, enabling you to automate your lead nurturing efforts to the point where you can take each prospect from initial engagement to a decision, giving them personal attention and helpful information along the way.

Were you surprised to find out that the majority of consumers check their email before they do anything else online? I wasn’t, because I do it too! I think it’s basic human curiosity – email is still more personal than social media channels. Messages we receive via email are meant for us, and often require us to take action. So it’s natural that we would be gravitated towards checking our email first. Kind of like in the past we used to wait for the mailman…

Will you agree with me that if consumers’ first online activity in the morning is to check their email, the same is probably true for B2B buyers? They get into the office, they sit down, start their computer… it makes sense that the first thing they would check is their email.

Which means that when you send these prospects an email, the last thing you want is for that email to be something generic, a message that means nothing to them and will be sent to the trash, or – worse – cause them to unsubscribe. You want your email messages to be targeted, interesting, filled with content that will grab the buyers’ attention.

You also want your emails to be short and concise. I can’t imagine wanting to read a very long message first thing in the morning. You don’t want people to glance at your email and decide it’s too long and they’ll get back to it later, becuase in the vast majority of cases, they won’t.

Way in the past, we used to treat email marketing as one of the easiest forms of marketing. It’s easy, right? You simply blast hundreds, maybe thousands of email addresses with your message and forget about it. But today we know better than to do that. We know that generic email blasts are not just ineffective – they could backfire and cause people to unsubscribe.

Personalized emails that contain the right message for the right recipient at the right time in the buying cycle are essential. Your prospects check their email first thing in the morning. What will they find in their inbox? Will it make them visit your site, hit the delete button, or unsubscribe?

Instead of pouring money into “dialing for dollars,” more and more B2B companies are shifting their teleprospecting investments to qualifying and nurturing prospects that have already shown some interest in their solution.

By focusing on prospects that have had some prior contact, inside sales or call centers typically have much higher success rates in creating opportunities for the sales team because they are spending time on “warm calling” rather than cold calling.

Dan McDade, President of PointClear, a prospect development company that has worked with B2B brands such as Microsoft and D&B, recommends his clients focus on multi-touch, multi-media campaigns to accelerate their pipelines. “Historically, database marketers expected to increase results by up to 8x when following up a direct mail or email campaign with a telephone call,” McDade said. “However, stopping at a single touch leaves anywhere from half to substantially more business on the table for your competitors to grab.”

To maximize pipeline performance, it takes at least nine individual touches, including a minimum of two email messages, according to PointClear’s research. “Our data also shows that the initial contact cycle, the first time you touch the market with those nine individual touches, will yield only 40%-50% of the total opportunities,” McDade added. “The other opportunities existing within the market can only be identified by continuing to touch the same prospects, with the same multi-media, multi-touch strategy on a regular basis.”

Sales intelligence tools not only allow sales reps to do “pinpoint prospecting,” they also help to identify “trigger events,” which can drive short-term sales opportunities. Real-time lead alerts can increase connect rates by up to 10X. Reps armed with website visit history, campaign and detailed prospect information have more confidence and more information to effectively engage with interested prospects. The result is a much higher success rate then traditional, often futile, cold calling.

The economic downturn has created increasingly lengthy sales cycles in the B2B space, making it important for companies to track more website visitors and their interactions on a site over a longer period of time.

Ideally, you want to start gathering data on a visitor to your site from as early a stage as possible, even at the stage where they are still anonymous visitors to the site and haven’t yet identified themselves.

Later, when an anonymous visitor does identify themselves, you want to be able to tie their information back to their activities on your site while they were still anonymous, in order to get a complete picture about this prospect, which would enable your sales rep to better understand their needs and to better communicate with them.

Following the widespread adoption of social media by B2B organizations, your website probably gets a large number of anonymous visitors. Capturing the history of each visitor before they have registered on your site is essential for helping your marketing team to nurture prospects and your sales team to effectively communicate with them.

Realizing the importance of tracking visitors from the very early stages, we have recently expanded out anonymous visitor tracking and have added unlimited anonymous web tracking functionality to our marketing automation and sales acceleration offerings – eTrigue Professional, eTrigue Unlimited and eTrigue SalesPro. The idea is to help companies refine and better target important inbound prospects before they self-identify.

eTrigue gathers and maintains anonymous information of an unlimited number of visitors from their first visit, to their first ‘hand-raiser” action on the website, such as registering for premium content via a form or clicking on a link in an e-mail. This enables you to nurture new relationships more effectively by having greater insight into each prospect’s exact needs and their level of interest before sales make contact.

Better communication with prospects means more sales – after all, from a prospect’s point of view, the worse thing you can do is to give them a generic pitch.