Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

What do customers want from the B2B sales process? While it’s tempting to assume that the most pressing concern is price, research from McKinsey & Company tells us this is not necessarily the case.

Instead, B2B customers are looking for the following:

1. Customers want to be contacted just enough, not bombarded.

2. Sales reps should know their products or services intimately and how their offering compares with those of their competitors.

3. Customers need information on exactly how a product or service will make a difference to their businesses.

This means that B2B sales reps must avoid making the following common mistakes:

1. Making too frequent contact. While you don’t want to neglect warm or hot leads, you definitely don’t want to give a cool lead the feeling that you’re harassing them. Use a sales acceleration system for prospect activity tracking and for making sure you only contact the right prospects at the right time.

2. Making too little contact. On the other hand, you don’t want to neglect your leads. Out of sight out of mind is more than a cliche – it’s actually quite true in life and in sales. Again, automating activity tracking can greatly help with the task of knowing which lead to contact and when.

3. Giving generic pitches. This is a common complaint among B2B buyers. There aren’t many things that are more of a turn-off for a buyer than a sales rep who gives them a generic pitch that clearly demonstrates she is not familiar with the specific customer’s pain points. The customer does not care about your product’s features. All they care about is the product’s benefits – for them.

4. Not having all the info. If a prospect asks questions about the product, or how it is different than the competition’s product, you better be able to answer that question. The only way to make sure you are ready for this type of questions is to have a deeply intimate knowledge of your company’s product. You should also be able to clearly explain how it is different than other offerings on the market.

Lead nurturing is an art, and in the B2B space it’s an important art to master, because long sales cycles mean that marketing doesn’t stop with generating leads – leads often need to be nurtured over long periods of time until they become sales ready.

Here are a few Dos and Don’ts of Lead Nurturing:

DO respect your leads. Listen attentively to their needs, pinpoint their issues and respond with content that answers these issues.

DON’T blast. Among other things, respecting the leads in your database means forgetting about generic email blasts and instead using a marketing automation system to make sure Sales approach the right leads at the right time, with the right solution.

DO create targeted content. The best way to maintain a long-term relationship with a not-yet-sales-ready lead is to create interesting, engaging and useful content that creates value beyond promoting your company.

DON’T nag. While it’s important to keep in touch with your leads and stay top of mind when the time comes for them to buy, you don’t want to harass your leads. Be very careful with how often you make contact, and use a lead scoring system to make sure you contact the warm leads more often.

DO be helpful. You’re obviously after the sale – that’s understandable – but in a long sales cycle, you risk becoming too pushy if all you talk about is how fabulous your solution is. Instead, be helpful to your leads, providing them with useful data, analysis and information that can help them learn more about their problem and about your market – not just about your product.

DON’T ignore anonymous leads. A large amount of your website traffic comes before a visitor actually registers for content or contact, so why miss out on that valuable visit data before they’re “converted?” Use Anonymous Visitor Tracking to identify companies and record each individual visitor’s web activity, starting with their very first visit to your web site.

DO listen to Sales. Listening to Sales and understanding exactly what it is that they need from you, and how they define a “sales-ready” lead, will greatly help you in identifying hot leads that should be passed on to sales, and with avoiding wasting sales reps’ time on leads that need more nurturing.

If you’re a B2B marketer, I’m sure you sometimes long to be marketing a product that is a tad more… exciting. You know, the kind of consumer product that people love to talk about, that they “Like” and tweet and promote in social media simply because they’re loyal to the brand and want to show their support.

Now, I’m not saying that marketing a B2C product is easy! In many cases, competition is fierce and creating that buzz, that consumer loyalty still requires a lot of innovative, creative marketing work. But in the B2B space, marketers are facing a unique challenge – especially these days, with social media becoming part of the B2B marketing mix.

For many B2B brands, growing a social presence is an excruciatingly slow process, and this is fine – you can’t expect an inherently not-exciting product to catch fire and get millions of fans. But you do want your target market to acknowledge your existence and to talk about you, because this is a great way to make sure their friends will hear about you, and their friends’ friends, and so on.

So how do you make people talk about a “boring” B2B product in social media? Simple. Content creation. Give them something to talk about by creating interesting, engaging, highly readable and easily-shared content. Maybe your B2B product is boring, but your content need not be. Get a good writer, make your content easy to read, and make it easy for people to share with social media links and buttons. Then go ahead and promote your freshly created content on your own social networks, leave relevant comments on industry blogs – make your presence known and push your content out.

Will your content catch fire and get millions of page views? No, but this is not your goal anyway. But if each piece of content will get you just one more relevant follower, just one more fan that will share your content with her own network, then you’ve justified the time and money you’ve put into that content.

In the B2B space, you need to give them something to talk about – and adjust your expectations when it comes to the amount of social chatter that each piece of content will generate. Slow and steady is likely the best scenario here.

So much has been written about aligning marketing and sales, about the need to align these organizations and about ways to achieve that. You would think by now we would all be well aligned, working together to promote business goals and close more sales.

And yet, it seems that this particular area is a tough one to master, and that even with the best of intentions on both sides, aligning marketing and sales is an elusive goal.

I enjoyed reading Michael Brenner’s recent post on this topic. I especially agree that “Sales is the customer of marketing,” and if this is true, then we marketers need to treat Sales as our customers.

What does it mean, to treat Sales as our customers? Above anything else, it simply means we should listen. We know that we should listen to our customers. If Sales are our customers, we should listen to them carefully, find out what it is that they need from us, what is missing, and work hard to meet their expectations.

I recently came across an excellent article on USA Today, titled “You have to listen to customers, not just hear them.” The article had really grabbed my attention with its strong story and powerful message, showing that in too many cases, businesses hear customers but they don’t really listen to them. The result: they risk losing those customers (and often, they do).

While Marketing will not lose the Sales department if it doesn’t listen to sales reps, there IS the risk of losing the best sales reps, and there is the even bigger risk of losing leads and losing deals.

Sales is the customer of marketing. We should listen to sales – truly listen – and see how we can work together to make sure Sales receive quality leads from us. A good marketing automation tool will greatly help with keeping track of all your leads, correctly identifying the sales-ready leads so that Sales can contact them right away, and sparing Sales from the need to make cold calls.