Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Anyone who’s ever served in any marketing capacity is painfully aware of how marketing is perceived in many organizations across the country. The CFO might view “marketing budget” as a dark, bottomless pit. Sales reps often accuse marketing folks of being clueless and completely unhelpful, sending them low-quality leads. Traditionally, marketing has often been viewed as a necessary evil, something an organization has to put up with, even though it’s difficult to justify.

But things are changing, and marketers today, at the age of quality content, exact metrics and elaborate reporting, can finally be proud of what they do. Here are a few ways you can be that awesome marketer that people inside and outside the organization respect.

1. Respect the customer. This is true in every market, and especially in the B2B space. Your customers are smart. They are internet-savvy, well-researched, and by the time they show up on your website (by registering to download a demo, for example), rest assured they already have a fairly intimate knowledge of your company and your products. Don’t insult them by trying to spoon-feed them the basic stuff. Use your marketing automation software to find out who they are, what they’ve been doing up until now on your website, and what exactly they need – then address those specific needs.

2. Respect the sales organization. Of course you’re aware of the need to work closely with Sales to determine correct messaging and what constitutes a quality lead. We’re all aware of the importance of marketing-sales alignment. But to be a truly awesome marketer, one that’s respected by Sales, you need to respect sales too. Sales reps, certainly the best ones in your organizations, know a lot. They have intimate knowledge of your customers and their needs, of what works and what doesn’t. Rather than ignoring this knowledge or fight it, listen to it. Working together will serve both your interests as it will culminate in more sales, and now that we are able to measure marketing campaigns’ impact on sales, you will be the hero too.

3. Be useful. Content marketing is important of course, but in the era of the internet, not any content will do. The content you churn out must be extremely useful. It needs to be the kind of content that people enjoy reading – the kind of material that they would want to share. Never worry about giving content for free. Quality content will attract business, generate repeat business, will establish you as a thought-leader, and will very likely translate into better sales numbers.

4. Be social. Are you using social media? I hope you do, because everyone else is, including your customers, your prospective customers, influencers in your space and your competitors. You needs to identify the social media channels most appropriate for your space (Twitter and LinkedIn work great for most B2B companies, while Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram are quite suitable for consumer-facing organizations); then, make sure you’re being truly social. Resist the temptation to only churn out content – this is fine of course, but you should also be listening to others, and responding to them. Social media is about having conversations, not about shouting out your messages to whomever might be listening, and those conversations can actually teach you quite a bit about your space and especially your prospects and their needs.

5. Be accountable. I could be biased, but I happen to think that marketing automation is one of the best things that ever happened to marketers, not just because it’s made our lives easier, but mainly because it finally gave us the tools to measure campaigns and become accountable. Traditionally a bottomless pit, the marketing organization can now defend itself and its budget by drawing a fairly clear line between marketing campaigns and their results. In addition, measuring helps you fine-tune your efforts, weed out the failing campaigns and focus on successful ones.

6. Be efficient. Never do manually something that you can automate. Some tasks are just too error-prone when done manually, and managing a complex marketing campaign is certainly one of them. You have marketing automation software, right? Then use it. And if it’s too complex to use, consider investing in a simple, straightforward, affordable marketing automation system that you’ll actually end up using.

Want to be an awesome marketer? I have five words for you: respect, usefulness, sociability, accountability and efficiency. Oh, and two more that can link all of these together and make your life much, much easier: marketing automation.

Think you’re the one qualifying your leads? Think again. As Scott Gillum recently observed, it is more likely that they are the ones qualifying you, as they browse through your website, compare your offering to your competitors’, and use social media to ask for advice.

So what can you do? Obviously, if prospects are qualifying you based on the content you put out there, you should make sure that content is top-notch. Your website, and more importantly your blog and social media channels, must convey that you know your stuff. If your website is outdated, your last blog post was published six months ago and your Twitter account is dormant, prospects will move on to vendors who actually appear to be on top of their virtual game.

This is not to say that you should divulge everything via free online content. I do agree with Mr. Gillum – good, high-quality content must be published to show you know what you’re doing, but that content should be viewed, for lack of a better word, as bait – used to catch prospects’ attention, earn their respect, and entice them to fill out that web form so that they can get more content from sales (and while you’re at it, use intelligent web forms to reduce web form abandonment).

I also agree that as business decision-makers continue to drive their buyer process deeper into the sales process, relevant content will continue to escalate in value, and that sales will need to move from pushing products to providing insight.

This is actually good news to us marketing automation vendors, because in the new sales process, prospects no longer need generic, mass-manufactured-and-emailed content. What they need is content tailored to their needs, delivered in a timely manner in response to their actions or inquiries, and there’s no better tool to achieve that intimate knowledge on a prospect than a marketing automation system that captures everything they do on your site, including what they did while still anonymous.

The traditional sales process is indeed obsolete, but there’s no need to feel worried. The new process provides exciting opportunities for vendors that are on top of their game to build a convincing online profile and to deliver great content, at the right time to the right prospects. In many ways, the new rules emphasize quality, which is always a good thing – to vendors and to buyers.

Web form abandonment is a big problem for B2B websites, which typically achieve a depressing 10% form completion rate. Since form completion rates are closely related to revenue growth, it’s important to improve these numbers.

Our solution? Dynamic Progressive Forms (DPF), a new kind of dynamic, easy-to-implement web form building technology that comes with eTrigue DemandCenter Marketing Automation and dramatically reduces form abandonment.

The technology intelligently requests information from website visitors, enabling marketers to build logic-based forms and ask website visitors questions based on their specific visit history, activity or demographic information, eliminating stupid, irrelevant or redundant questions and improving completion rates. Using dynamic progressive forms allows you to ask smarter questions and makes it easier to attract and hold interested prospects over time.

On average, customers using eTrigue DPF see a doubling in form completions, and a significant increase in the quality of data collected. By gathering bits of prospect information over time rather than all at once, the reluctance of prospects to complete long forms to gain access to premium web site content is reduced. Geared primarily for B2B lead generation efforts, Dynamic Progressive Forms greatly reduces form abandonment, delivers higher conversion rates, and better aligns marketing and sales efforts.

So how does it work? Contextual logic presents questions that are applicable to the individual prospect, and skips irrelevant questions. But more than just preventing redundant questions, eTrigue DPF poses questions based upon known demographic or firmographic data such as prospect role and responsibility. For example, IT prospects may be shown IT-related questions, while marketing prospects may see marketing-related questions. This only makes sense – after all, why ask an IT person about sales issues, or ask a person with a sales title about an IT issue? And why ask a question if you already have the answer in your prospect database?

In other words, eTrigue DPF helps you to make sure your forms are always appropriate and prevent stupid, inappropriate or plain annoying questions. The result is significantly reduced form abandonment.

eTrigue DPF works for all types of forms. Whether you want a simple form for collecting name and email, or a multi-step campaign that collects information over time, eTrigue’s DPF builder makes it easy, and provides unparalleled flexibility, including the ability to change your forms mid-campaign. No other marketing automation system gives you the same level of flexibility and control.

Stop annoying website visitors with long, tedious forms and increase completions! Higher conversion rates with more qualified opportunities entering the pipeline are possible. Use Dynamic Progressive Forms to ask shorter, smarter questions, and make it easy for your prospects to respond while attracting and holding interested prospects over time. To learn more about eTrigue DemandCenter Dynamic Progressive Forms, visit our website today.

I enjoyed reading Andrea Johnson’s recent article, discussing the importance of research by sales reps. While the entire article is very well-written, today I’d like to focus on one sentence that really caught my attention: “In one meeting, that [sales] rep launched himself from a vendor to a business resource.”

It’s a great sentence, because it beautifully captures what B2B marketing and B2B sales are all about. Of course we are vendors, trying to sell something to prospects. It’s the irony of the modern B2B sales cycle though, that as long as we are perceived as “vendors,” we will have a hard time selling anything to anyone. But if we can launch ourselves from “a vendor” to “a resource,” that changes everything.

B2B buyers are smart. They have access to plenty of info, and as Ms. Johnson says, they use that info and research their options. The last thing they need is a vendor telling them how awesome his product is. What they do need is someone that gets them and their issues and can offer quick, affordable ways to solve those issues.

This also goes back to the age-old marketing lesson of always highlighting benefits rather than features. Your prospect will be bored beyond belief if you attempt to speak at length about your product’s features – those features mean a lot to you but very little to her. What she does want to hear about is how your product is going to benefit *her* company, solve her particular issues.

So how does one get to a place where they are a valuable resource to a potential buyer rather than an annoying vendor? Ms. Johnson discusses several ways to become familiar with a specific company’s needs, the first quite simple – online research. Being the marketing automation geek that I am, I can’t help but add that marketing automation is a wonderful tool for getting a feel for a specific prospect and getting to know them better.

The very ability to closely monitor a potential buyer’s behavior on your website, his responses to your emails, the actions he takes, the pages he browses – this can provide you with very intimate insight into what that person is looking for, and – just as importantly – what he is not looking for (which you can learn from, say, his lack of response to a certain email campaign).

With great tools available to you such as prospect activity tracking, online research and – as Ms. Johnson suggests – inside information from within the company, there truly are no more excuses for ever making a cold call again. Get to know your prospects before talking with them, and you’ll elevate yourself from a “vendor” to a “resource.”

The best marketing is done when we really, truly understand our customers – when we reach a level of familiarity and understanding that makes us not just aware of what they think, but actually think like them.

When you think like the customer (or prospect), that gap between you as a marketer and them as a consumer is eliminated. Eliminating this gap can make a big difference, because if you stop thinking like *you* and start thinking like *the customer* you will avoid familiar pitfalls such as preaching features instead of talking benefits.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, because, after all, you are you and they are they. But the best marketers around -not unlike actors – find a way to BE their customers. Then they can approach them in ways that are enormously more effective than when that familiar marketer/consumer gap exists.

So, how do you do that? How do you think like the customer? One way is to use marketing automation tools that gather detailed information about each lead arriving at your website. Then take the time to look at the information and analyze it. In most cases, you will get a clear understanding of the person’s pain point, of what he’s looking for.

I also like Stephen Davidson’s suggestion that we stop focusing so much on surveys, and instead of inviting customers over, ask them to host us for a day of shadowing. Imagine how much useful information you could get from such a day – even from just an hour or two!

The basic idea is that the focus must be shifted away from the marketer and onto the customer and/or the prospect. The more we can focus our attention on our audience, the better we will be at communicating with them, and getting them to do what we want them to do – become buyers or repeat buyers – not in a spammy way, but in a helpful way that respects the customer and their needs.

I wasn’t exactly surprised to read that a growing number of companies are recognizing the importance of sales enablement. If sales reps are reporting that “inability to communicate value messages” was their number one inhibitor to achieving quota, and that they have “a knowledge gap” or their company has “too many products to know,” then clearly we’re looking at a situation where Marketing can provide better support to Sales than it does now.

After all, marketing has the knowledge – not just deep knowledge of the company’s products or services, but also – when using a marketing automation system – deep knowledge of the company’s prospects.

This knowledge about each prospect, where they are in the sales cycle, what they did so far on the Web site, how they have responded to emails up until now- this rich history must be communicated to Sales in order for sales reps to be able to have meaningful communication with prospects.

An interesting alternative to communicating marketing knowledge to sales is to directly equip sales with this knowledge, via a sales acceleration system such as eTrigue SalesPro.

A sales acceleration tool assists sales reps in their sales lead management efforts and gives them the power to be more prepared and proactive, making sure each engagement is relevant and timely.

When sales reps have real-time intelligence about prospects, they are empowered to sell more effectively. Tools such as unlimited trackable email, web site activity tracking, email alerts and live tracking give sales reps the information they need to focus on the right prospects, at the right time.

Of course, even with a sales enablement system in place, sales should never be on their own. When communicating with sales reps, B2B buyers already have so much knowledge about the product, that a conversation centered around features is simply useless, and frankly, so is conversation centered around general benefits. The sales rep must be able to communicate compelling value to the specific prospect.

Which means that marketing/sales alignment is still crucial, and marketing (or better yet, the entire organization) must find a way to support sales reps by providing them with key information about the company’s products, so that reps are able to communicate value to prospects and sell more effectively.

Is it a “new marketing” or has it always been about conversation? I have a feeling that truly successful marketing has always been about reaching out to your audience in a meaningful way. But of course, now we have more tools that enable us to actually carry a conversation with our audience. It’s not just about websites, seminars and webinars and trade shows, white papers, PPC campaigns and email blasts anymore. We now have blogs, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and we use those to create unprecedented volumes of content and to open ourselves up to immediate feedback from our target market.

Some people hate the word “conversation” in connection with social media and say it’s overused to the point of being abused. Maybe so. But I can’t think of a better way to describe what I see on Twitter, for example. When I post something, a thought or maybe a link to an interesting blog post, and someone replies with “this is exactly how I feel about it!” and we then exchange emails and keep talking, this is to me conversation and it happens fast and in ways it had never happened before.

I think social media is wonderful. I think that having channels that are so powerful, yet so accessible, truly opens up the conversation and makes it so much more authentic and real. I also think that for marketers, social media gives us an amazing opportunity to listen to customers and prospects, get honest feedback and use it to become better at what we do.

Simply listening to your audience on Twitter, or on LinkedIn Groups, gives you immediate information about what they’re looking for, what troubles them, and what kind of information they would be interested in. Read between the lines, and you’ll also learn what kind of communication they are NOT interested in – just as important, of course.

So yes, the new marketing – focusing on conversation – may or may not be truly new. But the new tools we have to talk and – more importantly – to listen, are priceless. We should all make the most of them.