We’ve been doing an increasing amount of bid support and win-based marketing work for clients in recent months.

With their strong understanding of positioning and presentation, B2B marketing departments complement the sales team’s skills are well placed to make a real impact on the outcome of a bid.

There’s a range of win-based activity you can undertake to support sales. We’ve a free powerpoint outlining the best of these - available from The Marketing Practice’s main site here.

I’m pleased to be able to make available our web 2.0 planning guide. We’ve had a lot of interest in this document, as marketers look to introduce more “pull” techniques into their programmes. You can download it here for free: B2B web2 blotter

It provides a process for thinking through your approach, suggests how different tecnhiques can be used to relieve pressure at points in the sales funnel and provides management considerations for marketers using web 2.0 for lead generation for the first time.

Easy to use, fill in, make notes on, and share in a brainstorming meeting. Do drop me a line or reply in the comments field with any questions.

Many B2B marketing campaigns are not fundamentally flawed. They are good ideas that suffer from lacklustre execution. Or a great idea, and great plan – targeted at entirely the wrong people.

We see a number of these issues happening again and again in the B2B marketing industry. Sometimes the devil really is in the detail. Here are 10 common mistakes and how to avoid them. 

1. Not engaging the sales force at the outset – ultimately, the sales force will define whether all your work has been a success. Did your campaigns increase sales opportunities or not? Were they the right kind of opportunity? Talk to them in person before you start to ensure you know what’s expected of you. A lot can get lost in translation.

2. Not listening hard enough – in creating a campaign, as the marketer, you’ll have a lot to add, and you can bring great experience to bear. Don’t forget that the sales and product experts have as much to add too. Ask a lot of questions before you make any broad statements, and don’t assume anything until you’ve checked it. A small misunderstanding can result in a campaign going very wonky later on.

3. Not finding out what current customers think – despite point 2, the best point of reference for any campaign is the people who will eventually be receiving it. Beg, borrow and steal to get the chance to speak to a few tame customers or prospects! For some help in framing up your client interview, see my post on B2B marketing client interviews.

4. Assuming leads can be “generated” for all propositions – it’s a huge and expensive challenge to “make” market opportunity. There is an ongoing debate in the industry about whether “making” demand is possible. Our view is that it can be uncovered, found, prompted, but probably not “made” – certainly not without mammoth budgets. The best way to proceed is to map the market size and build relationships in the long term – so that as opportunity arises you can get to it quickly.

5. Never reaching the real decision maker – many marketing campaigns are simply targeted at the wrong people. Completely understandable, given that the companies we are marketing into may have a hundred thousand employees or more. Being a “data junkie” is the key here – make sure you’re obsessed by the data the campaign will be sent out to. Its relevancy and its quality. Also, it stands to reason that your DM or email will hardly ever hit exactly the right person first time – it’s a process of repetition and refinement.

6. Misqualifying or overblowing new prospects – all campaigns are under pressure to generate leads. As a result, marketing departments can pass “leads” back to a client that don’t live up to expectations. Understand in detail what the sales team’s definition of a lead is – and don’t take it at face value – question them hard on it. Passing back non-leads will only lead to dissatisfaction, but opening the door to a key account (even if it doesn’t strictly meet BANT qualification) can be just what is needed. Sometimes sales don’t always mean exactly what they say.

7. Not following up on leads or nurturing slow burners – sometimes the sales team will commit to follow up on your campaigns themselves. As they get busy, or as other leads turn into bids, the salespeople can become distracted and drop the lead follow up. Make sure you have a plan if this starts happening. Also, have a strategy for “slow burners” – these are people who have expressed an interest but are not ready to move forward yet. How will the campaign keep them warm until they are ready to buy?

8. Not understanding the product or service – the IT world and the marketing world both become more complex by the minute. For us marketers, it’s a big job just to keep up to speed with the day job, never mind what the latest solutions do and how they work. The best campaigns are a perfect unity of customer need and product understanding. To develop the perfect campaign proposition, see a demo for every release, visit a site where it’s in use every day, speak to customers regularly and directly.

9. Assuming the buyer understands the market – it would be very easy to imagine a campaign being designed that proved in concrete terms why your software was palpably, demonstrably better than your competitor’s… and then finding out that the targets of the campaign didn’t understand the nature of the market at all and didn’t respond to the campaign as a result. At the same time, an experienced and savvy IT Director might well know the market backwards and dismiss a campaign as underestimating his/her knowledge. Understanding what the typical buyer does know about the market before getting started on your campaign is key.

10. Measuring activity rather than outcomes - marketers strive to measure the impact of their activity and rightly so. Marketing needs to demonstrate its value to the business. But a lot of metrics measured by marketing are fairly meaningless without knowing how much revenue they’ve generated. Whilst it’s easy to measure hits on a website, clicks from an email, number of mailers sent, number of event delegates (and these should still be measured) unless we know the ultimate impact that these activities had on business through the door, we can’t know how much of a return on its investment we are getting for our marketing spend.

So many of our team have found these links helpful, we wanted to make them more generally available. Both articles highlight the acute need to craft propositions very carefully around the ‘why invest in IT?’ message.

First, McKinsey’s views on how companies should be Managing IT in a downturn: Beyond cost cutting. It shows some key areas where IT suppliers can be focusing to create propositions and messages that have a sound business case in this economic climate. The report has some great ammunition for making targeted investments in IT (especially to streamline processes and make more of existing information) rather than cutting costs across the board:

“Investments in technology-enabled business processes can deliver up to ten times the impact of traditional IT cost reduction efforts.”

And here is Forrester’s view on which parts of the IT industry will be least affected according to current spending plans. It’s not that companies won’t be making IT investments in the downturn: the key point is that to access the budgets that are growing (especially services and outsourcing), marketing messages will need to major on instant ROI. There’s no doubt that marketing can really come into its own in taking this case to buyers – provided that we dig beneath the obvious headline ‘credit crunch’ messaging to the issues that really matter.

Campaigns that are grounded in an understanding of these spending trends and ROI cases are a critical component of ‘recession-toughened’ marketing – we’re already seeing the hunger that buyers have for information on how and where they could be making savings.

What are two of the top ways potential buyers find out about new software, hardware or services?

They Google for information, and they ask their colleagues and peers. Research in 2008 from ITSMA and The Marketing Practice back this up in concrete terms.

Relationship management and account-based marketing programmes are important as I’ve covered in previous posts, and are an important central platform in your lead generation. They are also extremely useful when looking to influence colleagues and peers both within and intra-organisation.

But what about Google? Technology firms, considering the market they are in, can be woeful at appearing in the search engine rankings. Research consistently shows that when people want to find out about something, they Google it.

Bear in mind this recent research from Think Eye Tracking. It would appear, if you’re not on the top page, you might as well have just fallen off the face of the earth.

Think Eye also says “when asked afterwards what they would normally do when they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, 87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category. 97% of people tested answered that Google was the search engine they most commonly used and out of those people, 87% stated they wouldn’t bother using anything else.”

When considering go to market strategies and campaigning, B2B marketers simply must consider their organic Google page rankings. You don’t want to generate a lot of interest in what you do, only to find that your competitor comes up number one on the rankings whilst you languish on page 6. And sponsoring the keywords through Google’s advertising programme just isn’t enough.

There’s a lot of unncessary confusion around web 2.0. Online communities, wikis, blogs, podcasting…the list goes on. Most sensible marketers say to me, “but my target market doesn’t comment on blogs” and they are absolutely right. 

But there is a danger of missing the point here. Your target market may not be commenting on blogs, but your target market is very probably Googling you and search terms related to issues they are having that you can solve.

To get inbound leads from the web, you need to get as high as possible up the organic rankings for your chosen search terms. To do this, you need to contribute to the debate in your area, online. You need to get out and do this online as well as offline, to cater for different tastes. Think of it as journalism - where you control what the article says. Make your articles interesting and get out there and comment in influential places.

Picture the scene: a run-of-the-mill proposition, being taken into a crowded market… hardly unusual in more established business-to-business markets.

Whatever the reason, sometimes a lead generation campaign needs to work extra hard, which is where these approaches can come in useful. None of them are easy to deliver – they all demand careful messaging and execution, and they’re all about creating content of interest above and beyond any solution proposition.

1. Let your customers do the talking
   Client references are like gold dust – but it needs more than an A4 case study to inspire an audience. So what are the other options for applying client references to lead generation?

   Consider hosting an event on a client site (it can be a good promotional boost for your client, and it is certainly more appealing for prospects). Or think about what prospects would really want to hear – not necessarily the standard challenges, solution, benefits structure, but a more ‘warts and all’ overview of the project.

2. Complete personalisation
   Not just merging a name or two, but getting under the skin of the target and creating something that they can relate to 100%. With digital printing, the idea of personalising a mailer is becoming more common, but creating a campaign from the ground up around the prospects is another thing entirely.

   Examples include the ‘future case study’ (written from the perspective of a prospect, explaining what the future looks like if they choose your solution). But as with all of these ideas, it’s the business message and creative execution that are key to success.

3. The mystery shopper
   What intelligence can you offer a prospect that will help them see the need for your solution, or (even better) help them do their job more effectively. Can you find out what their customers think, or prove that they are struggling with issues that you could solve?
4. Sell the next step
   More of an ethos for the three above than a technique in its own right, perhaps (hence 3, not 4 in the title). This one is all about taking a step back from the core proposition that the campaign is generating leads for, and thinking more about the kind of leads that are required.

   Need a first meeting with a prospect? Sell the meeting: what have you got that is worth an hour of their time? What value can you offer? How can we pitch a first meeting so that it doesn’t sound like a hard sell?

So what do they have in common? They are all hard work – relatively speaking, it is easy to create a website, or email, or mailer, or event that promotes the benefits of a solution. These ideas are all about added value, wider content, campaigns that start well before the communication piece is sent out.

* Given great messaging, pinpoint targeting and flawless execution. Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up repayments on a mortgage or other loan secured on it.

10-1 doesn’t always equal 9. When it comes to running lead generation campaigns, you need to get 10 things right – leave any one of these out and 10 minus 1 will give you a 0 return. Below are the 10 areas that you need to get right.

1. Does your campaign align completely with the business’ strategy?

2. Is it thoroughly researched, does it use market and audience understanding as its starting point?

3. Does it have contact strategies for both the buyers and the influencers? Do you understand the specific types of people you are hitting and have you built communications to influence them as people?

4. Does your campaign take a holistic approach to demand generation, considering the end to end sales process?

5. Is it targeted and pragmatically creative, and does it focus on demand generation as the goal. Not every contact should be designed to generate leads, but whole programmes should be focused around moving prospects through the sales funnel.

6. Does your campaign have an integrated contact strategy? Does it maximize the recipient’s familiarity with your organization, whilst building consistency and credibility through multiple channels?

7. Does it have a ccontinuous campaigning strategy at its heart; are communications focused on building a long term relationship (lots of bites of the cherry), not sending out a one hit wonder?

8. Is it closed loop? Does it focus on lead nurturing and sales support along the length of the pipeline? Does it have a sensible and effective marketing data management process?

9. Have you set goals at the beginning of the programme that you will critically measure against at the end?

10. Will the campaign move your organisation’s understanding of its market forward at every stage?

Yesterday I wrote a post on how to argue a case for your marketing budget.

But what if you’re not sure you’ve got a strong case to start with? Here’s a checklist to make sure you’ve thought through all the angles before you go in for the meeting with the CFO. (If you didn’t get it yesterday, here’s a download summarising other useful stats and links to online B2B marketing budget resources. Marketing Investment – Resources Sheet)

1. Have you started with a clean sheet of paper? Have you questioned old or inherited assumptions? Don’t use last year’s budget as a starting point, it will often lead you to make the same mistakes.
2. Have you budgeted on the basis of what you are paying now? Can you get things cheaper through better buying practices? Manage costs through prudent buying, investigate alternatives for spend rather than assuming it will cost the same this year as it did last year.
3. Have you looked hard enough at the people and skills side? Do you have what you need, or are you living with what you have? Have you considered outsourcing rather than increasing headcount or replacing leavers?
4. Have you budgeted programmes rather than lines? Line-based thinking can lead you from where the real issues are with marketing programmes. Sometimes changing creative or changing tactic masks a fundamental problem with the marketing strategy itself. You can also make a much more effective business case for a programme than a single line.
5. Have you cut out costs by standardising production? Adopt marketing agency type-approaches to numbers of authors’ amends you will allow internally. Impose SLAs on yourself and your team to uphold and improve the services you provide to the business.
6. Have you looked at where you can adopt new purchasing and manufacturing techniques within your job or team? Consider a “just in time” approach to content generation for example. Review your processes and look to minimise waste wherever possible?
7. Ask yourself a lot of tough questions – do you absolutely have to do things? Have you challenged received wisdom that certain activities work – are you sure they don’t just make people feel good? Do you have measures from previous years that can back you up?
8. Have you focused your spend on improving what really matters to the business? (Leads generated, a better conversion rate, customer loyalty increase?, larger average £ sale per customer, increased profitability per customer?)
9. Have you projected the revenue stream from your activity forward rather than looking back? Different activity, in a different market or at a different time will give different results. Look forward over the coming year with your assumptions, don’t base this year’s marketing on last year’s revenues.
10. If you have multiple products or services, have you budgeted differently for them depending upon the corporate objectives, aspirations and markets for each?
11. Are you being asked to do too much with too little? Avoid the “marketing always wants more budget” accusation. Be clear and realistic – don’t be pressured into agreeing to achieve myriad objectives with insufficient resources. You will fail to achieve your objectives and undermine the reputation of marketing.
12. Are there other areas of the business that will impact your success? Should you make a case for the marketing spend in these areas too? (Customer care, sales and bid support, internal communications.)
13. Have you pre-identified points throughout the year when you are willing to sit back down the CFO and review your progress and the returns you are generating?

Locking horns with the CFO or CEO over B2B marketing budgets? Here are 9 ways to argue a strong case.

Plus – struggling with where to start or how to put the budget together in the first place? We’ve collated the most useful starting points from our own desk research. Download it here – Marketing Investment – Resources Sheet.

1. Start by completely aligning your proposed marketing plan with the business plan – draw a straight line between what the company wants to achieve and what you are planning to do. Explain in detail exactly how it will contribute. Have the company’s stated strategic plan with you on the day.
2. Measure what matters, not what’s easy – use metrics that the CEO and CFO will genuinely care about. Pipeline, lead generation, increased revenue from existing accounts and new business. You will be measuring a lot of other things too, but these are the numbers they want to understand your contribution to.
3. Use the right language – talk about investment rather than spend. Argue a solid business case. Focus on short term ROMI (sales leads for today) and longer term ROMI (an easier selling environment for tomorrow). Explain for each budget line what you are targeting the return on investment to be and why.
4. Help the CFO achieve his/her ends – suggest that the marketing spend be amortised as the benefit is realised. We’ve also seen a number of companies who account for their marketing spend only when they see the actual benefit from the campaign (typically when the deliverables hit).
5. Use standard sales terminology – map your programmes against the sales funnel, visually if possible, showing how your plans will contribute to driving prospects through that funnel.
6. Get the sales director behind you – if you’re already delivering leads, use this to support your case. If not, make a start on sales-approved programmes and use the sales director to support your case before the meeting.
7. Don’t forget to map against profitability targets as well as revenue targets. Demonstrate how your programmes will increase average sale per customer, keep customers loyal for longer or retain more of them.
8. The CFO can’t argue with what the customer is saying. Poll your customer and prospect base about what they want and expect from you marketing-wise. Take visuals in with you to demonstrate what is needed. See my recent post on how CIOs like to be marketed to as an example of the kind of first-hand information you can use to back up your case.
9. Remember to sell the plan just as hard as you explain it. Enthusiasm is infectious.

Ed (name changed to protect the innocent) is responsible for all infrastructure globally for the entire organisation. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the IT sector, having worked in retail banking and for major retail organisations. He shared his thoughts with us recently on the best way for IT companies to market to him:

• I’m interested primarily in content and information that will help me do my job. If you can help solve the problem I’ve been grappling with in the car on the way in to work then I’ll listen to you.
• The strength of the proposition is not always the key determinant here; more important is the timing of the proposition and how relevant it is to me and my priorities.
• Be prompt and to the point. I want information, but I don’t want to spend too long getting it.
• Demonstrate a personal understanding of my business. Show you appreciate my company’s stated corporate direction and its market challenges.
• Make me feel obliged to respond, make the effort by investing time in helping me.
• If you can’t get me directly, the best way in is through a member of my team or my PA.
• I listen a lot to my ‘customers’ in the business, so you can always reach me through them – maybe they will be first people in the company to recognise the issue we have.
• Engage with me on a business level, don’t talk technical.
• Respect my team. If I ask you to deal with someone else there’s a good reason for it.
• Give me great content – sexy channels like podcasts are good, but I’ll only want the content if it’s useful to me
• I want to network with my peers, and hear their stories. Help facilitate that for me.
• My next step needs to be clear – if you’re asking me to do something (from taking a meeting to requesting a document), it needs to be easy for me to do and pitched to sound as valuable as possible.