But let’s assume that the proposition is a sound one, and that any right-thinking buyer would bite your arm off to sign on the dotted line – if only you could spend an hour with them to explain it (followed by 6-12 months going through the sales process…).

All you need is to sell them on the idea of spending an hour with you. Easy if you’re Megan Fox. Less so if you’re a ‘leading supplier of business services’.

Let’s also assume (it’s a dream scenario) that your data is entirely accurate and you have a contact strategy which is a thing of beauty (say, an integrated campaign plan with multiple touch-points over several months).

So you push ‘go’ on your lead generation campaign, but you only get a trickle of opportunities back. Why? 9 times out of 10, it’ll be because the strong proposition wasn’t converted into a strong set of campaign messaging.

What’s the difference between proposition and message?

The short answer: it’s the difference between a campaign that sounds good to an internal audience (strong proposition) and one that actually works when it reaches customers and prospects (strong message).

The longer answer:

The proposition is the articulation of the superior value (compared with the competition) that you can bring to bear on solving an issue that a prospect faces.

The campaign messaging is what happens when you take the proposition and think about what the audience needs to know there and then, what/who they are most likely to listen to, what will capture their imagination, and what will convince them to take the next step with you.

Let’s take the 4 elements of successful messaging in turn

1. What the audience needs to know – depending on what stage the market is at for your proposition and what stage of the buying cycle your ideal prospect is at, they will respond to very different messages. The simple example would be to compare a prospect who doesn’t even know they have an issue with one who is already evaluating different solutions. Clearly you need to share very different information with people in these two scenarios – the same applies to the difference between a proposition that is brand new to the market with one in a category that’s well established.
2. What/who they are most likely to listen to – really an extension from the previous point, the idea here is to think about the kind of information people will respond to and what sources will hold most authority (analysts, existing customers, their peers, your delivery experts….).
3. What will capture their imagination – this is an invitation to get more ‘creative’ than any standard value proposition would allow. That could mean ‘creative’ in the design/copy sense – for example, we took a client proposition about joining up strategy with execution and turned it into a campaign about great weddings (complete with pieces of wedding cake sent to their key customers). Or it could mean ‘creative’ in a more business sense – for example identifying that building a ‘maturity model’ around your proposition will help you to open doors and sell more consultatively.
4. Convincing them to take the next step with you – the best campaign messaging is entirely context-aware, and is rooted in the knowledge that buyers will be going through several stages and can be speeded up by focusing on selling the value of taking the next step (e.g. an hour’s meeting) rather than always focusing on the end solution. What’s the value of the hour’s meeting? What will they get that they couldn’t get from someone else? How will it help them to do their job? (In a way, this part of the campaign message is like building a little proposition all of its own for the next step in the sales process)

Get all of these 4 elements right, and prospects should be beating a path to your door – and having spent so much time on crafting vaue propositions it would be a shame for some of the mega deals to get away for lack of campaign messages.

Whatever their other flaws, retail banks have to understand the psychology of their target market. It’s been interesting to see in the last 6 months the new angles that are developing in their advertising (and especially interesting to think that these same angles could be the things that we should be promoting to our markets).

So what have the banks been up to?

There’s Lloyds TSB, who have been heavily featuring their ‘most trusted bank’ accolade:

And NatWest’s latest adverts, featuring the new ‘MoneySense’ service, promoting a ‘Helpful Banking’ approach and clearly acknowledging the sudden increase in customers hoping for ‘impartial’ advice from their bank.

The point that these adverts make for IT lead generation is twofold:

1. A basic point that anyone selling to banks may be able to build a case around helping banks deal with the sudden rise in demand for ‘advice’, and will have to fit in with the more cautious, ‘trustworthy’ direction that banks are taking.
2. A wider point whichever industry you sell to: it isn’t just ‘consumers’ who are reacting to the current economy by looking for advice and worrying about trust/reliability. Just one example of this: we’ve seen in recent months that promises of information-rich working sessions that will help a decision-maker understand how to de-risk their project or business are one of the most powerful calls to action.

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.

In response to this email, another colleague responded, “The chap makes it easy to digest – it doesn’t feel like work. That’s critical for longer content pieces particularly, and where most white papers and case studies let themselves down in our industry. How many people can claim to have actually read an entire Gartner or Forrester white paper?”

By introducing an element of personal story this vehicle is extremely successful at delivering its messages. We want to know what happened, we want to understand the mistakes that were made, we can empathise with the writer.

Food for thought in developing new vehicles for delivering lengthy B2B content.

Or not, as the case may be.

For too many very complex reasons, Chris (who works with me and has a physics degree) can confidently predict we’ll still be here at 10:30 (and if we’re not, shoot me. Or better still, shoot Chris).

What I’ve been thinking about this week, though, is how such a complex and potentially esoteric science experiment, three decades in the making, has captured the public’s imagination. The entire world has a film crew in there and Google returns more than 12m pages on LHC alone.

The answer lies in the first couple of lines of this post – it’s all about the story. The idea that the LHC might evaporate the planet in a single star-trek-esque moment has, understandably, got legs.

But it’s the facts and figures about the LHC that also grab attention. It’s so big it spans two European countries, just 1/8th of it qualifies as the world’s largest fridge, it will generate temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun and it houses the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

The really important stuff – like the fact that it will recreate the moments after the Big Bang, and that it may reveal where the universe is headed, that science and advancement as vital for us as people – are filtering through on the back of the statistics and “will it, won’t it” drama. The ultimate message is getting across, but the vehicle for the ultimate message is a handful of stories with the common touch.

We are compelled to find out more, and in doing so we learn a bit about what LHC is actually for.

I am in wholehearted agreement with FutureLab’s recent blog post on the power of the story in marketing. Stories and anecdotes stand out in our minds: we remember presentations that are heavily anecdote-based, we gravitate towards people who can spin a good yarn. Companies who have a good story to tell engage us – those who involve us in their stories keep us loyal.

The problem comes for B2B marketers when we try to create viral campaigns or marketing creative to take our message out in the marketplace, rather than trying harder to understand what the story is – what’s genuinely interesting about us and what will actually travel.

And you don’t have to threaten to blow up the world to do it. Take Rackspace – a B2B company. It’s spun great stories around the way it delivers something that other companies take for granted – customer service. It’s given it a name “Fanatical Support”, it’s involved customers (and very importantly staff) in delivering its pledge. Customers feel a vested interest – they are part of the story as they are experiencing and can talk about the great support they get. Rackspace has realised that the message (our servers are up all the time) isn’t what buyers really want, (and isn’t even something they believe to be true.) Buyers want Rackspace to jump to it when something does go wrong, because they know something eventually will. And that simple message, backed up by a super service organisation, has really travelled.

What travels helps people tell stories, helps them do their jobs better, helps make them interesting to have a beer with. The key is finding something that travels for all the right reasons.

So we can learn all something from LHC. And, of course, if I’m proved wrong about tomorrow, at least I won’t know about it…