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Ask any b-to-b salesperson: closing the so-called "complex" sale has never been harder.
One reason is that buyers now don heavy armor plating against outside salespeople each morning before they get to work. Another is that there just aren't that many buyers any more. Rather, there are committees. Yuck.
It's no wonder 48 percent of sales reps missed their quota last year, according to research firm CSO Insights.
For marketers who have to support a frustrated
b-to-b salesforce, good news can be found in the
pages of Ardath Albee's new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.
Albee, CEO of her own e-marketing firm, has written a compact users guide to attraction marketing that clearly shows she "knows her stuff."
In a clear, stepwise manner she explains how companies can capture and nurture leads in a world where buyers are "staying elusive longer."
Included are hundreds of sound suggestions for deepening your understanding of prospective customers; creating "contagious" content; and fostering progressive sales conversations.
The attraction techniques Albee presents are backed up in all cases by clear examples proving how they work and why.
Albee also manages to keep the book lively, despite the arid nature of most of her topics. Consider, for example, how concisely she describes the starring role marketers now play in business:
"In the past, marketing created content that focused on making prospects aware of the company's products so they'd consider shifting their buying dollars. Prospects who showed a bit of interest were then placed into the sales process. This approach was successful prior to the Internet because prospects needed to talk to salespeople to get the information they needed to solve their problems. We all know that this is no longer the case. Buyers now can scour the Internet, attend Webinars from their offices, and even participate in virtual events without ever speaking directly to a salesperson. Companies who are investing in customer-focused content are capturing the lion's share of prospect attention. Marketing's responsibility expands beyond interest generation to building engagement throughout the buying process. Yes, even after salespeople become involved."
By all means read eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. And if you haven't read Jeff Thull's Mastering the Complex Sale, read both books in conjunction, because they both tackle the same challenges.
You'll think about b-to-b marketing in a whole new way.
David Meerman Scott blogged recently about "business casual video," a nifty term he admits to borrowing from a friend.
"The concept is simple," he writes. When you think of using video to communicate, don't automatically envision a "formal" (i.e., professionally produced) piece when you can now produce a "casual" video yourself.
"For decades," Scott continues, "corporate videos have been stiff and formal. They cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to produce. When the subject of video is discussed at companies, people immediately think EXPENSIVE and DIFFICULT because they are thinking formal. But if you think business casual, all of a sudden videos can be low or no cost and can be completed in a day or even an hour."
I prefer the term "do it yourself video" for these things. And at the risk of seeming like a fussbudget I'll say that, like all "empowering technologies," DIY video can lead to some pretty scary outcomes.
What's next, business casual annual reports?
Disclosure: My spouse is a professional video producer.
I just polished off Success Secrets of the Social Media Marketing Superstars, a new 300-page anthology edited by Mitch Meyerson, author of Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet and eight other books.
The book's good. Really good.
Success Secrets gathers two dozen brief essays by today's darlings of the social media marketing circuit, including Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, Gary Vaynerchuk, Joel Comm, Mari Smith and Denise Wakeman.
The foreword (contributed by Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Mark Hansen) promises readers "will be spoon-fed insights and revelations" on every page. But, being a soup fancier, Hansen doesn't do the book justice. Its pages are so loaded with good stuff, you'll need a knife and fork.
Success Secrets opens with a beefy section devoted to social media marketing "Strategies and Principles." Readers will learn why developing solid content is essential and how to develop it; why transparency is crucial; and how the superstars promote their content and build "mega-followings."
The case study provided by Michael Stelzner alone is worth the price of the book. Stelzner, founder of the popular blog Social Media Examiner, recounts step by step the remarkable viral marketing campaign that launched his firm's high-flying Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
The second half of Success Secrets, "Applications and Websites," walks readers through all the major social media marketing tools: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Podcasting, Digg and the other social media bookmarking sites, mobile and video. The how-to advice offered is uniformly clear, detailed, sensible and practical.
The book concludes with some smart time-management tips from Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. Readers who hope to avoid "the dark hole of social banter" that invariably opens when social media marketing efforts aren't organized would do well to consider what Evans has to say.
This September 11, my wife and I took an out-of-town guest sightseeing on the Mall.
We began our tour at the FDR Memorial. Inscribed on the memorial's walls are 21 quotations; some well known, some not.
This one caught our attention:
"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
How a propos is that?
Five years ago, marketing gurus cautioned us: customers’ worldviews had changed.
They no longer trusted institutions of any kind, whether business, government, nonprofit or media.
Arguably, the distrust was deserved. Rascals and reprobates ruled the day’s headlines. Kenneth Lay. Bernie Ebbers. Jack Abramoff. Jayson Blair. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
But that wasn’t the whole story.
The gurus held out another warning at the time. Trust—the bedrock of purchasing—had not merely ebbed. It was in near-mortal danger.
As things turned out, the gurus were right. The years of distrust have ended.
We've entered the Age of Suspicion.
Customers today aren’t just distrustful. They’re downright suspicious.
They no longer give you a pass to treat them as lemming-like receptacles for marketing messages. Instead, they discredit your messages before they’ve even taken them in.
Everyday objectivity has given way to habitual disbelief. It’s as if your attempts to communicate were toxic or, worse, “candy from strangers.”
Old-fashioned curiosity, open-mindedness and the benefit of the doubt have vanished. Ordinary trust is a dinosaur.
Social scientists teach that trust is a bond based on one party’s willingness to become vulnerable to another.
Sadly, that bond has been broken once too often in recent years.
As a result customers no longer feel safe enough to consider unfamiliar risks, even trivial ones.
And their refusal to lower their defenses makes customers virtually immune to most forms of persuasion.
PS: For insight, read Charles Green's article, "2010: The Summer of Trust."
