Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 88—July 24th , 2007)

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 by Eric Gagnon

There’s a growing realization among many in our field that the job of business-to-business marketing is to support sales. And that’s no surprise to many of us working in the trenches who’ve been doing this all along in our marketing programs.

On the front end, this means running lead generation marketing programs that generate measurable sales response—that’s sales leads and new business opportunities from ads, mailings, trade show appearances, and other marketing activities—aimed at generating measureable sales leads (lead generation), for followup by your company’s sales team.

Increasingly, smart marketers are also realizing that their responsibilities to serve their company’s sales teams don’t end once the lead comes in—the real job of what I call “field marketing” begins here. Leads must be developed, over the long course of most B2B sales cycles, through a process involving focused, disciplined communication that effectively positions your company’s product or service as the best solution to the problem or business issue faced by your prospect. Working closely with the sales rep (or team) assigned to the account, these efforts, now increasingly known as lead development programs, support the interactions between your company’s reps and their prospects, by providing your sales team with the critical marketing support they need to move their prospects closer to their buying decision.

Widespread availability of powerful, easy to use, Web-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, like Salesforce.com, help a sales executive to structure, monitor, and measure their sales team’s interaction with their prospects, and provide sales reps with an easy way to dramatically boost their productivity and efficiency in their day-to-day communications and interactions with their prospects. Also, because they make it easy to execute and document communications between sales reps and prospects, CRM systems often expose important marketing communications gaps between prospects and reps, where product or feature issues, key product concerns, competitive pressures, or other issues reveal the need for a better, structured, more disciplined communications to help sales reps frame the terms of the “marketing conversation” that, over time, convinces prospects to buy from you, and not your competitor.

In short, as marketing professionals and the agencies and consultants who serve them, we can no longer just throw leads generated from our marketing programs over the cubicle wall to sales and hope for the best: We need to apply our skills to the task of ongoing communications, and to the tactical and strategic execution of lead development programs that turn prospects into buyers for our companies (and clients). To do this, we need to closely identify with the challenges faced by sales reps in the companies we serve, and develop marketing deliverables and programs that meet the challenges of the new and changing sales and marketing environments many of us are facing in B2B markets today.

Two Recent Books Define this New Marketing Model

To these ends, I strongly recommend two excellent recent books I think every marketing manager, agency professional, or consultant in B2B should read and internalize. Both of them do an excellent job of detailing the current business-to-business marketing environment, and the important role marketing professionals play in this changed new world.

The first book, Selling to Big Companies (Dearborn, 2006), by Jill Konrath, paints an accurate picture of the new environment faced by sales professionals working in B2B markets. Although this excellent book is written as a how-to guide to helping sales professionals, consultants, and small business owners sell their products and services to big corporations, the techniques and advice she provides applies to every B2B sales professional faced with the task of breaking in to a large corporate account opportunity. And for those of us in marketing, there are many lessons from Jill’s book we can draw in our own efforts to support the sales teams we serve.

For example, Jill is the first writer of any sales-related book to accurately describe the way things really work in big companies today: Thanks to restructuring, short-staffed corporations are pushing their staffs relentlessly to do more with less, and they’re demanding greater accountability and hard measurability for every purchase decision. Prospects inside of big companies have more projects than they have time to complete, and many priorities competing for their precious time. Increasingly, these prospects working inside of big companies are “wise” to the tired old techniques of psychological manipulation and “closing” still used by the many salespeople who approach them every day.

In her book, Jill defines a “New Model for Sales Success” that is a process of understanding the business problem or issue that’s faced by the prospect, and how to position and present your product so that it addresses and solves this problem or issue. This is a major shift away from how sales reps (and marketers) often present their products, by recitation of sales benefits and product features, which are often rattled off from the company brochure. Jill’s book covers a range of practical sales and marketing techniques to help build an effective value proposition to address prospect problems and needs, and a detailed, structured approach to developing a campaign to identify, approach, establish contact with, and present to the key purchasing decision-makers inside of big companies.

Although written for sales professionals, Selling to Big Companies is a must-read book every marketing professional, for two important reasons. First, Jill’s accurate description of the new environment faced by sales professionals is the same environment we as marketers face when reaching these same potential prospects with ads, direct mail, and Internet marketing programs: More and more, these potential prospects have trained themselves to screen out the senseless marketing hype they’re seeing in ads, brochures, and other marketing in their field. Instead, they look for the basic information that helps them answer the questions they have about products such as yours, usually by using Google to do their research. For marketers, using Jill’s techniques to build better value propositions into company marketing programs can help improve the effectiveness of any marketing effort, even before the sales rep’s first contact with a prospect.

Second, smart marketing professionals who read Jill’s extensive documentation of the deliverables and process required to effectively reach decision-makers inside of big companies will instantly recognize the areas where they can add value to this process:

• Helping to articulate and present your product’s value proposition, framed in a way that outlines the prospect’s problem or issue, and how your product helps the prospect by addressing or solving this problem;

• By working with sales reps to develop effective voicemail “scripts”—which, as Jill points out, aren’t scripts at all, but structured talking points designed to help sales reps to effectively present their product’s most important value propositions to the prospect in voicemail messages;

• Helping sales reps to develop the other deliverables required to communicate effectively and persuasively with their prospects: E-mail messages, sales letters, faxes, and telephone and in-person presentations

All of these activities, and more, have now become critically important parts of lead development systems described in another excellent book, Brian Carroll’s Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill, 2006). Brian’s book picks up where most marketing books end, by detailing the important underlying principles and methods required to work with leads after they’re generated by ads, mailings, trade shows, and other marketing activities, and then enter a company’s lead development process.

According to Brian’s research sources, in B2B marketing 70% of the customer’s brand perception and preference is determined through direct contact with the company’s salesperson. As Brian points out, from the marketing standpoint, this means the goal of lead development programs is to provide a company’s sales team with the planning, support, and deliverables required to help establish the company’s sales rep assigned to the account as a “trusted advisor” to the prospect.

Brian’s book is an excellent blueprint for helping any marketing professional understand the lead development process, and for linking all of the activities we know well as marketers, such as direct mail, events, e-mail and online marketing, into lead development programs. However, this doesn’t mean that lead development is simply another marketing program applied to the lead database: According to Brian, the process of converting prospects to leads “is an ongoing conversation, not a series of campaigns,” and his book is an excellent roadmap for helping marketing professionals and senior managers to plan, develop, and execute effective lead development programs.

For More Information on These Two Must-Have Books for Marketing Professionals:

You can find more information about Jill Konrath and her book, Selling to Big Companies, at her Web site, http://www.sellingtobigcompanies.com, and for information on Brian Carroll and his book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, visit his Web site at http://blog.startwithalead.com.