Should You Hire Your Demand Generation Leader from your Competitor?

May 1, 2013 Leave a Comment
TwitterGrade

A West Coast marketing recruiter wrote this to me a few days ago:

“Typically my clients are looking for someone who has a successful recent track record as a full-time, permanent employee, preferably coming out of a direct competitor.”

I have to ask a simple question. Is this a good or bad idea? And how do you define successful?

On one hand, hiring from a competitor means the person has some industry knowledge. Many undoubtedly think that makes for a safeSLMA winner choice.

But I also think it highly unlikely that this cast off from a competitor can touch an award-winning marketing expert like Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers.  Clearly, Jeff has assets unlike anyone else. Here is a list for you:

  1. A world-class network of contacts from his TV show, Marketing Made Simple TV.
    In fact, when Social Media Club wanted top speakers for their conference, they first called Jeff Ogden! Why is this important? Let’s say your company needs a strong metrics dashboard. With a couple of phone calls, Jeff could line up two of the top experts in the USA.
  2. Awards, like Top 50 Influencer in Sales Lead Management.
    Awards are the Good Housekeeping seal for marketing professionals.  I strongly you consider people who have won this award. Jeff Ogden has won it two years in a row!
  3. Content
  4. Has your candidate created content? If he has a blog, how long has he been writing it? (Jeff Ogden Has he written any white papers or e-books? Does he have a SlideShare channel? Does he have a YouTube channel? (For Jeff Ogden, the answers are “Yes”, for almost 5 years, “Yes” and “Yes.”)
  5. Social media
    Clearly you want someone comfortable in social media. One way to measure is to use Hubspot’s TwitterGrader tool. The top people in this get 100 out of 100 points, and Jeff Ogden gets a top score of 100 out of 100.TwitterGrade
  6. Training
    Last but not least, which kind of training do they have? Jeff Ogden is trained in Buyer Personas by the Buyer Persona Institute. And while he is trained in Silverpop, he’s actively working on additional certifications.

So when evaluating people, look for these four things – contacts, awards, content and social media. That way you will hire only the best demand generation professionals.

What do you think? Should companies hire from competitors? Or should they look for the best athlete available?  Please tell us in the comments.

Jeff Ogden is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. Sign up for free bi-weekly marketing tips here.

 

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What’s the Biggest Challenge Facing Your Business Today?

April 30, 2013 1 Comment
Selling Power TV

sales lead generationThat’s right. I want to know what’s on your mind now. What’s the Biggest challenge facing your business today? But I bet I can guess – from the role you play in your company.

  • If you’re in Sales, you hate the crappy leads Marketing is giving you. Crappy leads means wasted time and lost selling opportunities.
  • If you’re in Marketing, you are frustrated by the lack of budget and staff you are getting. You’re thinking “If I could get more budget, I could fix all these problems.”
  • If you’re a CEO, you are likely thinking “Can’t anyone around here sell something?“

The bottom line is that the biggest problem lies in the eye of the beholder.  Your point of view clouds everything.  I also do baseball umpiring and in nearly every case, a close play where I call the runner out is argued by the coach of the other team. He wants the runner to be safe so badly that he wills the runner to be safe. He’s wrong, but that is what he saw. His biases cloud his judgement. Those same biases exist in your business too.

My recommendation is simple. Get the Sales executive, the marketing leader and the CEO in one room. Discuss the company objectives and what needs to happen to deliver on those objectives. Voice your concerns.  Speak up.

Here’s what really needs to happen:

  1. The CEO needs to invest more in marketing.
  2. The head of Marketing needs to invest in a best practices sales lead generation program and purchase good software like Marketo or Eloqua.
  3. The head of Sales needs to work with Marketing to define leads and document a Service Level Agreement, so they deliver quality sales leads.

For a quick and fun education around aligning Sales and Marketing, watch this great show with me and Gerhard Gschwandtner . And please let me know in the comments if it addresses the Biggest Challenge Facing Your Business Today.

Jeff Ogden is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator and host of the popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV. Sign up for free bi-weekly marketing tips here.

 

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Who is the Hero of our Story? You are!

April 29, 2013 3 Comments
sales lead generation

With so many businesses struggling to create enough qualified sales leads, who’s the hero of our story?

Answer: Beleaguered sales people. YOU!

sales lead generation

You don’t deserve to suffer. Your voice-mail messages go unanswered and your emails go unopened. It’s harder and harder to meet with a real decision maker. We feel your pain.

Your employer’s to blame, because they have not invested fully in a best-practices sales lead generation program. They have not purchased marketing automation like Marketo or Eloqua.  They have not fully invested in content marketing either – especially in relevant, engaging content that move buyers down the buying journey.

This is why we champion those salespeople. You are the true heroes of our story. We are rooting for you!

Over the next few weeks, we will share examples of salespeople and try to help them with their challenges. We are Obi Wan Kenobi to your Luke Skywalker.

What do you think? We love comments and those who share on social media.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor is an award-winning marketer and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. Contact Jeff at 516-495-9350 or send an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com. Sign up for free bi-weekly marketing tips here.

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A Company that Fires No One = Job Security + Results!

April 28, 2013 Leave a Comment
sales lead generation

No layoff policy delivers Business Results — with job security

I’ve had the unfortunate experience of losing a high paying job recently (with zero notice). When asked for a reason, my manager said “You were an at-will employee. We don’t have to give you a reason.”  What he said is true, under the letter of the law. But it’s a terrible way to run a business.You're Fired

It’s that cavalier attitude about people’s lives that caused me to look at this article.  How did that dismissal make me feel? I felt I was being cast off like a pair of dirty socks – not much thought went into it. No warning. No ability to address concerns, and no reason given. Read this post for a different way.

Job security? Are you kidding?

How did I find this article? My TV sh0w!

Jenn Lim is the Chief Happiness Officer of Delivering Happiness, a Zappos company, and she was a guest on my former show, Mad Marketing TV, sponsored by Act-On Software. So I get their blog articles.

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This software firm, called Next Jump, has a no layoff policy. A breath of fresh air, I think.

Summary: The current ways of doing business may be nothing more than old habits that didn’t work particularly well in the first place.

This is hard to believe, but apparently a technology company called NextJump has a policy that does not allow firing their employees. (NextJump manages employee rewards programs for scores of Fortune 1,000 companies and they say they have at least 100 million users.) Their no-fire policy is in alignment with their goals to make the world a better place for their customers and their own employees.

So, what do they do with employees who are not performing well? They try to help them do better, or assist them to find a different job. The people who don’t fit well choose to leave.

The impact of implementing the no-fire policy was dramatic: the percentage of employees who said they love their jobs went to 90 from 20, and employee turnover went from 40% to 0.

Another positive development was that employees opened up in evaluation discussions like annual reviews, because they no longer could be fired, so they didn’t perceive evaluations as a potential threat to their employment. The more open discussions allow better dialogue about problems employees are having and how the company could help address them.

NextJump CEO Charlie Kim revealed these benefits and insights in a recent interview. His company takes employee culture very seriously. In fact, they reportedly will pay for half of an employee’s vacation. More importantly, they focus strongly on mentoring employees to help them improve, through coaching and peer communication.

Some of these employee benefits might sound radical, but probably only because standard business practices have been in place so long it appears to be very odd to change them. The fact they have existed unchallenged for decades does not mean they were ever the best ways of working with employees. They simply have become deeply engrained habits.

Zappos pays unhappy employees to quit their jobs, because they can damage company culture enough and drag down productivity far more than the cost of paying them to leave. Tony Hsieh has said bad hires have cost Zappos $100 million.

Thanks to Delivering Happiness for this great article. Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor is an award-winning BtoB marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the Creator and Host of the popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV. We also invite you sign up for free bi-weekly marketing tips here.

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A TweetChart Analysis of our Keyword “Sales Lead Generation”

April 27, 2013 Leave a Comment
sales lead generation

If you’ve seen the Day of Week data from Hubspot’s social media scientist, @DanZarrella (who’s written a new book, the Science of Marketing and will soon to be a guest on Marketing Made Simple TV), then you know that the weekends are the best time to publish your blog. As you see from the chart here, weekends are not just a bit better – they’re a LOT better.

Why is this so? As Dan points out in his book, The Science of Marketing, business people are busy Monday through Friday. Their only leisure time to do research is on the weekend. This is compounded by the fact most business people have smartphones today, so it is easy to do research anytime of the day or night.

This blog also publishes on the weekend, but it is also critical to our SEO campaigns for Find New Customers. We have carefully optimized this blog for a couple of keywords.

The cornerstone keywords at Fearless Competitor

Sales Lead Generation is one of the two main keywords we use at Find New Customers, around which we designed a cornerstone page.

But when is the best time to post? This Tweetchart analysis also offers some interesting data.

DZDayOfWeek

Source: DanZarrella.com

In addition to having a blog that posts regularly, every business needs to pick keywords that fit two competing criteria:

  1. High in popularity (A search term does no good if no one is using it.)
  2. Low in competitiveness (How aggressively are your competitors targeting it?)

That explains why we selected “digital marketing” and “sales lead generation” for Find New Customers. Each was high in popularity and moderate in competitiveness. By not only selecting using these terms, but also building “cornerstone pages” around those terms, we’re using the process recommended by top expert Brian Clark (@copyblogger) to build our search traffic.

What do you think? What is your option of our SEO strategy at Find New Customers? We love to read your comments and appreciate those who share our posts on social media. You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips here.

 

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Where’s your marketing plan? The most important marketing tool.

April 24, 2013 Leave a Comment
chief marketing officer

“Marketing Plans are an incredibly useful, but frequently overlooking tool for marketers” wrote Bill Blaney, author of B2B AtoZ

As the Creator and Host of the extremely popular show Marketing Made Simple TV, I get many books sent to me by prospective show guests.  These authors want me to read their book in hopes of being booked as a guest on the show.

One of those books is B2B AtoZ by Bill Blaney, which I am currently reading. There is something very important in this book you need to know – the importance of a good written marketing plan in your digital marketing planmarketing programs.  In this book, he writes on page 76

Getting Started: The Most Important Tool – The Marketing Plan

“It may seem elementary, but many companies overlook this crucial step. In order to understand what you want, where you want to go, how you plan to be perceived, and how to get there, you have to write it down.”

Here is what the author believes needs to be in your marketing plan:

“Marketing plans can be 50 pages or 2. They can include a full media plan or a suggestion of what sites, publications and events need attention. They can set agendas for quarters or the entire year. What you’ll accomplish in writing your marketing plan is clarifying your goals, thinking through your product or service categories, and pinpointing how you want to spend your money.

Here are typical elements:

  • Who”s your target market?
    Age range, Sex of primary customer. Income level and profession. Education. Location. Luckily, most companies know the profile of their buyers—and knowing your customer defines how you advertise to him or her.  (My note: Agreed, but you also need to understand why they would or would not buy from you and why. Those insights come from Buyer Personas)
  • How well do you know your product or service?
    What are the similarities and differences between your product and service and the competition’s? Do you have unique benefits or features? What are the key selling points?We always ask the same simple question to our client, and most of the time, they don’t have answers at the tips of their tongues. So right now, try writing down an explanation of why someone would buy your products and do business with you. When talking about unique features, try to explain them in plain terms. Many B2B products are technically complex. Whether or not your customer is an engineer, it’s always best to find the easiest, most conversational way to describe what it is you do. (My note: Talk in human English, keeping it simple.)
  • What is the demand for your product or service?
    What products or services are popular and what ones need a push? Based on a product’s yearly gross and increases in revenue, most companies have some idea where they want to concentrate their advertising.  With multiple products, the marketing plan is based on:
  1. If this is a new product, when will it be ready for market? If it’s not a new product, what are the expected profit goals for this product for the upcoming year?
  2. What are the most important (and well-populated) trade shows for these products?
  • Who are your competitors?
    What are their strengths and weaknesses? How lucrative is their business today? Do you intend to go head to head with your competitors in the same publications and online venues that they do? Or are their other strategies, or markets that the competition has ignored. Is there something your company can promote or enhance that the competition won’t, like exceptional service, or is there a new innovation you will integrate to make you the shiniest object in the bowl. A little bit of research on competitors goes a long way. (My note: Great idea, Bill. Understand your enemy.)
  • What is the marketing environment and how is it affecting sales?
    The psychology of your customer is of primary concern when the economy is in dire straits. You need to reseach who is buying today, and that may determine whether your advertising is focused across all markets or a few in particular which are showing growth? Some companies have found growth in India and China, for instance.
  • How much is your marketing budget?
    Although budgets vary, most marketing budgets are approximately 9% to 13% of revenue. It’s a good place to start, but smaller companies should know that you get what you pay for.  There are many creative ways to work with a small budget, but you can’t expect to get a five-month banner ad on Squidoo.com, and article in FastCompany, and a robust online presence for a small budget. Spend appropriately. It will pay off. (My note: Far too many companies starve the marketing budget, instead of investing smartly.)

What are the particulars?

  1. Online advertising
    1. banners, keyword marketing, page takeovers, videos
  2. Print advertising
  3. Smart devices
    1. mobile phone and tablets
  4. Social marketing
    1. blogging, forum posting, RSS feeds linking, guest posting
  5. Web presence
    1. company sites, , micro sites, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Slideshare, etc.
  6. Promotions
    1. online and off-line, sales oriented or vertical, which includes a promotion for the sales team and the end users.
  7. Trade shows
    1. displays, printed materials, article reprints, branded merchandise or give-aways, event marketing, which could include event organizers or experiential marketers giving your potential buyers a demonstration of your product or service or putting on a show or hosting a dinner.
  8. Public relations
    1. case studies, testimonials, white papers and articles about new products, local or national initiatives, company changes that might interest different markets or useful instructional information.
  9. Sponsorships
    1. Maybe you want to get your company name on a race car or be part of an affiliate promotion for an event that would compliment your business type
  10. Commercials or industrial videos
  11. Collateral
    1. brochures, stationary, sell sheets, ebooks, infographics, videos, forms.”

What do you think? Do you have a written marketing plan in your business today? If not, are you planning to write one. Why or why not?

This blog belongs to the sales lead generation company Find New Customers and is penned by award-winning BtoB marketing expert Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor. You can reach Jeff Ogden at 516-495-9350 or by sending an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com. You can also follow Jeff on Twitter at @fearlesscomp.

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I’m Your Customer. You Think You Understand Me, but You Don’t!

April 23, 2013 1 Comment
buyer personas

buyer persona execsDo your customers believe you truly understand them? Real Buyer Personas are needed.

If you are doing marketing (and Drucker famously said “all there is is marketing and innovation” – so any decent business has someone in charge of Marketing.  But we can ask a simple question:

If we were to ask your customers how well you know them, what would those customers say?

I’m willing to be most business leaders will claim “Hey we know a lot about our buyers!” And I’m also willing to bet that if I talked to those customers, most would say “No he does not.”

I cannot count the times I sat in a room with sales executives and salespeople and listened to them analyze their buyers. They all miss the point. They think they know their buyers, but they don’t. For instance, What qualms do they have about buying from your company? If I asked those internal people, they would be stumped.

True buyer insights come from phone interviews with buyers conducted by a trained professional, like Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers – trained by an organization like the Buyer Persona Institute.

Buyer personas are journeys of discovery. You are finding things you never expected. You are learning insights that you could never have guessed.

This is why surveys and apps cannot do personas.  Survey’s have pre-defined questions.  Pre-defined questions do not uncover fresh insights.  Neither do apps.

To learn about Buyer Persona services from Find New Customers, click here.

What do you think? We love your comments and appreciate those who share on social media.

Jeff Ogden, President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers is an award-winning BtoB marketing expert who is also trained in Buyer Personas.

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Buyer Personas are the Foundation of Great BtoB Marketing Programs

April 23, 2013 1 Comment
buyer personas in digital marketing

“There’s no aspect of marketing that buyer personas won’t improve” – Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute

Today, BtoB sellers compete around who has the best buyer insights. Companies who have the best buyer insights enjoy a clear competitive advantage today. If you want to get a competitive advantage, you need world class buyer personas.

Jeff Ogden, President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers is trained in Buyer Personas – having completed The Buyer Persona Process Master Class from the Buyer Persona Institute.

BuyerPersonaMasterClassLet me tell you a bit about this training:

See the diagram at right? This is the process covered in the Buyer Persona Master Class. It covers everything from

  • Understanding what personas are and are not
  • How to recruit interviews
  • How to collect and collate information from the interviews
  • Finally documenting your persona interviews in a form to drive all downstream marketing activities.

Please note that buyer personas cover more than simply understanding what makes a buyer tick. You also need to cover why and why not they would buy your company’s products and services.  The Buyer Persona Institute calls this the 5 Rings of Insight(TM), which is a trademark of the Buyer Persona Institute.

Interested in learning more about the Buyer Persona Service from Find New Customers. as well as our free buyer persona grading service? Click on Tell Me More About Buyer Personas.

Jeff Ogden, President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers is an award-winning btob marketing expert who is trained in buyer persona best practices. Sign up for free bi-weekly marketing tips here.

What do you think? We love to read your comments and appreciate those who share our posts on social media.

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How do you choose the right WordPress hosting solution for your websites?

April 22, 2013 Leave a Comment
WPEngine

WP EngineI’m no expert in WordPress hosting, however, I’m confident this blog, which is hosted by WPEngine, has the best host out there. Our our crack WordPress team led by the Petersen Media Group recommends WPEngine too. So I wish to share a guest post by them. This article will share why Managed Host is the best by far.

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Google “WordPress Hosting” and you’ll see results that span all sorts of price ranges and technical specs. You need a document to cut through the noise and help you choose the right hosting for your sites.

I’m going to go through and detail out the choices that you have when you choose WordPress hosting.

At the end, we’ll get you set up with hosting that is well-suited to the site you’re building, the blog you write at, or the app you’ve created.

Let’s start with the 4 basic types of hosting accounts to choose from:

  1. Shared Hosting
  2. VPS (Virtual Private Server)
  3. Dedicated Hosting
  4. Managed Hosting

And that there are 6 major factors to consider when you’re choosing a host:

  1. Speed
  2. Security
  3. Scalability
  4. Support
  5. Tools
  6. Price

Knowing those various features, we can quickly cut through the noise to prioritize which type of hosting suits your needs best.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a common hosting solution. It’s most compelling feature is price.

Shared hosting is cheap. For less than $10/ month you share a single server’s resources with a few hundred other small sites. If price is the most important factor, shared hosting is the way to go.

The downsides are that pages will take several seconds to load, and you’ll be responsible for keeping your site secure and updated from hackers and malware. And if you get a spike in traffic because your blog goes viral, there is a high risk that the site may crash.

Virtual Private Server

A VPS gives you more control over your site for development, along with more server resources, since you’re only sharing the server with a few other sites and not hundreds.

A VPS account can handle higher loads of traffic than a shared hosting account.

Choosing the right hosting for YOUR WordPress!

You’ll pay a bit more money for a VPS, $20-$100+ (depending on the storage) for the extra control and resources. And the server will be pretty beefy, so it can handle some significant traffic. However, scalability is limited to that server. Once the server runs out of processing power, either because of your traffic load, or maybe your neighbor suddenly got an influx of traffic, your site’s performance will drop as a result.

If you’re running a VPS, because you’ve got more control over the server, please make sure you are performing your own security measures to prevent hacking. You’ll receive pretty good support, but the folks you call or email won’t be able to offer much help if you get hacked, or if your site goes down.

Dedicated Server

This is the solution you’ll want if you need absolute control over all the technical aspects of hosting your sites. But you, or your SysAdmin better know the difference between Apache and Nginx, and being familiar with object caching. And someone on your team needs to know their way around a MySQL database, as well as how to maintain your own security protocol and firewall.

Dedicated servers give you a whole server, or several, for you to work with. Depending on how you set things up, your site will be extremely scalable under high traffic loads, and you’ll be able to hand-tune the performance and scalability. Dedicated servers are more expensive than a VPS: right at $250-$300 to start. It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s a good solution for websites that you want complete control over.

Managed WordPress Hosting

This elite breed of hosting is the top of the line for speed and scalability, and it also assumes that your site is running on WordPress. That’s a safe assumption, since about 20% of the Internet is built on WordPress. Managed WordPress Hosting means that a company like WP Engine takes care of all the technical details of the hosting and makes sure that your WordPress site is served quickly, usually under a second, and that speed scales with high traffic loads. So if (and when!) you get featured on the New York Times, you’ll be able to handle all the traffic.

WP Engine will also manage the security for you, and automatically update WordPress when the latest version is released. Knowing that your site is being cared for by WordPress hosting specialist means that you don’t have to worry about hackers or security. WP Engine even guarantees their security. No other Managed Host has the guarantee.

One of the biggest benefits is having expert support when it matters most. Managed hosts have support staff who know not only hosting, but they know WordPress as well, and can offer help in troubleshooting issues with plugins or themes.

Choosing the right hosting for YOUR WordPress!

WP Engine also provides tools like a staging area and automatic nightly backups of your site in case you ever need to restore your site. We also have git for version control.

WP Engine starts at just $29 a month. Visit wpengine.com to learn more and sign up today!

Choosing the right hosting for YOUR WordPress!

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The Remarkable Marketing Made Simple TV show

April 20, 2013 1 Comment
marketing made simple tv

This show, which premieres every Thursday at noon ET/9am PT is booming! So let me share 3 things that make Marketing Made Simple TV a great show.marketing made simple tv

  1. Marketing Made Simple TV is a TV on the Web show, and not a web show
    TV shows feature camera changes, B-roll content and a green room. Marketing Made Simple TV has those. Google Hangouts and Skype do not. It’s simply the most TV-like show on the web today.
  2. Marketing Made Simple TV is a widely syndicated show.
    By sharing with syndication sites, we reach over 2 million people every week. And we aim for many more.
  3. Marketing Made Simple TV is fun and engaging.
    Don’t take my word for it. Let VP of Marketing Sandra Zoratti and Celebrity CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett share:
  • “Jeff’s a talented host for Marketing Made Simple TV! He is informed, articulate, a great listener and is able to hone in on compelling topics and book stellar guests that add value. Jeff is also a skilled marketer and follows up, follows through and makes things happen. All around, Jeff is super impressive!” Sandra Zoratti, VP of Marketing, Ricoh
  • “This interview should be called “Under the Hat with Jeff!” Wearing his signature hat, Ogden gives and off the wall and dynamic interview, capturing the essence and message of the guest, and really embodies his own brand promise of Marketing Made Simple.You never know where it will go and that’s the whole purpose of the interview — refreshing in that Jeff’s style is honest and authentic.” @Jeffrey Hayzlett, Celebrity CMO and Cowboy

We also have some more goals for Marketing Made Simple TV:

  1. International expansion  - we want viewers in Western Europe and South America. Our friend Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners UK is helping.
  2. More viewers with PPC ads and more.  We want to pump money back into the program to get even more people watching the show. We just launched our first-ever Facebook advertising campaign.
  3. Live shows – our show Producer, Craig E. Yaris of Social Ribbit, is working on new show formats. Thanks, Craig!

Want to see all of the awesome guests on the show. Here’s a list for you. In fact, it’s the fastest way to check out the awesome shows.

Sponsorship/Advertising Opportunities on Marketing Made Simple TV

What do you think? We love comments and those who share on social media.

Marketing Made Simple TV is a production of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers.

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