The Definitive Guide to BtoB Demand Generation – How to Find New Customers

March 7, 2013 Leave a Comment
How to Find New Customers

Need to craft a best-practices sales lead generation program? Check out the Definitive Guide to BtoB Demand Generation: How to Find New Customers

In a recent meeting at my former employer,an Atlanta-based revenue marketing company, some folks from Marketo spoke about the series of content called “The Definitive Guide to…”  They joked that so many “definitive guides” have come out, that the next one might be named “The Definitive Guide to Definitive Guides.”

Those definitive guides from Marketo are terrific content, but Find New Customers has our own “definitive guide.” Our’s is The Definitive Guide to BtoB Demand Generation: How to Find New Customers.

BtoB sellers are struggling to create enough qualified sales opportunities.  In fact, a recent study by MarketingSherpa found that the challenge of Generating High Quality Leads was the big problem faced by BtoB companies, with 3 out of 4 naming it number one.B2B Marketing Challenges growing in pertinence

This great white paper is a superb guide to help companies like your create best practices sales lead generation programs. That is a great guide to fixing the key problem that vexes most BtoB sellers today – the lack of enough qualified sales opportunities.

In order to learn how to implement a best-practices sales lead generation in your company, just click the image below.

 

How to Find New Customers

How to Find New Customers

How to Find New Customers is “The Definitive Guide to BtoB Demand Generation”

The author of How to Find New Customers, Jeff Ogden, is a an award-winning BtoB marketing expert in sales lead generation and the President of Find New Customers.

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Awash in an Ocean of Content, Companies with the best Buyer Insights win the digital marketing battle

March 6, 2013 Leave a Comment
Digital Marketing

ship2-fixedBuyer Insights are what separate the best marketers in their digital marketing campaigns

I suggest you leave buyer insights to the pros.

According to MarketingProfs, 9 out of 10 companies are doing content marketing in 2013.  It seems everyone is doing it, but almost no one is any good at it. In fact, my friends at Velocity Partners UK issued an e-book entitled Crap – We’re About to Be Buried in It. It starts off with “9 out of 10 companies are doing content marketing today…..and one our of 10 is doing nothing and won’t be bothering anyone.”

“The problem is that everyone is doing content and no one has the people to create quality content today – so we’re about to be buried in an ocean of crappy content, and your digital marketing program will suffer greatly.”

So what are B2B sellers to do?

Everyone seems to advise you to slow down and create more compelling content.  But what is compelling content?  Think about it. When was the last time YOU found something compelling?

Chances are it was something that specifically related to YOU – your experiences, your passions or your family.  As you can see, Relevance is all in the eye of the beholder. And for BtoB sellers today, the beholder is the customer.

If customers hold the keys to relevance, more and more BtoB sellers will differentiate themselves based on buyer insights – what you know about those customers. Companies with the best buyer insights will win.

Companies who do the BEST jobs of uncovering key buyer issues and pains will create truly relevant content for their digital marketing programs. This is why buyer persona services are the single most important thing you can do in 2013. And please note, creating a survey and sending out is NOT buyer personas. Buyer Personas are all about discovering new information.

As one who has completed the Buyer Persona Master Class, I can tell you that these are not trivial or easy to understand processes.  Just like you hire plumbers and electricians to work on your house, I strongly advise you to bring in professional to collect and collate your buyer personas for your digital marketing programs.  Only the pros know exactly what needs to be done – using industry best practices.

But some are tempted to take short-cuts:

Isn’t there an easier way? Can’t we just email out a survey?

Some may be tempted to take a short cut, trying to get insights from focus groups or surveys. Resist this temptation.

  • Surveys are useful when you know what the question is.

  • Focus groups can get people to choose the best of three alternatives.

But these techniques can only confirm the best answer from a list of pre-selected options — validating what you already know.

The buyer persona interview process goes deeper to identify the questions you don’t know. It’s the way to get at non-obvious insights that allow you to redefine the competitive playing field.

 (Adele Revella, The Buyer Persona Institute)

We suggest you check out the Buyer Persona Service from Find New Customers today.

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

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Social Media Marketing becoming Mainstream in BtoB, though most still can’t measure it

March 5, 2013 Leave a Comment
social media marketing

A new study by BtoB finds that almost 1/2 of firms “are “very involved” or “fully integrated” with social marketing, up from 28% last year, and fully 96% of all marketers are engaging with social media in some fashion.” Read the original post at Social Media Marketing Reaches Maturity. {Editor’s Note] Social media marketing is playing a larger and larger role in Digital Marketing programs today.social media marketing in btob

Social also makes up 6% of the average marketing budget, but 9% in best in class companies.

However, social is still hard to measure. Only 41% of marketers even attempt to measure the results of social. ”

“Marketers rated social’s performance as a marketing tool at 6.4 on a 10-point scale, where 10 represents complete satisfaction with ROI.

“We know companies largely are unable to measure the success of their social media marketing programs,” said Jeremiah Owyang, industry analyst at consultancy Altimeter Group. “That’s been the top marketing challenge for the past three years.”

LinkedIn is the channel most used by b2b marketers, according to BtoB’s study, with 80% engaged in the professional profile site. Facebook (75%) and Twitter (74%) are almost as commonly used, with YouTube (59%), blogging (48%), Google+ (32%), customer communities (24%), Pinterest (19%) and LinkedIn’s SlideShare (13%) also represented.

A starker divide is seen when marketers were asked which of these, among others, is their most important social platform or tool. Here, LinkedIn (34%) bested Facebook (19%) by far, with blogging (17%), Twitter (12%), customer communities (10%) and YouTube (5%) following.

[Editor’s note: Facebook is way too high and blogging is way too low. Twitter is too low too.)

Companies are finding the social is ideal for company branding efforts, Other goals being positively affected by social media marketing include, in order, product/event production, community building and website traffic boosting. Respondents said an average of 11% of website traffic is being driven by their social marketing efforts.

BtoB’s study was based on an online poll conducted in January and February of 432 b2b marketers. The sample of respondents was largely from small-to-midsize businesses: 62% of respondents represented companies with less than $100 million in annual revenue. At the other end of the scale, 20% of respondents represented companies with more than $1 billion in annual sales.

Technology companies comprised 30% of the sample. Manufacturing (11%), financial services (9%), consulting (9%), publishing/media (4%) and wholesale trade/distribution (4%) also were represented.

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

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Ten Questions to Sharpen Your Competitive Differentiation – Guest post by Laura Patterson

March 3, 2013 1 Comment
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Ten Questions to Sharpen Your Competitive Differentiation

A guest post By Laura Patterson, VisionEdge Marketing

Laura Patterson

Laura Patterson

Companies need to make a myriad of strategic and tactical decisions on how they will operate in the market and engage with customers.  One of the most important tasks for digital marketing is to differentiate the company and its products from the competition.  Differentiation entails clearly distinguishing your product and/or company to make it more attractive and compelling to a particular target market.  Companies who do this well create a competitive advantage.

Differentiation plays an important role in gaining customer consideration and preference, two important steps in the customer buying process. So when was the last time you and your team took time to consider how your rivals operate, or might operate based on the decisions you make? For example, if you brought a new product or service to market:

  • Are they likely to discount their prices?
  • Provide incentives to their partners in an effort to tie up the channel?
  • Extend offers to customers that will dissuade trial of and switching to your offer?

As part of developing a go-to-market plan for innovations and/or demand generation strategies we consider technology, functionality, customer segments and requirements, channels and partners, pricing and promotion.  Our competitors are doing the same.  Therefore, thinking about these questions and areas from the perspective of your competition might provide some insight into their potential opportunities and possible responses. Taking the time to answering the following ten questions from your competitors’ perspective may enable you to better anticipate and counteract their moves:

  1. What technologies or features might a competitor include to make its product/service more compelling to your target customers?
  2. How much technological lead must each competitor need in their next generation product or service in order to leapfrog the current products in the market?
  3. How much more will customers be willing to pay for a competitor’s technological or experience improvements?
  4. What partnerships could the competitor establish that would affect our ability to gain traction and penetration in the market?
  5. What customer segments could competitors tap to accelerate their growth and category share?
  6. In what segments will price competition be the fiercest and how big are these segments?  What position does the competition have in each of these segments?
  7. How can the competition adapt any of their existing products to differentiate them further?
  8. Which markets/geographies/customers will the competition focus on to protect their current share?  In bringing a new offer to market?  To grow their category position?
  9. How will the competition position new products/services and bring these to market?
  10. What barriers to entry can the competition create or develop that could delay our ability to respond?

These ten questions will probably spark more questions for you and your team to address.  Reflecting on these questions will help you sharpen your thinking when it comes to innovation and market entry strategies.

Laura Patterson I @LauraVEM

President and Founder, VisionEdge Marketing

Want to prove and improve the value of your marketing? For 20+ years, Laura has been helping CEOs and Marketing Executives at companies such as Cisco, Elsevier Health Science, ING, Intel, Kennametal, and Southwest Airlines do just that. She was an early advocate of using marketing data, processes, automation, and dashboards to link marketing initiatives and investments to business outcomes. Laura has authored three books on marketing performance management, including the most recent: Metrics in Action: Creating a Performance Driven Marketing Organization, and is frequently interviewed for Marketing Made Simple TV.

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CMOs to Rein in Traditional Ad Spend, Press on With Digital Marketing

March 2, 2013 Leave a Comment
sales lead generation

Digital Marketing growth

Life is pretty bleak for TV, Newspaper and all off-line advertising. Digital Marketing is the future. (Source: MarketingCharts)

(Since I no longer work for The Pedowitz Group, I have restarted Saturday posts. What do you think?

And do you really truly understand your buyers? If not, check out the Buyer Persona Service from Find New Customers.)

Despite consumer and marketer beliefs that traditional media advertising on the whole is more effective than online advertising, marketers continue to shift budgets away from traditional media and towards digital marketing channels, finds Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in its latest installment of The CMO Survey.

In this latest survey, CMOs forecast a 2.7% decline in traditional advertising spend over the next 12 months, after predicting a 1.9% decrease in August 2012, an 0.8% decrease in February 2012, and a 1.3% increase in August 2011. So the drop is accelerating.

By contrast, digital marketing spending is forecast to grow by 10.2%, a slower rate than the 11.5% increase forecast in August 2012, but a healthy rate nonetheless. I look for continued growth in digital marketing in the months and years to come.

Segregating responses by type of company, the study finds that B2C service firms will pull back on traditional advertising the most (-5.4%), with B2B product companies (-4.1%) also curtailing spending. B2B services (-2.2%) and B2C product (-0.6%) companies will keep their budgets relatively flat. Each company type is projecting a double-digit increase in digital marketing spend, save for B2B product companies (+8.2%). So the increase in spend on digital marketing in B2B companies is substantial, if not quite double digits.

Meanwhile, CMOs are projecting increased budgets across a number of other areas, though they’re less bullish than in the August 2012 survey. They’re expecting to spend more on new product (8%, down from 9.4% in August 2012) and service (5.8%, down from 6.5%) introductions, while also forecasting an 8.1% increase in budgets devoted to customer relationship management (down from 9%), and 6.8% more spending on brand building (down from 7.5%).

Overall marketing spending is expected to grow by 6.1% over the next 12 months, slightly slower than the 6.4% growth forecast from August 2012. Currently, marketing budgets are reported to account for an average of 10.6% of firm budgets, down from 11.4% in August 2012. (In my opinion, reducing the marketing budget is cutting off your nose to spite your face.)

About the Data: The CMO Survey is conducted online twice a year. The latest survey was fielded from January 22 to February 8, 2013. 468 CMOs responded to the survey, of which 95% were VP level or above.

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Happy Birthday, sales lead generation company Find New Customers – belatedly

March 1, 2013 1 Comment
Logo1000x130.jpg

On February 13, 2009, the sales lead generation company Find New Customers was born. We are now four years old, which means we outlived a lot of other businesses.

cropped-fnclogo1.jpg

Find New Customers, the demand generation company, is led by the award-winning marketer Jeff Ogden, who’s also the creator of the very popular and highly syndicated online TV show, Marketing Made Simple TV.  You can follow Jeff on Twitter at @fearlesscomp. 

We also have a lot of great content on BtoB marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and more on sales lead generation  - all of which can be found at www.findnewcustomers.com. And all of our great content is 100% free, so feel free to grab it today.

While we did have a brief stop at an Atlanta firm, managing GE, we’re happy to be back at our own company, where I have control of my own destiny.

Who should talk to Find New Customers?

  • Companies struggling to create enough quality leads to fill sales pipelines. (That is nearly everyone.)
  • Companies looking to gain a competitive advantage by developing deep buyer insights.
  • Companies who want better results from software like Marketo, Silverpop or Eloqua.
  • Companies who want to drive revenue from marketing – connecting marketing to revenue

If any of those describe you, contact Find New Customers today!

It’s easy to reach Find New Customers:

  1. Call us – 516-495-9350
  2. Email us – sales at findnewcustomers.com
  3. Tweet us – @fearlesscomp

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

2012-50most-badge-ogden

SLMA winner

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Digital Marketing: 10 Tips for your Programs

February 26, 2013 Leave a Comment
Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the rage today. Everyone is moving away from print and focusing on digital marketing programs. But what are the keys to getting the most from your Digital Marketing programs?

Here are ten tips:

  1. Start by understanding buyers
    Good digital marketing programs start by developing a deep understanding of buyers. You not only need to know what their pain points are, but you need to connect your products or services, This is not a trivial process, which is why we recommend our Buyer Persona Service.
  2. Have a strong value proposition
    One of the keys to success in your digital marketing programs  is having clear value to prospective buyers. What is the business results that buyers get from your product or service? It needs to be specific and measurable, like an 18% increase in profits in just 18 months.
  3. Create content to move buyers through a process
    If you know your buyers, you can craft strong content which moves buyers in your marketing prdigital marketing tipsograms. The goal of your content should be to move prospects through a buying process. You need unstructured buyer interviews with both won and lost deals.  Find New Customers Buyer Persona Service can help.
  4. Ensure a solid lead management process
    It’s all too easy to drop the ball and your marketing programs will fail.  Ensure a solid and ongoing process to manage the leads you have.
  5. Gently nurture leads
    The goal of lead nurturing in your marketing programs is to earn trust. If you share valuable content gently in your digital marketing programs, you will earn trust.
  6. Score behaviors
    If your lead nurturing programs in your digital marketing campaigns are earning trust, how do you know when someone is ready to buy?  Watch their behaviors – aka Digital Body Language.
  7. Make sure Sales is on board
    Your entire digital marketing program will fail unless sales is on board. Start early by talking to them and ensuring they clearly see the value to them of your digital marketing efforts.
  8. Measure results
    Digital Marketing works if you can prove the value. That means continually measuring results – like qualified sales opportunities created, velocity through the process and win percentages.
  9. Continually test and refine
    Digital marketing is all about experimentation. Take a small part of your digital marketing budget and set it aside for experimentation.  As you learn new things, incorporate these ideas into your new digital marketing programs.
  10. Let us know how you did
    Okay, I couldn’t think of a 10th tip in Digital Marketing. But this is all for you and I welcome your feedback.

What do you think? Were these ten tips in Digital Marketing helpful? We love to read your comments and appreciate those who share on social media.

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Thanks for all the awards! Jeff Ogden of the sales lead generation company Find New Customer is honored!

February 20, 2013 Leave a Comment
AwardMarketing

I’m honored and flattered to be an award-winning B2B sales and marketing expert in sales and sales lead generation. Please forgive me for beating my chest.

Here are a few of the recent awards.

With all three of those, they cover sales, marketing, demand generation and blogging. Very cool. And I certainly congratulate all of the co-winners of these awards too, especially Jill Konrath.

Here’s info on the Top 25 Sales Influence award.

Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2012

By

Looking to connect with some of the top sales minds in the business?

OpenView's top 25 sales influencers for 2012

The research team here at OpenView Labs recently applied their talents toward identifying the most influential sales leaders on the Web today. Browse below for our list of 25 of the most powerful thought leaders in the world of sales management, lead generation, and more.

(Editor’s note: For more details on how this list was compiled, check out this blog post from Brandon Hickie on developing a prioritization scheme for market channel research.)

OpenView’s Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2012 are:

Jeff Ogden, Find New Customers

Jeff OgdenJeff is the president of Find New Customers, which focuses on “demand generation made simple.” He writes for the popular blog Fearless Competitor and hosts the B2B marketing show Marketing Made Simple TV.

Follow on Twitter: @fearlesscomp

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers is an award-winning BtoB marketing expert. He’s twice been named Top 50 Influencer in Sales Lead Management and was named a Top 25 Influencer in Sales as well.

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B2B Demand Generation Starts with Strong, Structured Buyer Personas

February 15, 2013 Leave a Comment
Persona

I’m often asked “Where do we start with our B2B digital marketing programs?”  Good question.

You need to start with deep understanding of buyers, and only a structured, planned buyer persona program consisting of buyer interviews will do the trick. Buyer personas need to come BEFORE content marketing – as the insights gained are invaluable in crafting content that resonates with buyers.

Let’s say you’re committed to driving qualified sales leads in your business in your digital marketing programs. Your company leadership just gave you a quota of qualified sales leads. So you went to work on it.

  1. You bought Adwords.
  2. You sponsored some events.
  3. You hired a writer to pen a white paper.

While that’s all great, if you missed the step of crafting Buyer Personas, all those efforts are far less than ideal. You simply won’t get very good results. This is why you need Find New Customers to help you create best-practices, useful personas.

Great B2B digital marketing starts with Buyer Personas.

Frankly, in every client engagement done by the lead generation company Find New Customers we start with customer interviews – buyer personas.  In fact, the two most recent clients, both software firms, hired us to help them to interview their customers and document their personas. It’s critical that you not only learn about buyers, but uncover the persona/product connection.

How can YOU learn to interview customers and uncover important facts? The top expert in Buyer Personas is Adele Revella of Buyer Persona. Watch my first interview with Adele on Mad Marketing TV here. (Please note that I hate the jarring music that starts this show.)

Please keep in mind that crafting and using Buyer Personas is a long and complex process. You need to understand the kind of information you need to collect, get Sales on board, recruit customers for interviews, conduct and record the interviews, manage the interview process, turn information into useful form, and use that information in your marketing campaigns and sales enablement programs.  We strongly believe companies need to learn new skills to do this well, so we now offer a Buyer Persona Service - in which we create best-practices personas for you.

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

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor of Find New Customers is an award-winning BtoB marketing expert who is Certified in Buyer Personas by the Buyer Persona Institute and has won Top 50 Influencer in Sales Lead Management the last two years. You can reach him at jeff dot ogden at fearlesscompetitor.com or follow @fearlesscomp on Twitter.

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Almost 2 out of 3 B2B Marketers Use Unreliable Data according to a NetProspex study

February 6, 2013 2 Comments
TooLowSlider

The State of Data Quality in B2B Companies Today is Abysmal

Almost all B2B companies suffer from contact databases that are “unreliable” (64%) or “questionable” (34%), according to [download page] a new study from NetProspex. Data quality is a major problem which hampers your sales lead generation programs..

NetProspex ran over 100M records through the NetProspex Data Healthcheck program evaluating database health across 4 best practice areas – record duplication, record completeness, email deliverability, and phone connectability. Using standardized scores for each component, the study arrives at a data health scale, with 98% of companies scoring on the lower end of the scale, and just 2% having “functional” databases.

It’s also interesting to see some of the findings:

  • Phone connectivity scored only a 1.5 out of 5 which is deemed “risky.”  Fewer than 1 out of 2 records were reachable by phone.
  • The average score for email deliverability was just 2.8, which means that 30-40% of emails sent did not reach the intended recipient.
  • The average score for record completeness was just 2.5, putting this area in the “unreliable” category, where only 50-65% of records are complete.

It seems clear that data cleanliness and accuracy is a massive problem for B2B sellers today. Lack of data quality is a major obstacle in B2B demand generation programs. Companies have zero chance to become true Revenue Marketers unless they improve data quality.

Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers is an award-winning BtoB marketer. He’s a two time winner of Top 50 Influencer in Sales Lead Management and his company helps BtoB sellers make the connection between Marketing and Revenue. Contact Find New Customers by calling 516-495-9250 or send an email to jeff dot ogden at findnewcustomers.com.

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