In complex B2B sales, people still buy from people. I don’t want to give the impression that ‘Closing’ has gone away. It’s still extremely important, and the people who are ‘Closers’ are extremely valuable. More about this later.

Sales 2.0 merges Sales and Marketing to target prospects more effectively, using online technologies in innovative ways, to bring in more business at a significantly lower cost of sales. Information is available free (or close to it) today that you couldn’t buy for any amount of money five years ago.

Now we can find highly specific target prospects much more easily, AND we don’t have to interrupt them while they’re trying to do something else. Outbound sales messages, when they’re done via phone or even in person, are analogous to interruptive advertising. An Alterian poll determined that in 2009, 95% of advertising was ignored or disbelieved by its target audience. The old saw was that 50% of advertising didn’t work… you just didn’t know which 50%. Today, you can rest assured that 95% of advertising spend is wasted.

How do you build trust when your prospects won’t engage with you? Today’s B2B buyers want to engage in conversation where and when it’s convenient for them. That means social media. It’s not expensive, but it’s not free. It takes time and effort, knowledge and finesse. Increasingly, Sales and Marketing people are going to have to immerse themselves in social media (or hire a trusted resource) to do demand generation, lead nurturing and to build relationships… albeit digital relationships.

Now we get back to the ‘Closers’ I mentioned earlier. In B2B they’re essential, and they’re expensive. You don’t want them (and they wouldn’t do it anyway) spending time writing blogs, Tweeting, and trolling Discussion Groups on LinkedIn. The good news is they don’t have to. Once a digital relationship is established with a prospect, and the lead is qualified, whoever is handling social media for you should turn the realtionship/lead over to one of your closers. (You have at least one, or you wouldn’t be in business.) When the prospect is nearing a buy decision, they will want to speak with a sales person.

If the Sales 2.0/Marketing operation has done its job correctly, that face to face conversation won’t be focused exclusively on price. Your closer can spend their time and energy developing a personal relationship… and closing a profitable deal.

This is the first post in a series about B2B Sales 2.0. The next one will be titled ‘Sales 2.0 is Sales Enablement’.

Social media and search have irreversibly merged the worlds of Sales and Marketing. Where marketing messages and sales relationship building begin and end is a moving target. So SMB IT providers must adopt a new set of marketing-related behaviors to thrive in this new environment.

Selling evolved long ago from an act of presenting and closing, to one of educating and consulting; but access to information via online sources (rating sites, filtering social media streams, and tools for competitive analysis) has changed the game.

Over the past five years B2B buyers have learned to research online. They don’t want to see or talk to a salesperson until they’re nearing a buy decision. That means Marketing, specifically online marketing, must create demand, nurture leads and keep them engaged until they’re ready for Sales.

Some businesses are attempting to meet this challenge by expecting salespeople to learn the ins and outs of the internet as a sales enabler, while also carrying a quota, building relationships, managing accounts and internal resources, upselling current customers, and prospecting! That’s a great way to set your salespeople up for failure.

My clients – SMB (20 to 100 employee) IT providers (hardware, software and/or services) have been evolving and they need to continue to do so. My experience with them (MSPs, SIs, VARs), is that they’ve been struggling to transition from a direct sales model to a model that better fits how their prospects want to buy.

SMB IT providers are still trying to get their web channel aligned (if they even understand that the web is their de facto channel to market). Now there’s another paradigm shift; and that’s social media. There’s the added challenge of figuring out how to reach prospects through blogs, LinkedIn, paid search, personalized email, and the new question burning up Twitter today – should we buy promoted tweets?

I want to draw an analogy here to earlier forms of media. Books were invented hundreds of years ago and they’re still going strong. Newspapers and magazines were invented later, and they’re still here, maybe not so strong. Radio is still here. So are movies and TV.

With each paradigm shift, the old way wasn’t destroyed, it was added to. That’s the situation with SMB IT providers – there’s still basic selling of boxes going on and that will continue, but there’s no margin in it. There’s still consultative selling of solutions going on, and that will continue, but now the prospect is in the driver’s seat and margins are under pressure. Effective Marketing (content marketing, inbound marketing, online marketing, social media marketing) can reduce the Cost of Sales and help IT providers to maintain margins.

There are no more blind dates. Your prospects can learn just about all there is to know re your company, your products and services, and your personnel. Some of my clients say, “Then let’s not tell them. Let’s leave that information off our website. Let’s not participate in social media. Then they’ll have to speak to our salespeople.” I disagree… vehemently. No SMB IT provider is selling any solution that prospects can’t find elsewhere. If your site doesn’t contain the relevant and useful information that people need to make an informed decision, you’ve already lost the sale.

In order to beat the competition, you need to be playing the social media game, and you need to do it well. There’s a misconception that social media is free. The platforms typically are free. Using them effectively takes time, knowledge (platform knowledge, but also business and people knowledge), and a well thought through strategy.

I have a client who asked me to help him find a recent college grad to do his company’s social media marketing. He figured that there are plenty of recent grads looking for work and they understand this social networking stuff. We couldn’t find anybody. There were plenty of applicants, just nobody capable. They didn’t understand business. They couldn’t discern what was appropriate communication, and what was not. They didn’t know the industry. When a client or prospect engaged them online, they didn’t comprehend the context of the message. They couldn’t reply in a meaningful way.

Social media is conversation. You need to make sure your end of that conversation is interesting, knowledgeable, relevant and courteous.

Social media presents a gigantic opportunity for SMBs. You can engage your prospects where they’re already congregating online, build credibility in your expertise, and (over time) gently persuade them to purchase from you. This takes both Sales and Marketing participation (and cooperation), time, effort, some money, planning, and a willingness to develop processes. It takes a concerted effort over time and across platforms. The payback is orders of magnitude greater than the Sales and Marketing ROI you’re used to.

Complex, high-ticket B2B solutions have long sales cycles. If you have a qualified lead (they have the need, budget and authority), keep them engaged and nurtured. There are right and wrong ways to do this. I’ve seen clients waste time and money on what they think are ‘nurturing’ activities, only to end up with annoyed, tuned-out prospects.

Here’s my list of Lead Torture vs. Lead Nurture:

Lead Torture – calling leads just to ‘touch base’ (“Are you ready to buy yet? I need to make my quota.”). Lead Nurture – calling leads when you have something to talk about, something that is of interest to that individual. Having a valid business reason to make the call.

Lead Torture - Tweets about mundane or arcane (too techie) matters; salesy, obviously self-serving Answers and Discussions on LinkedIn; invitations to become a fan of your company page on Facebook. Lead Nurture - a thought through, coordinated social media plan that has an objective, is congruent across platforms, and consistently delivers interesting, meaningful and/or entertaining information.

Lead Torture – sending the same, tired brochure (or case study or white paper) over and over again. Lead Nurture – sending new, relevant and useful information on a regular basis (blogs are a great way to accomplish this AND improve your SEO at the same time).

Lead Torture – sending weekly emails, written by whichever technician wasn’t billed out at the time, containing technology feature dumps. Lead Nurture - sending a weekly email that curates news items from the Net; items that are of interest because they’re related to that prospect’s industry, business role, etc.

If you’re going to do it, do it right. Otherwise you’re training your leads to dismiss your messaging and your company.

I agree with Jill. That may seem to be an odd stance for a guy who makes his living developing marketing collateral and sales tools, but it isn’t really.

Today people won’t agree to a meeting with a sales person unless:

1. they feel you have a solution to a business problem they’re experiencing, and
2. they’ve already checked out your website, read your company blog, and researched your executives on LinkedIn.

I’ve been there, so I know that hard copy collateral can be a crutch for sales people… especially young or inexperienced ones. It used to be that the collateral was necessary. Prospects had no other way to learn about complex B2B products and services. Those days are gone. Make sure your website is filled with high quality content that is relevant and useful to your clients and prospects; and keep adding content so people have a reason to return to your site.

Focus on developing relationships when you meet with clients. You’ll close more business. Don’t go in totally naked, though… I recommend you wear a smile.

Here’s Jill’s blog post Naked Selling.

My research opened my eyes. There are several different forces at work that make the valuation of an MSP business a dynamic process. How MSPs are valued is changing, and I was able to say, “Yes,” to my client.

Here’s what I found. The preeminent expert in this space is Charles Weaver. He’s the President of the MSP Alliance, and of a consulting group that specializes in MSP mergers and acquisitions. I exchanged a few emails with Charles. His position is that MSP valuations used to focus on annual profits. The purchaser would ask to see the books. They valued the business more if it could show a year over year improvement in net profits, and they would pay a multiple of last year’s net.

This profit metric led to MSPs choking off investment in the business for a couple of years prior to sale to pump up the size of their profits and, therefore, the selling price. Purchasers were paying top dollar for a business in decline, and they had to invest heavily to get it back into growth mode.

So the metrics changed. Instead of looking just at profits, potential acquirers also looked at the book of business. They reviewed the number of current contracts and their future value in order to get a better idea of future profits. So MSPs who were contemplating cashing out focused on signing clients to multi-year contracts. Charles feels that this is also a less than optimal valuation method. He thinks it’s actually unfair to the seller because there are many sources of non-recurring revenue that should be included. His preferred calculation method is to blend top line revenue and EBITDA.

According to Joe Panettieri, the ‘VAR Guy’ and President of MSPmentor, “effective Marketing, Sales and Consulting are the three basic criteria for long-term MSP success and maximum company valuation… the most successful MSPs have processes in place to work on social media, marketing and PR on an ongoing basis.”

What Joe is saying is that having processes in place to handle Marketing and PR functions delivers three positive influences on valuation:

1. they indicate a willingness on the part of the business’ management to build and deploy infrastructure devoted to demand generation and lead nurturing (critical sales enablement ingredients when selling complex B2B services),
2. they accrue sales assets, which are tools that accelerate and amplify the sales process, and
3. they result in company and brand visibility in the geographies served and across the online world.

Marketing is not a one and done kind of thing. Like Sales and Consulting, it’s an ongoing process that needs to be worked on all the time. Especially today when everyone is dealing with ’short attention span prospects’. Fresh, relevant and useful content is needed on websites and for social media platforms. You have to give prospects a reason to keep coming back (i.e. new information that educates and gently persuades), until they’re ready and willing to sit down with a salesperson.

So how do I help my client pump up the valuation of his business? By doing the same things I do with all my clients… get them to:

• focus on Marketing as a strategic part of their business;
• stop doing ‘promotional activities’ on an ad hoc, opportunistic, haphazard basis;
• plan, budget and execute Marketing functions just as they do with Consulting and Sales functions.

When B2B purchasers were seeking potential new suppliers, Twitter and blogs were considered  more influential sources of supplier information than any other channel, including word of mouth, seminars and industry press.

However, the most popular sources of information remain web searches and supplier websites. In fact, when asked how their information gathering behavior had changed, procurement professionals cited the greatest increased use of web searches (up 64%) and supplier websites (up 61%). Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter experienced 6% and 10% net increases respectively, and LinkedIn saw growth of 19%. Online videos/webinars/podcasts were also a strong source of information with an increase in usage of 36% – that coming off a small base, though.

It got me to thinking about how we at acSellerant might help our MSP clients build trust with their prospects. Using Covey’s universal tenets, I’ve come up with the following guidelines:

Talk Straight

Tell the truth. Be transparent. Work hard to communicate clearly so people understand exactly what to expect. Communications can get foggy for many reasons. What I see most are these three:

1. You’re rushed – slow down, make the time, think it through. It’ll save time in the long run.
2. You don’t completely understand the function/process/technology yourself – do your homework. Don’t communicate to the client until you’re confident you understand.
3. You understand a complex function/process/technology very well – be aware that the client may not be as versed in it. Slow down. Don’t use jargon or acronyms.

Right Wrongs

Mistakes happen. When they do, come clean immediately, apologize, and make it right. See what you can do to prevent the mistake from reoccurring.

Get Better

This is one I think most MSPs do well. They have the systems and the metrics in place, and they’re constantly trying to improve service levels. That’s great, but your clients are probably unaware of it. Think about things from their perspective. You know that fewer help desk calls means more profitability for you. The case can be made that fewer help desk calls also means better profitability (or at least productivity) for your clients. If you have stats that show you’ve brought the number of help desk calls down over time, SHARE THEM with your clients, and connect the dots for them re increased productivity.

How many other metrics that you work to improve can be framed as a benefit to your clients?

Listen First

We all know this is important, but most of us don’t practice it as often as we should.

Covey has thirteen tenets, but I think if you put the four I’ve listed above into practice 100% of the time, the rest will take care of itself.

I’ve been on  the other side of the fence at DEC and EMC, and it was blasphemy to allow the channel to mess with our collateral. “They might go off message!” That was then, and this is now. You can’t protect the marketing assets anymore (and after all, the whole point is to spread the word). Much better to assist resellers in leveraging all those expensive white papers, case studies, etc.

I wrote a post about how those corporate assets miss the mark when you get down to street level. They can’t address local environments and competition. I call the process of customizing corporate vendor collateral, ‘Sales Enablement‘.

This is a great opportunity to cost effectively add useful and relevant content (which Google LOVES) to your website. btw - acSellerant specializes in customizing generic vendor content for your market and distributing it via social media. View this well reasoned video from Cisco here…

Relevant, useful, interesting… even entertaining copy is no longer enough to hold the interest of harried, starved for time, inundated with information business prospects. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort researching and building a process to develop multimedia storyboards that can deliver a significant amount of information in a short amount of time. The idea is to use sight and sound simultaneously to compress the amount of time, and increase the ease, in which information is communicated.

You’re thinking, “Wow, Bob. Alert the media. Ever hear of television or the movies?”

This process might include video, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s designed to be deliverable at less cost, with less equipment, and less prep time than video. It’s designed to fit the budgets of my clients. It’s untried, though.

So, I’ve been thinking about how to launch it. I first vetted the idea with friends, colleagues and clients over the holidays. Then I submitted discussions to a half dozen groups on LinkedIn. I was surprised at the response. Many smart, talented, creative professionals joined in the discussions. The consensus was, if I can pull it off, it’s a winner.

Then I went to three online custom publishers I have a relationship with. They were positive. They all said the same thing, they can sell it, IF I can pull it off. So now it’s time to develop a proof of concept and get feedback.

I’ve built a prototype with a voice over script, some on screen text, and a story told in cartoon format (with my crude stick figure drawings). I realized I needed a professional cartoonist to do the eight or nine frames necessary to tell the visual part of the story. So I’m using iFreelance and contacting other cartoonists I found on LinkedIn and through graphic designers I know.

So stay tuned. I’m going to blog about the process as I reveal the proof of concept online, try to build buzz via social media, and crowdsource tweaks to the process/product to improve it. By the way, one of the outcomes of the discussions on LinkedIn is a name for the product: acStream.

Should be interesting.

If a new product or service is important enough to build a launch, give the launch the resources it needs to be successful. SWAT team members should include people from Marketing, Product Management, Sales and Service/Support. Expect that these people will be devoting significant time to the launch effort, so make sure that they aren’t encumbered with too many other deliverables in the same time frame. Assume that half of their time will be devoted to the launch for approximately three months.

It’s essential that Sales be involved in every product launch in a meaningful way. That means at least one sales person will have to split time between roles. Reduce their quota for the duration of the launch. If you don’t, they’ll be busy making their number. The launch process will suffer and the ROI of the launch will be compromised.

You’re going to be tempted to put a junior sales person on the team to minimize the revenue loss. Don’t do it. Put the sales exec who’s going to be most affected by the new product on the team. Typically that will be somebody more senior, and somebody who will whole-heartedly contribute to the success of the launch.

Bruce Seidel is a B2B sales coach with a long history of success selling software. He wrote an excellent blog post regarding formal agreements between Marketing and Sales to ensure a successful new product launch. Read it. Copy it. Keep it someplace safe where you can access it when you need it. I did.

My next post will be about using social media (your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) to crowdsource the features, benefits, delivery model – even the name and branding of your new product or service (and to start a whisper campaign about it).