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.

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.

Bob Leonard

In the B2B world, it’s going to require what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “simplicity on the other side of complexity”.

What I mean is that marketers are going to have to work hard to distill product and service information (features and benefits, competitive positioning, value propositions, etc.) into easily consumed, and quickly digested morsels. I’m not referring to slogans or tag lines. Marketers have moved beyond sales messages to delivering relevant and useful information. As the sheer volume of this information grows exponentially, marketers must learn to communicate to target prospects not only in a meaningful, concise way; but also using multimedia to engage more of the targets’ senses. To teach and to entertain simultaneously.

I happened to have a prediction ready for Joe because it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit.

As a content developer, my primary communication vehicle has been the written word. As technology advances, and the amount of information available to people explodes, text on a page or a screen is becoming less and less capable of competing for peoples’ attention. So, I decided to work on something new. I was looking for something I could do largely by myself with just a PC, some software and an internet connection. I’ve found that thing. I call it ‘storyboarding’.

It’s a mashup of PowerPoint, video and podcasting (voice over).

I’ll be evolving this blog to that format within the next few weeks. And will be using it to help clients communicate to their customers and prospects.

Meanwhile take a look at Joe’s 100 Content Marketing and Social Media Predictions for 2010.

These three Insurance Technology pundits are Ellen Carney, Barry Rabkin and Ara Trembly. All three of these people make their living consulting to technology vendors in the insurance space. They are all well-connected in the industry, and they all have valuable insights.

Barry’s blog is called ‘Rabkin’s ROI – Rants, Observations and Insights from an Insurance Technology Analyst‘. Barry has a unique point of view as a result of 30 years of experience in what he calls the ‘InTech’ world.

Both Ellen and Ara have blogs on the Insurance Networking site. You may have to register to access the blogs, but it’s well worth the five minutes. You can also sign up to receive IN’s enewsletter. Lots of good information. Here’s an excellent post by Ellen listing the findings of a recent Forrester research study re how insurance execs are planning their IT spending; and an insightful one by Ara discussing the demise of homegrown insurance systems (or not).

These people are bona fide world class experts in the field of information technology in the insurance industry, and you can peek inside their brains for free! Relevant and useful information to help you make better business decisions. It’s a wonderful world.

I remember my boss at Digital Equipment Corp. once awarded me the “bulldog”. It was a bronze casting of a bulldog meant to be proudly displayed on my desktop. It was recognition for sinking my teeth into an unqualified prospect and holding on until the prospect submitted to my will and bought.

That was then. This is now. Today that kind of behavior should be punished, not rewarded. Maybe even back then. We made the sale, but at what cost?

Once I had committed to that deal, I spent tons of time booking appointments, preparing proposals, building presentations, and making customer visits. Very time consuming and expensive. I’ve since decided that this is work that should be done only if there’s a real need and a good chance of winning a profitable deal.

Everything you do to generate leads and close deals is hard work. Don’t waste it. Get to ‘No’.

There’s a substantial difference in your mental attitude when you’re going for a ‘Yes’ versus when you’re going for a ‘No’.

When you go for a ‘Yes’:

• You’re trying to get an appointment.
• You’re trying to get approval for your proposal.
• You’re trying to close the deal or close for the next step.
• Your posture is one of a supplicant.

When you go for a ‘No’:

• You cross prospects off your list faster.
• You never do proposals that have no chance of leading to a sale.
• You’re looking for reasons not to waste time with loser deals.
• Your posture is one of confidence that what you sell is of value.

This doesn’t mean you throw out every lead that isn’t perfect and ready to decide today.

What it does mean is that you prioritize your efforts, and you make prospects show you why they deserve your sales time and sales resources.

It’s so much better to deal only with qualified prospects. Prospects who have pain and are actively seeking help.

Most companies don’t qualify leads well enough. In B2B, prospects are professional buyers, with budgets and business problems to solve. If you can help them, chances are good they’ll buy. You have a right to ask questions to determine if the opportunity is appropriate for your organization.

When you embark on a demand generation program, you need to qualify the leads that come in. Initially, they should be qualified to determine whether they belong in the sales funnel at all. Criteria to determine this:

• the prospect is the decision maker, a strong influencer, or has access to the decision maker or influencer
• the company is doing well and can make money available for the purchase (or, in some cases, is doing poorly and may go to great lengths to get funding for the right project)
• pain has been detected, and your product may solve their pain
• they have expressed interest in your product, and
• they project a purchase within a year.

If they don’t qualify at this point, discard them. On average, you’ll lose about 20% of the leads generated. You’ll save a lot of time and effort by not pursuing leads that will never close.

Then it’s time to qualify for “sales-ready” leads. It’s imperative that Marketing, Sales and the C-suite all agree on the criteria that must be met to qualify a lead as “sales-ready”. Here’s an example of sales-ready lead criteria:

• the prospect is the decision maker, or is a strong influencer and can get you access to the decision maker
• budget is available, or the person can make budget available
• pain has been verified, and your product can genuinely solve their pain
• they have expressed interest in a sales meeting to explore a solution to their need, and
• they project a purchase within three months.

You can loosen or tighten the scoring criteria based on whether you want more or fewer leads to hand to your salesforce. On average, 20% of the leads generated will be qualified as sales-ready. Hand them off to the appropriate sales contacts immediately.

You’ve discarded 20% and handed 20% off to your salesforce. That means you have 60% of the leads generated still in the sales funnel. They’re qualified as leads, but they’re not sales-ready. They need to be nurtured.

The way to build a relationship with these prospects is to let them educate themselves. B2B lead nurturing consists of making informative content (some subset of whitepapers, seminars, case studies, podcasts, webinars, demos, etc.) available to the prospect. The goal is to earn their permission to stay in touch and progressively deepen the relationship so that when the prospect does become sales-ready, they’ll want to engage with your firm. You’re top of mind when they’re ready to buy, and the conversation won’t be centered on price, because you’ve become a trusted advisor.

It isn’t news to you that the nature of your relationships with your clients and prospects has changed. Existing relationships are more difficult to maintain as the people you used to deal with leave their posts, and their replacements (if there are any) are much less inclined to engage with IT providers. Cultivating new relationships is more difficult because prospects don’t feel the need to interact with IT providers until they’re ready to buy. They do their research online. If they contact you, the conversation will be about price.

Relationships

What may be news is that there’s a more cost effective way to build, nurture and maintain relationships with clients and prospects. You don’t have to be in the same room (or the same country). You can build the trust online that forms the foundation of every sale. With one caveat – the relationships you build must be authentic. Everybody has a well-honed BS detector today. If you aren’t in it for the long haul, if you’re just trying to make your quarterly numbers, resign yourself to competing on price.

Return On Influence

There’s networking and relationship-building for business, and there’s ’sales disguised as networking’. Don’t confuse the two because your prospects won’t. The first one is truly helpful because he wants to make and keep relationships. The second one is interacting only to fill an immediate need.

By being helpful over time, even when there’s no imminent payoff on the horizon, you become a trusted advisor. And you’re able to accomplish this fairly easily, because it’s a one to many relationship. By communicating relevant and useful information through your blog (and commenting on other appropriate blogs), and/or a newsletter, white papers, videos, your website etc., you build a reputation. As long as the content you develop is high quality, people with an interest will find it and disseminate it to others.

Starved for Time, Not Information

It seems counter intuitive. Why develop more content when people don’t have time to consume the information that’s already available to them? If you develop content that resonates, or informs in a way that’s valuable, or entertains (or preferably, all three), people rightly perceive it as a time saver. They didn’t have to hunt down these tidbits, assimilate them and think them through – you did it for them.

Content Strategy

Of course, you can’t deliver useful, relevant, compelling information off the cuff. You must determine what your positioning is. What subject matter do you want to be the trusted advisor for? And who are your target prospects? Once that’s done, you can develop a content strategy that outlines the research you’ll do and the topics you’ll cover. An added bonus is that, as search becomes more contextual (see Bing, Kosmix and Duck Duck Go), your relevant content becomes your search engine optimization (SEO). No need to trick the search engines into driving traffic. The same valuable information that keeps people interested, will also draw the interest of the search engines.