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.

Alas, you’re not Apple, and I’m not Steve Jobs. That doesn’t mean we can’t pull off highly successful product launches, though.

Due to the tools we have available today, the research phase (which is an absolute must) can be combined with test marketing and some early promotion of the product.

The problem in developing successful new products is not a shortage of ideas, but the expense of bringing a new product to market without any guarantee of success. How much better to continually seek feedback from prospects along the way, and fine tune the product so you know it’s going to be a winner.

Research, Research, Research

Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter constitute mind-boggling tools for accomplishing research on the fly with built-in feedback loops, and rock bottom pricing. Five years ago you’d have to pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for the information you can get at virtually zero cost today. Here’s the process:

1. Determine who your best target customers are. “Everybody” is not an acceptable answer. Be as specific as possible. The better you know who you’re selling to, the better you can custom fit your product, and the more persuasive your marketing messages can be.
2. Determine how you want to go to market. Are you going to produce the product in-house or outsource the production? Will you sell the product yourself or through resellers? If you’re going the partner route, thoroughly research potential partners to determine best fit.
3. Market Research Phase:
   a. Research market size and potential.
   b. Interview end users, resellers and sales reps (you can do this via online polls on LinkedIn and Twitter, although you should also conduct some qualitative, in-depth interviews in person or over the phone).
4. Analysis and Development of the Marketing Plan:
   a. Competitive Analysis – review competing products and how they stack up against your proposed product. If there aren’t any closely competing products, research how else people are solving the problem. If they aren’t solving the problem and they’re not suffering any pain, pull the plug. If they are suffering, but don’t realize they have a problem, you need to add in the overhead cost required to educate them.
   b. Evaluate the product’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). Develop a Proof of Concept so people can understand what it is and what it does. It’s OK to use smoke and mirrors, as long as you can build the real functionality when the time comes.
   c. Develop an Online Marketing Plan that leverages the unique capabilities of the Net. Successful online launches create a series of interactions with current customers, employees, prospects, suppliers, trade media, resellers and any other appropriate audiences.
5. Execute the Plan and Launch the Product:
   a. Develop online (easily and inexpensively edited) collateral materials.
   b. Begin placement dialogues with the first step in the preferred channel.
   c. Have enough dialogues with enough different entities to uncover any previously undiscovered objections.
   d. Review and revise the Plan as necessary with the new information.
   e. Repeat until you’re satisfied you have market acceptance.
   f. Explore relationship extensions with partners.

I’ll come out with more details in shorter blog posts over the next several days.

1. traditional, interruptive advertising was no longer effective, and
2. traditional presales activities (educating prospects about your solutions) had been replaced by Google.

Largely due to the efforts of others, like Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett; and to the overwhelming evidence in the market place, my prospects now understand #1 and 2 above. So what’s next?

The Content, Connection, Conversation, Conversion Continuum

We all agree that to engage prospects we need to produce and publish relevant, useful, interesting and valuable content. You can’t just put it out there anymore, though. There’s too much competition for peoples’ attention.

We need to connect the content to our prospects. That means we have to deliver it to the online places where they hang out. That might be at industry-related websites like MSPmentor, or on special interest groups within Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Once you’ve set your content at the feet of the people it was developed for, if you’ve made the content compelling enough, your prospects connect with you. You’ve piqued their interest and they want to learn more… or they want to voice their opinion. They will comment on a blog post, in your online discussion, or they’ll email you.

Conversation ensues.  When a dialogue is created between you and your prospects, ideas are exchanged. This is the time to listen carefully. It’s a golden opportunity to find out exactly what prospects want. Let them tell you. If they feel they’ve been heard, trust is built.

Once they understand that you truly have their best interest at heart, the conversation will move from online to phone, and then face to face, as the topics move from features and benefits, to pricing, and to terms and conditions. The prospect converts into a customer. You close a profitable deal without selling anything.

Years ago your Sales department controlled every step of a prospect’s movement through the sales cycle – from initial interest to closing the deal. Your salespeople managed the prospect’s access to information about your products and services. Marketing’s job largely consisted of renting assets owned by other entities (advertising sales departments, PR firms with access to journalists, tradeshow organizers).

The internet has changed that forever. Fragmentation of media has created an information source explosion:

• happy and disgruntled customers freely comment about vendors and services,
• self-proclaimed industry experts blog about everything from features to pricing to future product releases,
• competitors engage prospects online via the clever use of social media.

The days of controlling the conversation with customers and prospects are gone. Marketing must move from renting assets to building them. Marketers must become publishers.

Content in Context

The internet has disintermediated the middlemen. Used to be that Marketing ‘rented’ access to prospects via print advertising in trade publications. We all know that ads don’t work anymore. People have become inured. They ignore the ‘noise’.

Or Marketing rented access to prospects via articles placed in those same trade pubs. This can still work, but is prohibitively expensive for SMB companies. Compared with 10 years ago, the prices are higher and the readership is lower.

Trade shows can still work, but they too are expensive, and they’re time-consuming. Most SMB IT providers are selective about exhibiting at trade shows, and only do one or two a year.

The internet has given us direct access to prospects. We don’t have to go through those middlemen anymore. But there’s a downside. Those middlemen gave us context.

When buying a print ad, Marketing made sure that the readers of that trade pub were people in a position to buy what they were selling; and made sure that the ‘content’ of that ad spoke in terms that made sense to that target audience.

When a PR agency placed an article, the agency made sure that the placement was appropriate and that the content was relevant. Then a professional journalist wrote the article in a way that was (usually) interesting to the target audience.

In the trade show scenario, organizers demand that exhibitors meet certain criteria… that they’re focused on a niche that’s congruent with the target audience. Then they book speakers and seminars designed to attract that target audience. And they promote the show to ensure the targets attend.

Content Strategy Supplies Context

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of relevant and useful content across a number of different vehicles (blogs, case studies, email campaigns, LinkedIn, online PR, podcasts, syndicated articles, videos, webinars, websites, white papers, etc.).

Gaining the interest of customers and prospects online is all about being willing to put your own agenda aside. Put yourself in their shoes and work hard to produce information that prospects find relevant and useful. If you can make it entertaining too – so much the better. Companies need not only the will, talent and skill to produce great content; they need the tools, processes and infrastructure. Those went away when we lost the middlemen.

The people who develop online content discuss user experience, information architecture, content management systems, metadata, visual design, user research and other disciplines that facilitate users’ abilities to find and consume content. What’s been largely ignored is the content development process.

Content Development Process

Content strategy is important. It provides the context for the content that forms the heart and soul of every successful B2B marketing effort. Content strategy deserves the focus of either someone internal to the organization, or by an external agency. A content strategist executes:

• Channel Distribution Strategy – defining how and where content will be made available to prospects. (e.g. blogs, email marketing, LinkedIn, online article publishing, podcasts, posted videos, Twitter, website).

• Content Management Strategy – defining the technologies needed to capture, store, deliver, and preserve an organization’s content. Publishing infrastructures, content management systems and workflows are key considerations.

• Editorial Strategy – defining the guidelines by which all online content is governed: values, voice, tone, legal and regulatory concerns, user-generated content, and so on.

• Keyword Research – using search term suggestion tools (on an ongoing basis) to determine which keywords and phrases people are using to find what you’re selling, and embedding those keywords in your content.

• Link Building – an important component for superior search engine ranking. Google bestows high ranking on those websites that have been linked to from sites it considers to be “of high quality and relevance”.

• Search Engine Optimization - editing and organizing the content on a page or across a website to increase its relevance and search engine ranking for specific keyphrases.

• Stewardship of Company Positioning - ensuring all messages are congruent with the established brand, value propositions, etc. and adapting them as markets or competitive conditions change.

Businesses must commit to treating their marketing content as a valuable asset worthy of strategic planning. Otherwise content marketing efforts are haphazard and less effective than they could be. Anything worth doing is worth doing well. Content strategy is worth doing well.