1. Include input from Sales. If you haven’t already, align Sales and Marketing. You can’t afford not to. Sales should be immersed in the conversations taking place with prospects offline. That information is critical to success in migrating, extending and amplifying those conversations online.

2. Be no longer than six months. You can’t plan beyond that. The conversations you need to be having with suspects, prospects and leads is influenced to a significant degree by the environment. Things change in a hurry. Your plan should define how you’ll adapt, not predict the future.

3. Develop and define target personas. Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests, needs and wants? If your content isn’t relevant and useful to that person; it won’t be consumed, remembered or acted on. You have to know, specifically, who you’re engaging in conversation. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next.

4. Include search engine optimization (SEO), link building, and probably paid search, too. Place your QUALITY content where your targets are congregating online; and take the extra step to PULL others to your blog and website. If they can’t find you on Google, you don’t exist.

5. Have a content strategy that doesn’t assume ‘existing resources’ will do the development. Beyond the strategy itself, this is the most important piece of the plan. Hire someone (either permanent staff or an outside consultant) as a dedicated resource… someone who is an expert at content development. That means not only an excellent copywriter, but one who has SEO skills, and one who understands how to deploy multimedia to communicate your messages quickly, clearly and persuasively.

6. Include distribution, outreach and socialization… the mechanics of how you’ll get your quality content in front of your target audience (which includes not only prospects, but influential people in your industry, in the blogging world, in the media, etc.); and give them the tools they need to comment and distribute.

7. Build in an analytics plan. List key performance indicators (KPIs). What are your goals? They should include traffic, blog comments, retweets, and conversions. This last, conversions, are where the rubber meets the road. What action(s) do you want your targets to take after consuming your content? That must be clearly defined up front. Google Analytics will give you reams of data for free. You don’t want reams of data. You want the half dozen or so stats that will give you a good idea of how well the plan is meeting its goals.

8. Serve existing customers. It’s easier to keep existing customers than it is to obtain new ones. Does your social media marketing plan lay out how you’ll keep your current customers informed and happy? Social media isn’t only a marketing tool. It’s also an excellent research, customer service and PR tool. Make sure your plan leverages it across all those departments.

9. Include Facebook along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. There are so many people on Facebook you’d be crazy not to try to reach .01% of them. Also look at niche social networks that may aggregate your targets. Once the content is developed, there are tools that automate the process of distributing to these platforms.

10. Follow through. After the content is distributed, you have to follow through. Your social networks must be monitored; and questions and comments must be answered. That’s the essence of  conversation. Listen.

11. Build your house list. It’s your most valuable marketing asset. Your plan should include integration of the various social media platforms into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

12. Include a feedback loop. You developed relevant and useful content for your target audience. You distributed it. You socialized it. You listened and gathered intelligence re what your target thinks of your messaging. You’ve seen which content drives traffic and conversions, and which doesn’t. Feed that information back into the plan. Tweak, and repeat.

13. Be reasonable. There’s a perception that social media is low cost. The price of admission is practically zero, but social media marketing is a process. It requires a significant investment of time. You must listen, participate, and converse over time. Budget money and other resources accordingly.

14. Do the math. The easiest way to check on #13 is to do the math. Your social media plan should put a dollar value on a customer, and provide a worst-case cost estimate for acquiring that customer. Your customer acquisition cost, using social media, should be no more than a few percentage points of the lifetime value of that customer. If it isn’t, something is wrong with either your plan or your pricing.

• changes in technology,
• changes in economies,
• changes in the perceptions of value,
• a power shift from the seller to the buyer,
• and a reversion back to the natural human interactions of commerce.

There needs to be a corresponding upheaval in how products and services are sold. Social media is contributing significantly. It enables a natural give and take between people. It’s a paradigm shift that is changing how business is conducted. The last 75 years or so (comprising the rise, reign and fall of the mass media selling model) were an aberration.

Back to the Future – the Bizarre Bazaar

It may feel like today’s world of transparency, social media, digital relationships and reputation management is something exotic and new. It’s not. Mass media and push marketing (and to a lesser degree brand building) are no longer working because they were an anomaly, brought about by an artificial marketplace. The good news is we are reentering a more human way of conducting business. The bad news is most of us have to unlearn our sales and marketing habits.

So what are we supposed to do?

CONTENT. CONTEXT. CONVERSATION.

Value is communicated over time through a series of interactions between your company and your prospects. However, this value isn’t transferred from business to business. It’s achieved through conversations that individuals from your company have with specific people within an account. B2B sales are the result of many discrete conversations, and value is best communicated when those conversations focus on a common goal: solving the client’s problem.

Strong customer relationships are built over time, through a series of value-added interactions between various people from the buyer and seller organizations. Nevertheless, most B2B companies fail to use key conversations as input to formulate go-to-market strategy for subsequent sales efforts.

Digital versions of these conversations are happening daily, by the millions, in social media (AND THEY LEAVE AN AUDIT TRAIL)! The value of this information is astounding. Participate. Learn how to leverage these conversations. You can bet your business your brightest and toughest competitors are immersed in it.

Here’s what I’ve learned in working with my clients on social media. Common mistakes include:

• Relegating social media to the most junior person on the Sales team.
• Investing 10 or 20 hours in it, and declaring it a failure.
• Treating it as a peripheral endeavor – something not core to the success of the business.

On the surface it makes sense to have a junior (i.e. young) person handle social media. After all, they understand this stuff, right? Yes… they understand the platforms and technologies. The danger is that they typically don’t have a deep understanding of your business, the industries it serves, and (HUGE) the nuances of interacting with clients and prospects. Social media are conversations. What is said, and how information is delivered, are extremely important. Sophisticated people skills are required.

Social media is relatively inexpensive. The price of admission is almost zero; but leveraging social media effectively takes a considerable investment of time. Social media reflects how we interact in the offline world. You must spend time listening and learning about the people you want to interact with; and then you must earn their trust. Plan on spending 10 to 20 person hours a week for a couple of months before you see a tangible payback. Too large an investment? It’s either that or compete on price. You choose.

Social media should be an intrinsic part of your business. It can drastically improve the effectiveness of everything from Customer Service to Marketing (including market research and PR) to Sales. Assign or hire a fairly senior person to manage your social media activities across your organization; and give that person a seat at the table along with the rest of your executives. This person will deliver significant value (more than you can imagine) if you give them the time, resources and respect that they deserve. Expect them to deliver documented, winning go-to-market strategies. Integrate them into the formulation and execution of your business development efforts.

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.

It reminded me about the disconnect between large vendor Marketing and the sales messaging needed by SMB MSPs, SIs and VARs. That VP had a slick PowerPoint presentation developed by a corporate Marketing department. It leveraged information purchased from major IT research vendors – Forrester, Gartner, IDC, etc. It was a good starting point, but almost worthless to sales people on the ground trying to sell specific solutions.

Sales Enablement is the process of arming an organization’s salespeople with information that will help to close profitable deals. Sales Enablement delivers the most relevant information for a specific sales situation.

Sales people are what I call “just in time learners”. They are extremely busy. They are action-oriented. They have little patience for sitting, reading and digesting reams of information so they can later distill and communicate the most significant message for a particular sales situation. Salespeople learn what they need to know when they need to know it. Sales Enablement should bridge the gap between the 35,000 foot PowerPoint and the, “I’m sitting across the table from a decision maker who is willing to take the next step… if I can show her that we are capable of solving her specific business problem.”

The specificity need not be deeply detailed, but it should address the particular problem… not describe issues that are universal across an industry. It should bridge Sales and Marketing departments. It should augment market research and global messaging with:

• Competitive Intelligence – not at the vendor level, but of local MSPs, SIs and VARs
• Tribal knowledge – specific to the client industry in the local geography
• Product knowledge from the minds of the technologists who have developed/integrated similar solutions, and
• Answers to questions and objections encountered by salespeople who have sold similar solutions in that market.

Here are three common mistakes salespeople make when attempting to bridge the gaps described above:

Mistake #1: Giving the Feature/Benefit World Tour

These tours often happen during demos, presentations, proposals, and in printed and online collateral. They’re an attempt to show prospects everything that your product/service/solution can deliver. Don’t give the ‘List of the Top Ten Features and Benefits’. Your website should have that information. When in front of a customer you want to pick the two or three features and benefits that are meaningful to them given their situation.

A savvy sales enablement provider will help the salesperson pick the three most relevant features and benefits, and will translate them into higher-order value statements. As an example, the three most relevant value statements for an Electronic Records Management solution might be:

1. A 25% increase in productivity due to improved access to information for daily tasks.
2. An average 40% savings on paper storage costs.
3. A 99% reduction in fines and penalties due to regulatory non-compliance.

If you know that all three of those are primary concerns with that prospect, you’ve just reduced your sales cycle significantly.

Mistake #2: Let Me Tell You All About My Baby

This happens most often when an engineer is brought along on a sales call. They are (usually justifiably) proud of their baby. They built it, and they love to talk about it… what it does, how it does it, why it does it this way, and so forth ad nauseum. There’s a time and a place for this conversation – when your techie is talking to their techie. When that occurs, it’s usually quite late in the buying process and the business people have already decided to go ahead.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, though. Summarize the solution effectively (and briefly) using graphics, then provide a link or a white paper which details the technical information. Your decision maker will be more at ease if he can give those details to his trusted technical advisor.

Mistake #3: No Proof Points… Just Trust Me

This is a situation that’s as old as B2B technology sales itself. Salespeople understand the effectiveness of case studies and testimonials. They constantly ask Marketing for them; but they never want to take the time to elicit them from clients. Your salespeople, and your technicians and customer service reps too, should be alert for positive statements from clients. When clients make these statements, the automatic response should be, “Thank you. We’d love to be able to use that in our promotional materials. Can I have someone contact you about it?” Then, whoever is handling your Sales Enablement should quickly follow up with a written testimonial, or if appropriate, an outline for a case study, for their approval. Don’t wait for the client to write it. It won’t happen.

Also be alert for situations where your solution has made a hero out of someone in the client organization. Those people will be happy to sit down with your Sales Enabler and tell them all about the problem that was solved, and how it came about, and the results achieved. Case studies with a client hero or heroine resonate with prospects. After all, who doesn’t want to be seen as a hero by their company?

Consider incenting everyone who has client contact to submit potential testimonials and case studies.