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The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. Wayne Breitbarth. 2011. ISBN 9781608320936.  This is a true how to do book, with enough why attached that the reader can understand the power of this tool.  A comment I picked up on was:  ignoring LinkedIn now  is like 10 years ago ignoring email. There is only one way to learn to find out how useful it can be.  He  splits the book in two, first making yourself easy to find ( fill in a proper profile)  and then how to find and approach others on LinkedIn.  Every person in any business can make good use of this book.  Buy it, read it and use it. Well written and a quick read.

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Maximizing Lead Generation. The complete guide for b2b marketers. Ruth P. Stevens. 2012. ISBN9780789741141.  The subhead is really true, this is a thorough and complete book on lead gen. Combine this with Brian Carrols work and you have all you need.  I recommend this book for the beginner through to the grey haired pro. Sure the tools will continue to improve, but the basics as laid out by the author are very very current. Warning, read this carefully as the  author is concise and direct, so it is up to you to understand each part of each step, including the need for great copy. A great addition to marketing literature and I suggest this is a must buy.

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Part 1 of these posts talked about how power in the market has shifted to the buyer. (Reference Voice of the Customer Marketing by Eaman).  Thus the focus in of marketing and sales  is to learn as much as possible about the buyer’s journey.

The marketing and sales departments must work together to extract value stories to help marketing build out:

• Agreement with sales on what is a sales ready lead (Reference: Brian Carroll)
• Knowledge of all the stages that a buyer goes through internally prior to and during a decision to purchase  ( Reference: Sharon Drew Morgen)
• The unique value(s) that they can demonstrate they bring to the buyer ( Reference: see how LeveragePoint can help)
• Knowledge of what buyers find valuable from dealing with your sales force. (Have salespeople earned the right to talk to buyers?)
• Campaigns that place the needed proof in front of the targeted buyers well before they engage with sales. (Lead your prospects to value, not a sale. Reference: Ardath Albee)
• The changing proof needed for each stage of the buyers journey.
• Segmented value proofs for the many different individuals participating on the buyer’s side (You deal with a committee).
• Compelling value stories that bolster the salesman’s efforts/confidence in using a value based, not pricing based approach.

This is an investment in time and effort that builds a long term sustainable sales funnel. Research has shown that at any one time only 5% of your “suspects” are in buying mode. This leaves 95% which need to be nurtured by marketing until they raise their hand.  As I said in the first post, the buyer decides when they will interact with you.

A recent LinkedIn Answer by Ian Dainty is relevant at this time on  Who is Responsible for Generating Leads, Sales or Marketing?

Ian Dainty • Here is my two cents worth.
Because I have been in the B2B tech space for over 35 years, as a sales rep, marketer, executive and owner, I have seen all kinds of scenarios. I came from the “dialing for dollars” days, when no SMB tech company had a marketing department. The sales rep did it all.
However, after all of this time, and through years of research, executive interviews, and being in the trenches, I have been able to make some good observations that work.
If you have a company, with under $100M in revenue, then marketing’s main function should be to generate leads. (or as we used to call them – suspects). This should be done through Direct Response Marketing (DRM). DRM includes emails, letters, Social Media, PPC, advertising, etc., anything that asks a suspect to put their hands up and ask for your free content, whether that be a white paper, a free download, etc

.
I have seen too many marketing VP’s spend their time designing logos (seriously) as if this is going to help build a company brand. Marketing needs to bring in and nurture leads, until they are qualified by sales.
Sales should qualify leads. Unfortunately, very few sales people know how to qualify properly, and end up chasing leads for months. Hence the long sales cycle in most B2B tech companies. Please go to my blog for more information, especially “How to Stop Chasing Dead Leads” http://bit.ly/mgCTGo But I digress from the topic here.

Once a lead has been qualified as far as timeframe and need, and this where most qualification processes fail, then sales should take over. If it is simply a tire kicker, then marketing needs to keep nurturing.

Too many sales people spend their time either cold calling, not needed if you have at least $1M in revenue, and/or not knowing how to qualify, and chasing dead leads.

Sales should also generate leads, through three main avenues. They should be asking for referrals from clients. They should be getting testimonials for use by marketing. And more importantly, they should be generating more business in each of their current clients.

Many sales people fail on all fronts. But marketing needs to take on the lead (suspect) generation for a company.

Thanks Ian, I could not say this any better. Next what does Sales have to do to implement a value based selling approach.

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Social Media Sales Revolution. The new rules for finding customers, building relationships, and closing more sales through online networking. Landy Chase & Kevin Knebl. 2011. ISBN 9780071768504.  Brand spanking new from McGraw Hill and very current.  I am researching resources for a Social Media for Sales course we are presenting this fall.  This one is a good fit.

The author has a great line at the end:

Your prospects have moved but left a forwarding address. That address is found in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the blogs they write.

The first chapters explain why the old outbound sales prospecting methods are giving lower returns. The book then shows the proactive sales person exactly how to leverage the new tools for 30 minutes a day to improve his sales numbers.  The chapters on really using LinkedIn and Hootsuite are priceless. I was able to immediately improve my LinkedIn profile.  As a result I had as best ever  one day increase in my Klout score.  The coverage of Twitter and Facebook is also valuable.  Could be the sales efficiency book of the year for me.  Most others have got this all wrong.

This is a must buy for the salesperson who wants to win.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

• Executive and C-Level management owns responsibility for providing high level market, message, and media  strategic direction.  and
• The strategic-level messaging most companies use does not work.

He also comes out against any firm that thinks using a metric like cost per lead tells them something useful. He is also against blueprinting.  A real advocate of nurturing leads until they are ready for the sales team. Begone the short term mindset.

A short. concise book full of nothing but the truth and how to do it. Every CEO, VP Sales and VP Marketing must have this book.  Buy it  and  keep it.

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Free. How today’s smartest businesses profit by giving something for nothing. Chris Anderson. 2010. ISBN 9781401310325.  I have had this book awhile and, really kick myself for not reading it sooner.  It is outstanding.  Anderson is able to debunk all the chestnuts out there around free as well as spend the time to give you some history lessons on free.  He also experimented with his own ideas on how to place the product out there for free using various methods he put forward.  Very insightful stuff . I especially appreciated his 10 Rules of Free on pp 241 and the review of the range of conversion rates one can expect from freemium on pp 247.  The key insight for me is his comment ( compressed and paraphrased by me)  that:

Price will fall to the marginal cost (in the digital bits case,  free) unless the provider has a monopoly and/or enjoys the network effect such as Microsoft (Office docs) and Facebook.  This supports a winner takes all effect, driving competitors to  very low numbers.   Facebook can not charge for new members because it has value in the network = linking new people all the time. So they will generate revenue from scale – losing with 99 % of the users and making it from a small % of ad revenue.  ( or perhaps – selling stock!)

I see that  Guy Kawasaki and Tim Ferris both used ideas from Anderson in their recent promotions.  Guy generated more “reputation” currency by offering free downloads of the Macintosh Way to people who “liked” his new book facebook page.  Tim Ferris drove buys of the new 4 Hour Body , by offering a pdf of the 4 Hour Workweek to those who bought the new book.  Tim drove his book to the top of Amazon very quickly = increased sales and reputation.

This is the best treatment of free and freemium out there. If you buy this very readible book, read and digest it. It contains numerous money making ideas. Do not treat it lightly! You can get the audiobook still free at Chris’ website:

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What Women Want. The global market turns female friendly. Paco Underhill. A new good book from the author of Why We Buy.  This is further  insight into the changing of consumers worldwide by an expert who knows how to write.  Every chapter will have you nodding your head with another few insights into the  opportunities missed to really direct your marketing to the segments that control the bulk of the money on our world.  Who? The over 50 market.  This may about what women want,  but any guy will find himself in these pages.   Very worthwhile marketing book, up to date and immediately applicable.  Good 4 hour plane ride book, it will keep your interest and get you thinking.

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. How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now. David Meerman Scott. 2011. ISBN 9780470645956.  This book is really on top of the real time marketplace, by the author  right on top of this as well..  The premise was first, find put how the top 100 US companies are doing in the real time digital /social media space. So he sent out a request shaped around that he was writing a book on how companies are responding  to this change in the marketplace. What a hoot – it was incredible the number of companies that he could not contact, or who did not respond. As well the ones who did respond were quite interesting, who,  how soon ( minutes to hours to days)  and the way they did  (Personal, web form, take a survey, take a number and wait and so on).  Meerman Scott then build a compelling up to date case on what to do, how to do it, tools to use and where the rubber meets the road on sales results.    This gets my vote as the marketing PR book of the year. Its current, well researched and very well written. Every C-Suite dweller needs to read this one.

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Sales’ response to a price rise. Pricing part 9.   In many of the companies I have worked for, the last group to ask for a price rise would be sales.  Perhaps you have tried to institute a price rise or even harder, change the comp plan to reflect a net margin component.   (Its more work to manage revenue & net selling price than revenue.)  What are the typical sales responses?  Sound familiar?

• The sales force will not execute on anything that reduces their commission or jeopardizes their job.
• A variable commission on gasp “margin” can be seen as a penalty
• Maximizing volume is hard wired in many companies , so the team will always go for the Porsche, not the steak knives.
• Price protection requests will rise
• Long term contract obligations are brought up
• In the absence of tools, tactics and training on value selling, cowboy behavior will increase.

Aside from what the company culture rewards, there is a basic reason for these responses.   Customers lie, especially to sales people.  You lost the bid?  Someone else “had a better price”.  You won the bid?  You priced it “just right”.  Do not believe this.  You lose more by being outsold, not out priced.  You win, very often because you left so much money on the table (ie underpriced), but sales  will rarely  find out.

We see the lack of a truthful  win loss reviews to be holding back so many companies, companies that then take what sales tells them at face value.  By hiring a sales team, younger companies often hope they have solved their sales problem.  Again hope is not a strategy.

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