Is Account-Based Marketing Right for Your Business?

One of the hot topics in B2B marketing circles today is account-based marketing (ABM). ITSMA (the Information Technology Services Marketing Association) led the development of account-based marketing about a decade ago. Although it started in the technology sector, ABM is now used by many kinds of B2B companies.

ITSMA defines account-based marketing as:  "A structured approach to developing and implementing highly customized marketing campaigns to markets of one, i.e. accounts, partners, or prospects." (emphasis added) By this definition, the distinguishing characteristic of account-based marketing is that it entails the development of a unique marketing strategy and communications program for each target account.

Recently, some marketing consultants and software companies have been arguing for a broader view of account-based marketing. For example, SiriusDecisions has identified four varieties of ABM - large-account marketing, named-account marketing, industry-account marketing, and customer marketing. For a description of these four varieties of ABM, read this post at the SiriusDecisions blog.

Firms that advocate the broader view use the term account-based marketing to describe marketing programs that focus on a specific group of named accounts, but do not necessarily involve the implementation of a unique marketing program for each target account. While these programs are often based on solid marketing principles and can be very effective, they are not true account-based marketing, at least in the original sense of the concept. In this post, I'm using the term account-based marketing as it was defined by ITSMA.

It's now clear that account-based marketing can be highly effective in the right circumstances, but is ABM right for your business?

Your answer to this question largely depends on the attributes of your universe of existing and potential customers. True account-based marketing is typically used only for very high-value customers and prospects because it's expensive to execute. For example:

• ABM requires both marketing and sales personnel to be deeply involved in the development and execution of each account plan.
• Many of the activities involved in ABM cannot be automated because they require the exercise of human judgment.
• Account-based marketing will usually require the development of unique marketing and sales content resources for each target account.

Because of the costs associated with account-based marketing, most companies that use ABM do so selectively. The diagram below illustrates how account value and the diversity of account needs influence which approach to marketing is most appropriate.

The lower left corner of the diagram represents accounts (existing customers and prospects) with relatively low value and relatively homogeneous needs. A mass marketing approach (i.e. "one size fits all") is probably most appropriate for this group of accounts. Note, however, that this group represents a small part of the total universe of accounts.

The top portion of the diagram represents very high-value accounts. These are the types of accounts that are suitable for account based marketing, even when their needs are fairly homogeneous. In most companies, these accounts also represent a fairly small portion of the total account universe.

As the diagram illustrates, targeted marketing (which may, in fact, focus on a specific group or set of named accounts) is the most appropriate marketing approach to use for most accounts. As I'm using the term, targeted marketing refers to the use of customized marketing messages for market segments and buyer personas, but not for individual accounts. When targeted marketing is done correctly, it enables a company to obtain many of the benefits of account-based marketing at a significantly lower cost.

So what's the bottom line? If you're a B2B company with a few existing customers who are "too big to lose," and/or if you can identify a small number of potential customers who would provide exceptionally high value to your company, then consider implementing account-based marketing for those selected accounts, and use targeted marketing programs for the rest.

Rethinking the Value of BANT (It's Not as Outdated as Some Suggest)

Last fall, I published a post here titled Why BANT No Longer Works for Qualifying Leads. In that post, I argued rather strongly that BANT (the acronym for Budget-Authority-Need-Timeframe) is no longer an effective way to qualify sales leads because of changes in how B2B buyers make purchase decisions.

My post was neither the first nor the last discussion of BANT to appear in the blogosphere. Here are a few of the blog articles that have been published this year.

• Why BANT is Bunk for Today's B2B Buyer by Ardath Albee
• Banning BANT:  Redefining Quality Lead Criteria and Handling Moot Objections by Allison Tetreault
• All Real Salespeople Love Sales Leads (but there is a tiny caveat) by James Obermayer
• BANT is Dead - Find the Authority by Mike Damphousse
• Lead Scoring:  Don't BANT On It by Sarah Hums
• BANT Isn't Enough Anymore:  A New Framework for Qualifying Prospects by Pete Caputa

As you can tell from these titles, the weight of opinion in the blogosphere is clearly anti-BANT.

While I stand by what I wrote last fall, I also now believe that my criticisms of BANT were probably too broad and that the BANT criteria are still relevant and useful for evaluating sales leads if they're used at the right times to answer the right questions. In the typical demand generation process, there are three major points at which you need to evaluate the quality of a sales lead.

Qualification of New Leads

The first is when you initially acquire a lead, and the issue is whether the lead should be added to your nurturing program. BANT criteria have little role to play in this decision. At this stage, the only information about the lead that you're likely to have is a name, a company affiliation, and a job title. Company affiliation and job title may allow you to infer something about potential need, financial ability to purchase, and buying authority, but that's it. For this decision, the primary criteria should be that the lead is affiliated with an organization that fits your company's target market and has a job title that indicates a reasonable connection with the products or services you sell.

Identification of Sales-Ready Leads

The next point at which you need to evaluate lead quality is when you are deciding whether a lead is ready to engage with a sales rep. A modified version of BANT should be part of the criteria you use to make this decision. For example:

• Need - A sales-ready lead will have acknowledged the existence of a need that your product or service can address.
• Authority - A sales-ready lead will be a member of the buying group that will make the purchase decision. The lead doesn't need to be the classic "economic buyer" or have sole buying authority, but he or she should be a member of the decision-making group.
• Timeframe - A sales-ready lead will be actively evaluating possible solutions for the recognized need. Your lead may not have a firm schedule for making a purchase decision, but he or she should have acknowledged that addressing the need has become a priority for his or her organization.
• Budget - A lead doesn't need to have an established budget to be considered sales ready. As I wrote in my earlier post, research by DemandGen Report has shown that between 70% and 80% of business buyers evaluate potential solutions, build a business case for immediate adoption, and then obtain spending approval. However, you should be fairly confident that the prospect organization has the financial wherewithal to purchase your product or service.

Identification of Sales Opportunities

The third point at which you need to evaluate lead quality is when you are determining whether you have a legitimate sales opportunity. By sales opportunity, I mean a potential deal that has progressed far enough to be included in your revenue forecast. For this decision, the focus of lead qualification is on the prospect organization rather than on an individual "lead" within the organization, and the BANT criteria are particularly relevant. For example:

• Need - To qualify as a sales opportunity, your sales rep should have confirmed that the prospect has a need that your product or service can address and that all members of the buying group have acknowledged the need.
• Authority - Your sales rep should have identified and established relationships will all members of the buying group. In addition, you sales rep must understand what process will be used to make the buying decision and what role each "buyer" plays in that process.
• Timeframe - To qualify as a sales opportunity, the buying process must have progressed to the point that the prospect is committed to making a purchase decision within a defined period of time.
• Budget - While it is not essential to have a specific budget line item for the proposed purchase, your sales rep should have confirmed that the prospect's buying group has access to sufficient funds to make the purchase and the ability to commit those funds when the purchase decision is made.

BANT should never be the only criteria used to qualify sales leads. As noted earlier, BANT is not appropriate for qualifying early-stage leads, and it provides only some of the criteria for identifying when a lead is sales ready. However, BANT is not nearly as useless or outdated as some of us may have thought.

How to Make the Cost of Delay Visible to Your Prospects

Keeping prospects moving through the buying process is a perennial challenge for B2B marketing and sales professionals. I suspect that all of us have faced this issue in one form or another. We acquire a new lead who seems to be a good fit for our solution, and for a few weeks, she responds to our lead nurturing offers and consumes our content. Then activity just stops. Or perhaps we've made a great presentation to the buying group and delivered a compelling proposal only to be told that our prospect has decided not to move forward "at this time."

When prospects don't keep moving through the buying process, the result is longer sales cycles, stalled deals, and the dreaded "no decision." Research from several sources shows that keeping prospects moving has become a difficult job. For example:

• In the 2013 Sales Performance Optimization survey by CSO Insights, 40% of respondents said that their sales cycles for new customers were seven months or longer. In the 2012 survey, only 33% of respondents reported sales cycles of that length. Research by SiriusDecisions, IDC, and others has also found that sales cycles are getting longer for B2B companies.
• The CSO Insights survey also revealed that the number of no decisions is increasing. In the 2013 survey, respondents reported that 26.1% of forecast deals resulted in no decisions. That's up from only 17% of forecast deals in 2002.

Longer sales cycles, stalled deals, and "no decisions" can be caused by several factors, some of which are beyond your control. However, you can alleviate one of the primary reasons that prospects stop moving through the buying process.

Today's business buyers are incredibly busy, and like the rest of us, they spend most of their working time dealing with issues or problems that they perceive to be important and urgent. If they don't see a problem as both important and urgent, they won't give it much attention. That's why the status quo is usually your toughest competitor. In most cases, doing nothing is the easiest choice your prospect can make.

The key to breaking the grip of the status quo is convincing your prospect that the problem your product or service will solve is worth his or her time and attention. In essence, you must help your prospect answer two questions: Why is it important for me to address this problem or issue, and why should I deal with the problem or issue now?

One of the most effective ways to demonstrate the importance and urgency of a problem is to make the cost of delay visible to your prospect. That's why I include a cost of delay calculation in every ROI calculator I develop. Most ROI calculators focus on the traditional ROI metrics - the basic ROI percentage, the payback period, net present value, and possibly internal rate of return. These metrics should be included in any ROI estimate, but they won't necessarily communicate a sense of urgency to your prospect. That's what a cost of delay calculation does really well.

The basic cost of delay formula is:

Average Solution Benefits - Average Solution Costs

When calculating the cost of delay, you can use daily, weekly, or monthly average values. I typically choose the unit of measure based on the size of the benefits and cost values. The larger the values, the shorter the unit of measure.

To illustrate how the cost of delay calculation works, let's assume that your company offers marketing asset management/web-to-print solutions to corporate customers. For a particular prospect, you've determined that your solution will produce the following financial benefits during the first twelve months after the solution is fully implemented.

• Reduction of request processing costs - $46,791
• Increase in gross profits - $25,000
• Reduction of obsolescence waste - $18,000
• Reduction of materials customization costs - $16,000
• Reduction of inventory management costs - $7,404

The annual cost of your solution is $75,000, and you will need one month to implement your solution for this prospect.

Based on these facts, the monthly cost of delay would be calculated as follows:

Monthly CoD = Average Monthly Solution Benefits - Average Monthly Solution Costs

Monthly CoD = ($113,195 / 13) - ($75,000 / 12)

Monthly CoD = $8,707.31 - $6,250.00

Monthly CoD = $2,457.31

To make the cost of delay even more compelling, I will typically include a cumulative cost of delay chart somewhere in my ROI calculator. For this example, that chart would appear as follows:

Making the cost of delay visible to your prospects won't cure all of your sales cycle problems, but it can create the sense of urgency that will keep your prospects moving through the buying process.

How to Avoid Lead Genocide

Several days ago, I came across a great blog post by Jill Konrath. If you're not familiar with Jill's work, she is a well-respected sales consultant/trainer and the author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies.

In her post, Jill describes an experience with a provider of CRM software. You can read Jill's post to get the full flavor of the experience, but I'll provide an abbreviated version.

Jill received an e-mail from the CRM provider offering an ebook on the social sales revolution. Jill registered to obtain the ebook because she was interested in the topic. She had zero interest in acquiring a new CRM solution.

Just a few minutes after downloading the ebook, Jill received an e-mail from the CRM provider suggesting a "brief 10 minute call" to answer questions and "explain how our different products and services could bring value. . ." This call would help "shorten your evaluation process" and provide "exactly the information you need to help make any comparisons or decisions."

Exactly 34 minutes after this message, Jill received a second e-mail. The second message indicated that the sales rep had been unable to reach Jill by telephone and asked Jill to "let me know if it makes sense to connect." Two minutes later, Jill received a third e-mail asking her to answer nine questions regarding her CRM environment, including what she wanted her CRM system to do for her business, how many users she would have, and what other solutions she was evaluating.

Jill's post provoked numerous comments, and many of the people who commented said they had experienced something similar. One person said that she called this kind of marketing lead genocide rather than lead generation. I've had several experiences similar to Jill's, and I suspect many of you have also.

Practices like this are the epitome of bad marketing. In some cases, these aggressive practices may be the result of an honest, but mistaken, belief that just because a prospect has downloaded one white paper or ebook or attended one webinar, he or she is actively evaluating a potential purchase and is ready for a sales-level engagement.

More often, though, these kinds of practices result from an erroneous belief by sellers that they can push or drive or advance prospects through the buying process. The reality is, prospects control the buying process, and they determine how quickly they will move through the cycle. As I wrote in an earlier post, the only way you can consistently accelerate the buying process is to eliminate the friction that slows prospects down. Anything else is, at best, wasted effort, and it will usually do more harm than good.

To avoid the kind of marketing malpractice described in Jill's post, resist the urge to treat a prospect's first interaction with your business as an invitation to begin a late-stage sales conversation. And remember that, while you can facilitate your prospects' decision-making process, they ultimately decide when and to what level they will engage with your business.

Can Your Marketing Content Meet the Burden of Proof?

The CMO Council recently published a white paper - Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field - that contains both good news and bad news for B2B content marketers. The white paper is based on a survey of more than 400 B2B content consumers conducted by the CMO Council's Content ROI Center and NetLine Corporation. Forty-one percent of the respondents were from companies with more than $100 million in revenues, and half held titles of director and above.

First, the good news. Online content plays a big role in B2B purchase decisions. Eighty-seven percent of survey respondents said that online content had either a moderate or a major impact on vendor preference and selection. This finding demonstrates why good content has become essential to effective B2B marketing.

Now for the not-so-good news. When survey participants were asked what types of content they most value and trust, vendor-created content came in last. As the table below shows, B2B buyers value and trust professional association research reports and white papers, research reports and white papers created by industry groups, customer case studies, analyst reports and white papers, and independent product reviews more than vendor-created content.

 

While these survey findings should concern B2B marketers, they are also understandable, at least to some extent. Business buyers have been conditioned to treat the information they receive from vendors with a healthy degree of skepticism. They recognize that vendors have an agenda, and they perceive that this agenda can cause most vendor-supplied information to be somewhat less than completely objective. The survey findings show that B2B buyers believe they will get more objective information from professional associations, industry groups, and independent analysts and product reviewers.

In our criminal justice system, there is a presumption of innocence. An individual is presumed to be innocent until the state proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the B2B marketing world, most business buyers presume that vendor content is usually biased, probably not always accurate, and therefore not completely trustworthy. The burden of proof is on B2B marketers to develop content that can overcome this presumption.

Meeting this burden of proof is particularly critical for content that is designed for early-stage buyers. That's because early-stage buyers will often form their first impression of your company based on your content. If you can establish credibility early, you'll take a big step forward with potential buyers.

Many adjectives can be used to describe content that will build credibility with early-stage buyers, but I contend that two stand out in importance. First, credible content is authoritative. Marketing content doesn't need to read like an academic journal or a legal brief, but the main points you make should be supported by sound evidence, preferably from third-party sources.

The second essential attribute of credible early-stage content is that it is non-promotional. For many early-stage buyers, even a hint of self-serving promotion will taint their view of the content. When I prepare a new early-stage content resource, I use a simple test to determine if it is sufficiently non-promotional. I ask myself this question:  If I created a version of the resource without any obvious brand identifiers and gave that version to a reader, would the reader be able to determine who prepared the resource? If the answer to this question is "yes," the resource may be too promotional.

 

Recent research by DemandGen Report has shown that B2B buyers are more reliant on content than ever. The same research also shows that buyers are becoming more selective when it comes to content. They will only spend their time with content that they deem to be valuable and trustworthy. Therefore, it's more important than ever to develop content that potential buyers will see as credible.

 

When Listening to Customers is a Bad Idea

Over the past three decades, dozens of books, magazine articles, and blog posts have been written about the importance of listening to customers. Becoming more customer focused is now a critical strategic objective for many companies, and listening to the "voice of the customer" is seen as an essential ingredient in the recipe for success.

Marketers often have the primary responsibility for gathering, analyzing, and extracting insights from customer input. So, it's important for them to understand that listening to customers in the right way can valuable, while listening in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons is a bad idea.

Companies often seek customer input in order to develop products or services that customers will buy. However, many companies still struggle to develop new solutions that resonate with potential buyers. Of course, a new product or service sometimes fails because a company hasn't listened enough to its customers. But just as often, the failure occurs because the company listens to customers in the wrong way and for the wrong purposes.

In the typical scenario, companies ask their customers what they want and encourage them to describe specific product or service features that would be desirable. The problem is that most customers aren't well suited to perform this task.

Most customers have a limited frame of reference. Like all human beings, most of what they know is based on their past experiences. This means that customers can do a fairly good job of describing what they want when they're asked about familiar products or services. However, when customers are asked to imagine or describe new products or services, they usually encounter what psychologists call "functional fixedness." This is the normal human tendency to fixate on the way a product or service is normally used or on the features and attributes a product or service normally possesses.

Functional fixedness can make it almost impossible for people to imagine new features or functions. In short, most customers have great difficulty describing products or services they've never experienced. As a result, customers often describe features or functions that offer only modest improvements over what already exists. As Henry Ford is credited with saying, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

The key to listening to customers the right way is to shift the focus from specific features or functionality to desired outcomes. Customers may not be particularly good at describing specific solutions, but with a little prodding, they can usually do a great job of describing what they want to accomplish and what problems they face.

Focusing customer input on desired outcomes enables you to understand what customers really value, and this will help you design solutions that customers will be anxious to buy. The outcomes-based approach places the responsibility for designing the solutions squarely on your shoulders. That's where the responsibility should be since you, and not your customers, are best suited to perform this task. So by all means, don't stop listening to your customers. Just be sure you are listening in the right way and with the right objectives.

Passing the Baton Without Missing a Step- Sales Enablement, Part 3

 

This is the third of three posts that are discussing the role that marketing plays in helping the sales team sell - what is usually called sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed what sales enablement is and why it is an important issue for most B2B companies. The second post discussed one of marketing's primary sales enablement responsibilities - providing the content resources that will help sales reps advance sales opportunities.

In this post, I'll explain why effective sales enablement also requires marketers to provide information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without a loss of momentum. In essence, marketing and sales need to work together like the runners in a relay race. Here's what I mean.

As I wrote in my last post, business buyers don't distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. We now know that most buyers are performing research on their own before they are willing to meet with a salesperson. So by the time a potential buyer meets with your sales rep, the buyer will probably have visited your website and accessed several of the content resources you offer.

These self-educated buyers have little patience for "starting over" with a salesperson. They expect their sales rep to come into the initial meeting with a basic working knowledge of their business and industry. Just as important, today's buyers also expect their sales rep to know what has already transpired in the relationship. They want the sales rep to step in and provide new insights that build on what has already occurred and help advance the decision-making process.

To make the transition from marketing to sales without losing forward momentum, marketers must do more than simply provide contact information when they pass a lead to sales. An effective lead hand-off should include significantly more information, such as the buyer persona assigned to the lead, a description of the content plan for the relevant buyer persona, and a list of the content resources developed for that buyer persona.

An effective lead hand-off will also be accompanied by an activity history detailing the prior contacts between the lead and the selling company. The activity history should include the following kinds of information:

• Outbound marketing offers sent to the lead
• Outbound marketing offers the lead has responded to
• Website pages viewed by the lead
• Content resources accessed by the lead
• Summaries of any person-to-person communications between the lead and representatives of the selling company
• The prospect's lead score

Delivering this information isn't as overwhelming as it might first appear. Marketing should have developed a content plan and content resources for each buyer persona for each stage of the buying process. So, this information should already be available. Your marketing automation software should be able to capture most of the lead's activity history and transfer that information to your CRM system when the lead is passed from marketing to sales.

Don't misunderstand me. This type of lead hand-off does require additional work, but it will also provide significant benefits to the sales team and the company.

• It reduces the amount of time that sales reps must spend on lead research.
• It eliminates the need for sales reps to guess about what content resources to use.
• It reduces the need for sales reps to create or customize content.
• It improves the ability of sales reps to continue prospect relationships without losing momentum.
• It helps improve sales pipeline velocity.

The changing dynamics of B2B demand generation require a coordinated effort by marketing and sales. That's why sales enablement remains one of marketing's most important responsibilities.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 2 of the sales enablement series here.

Create Content that Helps Sales Reps Sell - Sales Enablement, Part 2

Business buyers do not distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. As they work through their decision-making process, what really matters to buyers is the relevance, quality, and credibility of the information they receive from prospective vendors. They couldn't care less about whether the information comes from the marketing department or a salesperson.

To maximize results, what B2B companies need is a demand generation process/system that can address buyers' needs at every stage of their decision-making journey. I call it managing demand generation "from curiosity to close."

Marketing and sales play distinct roles in the demand generation process, but marketing is well-suited to help make the selling process more effective. This role of marketing is usually called sales enablement, and marketing has two major sales enablement responsibilities.

• Content - Marketers must provide the content resources that will enable sales reps to advance sales opportunities.
• Information - When a lead is passed from marketing to sales, marketing must provide the information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without loss of momentum.

This is the second of three posts dealing with sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed why sales enablement is important for B2B companies. In this post, I'll discuss the content aspect of marketing's sales enablement responsibility. My next post will cover the information component.

Sales Enablement Content Needs Improvement

Recent research by Richardson, a sales training firm, paints a mixed picture of marketing's performance on the sales enablement content front. The Richardson research consisted of a survey of over 400 sales representatives and sales managers. Here are a few of the significant findings.

• 54% of sales reps and 65% of sales managers say they understand their company's content marketing strategy.
• 65% of sales reps and 74% of sales managers say that the content their company publishes is valuable to their customers.
• Only 52% of sales reps and 43% of managers say that the content their company publishes helps improve sales effectiveness.
• When asked how their company's content could be improved to better support sales efforts, 59% of sales reps and 57% of managers said "improve content relevance to our customers." Fifty-one percent of sales reps and 65% of managers said "create a stronger link between the content and the solutions we sell."

Two Flavors of Sales Enablement Content

There are two basic types of sales enablement content. The first consists of "normal" marketing content resources that are distributed to prospects directly by sales reps. Marketing is responsible for developing content resources for all buyer personas for all stages of the buying process. This will necessarily include those stages that occur after marketing has passed a lead over to sales.

These later-stage resources are designed for prospects who are actively considering a purchase. To borrow the terminology used by SiriusDecisions, these are prospects who are "exploring possible solutions," "committing to a solution," and "justifying the decision." When late-stage marketing content resources are distributed by sales reps, they become sales enablement content.

The second category of sales enablement content consists of various "tools" that are specifically designed for use by salespeople. This category includes, but is not limited to:

• E-mail message templates
• Sales presentation slides (with accompanying scripts or notes)
• ROI calculators
• Total cost of ownership calculators
• Sales proposal templates

While I contend that marketing should take the lead in creating these kinds of content resources, marketers need to involve sales reps at every stage of the development process, and they need to pay close attention to the "real-world" intelligence and insights that sales reps can bring to the process. Getting salespeople to buy into these resources is critical because they will have no value if they aren't used.

In my next post, I'll discuss the kinds of information that marketing should provide to salespeople as part of the lead hand-off process.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 3 of the sales enablement series here.

Why Sales Enablement Matters More than Ever - Sales Enablement, Part 1

In most B2B companies, your success as a marketer depends to a significant extent on your ability to help the sales team sell. By no means is this a new development. For decades, many (perhaps most) B2B companies have been "sales driven," and the primary role of marketing in these organizations was to support the selling effort by creating collateral materials, managing trade show participation, and running occasional brand building and lead generation programs.

Today, marketing is playing a broader and more significant role in the demand generation process in many B2B companies. In particular, marketers are taking greater responsibility for nurturing potential buyers before passing those leads over to sales.

Notwithstanding all of the changes, sales is still a critical part of the demand generation process, and improving sales effectiveness is still an important business objective. If anything, the increased power and heightened expectations of business buyers are driving greater interest in the topic of sales enablement. For example, Forrester Research held its third annual sales enablement conference earlier this year, and other national research/analyst/consulting firms, including IDC, Gartner, and SiriusDecisions are also focusing on this topic.

In my next two posts, I'll discuss the two most important ways that marketing can support and enable the sales team. First, however, a little background information.

What is Sales Enablement?

Both Forrester and IDC have published "formal" definitions of sales enablement.

Forrester's definition:  Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.

IDC's definition:  Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format, to move a sales opportunity forward.

These definitions are very broad because both Forrester and IDC view sales enablement as a strategic business function. Under these definitions, for example, sales enablement would probably include sales training, sales process management, and technology solutions, and sales enablement would extend to all "client-facing" employees, not just salespeople. I don't disagree with this approach, but in my upcoming posts, I'll focus specifically on how marketing can help sales reps sell more effectively.

Why is Sales Enablement Important?

Sales enablement is important for three very simple reasons:

• Sales enablement is expensive - According to Forrester, companies on average are spending about $135,000 per year per sales rep on sales support people, activities, and processes.
• The selling process in most companies needs improvement - In research by IDC, 26% of business buyers said their sales reps were unprepared for the initial sales meeting, and 31% of buyers described the sales reps as somewhat prepared. Only 43% of buyers rated their sales reps as very or extremely prepared for the initial meeting. A recent Forrester survey found that only 15% of executives say that their meetings with sales reps meet expectations.
• Poor sales enablement is costly - According to IDC, a lack of good sales enablement results in $14 million of wasted sales and marketing expenses and $100 million in lost sales opportunities in a "typical" $1 billion company.

In my next post, I'll explain how marketers can support the sales team by developing the right kind of sales enablement content.

Read Part 2 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 3 of the sales enablement series here.

Kill the Friction Gremlins to Accelerate Buying Decisions

In a recent survey by CSO Insights, almost three out of four respondents (73%) said that their average sales cycle for new customers requires four or more months to complete. B2B marketing and sales professionals know that reducing the length of the buying/sales cycle will produce substantial benefits, but this is not an easy task. The only truly effective way to accelerate the buying process is to reduce the friction that slows prospects
down.

When it comes to accelerating the buying process, B2B marketing and sales resemble the sport of curling. Curling is a little like shuffleboard, but it's played on ice and involves sliding a large polished granite stone toward a target painted on the ice. The playing surface is prepared by spraying water droplets (called "pebble") on the ice. Because of the friction between the stone and the pebble, the moving stone will turn or "curl" to one side or the other.

After one team member "throws" the stone toward the target, two other team members accompany the stone as it moves down the ice and guide it toward the target. The catch is, these players aren't
allowed to actually touch the moving stone. Instead, they use brooms to sweep the ice in front of the stone. Sweeping temporarily melts the pebble and reduces the friction between the stone and the ice, and this changes both the speed and the direction of the stone. Therefore, sweepers affect where the stone stops, but they do so indirectly.

In B2B demand generation terms, friction is anything that slows a potential buyer's progression through the buying process. Like the sweepers in a curling match, one your primary jobs as a marketer or a salesperson is to reduce friction. You would like to be able to directly lead your prospects through the buying process, but in today's B2B buying environment, attempting to push prospects through the buying process on your schedule just doesn't work - at least not very often.



The friction gremlins live everywhere in the buying process, and some of the causes of friction are beyond your control. For example, a change in the prospect's business or financial condition, or a change in the composition of the prospect's senior management team can delay or stall the buying process.

The good news is, you can address many causes of friction with the right marketing content and selling skills. Most causes of friction fall into one of two categories - friction that relates directly to your solution or the problem or challenge it addresses, or friction that accompanies any significant organizational change.

Friction Related to Your Solution

This type of friction usually results from a lack of information. To keep moving through the buying process, potential buyers need the right information at the right time, and if they don't get that information, the buying process can stall. For example, a potential buyer's progression can be slowed or stopped if he or she:

• Doesn't understand or appreciate the costs or negative ramifications of the status quo
• Doesn't fully understand how your solution will improve the status quo
• Perceives that the purchase of your solution will entail substantial risks
• Doesn't have an accurate picture of the ROI that your solution will produce

Change-Related Friction

Change-related friction is usually caused by internal prospect issues, and most of those issues have little to do with the selling company or its products or services. Every prospect organization will have a unique mix of change management issues, but there are four causes of change-related friction that arise in most organizations. The buying process is likely to stall if the principal buyer:

• Doesn't understand how the proposed change will affect the existing organizational "system" (people, processes, and technology)
• Hasn't identified who must be involved in the decision to change
• Believes (or other stakeholders believe) that the problem or need driving the consideration of change can be addressed using internal resources
• Hasn't identified the issues or concerns that must be addressed to get buy-in from all necessary stakeholders

How to Reduce Friction

Both marketing and sales are responsible for reducing friction in the buying process, but marketing's share of the job has grown because of changes in buyer behavior. With business buyers delaying interactions with salespeople until later in the buying process, marketing content must be a primary tool for reducing solution-related friction. In fact, marketing content is often the only effective tool for dealing with the solution-related friction that arises in the early stages of the buying process.

Because change-related friction is unique to each prospect, sales must assume a large part of the responsibility for reducing it. Even here, however, marketing content can play an important role. For example, a white paper or ebook that describes how to build a business case for your type of solution can help your potential buyer identify all of the stakeholders who must be involved in the decision to change. A white paper or ebook can also be used to discuss why an internal "home-grown" solution isn't the best alternative for most companies.

You can't completely eliminate friction from the buying process, but the best way to speed up buying decisions is to kill as many friction gremlins as possible.

Photo Credit:  pop culture geek via Flickr cc

Why Sales Winners Win (And What It Means for Marketers)

Last month, the RAIN Group, a respected sales training and consulting firm, published a research report titled What Sales Winners Do Differently. The report is based on a study of more than 700 individual B2B purchases in industries with complex sales. RAIN asked the buyers involved in each purchase to rank both the winners (the sellers who won the deal) and the second-place finishers based on 42 sales-related factors.

The major objectives of the study were to determine what sales winners were doing better or more frequently than the second-place finishers and what the second-place finishers need to change to increase their odds of winning.

What Sales Winners Do Differently contains many valuable insights, and I recommend that you take the time to read the entire report. I found three of the study's findings to be particularly interesting.

New Ideas and Fresh Perspectives Win

According to the buyers surveyed for the study, the most important factor that separates sales winners from second-place finishers is that the winners excel at providing potential buyers new ideas and fresh perspectives on important business issues. When potential buyers perceive that a seller is bringing something new to the table, the seller has a huge advantage. To produce this advantage, however, the insights provided by sellers must be new and fresh as well as valuable. The study found that providing insights that are useful and valuable, but not new, is not a significant factor separating sales winners from second-place finishers.

Sales Winners Excel at Communicating Value

The third most significant factor separating sales winners from second-place finishers is that sales winners do a superior job of communicating the value of their solution to potential buyers. There are three critical aspects of this task.

• Sales winners persuasively demonstrate that their solution will produce an attractive return on investment for the potential buyer.
• Sales winners effectively minimize the potential buyer's perception of risk.
• Sales winners convince potential buyers that their solution is the best choice among the available options because it delivers superior overall value.

Buyers in the study identified demonstrating superior overall value as the most important thing second-place finishers need to change to increase their odds of winning.

Solution Sales Still Lives

The authors of What Sales Winners Do Differently argue that their research findings differ substantially from some of the research results described in The Challenger Sale. In particular, the RAIN study authors contend that their research supports the view that solution sales is still a vital component of sales success, although they acknowledge that solution sales is no longer sufficient for success and that the concept needs to be changed in significant ways. To support their view, the authors note that "collaborated with me" was the second most important factor separating sales winners from second-place finishers, according to the buyers they surveyed.

In my opinion, the recommendations found in What Sales Winners Do Differently and those included in The Challenger Sale are more similar than contradictory, but that's a topic for another post.

What Sales Winners Do Differently obviously deals with the factors that drive sales success, but it also has a lot to say to marketers. As discussed above, sales winners win in large part because they excel at providing prospects new and valuable insights about important business issues and because they do a superior job of communicating the value of their solutions.

Today, marketing content must perform these same functions. Because business buyers are self-educating and postponing personal interactions with salespeople, your marketing content must act as your "surrogate sales rep" early in the buying process. In many cases, your first opportunity to provide new and valuable insights and communicate how your solutions create value will be via marketing content. If your content performs these jobs well, your odds of staying in the game will be greatly improved.

Why Improving Performance Doesn't Always Create More Value

In a recent post at the SiriusDecisions blog, Jeff Lash wrote about seeing an advertisement for a cell phone that boasted about the phone's 215 hours of battery life between charges. Mr. Lash noted that on a heavy usage day, he spends at most two to three hours on his phone and at that rate, 215 hours of battery life would last about ten weeks. He thought it was pretty likely that he'd be able to find a convenient power outlet more frequently than once every two and a half months.

Mr. Lash's point was that 215 hours of battery life far exceeded his requirements, and therefore much of that long battery life would provide little value to him.

I've written frequently in this blog about the importance of understanding how your solutions create value for customers. Clear and compelling value propositions are, in fact, the foundation of all effective marketing.

Unfortunately, it's easy for marketers and other business leaders to overestimate the value of their solutions. The problem stems from an implicit belief that improving the performance of a solution automatically increases the value of the solution.

Clayton Christensen addressed this issue in The Innovator's Dilemma. In Christensen's view most established companies in any industry improve their products or services along dimensions of performance that their major customers have historically wanted and valued. What often happens, however, is that the pace of performance improvement exceeds the ability of customers to take advantage of the increased performance. Eventually, a company "overshoots" its market. Prospective customers are happy to accept the higher performance, but they aren't willing to pay more to get it because they can't translate the increased performance into benefits that produce better business results.

This circumstance has several important implications for marketers. Most importantly, it means that marketers should always seek to understand whether and to what extent new features or capabilities will enhance the value of a solution in the eyes of potential buyers.

So, before deciding how to market a "new and improved" version of your solution, answer these questions from a prospective buyer's perspective:

• What performance criteria are most important for my business?
• What levels of performance must a solution provide in order to meet these criteria?
• Are some of the performance criteria more vital or important than others?
• Once "acceptable" levels of performance are met, do higher levels of performance and/or new capabilities create meaningful new value and, if so, how?

How Lead Development Reps Take Demand Generation to the Next Level

Effective lead management is now an essential component of a high-performing B2B demand generation system. Broadly speaking, lead management refers to demand generation activities that begin when a potential buyer identifies himself or herself to your company and expresses some interest in what you offer.

The two most important components of lead management are lead nurturing and lead qualification. Lead nurturing is designed to build relationships with prospects who are in your target market, but who aren't ready to have a productive sales conversation. Lead qualification refers to the activities and criteria you use to determine where a prospect is in his or her buying process.

Lead management is the weak link in the demand generation chain for many companies. One reason is that it hasn't typically been viewed as a top priority by either sales or marketing. In the conventional view, marketing's primary role is to acquire new leads, and the top priority of sales is to close short-term sales opportunities.

B2B marketing software provides powerful capabilities for automating content-based lead nurturing and some aspects of lead qualification. However, it is also becoming apparent that automated lead nurturing and lead scoring will not, in themselves, enable a company to optimize demand generation. A growing number of companies have recognized that person-to-person communication and human judgment are needed to produce maximum demand generation results.

This recognition is causing a growing number of companies to establish a lead management function that is responsible for coordinating lead management activities. The people who perform this function can have a variety of job titles. Some companies call them telemarketers or inside sales representatives, and others call them business development representatives.

I prefer to call these individuals lead development representatives because this title more accurately describes their actual function. The primary responsibilities of lead development representatives, or LDRs, are to orchestrate lead nurturing communications with specified leads and simultaneously qualify those prospects.

More specifically, LDRs will perform the following major activities:

• Make contact with leads who have indicated a defined level of interest. This would include both inbound leads and leads acquired via outbound lead generation programs.
• Ask the lead appropriate questions to determine his or her level of interest and place in the buying cycle.
• Place each lead in the appropriate lead nurturing track so that nurturing communications will be most effective.
• Document interactions with the lead in the company's CRM system.
• Identify leads who are ready to have a productive conversation with a salesperson and arrange an appointment.

The capabilities offered by B2B marketing software play a critical role in today's demand generation, but those capabilities need to be supplemented with person-to-person communications to achieve optimum results. Lead development representatives can take your demand generation to the next level.

Identifying the Questions Your Prospects Need to Answer

At the most basic level, successful B2B marketing and sales depend largely on having solid answers to four questions:

• Why do companies and businesspeople buy products or services like those we provide?
• How do our products or services create value for our customers?
• What differentiates our products or services from those offered by our competitors?
• How do our prospects make buying decisions?

Of these four issues, many B2B marketers and salespeople have the least understanding of how prospects actually make buying decisions. In the 2013 Sales Perforance Optimization survey by CSO Insights, only 9.6% of respondents said that their ability to understand their customer's buying process exceeded espectations.

Over the years, marketing and sales professionals have developed several models to describe the B2B buying process. Some still use the Awareness-Consideration-Evaluation-Purchase model that's been around for decades. The SiriusDecisions model depicted below is another widely-used representation of the B2B buying process.

Models can help us understand the buying process, but all buying process models have two important limitations. First, they inevitably make the decision-making process more linear and less complicated that it actually is. And second, buying process models don't contain all of the information you need to design effective demand generation programs or develop relevant and compelling marketing content.

Because of these limitations, I use a different approach when I work with clients on demand generation/content marketing programs. What we do is identify the questions that prospects will need to answer to feel comfortable making a buying decision. These questions are developed for each relevant buyer persona, and they are also formulated with a specific product or service in mind. These critical questions are part of what Ardath Albee called a "buyer synopis" in her great book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.

To illustrate how this works, the table below shows some of the types of questions that would likely be included in any buying process for a complex product or service. For this example, I've collapsed the six-step SiriusDecisions buying process model into three broad buying process phases - Discovery, Consideration, and Decision. The questions in this table are general, and when you develop buying process questions, you'll want to include several that relate specifically to your product or service.



Developing an extensive list of buying stage questions helps you understand how your prospects think whey they're evaluating a prospective purchase. Just as important, it helps you design effective demand generation programs by enabling you to pinpoint the issues your marketing content resources need to address to move prospects through the buying process.

Why Content Marketing is the Best Way to Build the Brand

Howard Sewell with Spear Marketing recently published a blog post titled, "Has Content Marketing Made Branding Obsolete?" He argues that most B2B companies don't need "branding." Sewell writes, "If generating leads depended even in small part on how consumers felt about your company, branding might still have a role to play. But successful demand generation today has little to do with your company, and much more to do with your content."

I agree that content marketing is now an essential component of B2B marketing, perhaps the single most important component. However, I disagree with the argument that content marketing makes branding obsolete. Here's why.

Branding is one of those marketing terms that is used in a variety of ways. In one sense, branding refers to the process of creating the name and symbols (logos, etc.) that will be used to identify a company, product, or service offering. Branding can also refer to several kinds of advertising and marketing programs that are primarily intended to (a) raise public awareness of a company, product, or service, or (b) create and maintain a positive perception of a company, product, or service in the minds of prospective customers. When marketers engage in these types of advertising and marketing activities, they often say they are building the brand.

Building the brand is a marketing objective that can be pursued using a variety of marketing tactics and methods. Traditionally, the most prevalent brand building tactics were "mass advertising" activities such as TV/radio/print ads and various kinds of public relations activities.

In the B2B world, content marketing is a marketing tactic or method that emphasizes the use of educational and primarily non-promotional content to capture the attention and interest of prospective customers. Content marketing can be used to achieve multiple marketing objectives, including both lead generation and brand building.

The important point here is that a marketing tactic or method will never render a legitimate marketing objective obsolete. To say that content marketing makes brand building obsolete is like saying that charcoal grilling makes dinner obsolete.

Building the brand is still an essential marketing function for B2B companies. No sale will occur until the prospective buyer accepts and "believes in" both the relevance and credibility of your brand promise. What has changed is that traditional brand building methods and tactics are far less effective today than they once were. Business buyers are quick to tune out promotional marketing messages so what companies need is a more effective method for building the brand and communicating the brand promise. For most B2B companies, content marketing is now the best way to build the brand.

It's true, as Mr. Sewell writes, that most good demand generation content is not usually about a company or its products or services. Today, the best content focuses on business issues or challenges that are relevant and important to a company's potential buyers. But, even when a content resource is not about a company or its products or services, prospects will inevitably associate the content with the company that produced it. After all, the resource itself will be branded. If the resource is a white paper or an e-book or a case study, the company name and logo will almost certainly appear somewhere in the document. If the resource is a webinar, the company name and logo will probably be on every slide.

The point here is that your company, your brand, will be closely associated with the content you publish. The relevance and quality of that content (good or bad) will have a major impact on how prospects view and define your brand.

Why Marketing Content Must Both Convince and Persuade

In a blog post last November, Seth Godin described something that occurred in connection with the publication of his new book. It seems that a copyeditor changed each usage of persuade in the book to convince. Godin says he had to change all of them back.

Godin explained why he thought this was necessary:  "Marketers don't convince. Engineers convince. Marketers persuade. Persuasion appeals to the emotions and to fear and to the imagination. Convincing requires a spreadsheet or some other rational device. It's much easier to persuade someone if they're already convinced, if they already know the facts. But it's impossible to change someone's mind merely by convincing them of your point."

Seth Godin is one of the most insightful marketing thought leaders around, but I disagree with him slightly on this point. In the B2B world, marketers must be prepared to both convince and persuade. Let's look first at the need to convince.

The Need to Convince

Survey results by IDC have revealed that, on average:

• Ninety percent of companies require quantifiable proof of economic/financial benefits for most potential investments.
• Almost two-thirds of business buyers (65%) say that they do not have the knowledge or tools they need to perform business value assessments and calculations.
• More than four out of five business buyers (81%) expect prospective vendors to quantify the business value of proposed solutions.

These research results clearly show that B2B companies must be able to demonstrate and prove the value that their products or services will create for customers. In essence, you need to be prepared to help your buyer build a compelling business case for investing in your solution. Several kinds of marketing content can be used to perform this function.

• White papers or eBooks that describe how your solution creates value and explains how to calculate the value delivered
• Online assessment tools that enable prospects to obtain a preliminary estimate of the financial benefits your solution will provide
• ROI calculators that your sales reps can use to provide credible proof of the value your solution will deliver

The Need to Persuade

Marketers have traditionally believed that B2B buying decisions follow a rational, step-by-step process and that emotion has little effect on the process. We now know that this view is, at best, incomplete and that B2B buying decisions are far less rational that we like to think.

The reality is that emotions - particularly fear, uncertainty, and doubt - are part of every significant B2B buying decision. In The Buyersphere Project, Gord Hotchkiss wrote, "B2B buying decisions are usually driven by one emotion - fear. Specifically, B2B buying is all about minimizing fear by eliminating risk."

In an earlier post, I discussed why it's important for marketers to have content that directly and intentionally addresses fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The main point I want to make in this post is that B2B marketers must be ready to address both rational and emotional issues.

The bottom line? To succeed at B2B demand generation, you need marketing content and sales enablement tools that will both convince and persuade.

Should Marketing or Sales Lead Demand Generation?

Over the past few years, two distinct approaches to B2B demand generation have emerged. Both of these models have evolved in response to profound changes in the B2B marketing and sales environment, the most significant of which has been the appearance of empowered buyers.

Business buyers now have access to a wealth of online information, and they are using that information to perform research on their own. As a result, they are much less dependent on sellers than in the past, and they're avoiding interactions with sales reps until later in the buying process. Research by the Corporate Executive Board, SiriusDecisions and others has shown that prospects are often 50% to 60% through the buying process before they engage with a salesperson.

One approach to dealing with empowered buyers is to expand the role of marketing in B2B demand generation. Not surprisingly, the strongest early advocates of this model were providers of B2B marketing automation software like Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, and several others. The second approach argues that what is needed is a new sales methodology. The Corporate Executive Board is a strong advocate of this model, and two CEB executives, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, provided a detailed description of this model in their best-selling book, The Challenger Sale.

The marketing-centric model accepts that most potential buyers prefer to access information about business issues and potential solutions on their own, especially in the early stages of the buying process. Instead of fighting this preference, the marketing-centric model seeks to support the "self-directed buyer" as he or she goes through the learning process. The marketing-centric model relies heavily on content marketing principles and techniques (because it assumes that most early-stage interactions need to be content based), and it leverages technology to manage and execute activities such as lead nurturing and lead qualification.

The "new sales methodology" model emphasizes the continued importance of sales reps in the demand generation process. What CEB and others argue is that salespeople should engage with early-stage buyers and use disruptive insights to change how they think about their business. To use CEB's teminology, these disruptive insights enable sales reps to shape emerging demand rather than simply react to established demand. More importantly, these insights provide value that buyers can't get anywhere else and thus make it necessary (or at least very worthwhile) for buyers to engage with the sales rep.

Which of these demand generation models will ultimately prevail? My answer is neither and both. Neither model will completely win because both will (and should) be used.

Many proponents of both models now recognize the value of the other approach. Advocates of the marketing-centric model now acknowledge that human involvement with early-stage buyers can be very valuable, and CEB is expanding its concept of disruptive insights to include marketing content as well as sales messaging.

The bottom line is that neither marketing nor sales should "own" B2B demand generation. Effective demand generation requires marketing and sales to function as an integrated team.

Will Your Marketing Content Help You "Make the Cut?"

I'm not a big fan of professional golf, although I do watch at least part of the four "major" tournaments that are held each year. As I was watching last year's US Open, it occurred to me that B2B demand generation and professional golf have something in common.

As most of you probably know, professional golf tournaments typically consist of 72 holes, with contestants playing four 18-hole rounds over four days. After 36 holes (two rounds) are completed, the tournament field is reduced by eliminating the players with the worst scores. The "cut," as it's called, can sometimes eliminate almost half of the players. To have a chance to win a tournament, the first thing a player must do is "make the cut."

One of the truisms in golf is that you can't win a tournament on the first day, but you can lose it. Because the scores are cumulative, a bad performance on the first day can put you so far behind that it's all but impossible to catch up. A really bad performance on Day 1 may cause you to "miss the cut" and not even have a chance to play in the final two rounds.

For B2B companies that have complex and lengthy sales cycles, demand generation resembles a professional golf tournament. The buying process can extend for several weeks to several months and typically includes multiple buying stages. At several points along the purchase journey, prospects make decisions about which potential suppliers to consider. If your company doesn't "make the cut" at any of these decision points, you won't be in the game when the final buying decision is made.

The critical point here is that prospects are increasingly making these decisions before they've had a person-to-person interaction with anyone in your company. According to research by the Corporate Executive Board, SiriusDecisions, DemandGen Report, and others, the average prospect is 50% to 60% through the buying process before he or she meets with a sales rep.

So how do prospects decide which potential sellers to consider? To a great extent, these decisions are based on what prospects learn about and from a potential seller when they take initial steps to get information about the products or services they may be interested in purchasing. This is what Google has called the Zero Moment of Truth.

Most of this early research is performed online, via web searches, anonymous visits to company websites, reading or viewing online content resources provided by prospective sellers, reading online user reviews, and, increasingly, interacting with peers via social media.

This new buyer behavior means that what is said about and by your company online plays a critical role in your demand generation success. While you can't control what others say about your company, you can control the quality of the content you publish. If the content you provide demonstrates that you understand your prospects' problems and that you have the requisite expertise to help solve those problems, your odds of beginning a meaningful sales conversation with those prospects will be a lot higher.

What about your marketing content? Will it help you "make the cut" and stay in the game as your prospects move closer to a buying decision?

What is a "Sales-Ready Lead?"

One of the most important requirements for an effective B2B demand generation system is a clear understanding of who constitutes a sales-ready lead. Decribing who is a sales-ready lead is the essential starting point for defining the roles and aligning the work of marketing and sales. In an optimized demand generation system, marketing is primarily responsible for acquiring new leads and for nurturing leads until they are sales ready. Once a lead becomes sales ready, sales assumes the primary responsibility for managing that relationship.

The term sales-ready lead can be found in many books, articles, and blog posts, but it's surprisingly difficult to find a definition that's really useful. I'll offer one momentarily, but first it's important to understand what a sales-ready lead is not. A raw inquiry does not constitute a sales-ready lead. A raw inquiry is someone who has shown only a minimal level of interest in what you offer. He or she may have responded to an outbound lead generation campaign or visited your website and filled out a registration form, but that's it. The problems caused when marketing passes raw inquiries to sales have been widely discussed in the demand generation literature, so I won't repeat them here.

Sales ready is also not equivalent to ready to buy. Some people suggest that sales-ready leads are only those leads who are fully qualified using tradtional BANT criteria. In an earlier post, I discussed why BANT is no longer an effective framework for qualifying leads. The basic problem with BANT is that some of the criteria will not be met until near the end of the buying process, and in addition, it can be impossible for any individual lead to satisfy all of the BANT requirements.

A sales-ready lead, therefore, falls somewhere between a raw inquiry and a BANT-qualified lead. Here's my proposed definition:

A sales-ready lead is an individual who (a) is affiliated with a qualified prospect, (b) can make or influence the decision to purchase your product or service, and (c) is sufficiently interested in exploring solutions to engage in a meaningful sales dialog with a sales rep. In this definition, the term qualified prospect means an organization that has a need your company can address and falls within your defined target market.

This definition provides a good starting point, but I also think it's important to use some specific criteria for identifying sales-ready leads. The table below shows eleven criteria that I suggest are appropriate for most companies. The first four criteria apply to the prospect organization, and the remaining criteria apply to the individual lead.

OK, that's how I define sales-ready lead. How about you? How would you change my definition? Would you use an entirely different approach?

The Most Popular Posts at B2B Marketing Directions

This will be my last post for 2012, and I want to thank everyone who has spent some of his or her valuable time reading this blog. I hope that you have found the content here to be both thought-provoking and useful.

Thanks to analytics, I can see how many times each of my posts have been viewed. I thought this would be an appropriate time to share which posts have been most widely read. This ranking is based on cumulative total reads, and therefore older posts obviously have a built-in advantage.

So, in case you missed any of them, here, in order, are the four most popular posts.

Use an Importance-Performance Matrix to Get Marketing and Sales Talking - This post explains how to use an importance-performance matrix to capture the degree of agreement or disagreement between marketing and sales regarding key demand generation activities. The matrix requires marketers and salespeople to evaluate an activity along two dimensions - how important the activity is, and how well the company is performing the activity. An importance-performance matrix can reveal where significant gaps exist between marketing and sales. It won't tell you how to resolve conflicts between marketing and sales, but it will identify the issues you need to address.

Stop Depending on Your Salespeople to Generate Leads - This post explains why B2B companies should not rely primarily on their salespeople to generate new sales leads. Depending on sales reps to generate leads is a long-standing practice in many B2B companies, but changes in the attitudes and behaviors of business buyers make this practice less and less effective.

Stop Trying to Measure Marketing ROI - For the past several years, CEO's and CFO's have been demanding greater accountability from the marketing function, and they have been pressing marketers to prove the value of their activities and programs. In this environment, return on investment has become the "gold standard" for measuring marketing performance. This post explains why you can't use ROI to measure the value of every marketing activity.

It's Time to Fix the Marketing Supply Chain - Marketers are facing tremendous pressures to drive increased revenues and maximize the return produced by every dollar invested in marketing. So, it's understandable that they focus most of their attention on developing more effective marketing campaigns, creating more compelling content, and generating more sales leads. This post explains why the marketing materials supply chain represents a large, and largely untapped, source of both cost savings and revenue-enhancing improvements.

Happy New Year, everyone!