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.

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.

Four Key Ingredients in the Marketing/Sales Integration Recipe

In November of last year, I published a post here titled It's Time to Integrate Marketing and Sales. It's now the second most popular post at this blog, and it also created quite a stir at LinkedIn. In the Sales and Marketing Alignment group alone, the post had prompted 99 comments as of yesterday.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of comments that supported the basic idea of integrating marketing and sales. The comments also revealed, however, that there are widely different views about what the "integration" of marketing and sales really means. To maximize the potential of integrating marketing and sales, company leaders must have a clear and detailed picture of what the end result should look like.

In my view, there are four key ingredients in the recipe for marketing and sales integration.

A Unified Go-to-Market Strategy and Plan

An integrated marketing/sales function must be based on a comprehensive go-to-market strategy and plan that has been jointly developed by marketing and sales. For integration purposes, the most important components of the go-to-market strategy/plan are:

• The value propositions that describe how your products and/or services create value for customers
• A definition (description) of the kinds of organizations that constitute your company's target market (an ideal customer profile)
• Profiles (personas) of the types of individuals who make or influence the decision to purchase the kinds of products or services that your company offers
• A description of the messages and content resources that will be used to communicate your value propositions to potential buyers
• A description of the lead stages that your company will use to categorize prospects and the criteria you company will use to qualify prospects. This will include a definition of what constitutes a "sales-ready" lead.

Integrated Demand Generation Processes

An integrated marketing/sales function is also based on a set of demand generation processes that collectively span the entire revenue generation cycle. Some of these processes will be performed exclusively by marketing, and others exclusively by sales. However, several critical demand generation processes, such as lead nurturing and lead qualification, will require the involvement of both marketing and sales. What's important here is the recognition that marketing processes and sales processes are components of a single revenue generation system and that they are often connected and interdependent.

Integrated Technology Systems

To maximize the results from marketing/sales integration, marketers and sales professionals must be working from the same data relating to prospects and customers. Therefore, it's important to integrate the information systems and technology tools used by marketing and sales. The most significant integration will typically involve the company's marketing automation/lead management software and its customer relationship management software.

Unified Leadership and Management

A fully integrated marketing/sales function will be led by a single C-level executive. The title of this executive may be Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, or something similar. Whatever title is used, the important point is that one senior executive is responsible for leading all of the company's revenue-generating activities.

Those are my key ingredients for a full integration of marketing and sales. What would you add to or remove from this list?

I'd also like to hear your views about whether fully integrating marketing and sales is always the best course of action. What circumstances make integration critical to success, and what circumstances make another approach the best solution? Please comment to share your views.

Why You Need to Think Twice About Cold Calling

The effectiveness of cold calling as a lead generation tactic is still a much-debated topic in B2B marketing and sales circles. Many thought leaders and practitioners contend that cold calling is no longer an effective and efficient way to generate new sales leads. It's also clear, however, that many B2B companies still rely heavily on their salespeople to find new leads through a variety of prospecting activities, including cold calling.

Unfortunately, most of the "evidence" used to argue for and against cold calling has been anecdotal at best, and the lack of empirical data regarding the efficacy of cold calling makes the debate interesting, but not necessarily useful for decision making.

Recent research by Baylor University's Keller Center for Research takes an important step in quantifying the effectiveness of cold calling as a lead generation tool.

The Keller study involved 50 real estate agents who made a total of 6,264 cold calls over a two-week period. The agents were using a generic, random list of telephone numbers from a geographic area not previously marketed to by the agent. So, these were truly cold calls.

Here's an overview of the study's major findings:

• Of the 6,264 calls placed, 17% were non-working numbers, 55% were not answered, and 28% were answered.
• Of the 1,774 calls that were answered, 1,612 of the prospects (91%) were not interested in the offering or refused to provide additional information.
• The agents involved in the study generated 19 appointments with prospective clients and received 11 referrals as a result of the calling effort.
• The agents had to make 209 calls to obtain one appointment or referral.
• The overall "success rate" for the calling effort was 0.5% (30 appointments and referrals / 6,264 calls placed).
• The authors of the study assumed that "bad" calls (non-answers and non-working numbers) required (on average) one minute per call and that answered calls required (on average) five minutes per call. Based on these assumptions, it would take about 7.5 hours to make 209 calls and obtain one appointment or referral. (In other words, based on the authors' assumptions, it would take one full day of calling to get one appointment or referral.)

Does the Keller study provide the "final" answer regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of cold calling for lead generation? I don't think so. For one thing, the study involved cold calling in a B2C setting, and I don't think the findings of the study can be projected to B2B cold calling. In a B2B setting, the results might be better or worse, but we shouldn't assume they would be the same. Nevertheless, the Keller study raises serious doubts regarding how effective cold calling can be.

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.

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?

Year-End Lessons From the Past

Early in my business career, I was privileged to have a great B2B sales mentor. I met William in 1988 and interacted with him frequently until his retirement in 1995.

William sold printing presses to commercial printing companies and businesses that had internal printing departments. The company that William worked for was (and is) highly respected within the printing industry, and William was a very successful salesperson.

Early in our relationship, William told me that one important key to his success was identifying which prospects in his territory were ready to engage in a serious evaluation process that would lead to a buying decision. William also told me that, at any given time, only about 10% of the prospects in his territory would fit this description. William realized that he could use his time more effectively and close more deals if he could consistently identify which prospects were ready to begin an "active buying cycle." So, William spent a significant amount of time "taking the pulse" of his prospects.

How did he do this? Well, he spent three or four days of almost every week visiting prospects. Sometimes, he would make appointments, but frequently, he would just drop in. In most cases, the business owner or another senior manager was willing to spend thirty minutes or an hour with William, even when he showed up unexpectedly.

During these visits, William and his prospects would discuss a range of topics - what was happening in the prospect's business and in the overall printing industry and, most importantly, any issues or problems the prospect was having with his equipment. Through these visits, William could get a pretty good idea of which prospects were ready to have a meaningful conversation about buying new equipment. When he identified these "sales-ready" prospects, William would move to a more focused selling process.

I frequently write in this blog about how B2B buyers have changed and why these changes require a new approach to demand generation. So, it would be easy for me to devote this post to a discussion of why William's approach won't work in today's environment. But, as I think about what William taught me, I'm struck more by what hasn't changed.

In 2013, as in 1990, B2B companies will need a way to determine which prospects are ready to begin a serious sales conversation . . . and which ones aren't.

In 2013, as in 1990, B2B companies will need to "stay in touch" with prospects who aren't ready to begin a serious buying process . . . because some day they probably will be ready.

In 2013, successful demand generation will be more about demonstrating value and providing prospects the information they need to make a sound buying decision than about "persuading" an unprepared or reluctant prospect to buy. And, this was largely true in 1990.

The B2B marketing and sales landscape has changed, and the new rules of B2B demand generation do require different tactics and methods. I don't believe that William's tactics will work as well today as they did in the 1980s and early 1990s, but his objectives are just as valid now as they were then.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

It's Time to Integrate Marketing and Sales

Marketing and sales "alignment" remains a hot topic among B2B marketing and sales professionals. Many people on "both sides of the aisle" now recognize that successfully finding and winning new customers in today's business environment requires a cohesive and coordinated effort by both marketing and sales.

A growing number of marketing and sales thought leaders are beginning to advocate more dramatic changes in the structure and character of the marketing-sales relationship and/or the techniques used to manage marketing and sales activities. Late last year, the Chartered Institute of Marketing in London published a report arguing that most companies should merge their marketing and sales functions.

Adam Needles, the author of Balancing the Demand Equation, argued in an  article for DemandGen Report that marketing and sales need to be more closely aligned against a strategic lead-to-revenue demand process. Commenting on Adam's article, Eric Wittlake wrote in his B2B Digital Marketing blog, "The real implication, although Adam doesn't say it, is that sales and marketing alignment is the wrong objective. Perfectly aligning sales and marketing on either side of the fictitious wall dividing them isn't the answer. Instead, the wall needs to be torn down and sales and marketing need to be integrated through the entire customer experience."

Research firm IDC has also entered the discussion. In addition to research, IDC provides marketing and sales advisory services to technology companies and has produced operational-level scorecards for both marketing and sales for several years. Now, IDC has introduced a Customer Creation Scorecard, which IDC describes as, "Operational KPI's for the Intersection of Sales and Marketing." The new IDC scorecard contains eight key performance indicators, including the combined sales and marketing budget ratio (marketing and sales spending as a percentage of total revenues), the ratio of sales spending to marketing spending, and the marketing investment per total sales headcount.

While IDC doesn't expressly advocate that marketing and sales should be merged, these metrics strongly suggest that managers should treat marketing and sales as components of a single "customer creation" process.

Rich Vansil, IDC's Group Vice President, Executive Advisory Services, has expressed something close to this view. In an article for BtoBOnline, he wrote, "I encourage b2b marketers to think about redefining the footprint of marketing in your organization, and by extension the footprint and impact of the marketing budget. . . Think about the totality of marketing plus sales costs. . . The best opportunity for marketing and sales productivity improvement continues to be at the intersection of these two functions."

Compared to other major trends in B2B marketing and sales, such as the shift to content marketing, the growing use of inbound marketing, and the implementation of marketing automation technologies, moves to integrate marketing and sales are just barely beginning.

As I noted earlier, most of the focus today is on aligning sales and marketing, and only a few companies have addressed the more controversial issue of marketing-sales integration. This is a touchy political issue, and I don't pretend to know how it will play out. There is still a significant amount of cultural and political baggage that separates marketing and sales, and there are legitimate issues regarding the consequences (intended and unintended) of integrating marketing and sales. In addition, no single approach to marketing and sales integration will be optimum for all B2B companies. What I do know, however, is that we can no longer afford to treat marketing and sales as completely separate functional silos.

Why BANT No Longer Works for Qualifying Leads

One of the most widely-used methods for qualifying B2B sales leads is known by the acronym BANT, which stands for Budget - Authority - Need - Timeline. The basic idea is that you will  have a strong sales opportunity if you identify a lead who:

• Has a recognized need that your company can address
• Has the authority to make the buying decision
• Has the budget to purchase the kind of product or service you provide
• Has an identified timeline for purchasing the kind of product or service you provide

At first glance, BANT appears to offer an entirely reasonable way to qualify sales leads. It's hard to argue that a lead who meets these four requirements would not be highly qualified.

In reality, however, BANT is no longer an effective way to qualify sales leads for two reasons.

• Some of the criteria are all but impossible for an individual "lead" to meet. So, a strict use of the BANT criteria will cause you to ignore many valuable leads.
• By the time a lead is fully "BANT-qualified," it's probably too late. Your odds of concluding a sale on your terms are greatly diminished because a competitor has probably established a favored position.

To understand why BANT no longer works well, let's look at each of the criteria.

Budget
B2B companies no longer budget for many purchases in advance. Surveys by DemandGen Report indicate that only 20% - 30% of purchases are budgeted at the beginning of the year. Between 70% and 80% of survey respondents say they evaluate potential solutions, build a business case for immediate adoption, and then obtain spending approval. Therefore, if you require qualified leads to have established budgets, you will obviously miss out on many sales opportunities. Instead of requiring a specific budget, what you have to do is make a judgment call about whether a prospect has the financial ability to purchase your product or service.

Authority
In the 2012 Sales Performance Optimization survey by CSO Insights, 76% of respondents indicated that 3 or more individuals are involved in making the final buying decision. Purchasing by committee is now the norm. In this environment, most of the leads you encounter won't have full purchasing authority, but many of these leads will play a major role in the final buying decision. The right criteria for lead qualification is influence or involvement, not authority.

Need
Of the four BANT criteria, need is still obviously essential. In most cases, if there's no need, there won't be a sale. Even here, however, the idea of "need" is changing. In the past, the goal was to find a lead who recognized the need and understood it. Now we know that a seller can often have greater influence with a lead who does not fully understand the scope or implications of the need, at least at the beginning of the engagement. This can enable the seller to use marketing content and sales messaging to shape and influence how the lead thinks about the need and possible solutions.

Timeline
The primary problem with using timeline for lead qualification is that by the time a prospect has set a timeline for a significant purchase, the prospect has probably completed most of the buying process. In this sense, timelines have become like budgets. Potential buyers identify needs, evaluate potential solutions, and then get spending approval and set a purchase timeline. In fact, a purchase timeline may not be set until after the supplier has been selected.

For many years, BANT provided a useful framework for qualifying sales leads. Given the new realities of B2B buying, however, BANT no longer works for lead qualification. Today, the BANT criteria develop and evolve as the buying process moves forward. But, you can't expect them to exist at the beginning of a prospect relationship.

Who is Responsible for "Challenger" Lead Generation?

The principles described in The Challenger Sale continue to provoke a great deal of discussion among B2B marketing and sales professionals. In this important book, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson argue that what business buyers really want from their potential vendors - and by extension their sales reps - are fresh insights about how to improve their business. Dixon and Adamson are affiliated with the Corporate Executive Board, and CEB has make challenger selling a focal point of its sales advisory practice.

I've written about The Challenger Sale in previous posts (here, and here, for example), so I won't go into detail again. Essentially, Dixon and Adamson contend that high-performing sales reps challenge the thinking of prospective customers, make the costs of the status quo visible, and teach prospects how to think about problems and opportunities in new ways.

Earlier this month, Matthew Dixon and Nick Toman wrote a post for The Sales Challenger blog in response to some critics who have contended that challenger selling confuses the roles of sales and marketing. These critics say that communicating insights about new capabilities and benefits is the primary job of marketing.

Dixon and Toman point to new CEB research regarding how sales reps are engaging potential customers. According to this research, average salespeople:

• Believe lead generation is the company's responsibility
• Assess opportunities based on the clarity of customer needs
• Use social media indiscriminately

In contrast, the research found that high-performing sales reps:

• Conduct non-traditional due diligence
• Personally own lead generation
• Lead with insights
• Use social media as a channel to deliver insight

Dixon and Toman write, "Put differently, the average rep fills orders by reacting to existing demand; stars sell where customers learn (not just where they buy), shaping demand and teaching customers into the sales funnel. The best sales reps, it turns out, are just as good at marketing as they are at selling."

Dixon and Toman don't appear to believe that sales reps should be completely responsible for lead generation. They point out that the heart of challenger selling is disruptive insights, and they acknowledge that depending on salespeople alone to develop such insights is a "fool's errand." According to the authors, it's marketing's responsibility to "arm" sales reps with the required disruptive insights.

So in a sense, Dixon and Toman are contending that marketing is responsible for identifying and developing the insights, but that sale reps are the primary channel for delivering those insights to potential customers.

With all respect, I disagree.

The reality today, whether we like it or not, is that business buyers are self-educating and avoiding conversations with salespeople until late in the buying process. Other research by CEB has found that the buying process is nearly 60% complete when prospects engage with suppliers, and I've seen similar results from research conducted by SiriusDecisions and others.

As powerful as challenger selling techniques are, they can't be effective if prospects won't talk or meet with you.

More than ever before, effective B2B demand generation requires the combined efforts of both marketing and sales. The real essence of the challenger message is that selling organizations must provide new and valuable insights to potential customers. In today's environment, both sales reps and marketers need to be armed with those insights, and they both must be involved in communicating those insights to potential buyers.

Three Things To Do Before Hiring More Sales Reps

When B2B companies need to increase sales, managers will usually consider hiring more sales reps. This thinking is understandable because many B2B companies have long relied almost exclusively on their salespeople to find and win new business. Today, however, simply putting "more feet on the street" isn't likely to produce the volume of new sales that managers are looking for, and even if it does, the cost of those new sales is likely to be unacceptably high.

I've written before about why B2B companies should no longer rely exclusively on salespeople to generate new sales leads. Business buyers have fundamentally changed how they make buying decisions, and these changes require a new approach to B2B demand generation.

So, before you invest in more sales reps, there are three other steps you should take.

Step 1:  Improve Lead Acquisition Marketing

If your marketing programs aren't producing at least 40% - 50% of your qualified sales leads, it's likely that you aren't investing enough in lead acquisition marketing or your marketing programs aren't as effective as they need to be. Marketing must play a larger role in generating new sales leads because in the current environment, business buyers are less receptive to traditional sales prospecting techniques, making such  techniques far less effective and efficient.

For most B2B companies, effective lead acquisition marketing should include a mix of inbound and outbound marketing programs. In both cases, persistence is an important key to success. In today's environment, marketers must assume that multiple contacts will be required to entice a potential buyer to respond.

Step 2:  Implement a Sound Lead Management Process

Research continues to show that most new sales leads are not ready or willing to engage with a salesperson. We also know, however, that most "qualified but not ready to buy" prospects will eventually buy from someone. Once a new lead is acquired (meaning that the prospect has identified himself/herself and indicated some level of interest in your product or service), the big challenge for B2B companies is to build the relationship with the prospect until he or she is ready to make a buying decision.

A lead management process encompasses all of the marketing and sales activities that you use with prospects "from curiosity to close." The objective of a lead management process is to prevent valuable leads from "falling through the cracks" and out of the marketing/sales funnel. While a comprehensive lead management process includes many components, the three core elements are:

• A lead nurturing program that provides prospects relevant, primarily non-promotional information in multiple formats and through multiple channels. The primary objectives of a lead nurturing program are to support prospects throughout the buying process, establish and enhance your credibility, and maintain "mindshare" with prospects until they are ready to have a serious sales conversation.
• A lead qualification system that defines appropriate buying process stages and provides a mechanism for estimating where each prospect is in the buying process.
• A selling process that's designed to identify legitimate sales opportunities and convert those opportunities into closed deals.

Step 3:  Add a Lead Development Representative

Rather than adding more outside sales reps, hire one or more lead development representatives to support your demand generation efforts. Lead development representatives have two primary responsibilities:

• They provide the "human touch" components of your lead nurturing program. In this role, their objective is to use multiple conversations to build rapport with prospects in ways that automated, content-based lead nurturing cannot accomplish.
• They play a major role in the lead qualification process, and they can be primarily responsible for determining when a prospect meets the criteria to be considered a sales-ready lead. When that occurs, the LDR may also be responsible for arranging the first meeting between a prospect and your sales rep.

Lead development reps can perform these functions more efficiently that regular sales reps, and they enable your sales reps to devote more of their time to working with fully qualified prospects who are in the later stages of the buying process.

Hiring more sales reps may be necessary to achieve your growth objectives, but take these three steps first to ensure that you're getting the most out of your existing sales force.

Closing the Credibility Gap in B2B Marketing

The dictionary definition of credibility is the quality or power of inspiring belief. Credibility with prospects and customers is critical to the success of any business. Credibility creates trust, and it is one of the attributes that elevates a B2B company from "potential vendor" to "trusted advisor."

It's now clear that marketing content plays a leading role in B2B demand generation. In many cases, a prospect's first impression of your company will be based on the content you publish. To be effective, marketing content must be relevant and credible to the intended audience.

The relevance of marketing content is primarily determined by what the content communicates. Does it discuss issues that are important to the intended audience? The credibility of a content resource is primarily determined by how the resource communicates the message.

All B2B marketers face a credibility challenge, at least to some extent. The reality is that business buyers have a built-in inclination to distrust marketing content. The credibility gap was clearly shown in recent research by DemandGen Report. In the 2012 Content Preferences Survey, participants were asked to identify the kind of content they gave more credence to.

• 52% of respondents said peer reviews/user generated content.
• 33% said content that is authored by a third-party publication or analyst and sponsored by a vendor.
• 12% said co-branded content.
• Only 4% chose content that is branded directly from a vendor.

How to Close the Credibility Gap

Credibility is important for all kinds of marketing content, but it's absolutely critical for content that is used to reach prospects who (a) are in the early stages of their buying process, and (b) are not familiar with your company. Content credibility is essential in this situation because many of these prospects will decide whether to begin or continue a relationship with your company based solely on the credibility of your content.

For these early-stage prospects, the most effective way to establish credibility is to use brand-agnostic content. Brand-agnostic content is content that does not directly or overtly promote your company or your products or services. To create engagement with early-stage prospects, the first requirement is to demonstrate that you are a reliable source of relevant, accurate, insightful, and (mostly) objective information. If your content overtly promotes your company or your products or services, many early-stage prospects will tune you out even if your content also provides valuable information.

Recent research shows just how widespread the dislike of promotional content is among business buyers. In the DemandGen Report survey mentioned earlier, 74% of respondents said that solution providers should "curb the sales messages" in their content resources. In a 2012 survey of technology buyers by UBM TechWeb, 77% of respondents said the biggest mistake technology vendors make is to include too much marketing "fluff" in their content resources.

When prospects enter the consideration/evaluation stage of their buying process, they will want and need to learn more about your company and about the specific features and capabilities of your products or services. That's where promotional content is both necessary and appropriate. Before that, however, promotional content may do more harm than good when it comes to creating engagement with potential customers.

Using brand-agnostic content will undoubtedly be counterintuitive for many B2B marketers. But in today's environment, the reality is that you can sell more by "selling" less.